Sing what needs to be sung

“Sing what needs to be sung, nothing more, nothing less” — David Bradley

dylan-quote

“Nowadays, what isn’t worth saying is sung” — Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville

“Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about” — Bob Dylan, Singer-songwriter of Minnesota

“The key to longevity is to learn every aspect of music that you can” — Prince, Another singer-songwriter of Minnesota

“How strange when an illusion dies. It’s as though you’ve lost a child” — Judy Garland Actor-singer of Minnesota

 

The zero login audio format

UPDATE: There is a movement among musicians to boycott the major streaming services and to hope that music fans do to. Indeed, many musicians would be happy if listeners pirated most of the music they listen to if they’re not going to buy CDs or vinyl rather than pay a monthly fee to a streaming service that pays the artists a tiny fraction of a penny per listen.

Yesterday there was yet another hacking scare. Rumours went around that users of the popular music streaming site, Spotify, were seeing tracks they weren’t expecting, their playlists were skewed and other problems arose. Security bloggers suggested we all change our passwords immediately as a precaution (it’s a good idea to refresh passwords from time to time, anyway). Spotify is denying a breach although a data dump that looks suspiciously like Spotify usernames, passwords and personal details turned up online, according to Mashable.

Anyway, I alerted my Facebook and Twitter crowd as soon as I heard, again, it’s sensible to refresh passwords and this was a better safe than sorry situation at the time whether or not it eventually turns out that Spotify had a data breach.

vinyl-collection

One wag on my Facebook page, however, gave me a laugh this morning, pointing out that she has asbolutely no intention of changing any passwords because her whole music collection is on vinyl. Hah! She can keep her crackles and pops though and I do wonder how she manages to take his music with her when he travels…or…maybe…just maybe…she doesn’t need to and is quite content to absorb the acoustic atmosphere of the places she visits without blocking it all out with noise-cancelling earbuds and the latest Bowie tribute/Beyonce soft drink/Miles Davis soundtrack…or whatever.

vinyl-zen
It would be a very Zen moment, wouldn’t it, if we all went back to unblocking our ears, as we did for the 99.999% of human history before the invention of the Sony Walkman.

More musical icons for the smartphone generation

UPDATE: “looking for treble”, “all about the bass”, “it’s a sign”, “big mouth” now all available as various types of print, as greetings cards, throw pillows (scatter cushions), phone covers, duvet covers, and shower curtains from the sciencebase FineArt site. Others to follow. Please put in a request for your favourite.sciencebase-musical-icons

The original two sets I did can be found on my Imaging Storm site. I reckon these would be perfect for beermats, mugs, fridge magnets, teeshirts, cushion covers and much more as gifts and giveaways for the muso in your life. Let me know if you’d like high-res versions to print, I can also edit them to include your logo and link

Gravity Suite

My musical celebration of the recent announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime, the very fabric of our reality, generated by the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away that began their outward journey at the time multicellular life on Earth was first beginning to emerge.

Why are all our rock heroes dying?

Why are all our rock heroes dying? David Bowie, Motorhead’s Lemmy and former drummer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, Yes’s Chris Squire, Toto’s Mike Porcaro, Mott the Hoople’s Dale Griffin, blues legend B.B. King, REO Speedwagon’s Gary Richrath, bassist Jimmy Bain, electronic music pioneer Edgar Froese, Greek great Demis Roussos, APP’s Chris Rainbow, Free’s Andy Fraser, legendary Lindisfarne’s Simon Cowe, Paul Kantner and, on the same day, Signe Toly Anderson from Jefferson Airplane, EW&T’s Maurice White (the day before I wrote this), The Eagles’ Glenn Frey, Colin Vearncombe (aka Black)…the list goes on…

Any claims that any of these deaths were anything to do with the sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll excesses of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, would be pure speculation. It’s just pure statistics people, there is no conspiracy. They’re simply getting old and succumbing to the diseases of old age. Too old to die young…

There’s a gallery of rockers we lost in 2015 here

General musical inspiration, relatively speaking

A century since Einstein’s published his General Theory of Relativity and the launch date of the new track from Diagrams, the artistic moniker of Sheffield-based Sam Genders on which I played a tiny advisory role on a nanoscopic part of the lyrics.

“I’m fascinated by science and had been reading Einstein’s biography on the last European tour,” says Genders. “When I read that the centenary of the theory was approaching I was inspired to write a song to commemorate it.”

Swirling atmospherics reflect the cosmic subject matter, which inspired the track as synthesizers hum and whirl; yet these textures are juxtaposed with Genders' rich, subtle vocal delivery and pastoral horn arrangements. The overall effect is wistful, but cautiously optimistic, drawing parallels between the incomprehensibility of universal matters, and, as Genders puts it, 'the cosmos that we each have inside our heads.

The imagery included in Bates’ animation alludes to these parallel themes, as two figures seek to be reunited as they float through the void. They drift past intricate, intertwining concentric patterns while Genders sings of dancing ‘like two electrons held in the orbit of a radium ion’.

