NY Times: 104 years in mash-ups

From Charles Ives and Pierre Scaeffer to Remix.vg, DJ Hero, and Girl Talk.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/09/magazine/mashup-timeline.html?ref=magazine

also: a history (and brief manifesto) on the headphone:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/magazine/09FOB-medium-t.html?ref=magazine

Revista Shock - Historia del picó champetero cartagenero (c/ música)

El nuevo evangelio picotero. Guía Shock de la Champeta y el Picó

Se trata de un ritmo muy joven, un niño genio que está creciendo, adquiriendo nuevos poderes, y que nos dará muchas más sorpresas en el futuro. Una guía poderosa pa’ poner la música a tronar y a la pareja a afinar paso. ¡Suénalo!

Nació en un lugar inesperado, en un momento inesperado y de la manera más inesperada. Hace unos 30 años, en lo más profundo de la Africolombia y de nuestra costa Caribe, nació un bebe musical, punketo de corazón: la champeta criolla, uno de los ritmos más originales, censurados e incomprendidos que haya parido nuestra tierra, y el único nuevo ritmo que ha dado nuestra nación cumbiera en las últimas décadas del siglo XX.

[Artículo sigue aquí: http://shock.com.co/actualidad/musica/articuloshock-el-nuevo-evangelio-picotero-guia-shock-de-champeta-y-el-pico ]

Música:
Picó El Timbalero: "La Escopeta"


El Guajiro El Tiraflechas: "Lawose Oh Yeye"


El Indio Mayeye El Cucu El Sibanicu
(Con el supuesto primer tema africano escuchado en Colombia en el movimiento picotero)

Hi-Tech/Lo-Tech "Bubblegum Sequencer"

Sorry ASCAP, a ringtone is not a performance :-(

Says ASCAP: "AT&T has gone much further than Napster ever did."
Says US District Judge Denise Cote: "Puh-leaze." (Not in so many words).
Say the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Center for Democracy & Technology: "This ruling should also protect consumers who roll down their car windows with the radio on, who take a radio to the beach, or who sing "Happy Birthday" to their children in a public park (remember, ASCAP once demanded royalties from Girl Scouts for singing around the camp fire!)."

EU calls for volume limit on MP3 players/Nuevas regulaciones europeas podrían limitar el volúmen del iPod

En español de Appleisimo
In English from The Telegraph.

African Diaspora Music Website Projest

I got this from someone I don't know, Brittany Anderson, but I'll throw it out for you all in case anyone's interested.

I am looking for individuals interested in working on a project development team of 10-12 creative persons for a multimedia Global Music Video website. The project would run from mid-February to mid-April (approximately 10-12 weeks). Much of the work will be completed using online collaboration tools, so as to fit within everyone’s schedules.The Project:A music discovery website dedicated to African Diaspora pop music videos. Think MTV meets Putumayo meets iLike. This website exposes people to new music and uses this music to build bridges throughout the African Diaspora and the world. The production of this website will eventually lead to a global internet-television hybrid channel.The website has three main components: an extensive music video library with a dynamic music discovery tool, a community space for user’s web pages, and a blog. Each music video and audio track is complemented by short, lively, articles, background info, and photos and videos of the region that the music comes from – with much of the site’s content contributed by site users in the region.Who we’re looking for:Content Manager – Builds and manages an international network of content providers, acquires content and uploads content to website, validates content, works with project manager and database programmers to organize content.Artist Outreach/PR Associate – Works with online music licensing/legal consultant to produce contracts/agreements, works directly with musicians to secure new contracts, works with content manager to add content to site.Creative Direction Associate – Works with project manager and design team to determine the overall look and feel of website, works with marketing/promotion specialist to integrate the marketing strategy into the site’s design.Marketing/Promotion Specialist – Plans and executes the marketing strategy for the website, performs market data research, evaluates results, works with artistic direction associate.Multimedia Blog Manager – Works with project manager to create blog strategy, brainstorms blog features, helps recruit blog content providers. Familiarity with African Diaspora pop music essential.HTML/CSS/Flash Programmer – Codes HTML, CSS, & Flash elements of the website. In particular, I’m looking for someone who can build a 3D wall, like Cooliris, or at least work with implementing their coding into the site (see for developers).PHP/SQL Programmer – Codes database aspects of site, works with project manager and content manager to set up content organization system. Works specifically to build the dynamic music discovery tool (search engine).Translation/Interpretation Coordinator – Constructs a long-term translation strategy for the site and the site’s content (music/artist info/announcements/articles).Web 2.0/Mobile App Creative Consultant – Researches, brainstorms, and constructs a plan for integrating Web 2.0 concepts and mobile applications into the project. Performs some coding, and works with project manager to recruit specialists.Online Music Licensing/Legal Consultant – Provides legal advice specific to online content, music videos, and song licensing.What you gain by joining this team:• The website we are developing is a live prototype to secure funding. When this funding becomes available, there will be paid website management, maintenance and expansion positions available.• This is a recession! So, until funding is secured for this project, I’m willing to barter my skills or services in exchange for your participation with the project. Contact me for further information.• Possible course credit through NYU’s Graphic Communications Management Program, and a very exciting project to work on for the semester.• Direct experience working as part of a project team, and the ability to network with others in the global media, communications, & new media/web industries.• Contributing important ideas to a big project and an important global cause that will improve the lives of many people.• Building your skills and talents, and tangible experience for your portfolio and CV.• A challenge and a good time!I understand that this may be a hectic time for some of you (it is for me), but please contact me at bka214@nyu.edu if you are interested in any aspect of this multimedia social change endeavor.About Me:I am a 2nd-year Gallatin MA student with a concentration in Project Design for Global Social Change. My background is in International Affairs, African & Diaspora Studies, Ethnomusicology, and French. I have some experience with web design, and a whole lot of experience with art and the Internet.

