it is what it is

The Quantum Leap synthesizer sounds are commendable, but take a Herculean effort to program well.

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It’s not like I play piano (I don’t), but I’ve never been convinced by most of Lang Lang’s performances. Too raw. Sure, one can argue it’s his own interpretation but it really is a bad one if it doesn’t make sense… I mean Beethoven is not video game music, which seems to be Lang Lang’s self professed straightjacket… Barenboim explains it well and I must say I agree with most of his criticisms:

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fakalin pointed me to this product from MSR. I was actually sort of aware of this during my stint at MSR, via overheard hallway conversations, but didn’t know it was going to be released as a product.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/songsmith/

So I downloaded it to see what’s up. It has been called the reverse Karaoke program. It has only been released a month and it appears there are already a handful of parodies of well known songs. There is one that turned a rap by Eminem into bluegrass (stupid vulgar song, but anyway):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ScVTBg2vxk
(Read the article)

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a novelty

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Reuters likes to stick their three-chord jingle at the beginning and end of every one of their video clips on the net. It actually sounds a bit more interesting than the simple three-note jingles of major US TV networks like NBC. So I parsed it. Reuters jingle.

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It looks like the Zune is a flop. At least in the conventional sense of market share against the iPod and portable music players. This is predictable with the kind of PR that came before its release.

However, I highly doubt the Zune was meant to be just a music player. Earthlings know that the industry vision has been that of a central computational and storage hub in the home or on the network, and portable anywhere devices as terminals. It’s old news, but I guess it’s time to get pushy when vanilla home PC’s are already in pretty much every home and old usage models require no more computational power than is already available.

In this context, the Zune is a way to dump a preferred portable devices platform out there so Microsoft can write software for it. Windows Mobile on PDA is another one of those things, but far more people buy music players and cell phones than full-blown PDA’s (I’m guessing). One has to be a bit deceptive about what is really going on when pushing these devices, which is why the Zune is “just” a portable music player, when in fact, it is a big screen with computational capabilities and built-in wireless, so with a software change it immediately becomes a generic portable device. Microsoft has done this before, certainly. The XBox was “just” a gaming console — for a while. Not any more, despite J Allard’s early protests to the contrary. It’s clearly a computational and storage hub that just happens to be accepted in the living room. Intentionally implementing an accepted specialized device within a generic platform embodiment so that the specialization can later be removed is like Trojan horse marketing, I suppose (no revelation here, just a personal reflection), but it remains the case that the Trojan horse must be a gift worthwhile enough to be accepted.

By that measure, the XBox achieved a level of success as a gaming console by having some compelling features, but the Zune did not. The Zune was too similar to practically everything else. Maybe if the Trojan horse were a cell phone instead (iPhone?) or a car-device (GPS+music player?), Microsoft would have had more success. Actually the GPS+music player idea isn’t bad. It is getting pretty popular, but only a bunch of small random brands are selling it, with inconsistent interfaces and idiotic software as a result. There is where Microsoft could have made a difference — as it already has a well regarded PC-based navigation solution and user base from that.

So there you go, Microsoft. Keep the 2-cent change.

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This paragraph caught my eye:

Some music theorists have criticized serialism on the basis that the compositional strategies employed are often incompatible with the way information is extracted by the human mind from a piece of music. Nicolas Ruwet (1959) was one of the first to criticise serialism through a comparison with linguistic structures. Henri Pousseur (1959) questioned the equivalence made by Ruwet between phoneme and the single note, and suggested that analyses of serial compositions that Ruwet names as exceptions to his criticisms might “register the realities of perception more accurately.” Later writers have continued Ruwet’s line of reasoning. Fred Lerdahl, for example, outlines this subject further in his essay “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems” (Lerdahl 1988). Lehrdahl has in turn been criticized for excluding “the possibility of other, non-hierarchical methods of achieving musical coherence,” and for concentrating on the audibility of tone rows (Grant 2001, 219), and the portion of his essay focussing on Boulez’s “multiplication” technique (exemplified in three movements of Le Marteau sans maître) has been challenged on perceptual grounds by Stephen Heinemann (1998).

Although the above paragraph refers to “the way information is extracted by the human mind,” I think the problem is not that the serialist information is encoded in a way that is difficult for the human mind to extract (it may well be), so much as there is possibly insufficient information encoded to begin with, by any reasonable measure. Certainly, the compositional strategies of serialism call for much randomization and uniform dithering, such that most of what appears to be informative content is in fact common randomness coupled with very very little actual musical idea. I mean that’s how this music gets written right? A tiny bit of innovation, then mechanically amplified by pseudorandomness.

I don’t know enough about this, so just pure speculation here. Note to self, read: Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems

Contemporary Music Review
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group
Issue: Volume 6, Number 2 / 1992
Pages: 97 – 121
URL: Linking Options
DOI: 10.1080/07494469200640161

Cognitive constraints on compositional systems

Fred Lerdahl
Columbia University, New York City

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