SmoothHound – a new angle for wireless guitarists

I’ve been casting around for a good way to avoid the trip hazard that is the generic guitar lead, they’re tiresome in my home “studio” where wires are everywhere, but, also a mission critical problem in the small venues I’ve gigged at, especially when fellow musicians tread on them mid-song and suddenly I’m unplugged and silent…

Turns out there’s a local company here in Cambridge, SmoothHound, who have weighed in with a clean and lean piece of kit that could be the best catch for the home musician, street buskers, the semi-pro (and probably even) pro gigging players. Their classic Wireless Guitar System uses digital wireless audio to get rid of the wire but avoids that whole bulky belt pack transmitter technology too. In fact, having tried it out in a live setting a couple of times, I can vouch for the fact that you almost forget it’s there, it just jacks into your guitar (electric, electro-acoustic, bass, whatever) almost out of sight and out of mind. The receiver simply plugs into the desk or your amp and sends out rich, high-fidelity sound, that picks up every nuance of your tone without any of the nasty hiss of the outmoded VHF-type systems out there.

SmoothHound-Wireless-Guitar-System
It’s all very easy to setup. Just plug it in and switch on. The system automatically adapts to the environment and avoids interference from any nearby Wi-Fi gadgets. Moreover, the SmoothHound has an ARM chip in the transmitter and in the receiver to encode and decode the signal from your guitar without any loss of quality and does all that pretty much instantaneously giving it a very low latency, which worked perfectly playing live with my electro-acoustic Taylor  six-string recently). Speaking of which, the system has a range of about 60 metres, which is more than adequate for your home studio or the upstairs room at the local pub.

SmoothHound-Wireless-Guitar

The two AAA batteries in the transmitter last about 15 hours, which would be plenty even for Springsteen, and the mains-powered receiver has a charge indicator for transmitter battery strength so your guitar tech (yeah, right) knows when to run to you with replacements, preferably not mid-song. Oh, and here’s a top tip: being wireless at your soundcheck means you can step away from the performance area and listen to the full band (and you), which is a very useful thing to be able to do when setting up!

I’ve been fishing for an angle for this review and so I’m reeling in a few puns I’ve hooked just to say that the SmoothHound frees you entirely from the guitar lead that so often gets snagged and tangled while you play whether you’re gigging or riffing on a chair at home with your Marshall cranked up to 11. Highly recommended. Weigh up SmoothHound here or sail on over to amazon to land one right now.

Aurous for free music

UPDATE: This service was shut down within two months of launch and all IP that it had offered was re-assimilated by the major record labels.

Aurous…nice name…ish…as you may have heard will look a bit like Spotify, behave a little like Apple Music and will be far more unsinkable than The Pirate Bay. If you liked the original music P2P systems, Napster, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, Limewire, IRC sharing channels, Usenet binaries, and then Bit Torrents, cos you didn’t want to actually pay for music, then Aurous will be your go to outlet. This site could be the final death knell of a nineteenth century copyright industry that began with sheet music and rolled on through wax cylinders, 78s, 45s, CDs, mp3s and streaming…made billions for a tiny few and left millions of artists and music fans floundering in its wake for decades.

The RIAA, copyright trolls, industry mobsters and all the others will soon be as dust. But, then what of the songwriters and musicians? Well, many of them have already turned to a new 21st model of making a living from their music that might work for some but for most will not, sadly. The industry as we knew it with its sharp, cutting contracts, its years and years of record shop hype, its supposed vinyl revival, it’s “pay-what-you-want” offers, even its cassette reissues(!) will be pretty much gone within a year or two. It may rise Phoenix like into some other manifestation, but its wings will be scorched and it will never fly again.

Music: emotion by proxy

I’ve always loved music, in the words of the song, “music was my first love”. It’s been with me from early childhood from the time when I’d listen to my mother trilling the songs of Dusty Springfield on washday, to my Dad doing his Big O and Frank Ifield impressions. Aged 2 or 3 I had toy instruments like glockenspiels and miniature guitars.

Then, when I was about 12, my little sister decided she didn’t want to learn to play the classical guitar she’d been given for Christmas. I was riff-happy to take it off her hands and start teaching myself chords and melodies. I’ve still got that guitar along quite a few additions that I’ve acquired in the intervening four decades or so). Music ist still with me now as I sing with a community choir (have done for 16+ years), play with a covers band (10+ years), play with a theatrical pit band (10+ years), and also do some solo performances. I am also, in my late middle age still deluded in my attempts to reinvent myself as a hybrid of David Bowie and Peter Gabriel but with none of the masks, makeup and gold lame hotpants.

We talk about music evoking emotions, about moving pieces of music, and I remember as a small child being brought to tears by the theme tune to the French children’s drama about a small boy, Sebastian, and his a Pyrenean mountain dog Belle set in Belvedere in Alpes-Maritimes, that seemed to be repeated endlessly during the long school summer holidays.

In a classic TED Talk, conductor Benjamin Zander talks of one-buttock piano playing and has his captivated audience in tears explains the emotive power of Chopin’s use of chordal suspense and musical resolution in one of his preludes. Music captivates, fascinates, makes us cry, makes us laugh, rouses and arouses us, angers us, amuses us. And, that’s even before anyone has added any words to an instrumental piece and called it a song.