"Semantic ontology" databases: Natural vs. ambiguous language for search engines

Making language have precise meaning (or trying) is as old an endeavor as Francis Bacon (maybe older). As Baumann & Briggs have it, the back-and-forth between language's denotative and more gestural, socially malleable, ambiguous or performative uses are at the center of modernity. And we're still at it, according to the BBC, as "semantic search engines" aim to build databases based on the principle of "semantic ontology," which attempts to capture how all the different parts of an organisation understand a particular thing. This seems like no easy task, in fact, it might be something like the creation of AI, since it is this very property of language that seems to be (so far) unique to humans...

RIAA will stop suing music file-sharers...

... and will just unilaterally and without recourse cut off internet access for people making files available. Link This isn't too great either.

"Capt. Nemo": Ghettotech designer of homemade Colombian drug subs / Malicia indígena: "Capt. Nemo," diseñador de los narcosumersibles

Tengo que confesar una pequeña obsesión con el tema de los narcosumersibles, de los cuales he tratado antes en este blog. Pues ahora sí cayó su diseñador, un tumaqueño con el muy apropiado nombre de pila de Capt. Nemo. En un artículo del Los Angeles Times (aquí traducido al español por Google), explican el diseño:

una elegante forma de "V" del casco; una robusta quilla, que es la espina dorsal del barco, y un sistema de escape que hace que el barco parece un monstruo de las profundidades...los buques que miden hasta 60 pies de largo y equipado con complejos sistemas de lastre, comunicaciones y sistemas de energía. Ellos normalmente tenían motores de diesel de 350-caballos de fuerza, y los cuatro tripulantes tenían lo último en radio, GPS y teléfono satelital.Los subs tienen una extensión de 2000 millas, más que suficiente para ir de aquí para la Bahía de Tehuantepec en México, un destino favorecido...

Sé que es por mal y todo, pero vacana la astucia de Capt. Nemo.

Fernando Vergara / Associated Press (from http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-captainnemo14-2008dec14,0,1166020.story)

I have to confess a slight obsession with homemade Colombian drug subs, which I've mentioned before on this blog. Well, they finally got the designer, a commerical shrimper for Tumaco known by the appropriate sobriquet of Captain Nemo. The LA Times has a full acount, including some of the design principles:

"He had a marvelous criminal vision," Colombian navy Capt. Luis German Borrero said. "He introduced innovations such as a bow that produced very little wake, a conning tower that rises only a foot above the water and a valve system that enables the crew to scuttle the sub in 10 minutes. He is very ingenious."

Portocarrero's craft are difficult for counter-narcotics officials to detect on the open seas because their tiny wake creates a negligible radar "footprint." Also, authorities say, the exhaust is released through tubing below the surface, frustrating patrol aircraft's heat-sensing equipment....

Portocarrero's vessels measured up to 60 feet long and were outfitted with complex ballast, communications and power systems, officials said. They were typically powered by 350-horsepower diesel engines, and the four-man crew had state-of-the-art radio, GPS and satellite telephone communications. The subs have a range of 2,000 miles, more than enough to get from here to Mexico's Bay of Tehuantepec, a favored destination, Borrero said.

Bibliographic smackdown

Bibliographic software program Endnotes sues makers of open source Zotero. Let the nerdsmacking commence.

Link

IP News / Noticias en Propiedad Intelectual

• El juez en un famoso caso de piracía digital (una madre cabeza de hogar tiene que pagar $220,000 dolares - $457 millones de pesos - por bajar música) equivaló el acto de bajar la música con el intento a distribuirla. Puede haber un nuevo proceso.
• Judge in landmark IP case ($220,000 in damages for single mother for downloading music) equated downloading with intent to distribute, a new trial may happen.

