Fnord.

Way back at UNM, I worked on the problem of audio positioning via convolutions and HRTFs, using wavelets. The results weren’t as hoped (details here, the filters didn’t compress well at all), but I keep an eye out for the state of the art. I just found SweetSpotter, an unfortunately-Windows-only thesis project of amazing promise.

It ups the ante of audio positioning by using your webcam to see where you are, and adjusting the filtering in realtime to correct.

That is, to use the proper technical adjective, fucking amazing.

Sebastian Merchel did the work. I am impressed. As soon as the borked webcam on my MacBook gets fixed, I’ll see if I can run this in VMWare or VirtualBox.

One of my all-time favorite CMJ disks was #29. Awesome discography, much better treasure/trash ratio than usual.

Anyway, one of the tracks is ‘Rainfall‘ by a group called Bentley Tock. Every now and then I’d google the name but never found much; tonight I hit the jackpot. According to this blog post:

Bentley Tock played around campus a lot, usually at a place called The Chukker (which sadly closed in 2003) and usually on Thursday nights. There were a lot of super late Thursdays (or early Fridays) when the band played. Me, Angela, Cheryl, Tracy, Billy and whoever else was up for it, would always show up. It didn’t matter to me if there was an exam, or if I had to work… if Bentley Tock was playing, I was there. Somewhere around the time I graduated in ‘91, the band packed up and headed to Austin to make a go of a bigger career. One CD came out, titled Able, but unfortunately not much came of it outside their home turf.

He links to the website of Paco Ahlgren, who turns out to have been the frontman for the group, and better yet has posted all the songs for free!!

So go have a listen and see if you like ‘em too. Can’t beat free, and feel free to comment and denigrate my taste in music.

After being introduced by Daniel, I’ve been using last.fm for a couple of years. Yesterday, it told me of a good match for my musical tastes:

Yep. I’m a strong match to a German Goth.

Words fail me.

…was wonderful. A couple of iPhone snaps, we do have some real pics to upload later.

Stage, pre-performance.

Chris looked lovely:

As an aside, I finally found a fix for image rotation! More later.

And yes, I can’t wait. I may have to break out the classy clothes and G-P for this.

(Click for link)

I’m a big fan of mashups, and the Best of Bootie series are an excellent way to discover both mashups and new music. Mashuptown, A+D and others regularly have new tracks (there are even podcasts), but the Best-of series ties it all up with a bow – album art, selected tracks, all in one free zipfile. 

20 tracks this year, playing as we speak!

1. The Metropolitan Opera now has pay-per-view high-def streaming operas. I ran their previewer and was impressed at the quality, so maybe Chris and I will try this on the iMac. The staging and production values look spectacular, higher than the shows we saw in Chicago, so if you want to sample opera this is about as good as it gets. Now if Netflix’d just get their Mac software done…
2. Lisa Kudrow is doing a web TV show called Web Therapy. Haven’t watched it yet, but she’s done some good stuff and it’s free.
3. Learn You A Haskell.
4. There is no link four.

Update same day: Link four is actuallySwatch villain watches, one for each movie. Niiice.

I was listening to Elbow this morning while working on a report, and was struck by this lyric fragment:

Words to make me stay

You said “Leave me and the plants die.”

It really struck me as a compressed vignette, a moment where two people are struggling to make a relationship work and one of them tries a bit of humor to lighten the mood. Elbow is good that way, succinct and intelligent lyrics everywhere.

(The song is Not a Job, from Cast of Thousands. Listen to it here on last.fm)

The next thought that I had was a bit random – while everyone likes to think that they have a sense of humor, those that have defective ones are the same people who are angered when you try to introduce humor into stressful situations. “This is no time for jokes!” and similar responses. On the contrary, stress is exactly the time for humor.

Of course, to make this all quite humorous, I just got an email of familial bad news. So now I have to try and apply the medicine I’ve just prescribed. Ahh, life, never dull.

I just (legally, thanks much) downloaded the first part of Ghosts 1-IV from the NIN website. High-quality free MP3s of the first disc, the rest is must-pay. I’m on my second listen now, first impressions are surprise and liking – it’s very ambient and chill, much more so than anything previous. More background music, especially given the total lack of vocals.

I was initially a huge fan of NIN (Hi, Chase!) but soured on or about the third album. Who knows, maybe this’ll get me listening again. Anyway, worth a download if you’re curious. I really like this idea of giving away a portion of the album, no DRM, very nice.

I’ve been a fan of Leonard Cohen for a while now. He’s kind of an acquired taste, but so are many worthwhile things. On a related note, Chris got into ‘The West Wing’ a while ago, and from that had me buy a copy of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ album for his cover of ‘Hallelujah.’

I gotta admit, the cover is excellent, and changes the song completely. What I didn’t realize was that Hallelujah has become a complete cliche, and was used dozens of time in various versions, n TV shows and movies.

But wait, it gets better – it was used so often that there’s an excellent paper about the songs, how its used and what it all means. The bad news is that all of the ambiguity, complexity and politics of the original are lost, and it becomes a signifier of loss and sadness. Ahh well.

What they’re singing there, aside from what I believe professionals call “twaddle,” is the chorus of a Leonard Cohen song. This is mildly incredible. Twenty-five years ago, a character on the TV show The Young Ones named Neal–the hippie–said, “I’m beginning to feel like a Leonard Cohen record, cause nobody ever listens to me.” Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen song is featured prominently in no less than three separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack to a montage of people being sad.

What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that happened to a song called “Hallelujah.”

The author is Michael Barthel and the paper is “It Doesn’t Matter Which You Heard”: the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. Well worth a read.