The Best Free White Noise Generator on the Internet.

Explaining what we mean by ‘popular’ and ‘music’ when we talk about ‘popular music.’

Composer

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.

Yesterday at Atlantic.com, Hans Villarica posted “Study of the Day: Why Crowded Coffee Shops Fire Up Your Creativity,” a rundown of a research study that alleges moderate noise is beneficial to creativity. While I’m intrigued by the question of noise and individual cognition in public(ish) spaces, the Atlantic post exemplifies the way that research loses its contextual trappings as soon as it enters “the cultural conversation” to become the kind of free-floating “news you can use” that inevitably gets “contradicted” in subsequent studies, undermining people’s faith in the academy. …even the most cursory skim of the actual journal article provides contextual information that undermines Villarica’s pithy, straightforward advice.

‘Sleigh Bells' music has always been about overwhelming your senses, making things so loud and so blurred that you don't know where one thing stops and another ends, how fast the day is passing. Slow things run at double-time, fast things run at half-time; the world runs backwards, slows down, speeds up.’

‘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.’

The Hum. ‘For some time now there appears to be certain people who have sensitive hearing that can hear a low frequency humming noise late at night or in the early hours of the morning. The problem appears to be all over the North Shore of Auckland. We don't know the origin of the generic hum which appears to be world-wide.’

‘Tectonically, this remote region is a patchwork. The Antarctic, Nazca and Pacific plates all converge here. Even better, four of modern history’s unaccountable terra-acoustical blasts have all eked from its depths.’

“The piece is by Mathias Delplanque. Titled ‘Call Center,’ it’s recent a stereo reduction of a sound installation of his from several years back. It was part of an exhibition titled ‘Bombay Maximum City.’ The sounds, he reports, were ‘recorded during the summer of 2006 in a call center in Gurgaon (suburbs of New Delhi).’ The result is a half hour of sound that flirts with narrative, but also manages to transform the everyday into something sonically complex. That the source of the audio is itself such a quintessential emblem of technology, of globalism, of communication services, and of interpersonal mis-communication only adds to its impact.”

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."

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

Great work, as usual. Understated, to great effect. Adam kills. The short bits are great. Want more.

"One hundred ambient tones is a collection of short ≈40sec ambient audio snippets designed to be listened to in 'random' or 'shuffle' ordering. The transitions between tracks, chosen randomly by your machine on playback, become the focus."

Very neat MIDI controller iPhone apps.

How to create an iPhone ringtone.

For future reference?

Just like the good old days.

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

"Best known for touring the country spreading the good word of D.I.Y. electronics with uniquely playful performances and Circuit Bending Workshops."

"...if anyone offers you a single CD of Zaireeka mixed down from it's four parts, remember to laugh in their face."

"Hi Joe! Hi Jane!"

"An outdoor ambient music piece for an infinite number of boomboxes. It’s like a Christmas caroling party except that we don’t sing, but rather carry the music, each of us playing a separate track that is a 'voice' in the piece."

"Toneshared is the world's most interesting collection of mobile phone tones made by well known musicians and artists working in the electronic and alternative music scenes." Free, short, sweet. Inclues Caribou, Faux Pas, Califone...