Link/Enlace

The court granted the RIAA’s jury instruction #15 that:
“The act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners’ exclusive right of distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.”
If this was error – if the RIAA had to show actual distribution not mere availability – as the judge ruled it was, Thomas is entitled to a new trial. The RIAA argued the error was harmless because the jury would have convicted on the reproduction right in any case.

• Dice Dept. de Justicia de EE.UU. a la industria de entretenamiento: "No somos sus abogados"
• US Department of Justice to entertainment industry: "We're not your pro bono lawyers" Link/Enlace

"Department of Justice prosecutors serving as pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders regardless of their resources. In effect, taxpayer-supported Department lawyers would pursue lawsuits for copyright holders, with monetary recovery going to industry."

Suzanne Vega on intellectual property, mothering the MP3, and not being half Puerto Rican

I'm not exactly a huge Suzanne Vega (remember "Luka" and "Tom's Diner"?) but this blog post of hers gets more interesting as it goes along, as she ruminates on intellectual property

"I had to go back to all the people who had taken the song without permission, and ask their permission . . . to use their version of my song!"

on being called "the mother of the MP3"

"I ran home and found the article online. The title was “Ich Bin Ein Paradigm Shifter: The MP3 Format is a Product of Suzanne Vega’s Voice and This Man’s Ears.” “The MP3 fools the ear by eliminating the least essential parts of a music file…To create MP3 [Karl-Heinz] Brandenberg had to appreciate how the human ear perceives sound. A key assist in this effort came from Suzanne Vega. ‘I was ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm,’ Brandenberg recalls. “Somewhere down the corridor a radio was playing “Tom’s Diner.” I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice.”

and some interesting stuff about race, not least of which is her own history:

"It was astonishing to me to hear that the kids at Joan of Arc Junior High on West 93rd Street were dancing in the street to it one day, since as a kid growing up on the Upper West Side, I was ostracized in some of my classes for being “white.” In African Dance class in 1972, I was smacked in the back of the head for being there at all. (I was raised in a half-Puerto-Rican family, as half-Puerto Rican. I found out at the age of nine or so that I actually had a different father from my brothers and sister — my birth father was English-Scottish-Irish from California.)"

Plus it has some cool remixes of "Tom's Diner."

More Remote-Controlled Drug Submarines/Más Submersibles Caseros

Submersible casero/Home-made submarine - from Reuters Pictures
http://www.daylife.com/photo/0fU49HP9UO5bn

A factory for making homemade, remote-controlled drug submarines was dismantled in Tumaco. Say what you will about the many evils of the drug trade in Colombia, you've got to admit that people are resourceful.

Una fábrica para hacer submersibles caseros de control remoto fue desmantelado en Tumaco. Todos sabemos los numerosos males del narcotráfico en Colombia, pero la astucia de la gente no deja de asombrar - imaginate, sumersibles caseros!
Link/Enlace

Die, internet, die

This by Rob Pegoraro at the Washington Post on how the industry is going to kill Web Radio (lots of good links).

Music Biz *Still* Trying to Kill Web Radio

If you're a fan of new music and easily offended by corporate thuggishness, you may not want to read my colleague Peter Whoriskey's story from Saturday's paper about the possible demise of the Pandora Web-radio service.

This is only the latest chapter in a sad saga that's been dragging on for most of this decade: how a largely unaccountable regulatory body and a trade group dominated by representatives of major record labels have tried to inflict a punitive system of royalty payments on Web-radio broadcasters.

The unfairness and irrationality of this idea seemed obvious when I first devoted a column to it, back in 2002. More than six years later, nothing seems to have changed.

In case you've tuned out of this story, here's a quick recap:

1. The royalty payments at stake are supposed to compensate performers (and their record labels) for the use of their music, much as songwriters have long received a small royalty payment for the use of their work.

2. But unlike royalties paid to songwriters, these "performance royalties" don't apply to FM or AM -- whether analog or digital HD Radio broadcasts -- but do cover satellite, cable and Internet broadcasts.

3. Cable and satellite broadcasts pay a simple percentage of their revenues.

4. The proposals cooked up by the Copyright Royalty Board -- a panel of judges appointed by the Librarian of Congress to settle certain intellectual-property disputes -- and backed by SoundExchange, the theoretically nonpartisan group charged with collecting these royalties, would impose a per-song, per-listener fee that many Webcasters say would put them out of business. (See, for example, musician and Webcaster David Byrne's analysis.)

5. Maybe this is all one big coincidence, but in terms of political clout and lobbying efforts, FM and AM broadcasters vastly outweigh satellite- and cable-based music outlets, who in turn easily outrank Webcasters.

