The Torontoist blog did a photo roundup of Toronto's crazy crazy weather this summer, and they picked (and i think, colour corrected) one of my photos.
Go for the crazy weather pics...you know you want to! Click here.
Canada's national broadcaster, CBC Radio 2, has a program called Canada Live, and they have a whole bunch of live concerts available on demand on the interwebs for your listening pleasure, including an Autorickshaw concert here
Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Whether you know it or not, that compact disc you just copied to your MP3 player is only partially there.
With the CD on its way out and computer files taking over as the primary means of hearing recorded music, the artificial audio of MP3s is quickly becoming the primary way people listen to music. Apple already has sold 100 million iPods, and more than a billion MP3 files are traded every month through the Internet.
But the music contained in these computer files represents less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs. In its journey from CD to MP3 player, the music has been compressed by eliminating data that computer analysis deems redundant, squeezed down until it fits through the Internet pipeline.
When even the full files on the CDs contain less than half the information stored to studio hard drives during recording, these compressed MP3s represent a minuscule fraction of the actual recording. For purists, it's the dark ages of recorded sound.
Have you noticed some of your CDs sound terrible? Welcome to the loudness wars. Modern mastering is sucking the life out of music.
'The phrase loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the music industry's tendency to record, produce and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to create a sound that stands out from others.
However, as the maximum amplitude of a CD is at a fixed level, the overall loudness can only be increased by reducing the dynamic range. This is done by pushing the lower level program material higher while the loudest peak sounds are either destroyed or severely diminished. Certain extreme uses of compression can cause distorting or clipping the waveform of the recording.'
The trend of increasing loudness as shown by the waveform image of a song mastered on CD four times since 1983.
"With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."
Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.
The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
By Chris Anderson, From Wired Magazine.
Highly recommended reading to understand the changing world of the music industry:
Another excellent article illuminating the rapidly changing music industry. Good reading for music creators and consumers alike.
"What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that's not bad news for music, and it's certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists"
Written by David Byrne, from Wired Magazine. Click the link below to read the article.
Move over WKRP Physics lesson...the Large Hadron Rap is here...ignore the dancing, the physics content is awesomely dense.
You'd think, with all those big brains around, they'd be able to come up with a more engaging website ...
If anyone finds the WKRP In Cincinnati episode where Venus Flytrap teaches a gang member about physics, please let me know. My google-fu has failed on this one.
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