Philip Sherburne asked for my opinion on earbuds for this article, and here it is! The Jabra Elite 65t is the current entry-level model, offering 5 hours of battery life (or up to 15 with the charging case), Bluetooth 5.0, wind noise reduction on calls, and three sizes of molded tips; it’s also rated IP55 waterproof. “I’ve used the Jabra Elite 65t daily for a few years,” says Portland, Oregon, web developer Matthew McVickar. “They’re considerably cheaper than AirPods and sound great, but the essential difference for me is that you can control volume, track skipping, and the hear-through—which amplifies the outside sound for better environmental awareness—with the on-earbud buttons.”

Philip Sherburne asked for my opinion on headphones for this article, and here it is! Portland, Oregon, web developer Matthew McVickar says, “I have yet to find a pair of over-ear headphones that don't feel uncomfortable with glasses after more than half an hour or so, but I love the Sony MDR 7506.”

Winamp 2.9 reimplemented in HTML5 and JavaScript.

Free download of samples made from a collection of broken instruments. The Broken Instruments Sample Pack is a free download of Found Sound Nation's favorite sounds from the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra Project.

Interactive music-making. Build synths & sounds all in the browser, and share your creations.

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response. Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

"In his 'photosonic' process, Dudon shines light through a series of semi-transparent, rotating discs that slow and modify the light waves’ frequencies; the resulting waveforms are picked up by photoelectric (solar-power) cells connected to standard analog amplifiers."

The mastering engineers I spoke to for this story kept using the same phrase when describing their job: “to make the song competitive in the marketplace.” That is, making the music sound better in audio quality—clearer, louder, more vibrant—than anything else out there. Traditionally, the “marketplace” has been radio, where a well-mastered song hits that sweet spot where you feel immersed in the music but not battered by it. If your song is poorly mastered, the logic goes, people won’t want to buy your album. Worse yet, they might switch stations. And now, the marketplace also includes online streaming, which has raised the popularity of listening to music on headphones or portable devices with lousy speakers—platforms that require their own kind of mastering.

A portable animation and sound kit. With the touch of a finger create melodies charged with moving shapes.

“One day, Phil was playing the drums and I had the reverse talkback on because he was speaking, and then he started playing the drums. The most unbelievable sound came out because of the heavy compressor. I said, ‘My God, this is the most amazing sound! Steve, listen to this.’”

One of the often overlooked facts about LP reproduction is that some people prefer it because it introduces distortion. The "warmth" that many people associate with LPs can generally be described as a bass sound that is less accurate. Reproducing bass on vinyl is a serious engineering challenge, but the upshot is that there's a lot of filtering and signal processing happening to make the bass on vinyl work. You take some of this signal processing, add additional vibrations and distortions generated by a poorly manufactured turntable, and you end up with bass that sounds "warmer" than a CD, maybe-- but also very different than what the artists were hearing in the control room.

Eraserhead, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Stars of the Lid, and a mixtape of dark ambience that was there when it was most needed.

In his new book, Mp3: The Meaning of a Format, McGill University professor Jonathan Sterne exhaustively and eloquently traces the history of the mp3 from the initial hearing model developed in Bell Labs to the current debates about piracy. As the author argues, each time we rip a CD to our hard drives, we're not only saving space in our living rooms or ensuring we have the appropriate gym soundtrack, but also reaffirming a fundamental idea about the limits of human perception.

I interviewed Jonathan Sterne for Pitchfork about his new book. While conducting the interview, I thought Pitchfork readers would like to know about how AT&T’s capitalistic policies in the 1910s and 1920s laid the groundwork for those compressed bits of data currently clogging their hard drives, and other gentle, science-laden facts about the mp3’s history. I was wrong. But not to worry! Here are the cut bits.

Great explanation. I intend to use this bit: By placing a compressor after the reverb and assigning the lead vocal sound as a side-chain trigger for the compressor, the reverb level will drop whenever the vocal part is performing but rise whenever a phrase finishes, providing long reverb times in gaps but apparently smaller levels when the vocal is in full flow.

‘So, you want to make a contact microphone? Whether you want create noise music by banging on scrap metal, cheaply and easily amplify your acoustic instrument, or just play with wires, you’re in the right place.’

From the first EP to the soon-released LP, how it all happened.

“I set myself a half-day project to write music specifically for shuffle mode — making use of randomness to try and make something more than the sum of its parts. Over an hour or so, I wrote a series of short, interlocking phrases (each formatted as an individual MP3) that can be played in any order and still (sort of) make musical sense.” The reference points here to electronic music (glitch and dubstep, obviously) are interesting, as are his integration of skipping noises as percussive elements and how the skip itself can be used as a musical device. Hat-tips to and reminders to look further into the work of pioneers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, and John Cage.

Great free releases. Post-pop, lo-fi, experimental, etc. etc.

Fantastic collage/ambient label whose releases are mostly free.

A fun tenori-on sort of musical instrument.

A great selection of VST and AU audio effects plugins for free download.

This is absolutely beautiful. "Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies."

Small MIDI controllers. Glorious.

"Adaptable, minimalist interfaces." Oh. My. God.

Very neat MIDI controller iPhone apps.

Advice on samplers, audio interfaces, drum machines, etc.

Just like the good old days.

"Equalizing the balance causes your brain to reorganize the tones, so that you hear two smooth melodies instead."