But, something about music bothers me. It’s an emotional placebo, isn’t it? Am I right? The emotions we feel when we listen to music, they’re real, but they are triggered by something that is somehow not real. A song that makes you cry is triggering something emotionally, but it’s not a genuine unhappy occasion that brings one to tears, it’s a succession of notes and chords, a tune, a melody… not a real sad “event”, it’s just noises. It’s not an incident, nor an accident the likes of which would make you truly sad.

Accidents will happen as Elvis Costello taught us so evocatively, but what is it that we are feeling when we listen to music that brings us to tears or makes us want to rhythmically jump for joy? I remember an interview with Phil Collins in which he mused that when you’re feeling sad you put on a sad song for the purposes of emotional reinforcement, I assume, he meant, again it’s as if we also want to bolster our emotions with the placebo-like trigger.

Composer Igor Stravinsky once famously suggested that, “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” So, my hypothes is unoriginal, Stravinsky got there before me suggesting that music does not have an inherent ability to convey specific emotions or meanings and that its power lies in its abstract and non-representational nature.

It may well be that a particular piece of music reminds us of something sad, something happy, or whatever emotion is being triggered, but what did the three-year old me watching Belle and Sebastian and listening to the theme music have to be sad about? What was that tune reminding me of? Why did it make me cry? It wasn’t the words, they were in French and I didn’t learn my “schoolboy French” with Mrs Nancarrow until I was…a schoolboy…many years later. Moreover, there are definitely cultural differences too and the dirges of Western funeral music are in sharp [pardon the pun] contrast to what sound like much happier bells and percussion of the funeral music of certain other cultures.

A new clue to help explain why music is emotional emerged from medical science because of renewed interest in the therapeutical potential of psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). It is well known that LSD was widely used by artists and musicians in the 1950s and 1960s and one might imagine that it isn’t just Lucy in the sky that owes her existence to the substance (allegedly), but many other songs and concept albums and their covers!

A modern placebo-controlled study of whether or not LSD enhances the emotional response to instrumental music has shown in a small group of volunteer daytrippers that the drug apparently boosts emotions such as “wonder”, “transcendence”, “power” and “tenderness”. Given that other drugs can cause or “simulate” excitement (caffeine, cocaine, amphetamines), empathy (ecstasy), relaxation (cannabis), sensual pleasure (heroin, chocolate), depression and loss of inhibitions (alcohol) it’s perhaps not a shock that another drug can affect other emotions.

Mark Changizi in his book “Harnessed”, as I’ve discussed in the blog before (November 2011), suggests (I do believe) that music moves us because it hooks into a primitive part of our brain that hears sounds in terms of our fellow apes moving around and or predators and prey coming and going. The Doppler effect lets us know whether those heavy steps are running towards us or away because of the changes in perceived pitch. So, sounds might trigger primitive emotions by hooking into the fight or flight response and setting us up to lash out or run away, perhaps.

While other sounds might be evocative of prey to be stalked or a mate to be wooed? Maybe too, there are noises of sadness that one might hear if someone is sick or dying.

“I suppose I might suggest they’re real emotions, albeit evoked by a fictional human mover,” Changizi told me. Music equates to emotion for so many of us, we love it, cannot live without it, are desperate to hear and make new music as well as keen to listen on repeat to old favourites and golden oldies. And, yet…while the emotions feel so real, they’re not as authentic as the emotions we feel when faced by those incidents and accidents, when times are good or bad, happy or sad.

Maybe “emotional placebo” is not quite the right phrase, although music is not only emotional but often healing too, an emotional rescue, you might say. It’s a stimulus that tugs at our heart’s different strings by proxy.

Perhaps music is working like a kind of emotional synesthesia. Just as those with that condition can hear colours, smell textures, for instance, perhaps music (which really is just sounds) is stimulating the emotion centres in the brain as if it is a real happy, sad or other happening that we are experiencing and so triggering the same response.

Changizi offers an additional insight, “Is a television show a proxy stimulus? Are the emotions resulting from TV fake?” he asks. Where I argue that music is more abstract than that, he suggests that “Music is just more abstract fiction than television. But still amounts to a stimulus which seems to your brain like a story of an individual moving around you doing stuff. But a more emotional story, not with the people talking.”

As an aside, my good friend James (Fentiger), pointed out to me that the melancholic musical genres in songwriting are often misunderstood. I took this to mean, without his actually saying, that: this kind of emotional music isn’t about being negative or down, it’s about recognising the human condition, our existential angst, and tugging at our heartstrings to make us enjoy the love and beauty in the world more…while we can. “A perfect description,” James reckons, “I think it’s about connecting to the realities of life, no matter how grim…it’s about relating which can be comforting, and bring hope too.”

Whatever the answer, I’d just like to say, in the words of ABBA, thank you for the music and, in the words of Phil Collins and Genesis, put another record on.

The original, much shorter, version of this this article first appeared in my column in the magazine Materials Today.