As I wrote a year ago, when the CRB reaffirmed this foolish idea, choking off Web radio by imposing discriminatory and disproportionate fees is just about the last thing the music industry needs. Webcasters like Pandora are far more effective at exposing listeners to new music than the playlist-choked wasteland of commercial FM and AM -- so of course we should tax them to extinction, ensuring record labels and musicians a one-time profit, followed by years of much poorer exposure for new musicians.

Seriously, who comes up with this kind of strategy? It's one thing for the CRB to lose its collective mind, it's another for businesspeople who ought to know the market to start sawing their own feet off. It's not as if they'd even make much money in the process: The Web radio industry just isn't that rich.

The people at SoundExchange do not help their cause when they continue to spout melodramatic hyperbole like this line, from Whoriskey's story:

"Our artists and copyright owners deserve to be fairly compensated for the blood and sweat that forms the core product of these businesses," said Mike Huppe, general counsel for SoundExchange.

"Blood"? Give me a break. You represent musicians, not the Marine Corps.

I'm past tired of seeing this story refuse to die. There's only so many times you can see such obvious, blatant abuse of power before you want to find the people responsible, grab them by the lapels, and ask: "What's wrong with you? Why do you hate America?!"

There is, however, one simple and fair way out of this: Congress and should finally pass the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would vacate the CRB ruling and apply the same per-revenue scheme to cable, satellite and Internet broadcasters alike.

Petronio virtual

Felicidades al periódico caleño El Pais por su excelente página sobre el Petronio, con videos fotos, programación y todo aquí (para los que no podemos estar).

Congratulations to the Cali newspaper El País for their page on the Petronio, with videos, photos, schedule, and everything here (for those of us that missed the Petronio.)

Update: Viéndolo con más cuidado... cierto que pusieron una categoría para música nortecaucana? Por fin!!
Looking over the site, did they add a category for music from Norte del Cauca? Finally!

Update 2: Tienen ringtones y wallpaper para descargar (no me gusta el mico tocando marimba, pero dejémoslo ahí) - las cosas van muy rápido para una música que no se había grabado comercialmente hace apenas 8 años.
They have ringtones and wallpaper to down load (with a monkey playing marimba, but the less said the better) - WTF! Things are moving very fast for a music which hadn't ever been commerciallt recorded only 8 years ago...

Sound systems on wheels

Trini kids in Queens making bikes into mobile sound systems. Link

Capitalism and Intellectual Property in Academia: Sage Sux

It sounds like a satire on capitalism but reality is often even worse. If you have written an article for SAGE you cannot send your own article to colleagues, you cannot copy nor save it. You can read it on one computer only, according to anthropologist Lisa Wynn. Unless, of course, you pay for it.

Link "Is It Time to Boycott Sage?"

Digital Divide

This from the "Culture Matters" anthro blog (hey ethnos, how come we don't have something like this?):

Wired magazine has a recent story about Dawn Nafus, a Cambridge PhD in anthropology working for Intel: Intel Anthropologists Find Keys to Tech Adoption. The map of which countries are rapid adopters is great; there’s some interesting surprises. For example, Nafus found that Estonia and South Korea were early adopters of technology in relation to income:

…her team found that they both have agile governments, strong offline social networks, and major upheavals in living memory (the transition out of Communism and the Korean War). That raised the counterintuitive question: could turmoil actually be good for preparing people for disruptive technologies?

I won’t review the whole article, but there’s some great examples of anthropological research producing counter-intuitive results. For example, ‘One other surprise in the Intel data: foreign direct investment, or how much money foreign firms pour into a country’s economy, can actually constrain how fast technology is adopted.’ Worth checking out.

Guess what - the music industry is changing / Sabías? Se está cambiando la industria discográfica

How do I know?/Como es que lo sé?

1. Apple's iTunes, which sells mp3s, is now the #1 music retailer, passing WalMart, which sells CDs. Link
2. Jay-Z ditched record companies to sign, like Madonna and U2, with a booking agency, of all things... Link
3. MySpace is getting in on the act. Link
   

1. iTunes, de Apple, que vende mp3, ya es el vendedor más grande de música, pasando el almacén WalMart, que vende CDs. Enlace
2. El rapero, productor, y empresario musical Jay-Z ha roto su relación con las disqueras tradicionales para firmar con una agencia promotora, una manera completamente diferent de distribuir y financiar sus proyectos. Enlace
   
3. MySpace también se ha lanzado a la industria musical. Enlace
   

Rsearchers find 1860 sound recording, 20 years before Edison

From the N.Y. Times
Picture printed in NY Times, Courtesy of David Giovannoni

Apparently, this contraption, invented by the Parisian Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, represented sound visually, rather than being designed for playback, which Jonathon Sterne has interesting things to say about in the article. It has links to the playback, too, you can here a French song from 1860, which is just frickin bananas!