Malazan Empire: Music - Malazan Empire

New release I'm thinking of getting:



I already have a phormynx and some other instruments from Sonokinetic's Delphi, and 8dio's ancient Greek lyre, but this seems to be the most extensive collection of ancient Greek strings. Soundiron is generally excellent.

'features a Barbiton, Cithara, Lyre, Goat Horn Lyre, Pandura, Phorminx and Trigonon.'

A Cithara! Maybe not the same as the Roman Cithara that Nero (might have) played as Rome burned, but still...

'Why Are Cats on TikTok Getting Really Into Mid-2000s Ambient Music?

[...] When a fan told Jimmy Lavalle that a song he wrote about 18 years ago had become really popular with cats on TikTok, he was shocked. He wrote the track in Reykjavík, Iceland, gazing at the Esjan mountains across Kollafjörður bay — now, cats were prancing across their living rooms to the tune.

[...] Music for Cats, which came out of a study he did with researchers at the University of Wisconsin. Teie was already interested in how music affects human emotion, and he carried some of his theories over to other animals, first working with cotton-top tamarin monkeys, then house cats. Teie's work was rooted in the notion of "species-specific music" — essentially taking sounds that certain species would be innately familiar with and turning them into music.

"The theory certainly holds for humans, Teie explains. For instance, it's no surprise that after gestating in the womb for nine months, hearing nothing but a mother's heartbeat, humans seem preternaturally attracted to music that falls within the same 60 to 100 beats-per-minute pulse range as an adult heart. Because cats have a shorter gestation period, Teie focused instead on other sounds kittens would hear, such as suckling and purring. But rather than just set recordings of purrs to music, Teie crafted purr-like sounds using production software; should the sound be too recognizable, he figured, a cat would just habituate to it and ignore it.

"When we create musical instruments that have a rough approximation of the emotions that it's designed to trigger, but it's not the real thing, we don't habituate to it," he says. "We can't really identify it, so the mystery of the sound is something that keeps it affecting us."

Teie thinks that mix of mystery and familiarity is at the heart of what some cats are responding to when they hear Album Leaf's "Window." The key sound is that dual synth tone that arrives about 16 seconds into the song: [...] mice are capable of biphonation, so they can create two pitches at the same time. And they basically have that signature — the lower one is a vocal sound, and the upper one is a very pure whistle sound, and they are about that far apart, about a tenth apart. So it does have the signature, in the sense, of a mouse singing."

[...]

Teie is quick to add that he doesn't think cats responding to "Window" think there's a mouse in the room. Rather, he compares it to the way a violin sounds like a female singing voice or an electric guitar with some gain on it sounds like a human scream. "It's not as if we're thinking, 'Oh, that's the human scream. I need to respond with an adrenal rush,'" he says. "It's just a feeling, and I think that would be the same with the cats. It's like, 'I feel like going toward that sound.'"

This also helps explain the variety of responses among cats to, not just "Window," but also Teie's Music for Cats. Cats, like humans, are individuals, and like humans, they can have different tastes in music. To that end, when Galaxy tried playing "Window" for his cats, he said he got just one taker: "Three slept through it, one left the room, one poked his head up and one came toward the sound."

Still, sound and music can have practical purposes when working with cats. A softer, higher human voice can make a cat more trusting of a human, Galaxy says. And last year, Louisiana State University researchers found that cat-specific music like Teie's could be used to calm cats down during otherwise stressful vet visits.'

Why Cats Are Reacting to the Album Leaf's 'Window' on TikTok - Rolling Stone



'I'm a Musician, and Here's Why I'm Learning Quantum Computing

[...] I learned that IBM had released a quantum processor available on the cloud, I started studying quantum computing more seriously, and decided to make it a core component of my research. Today, I'm a Ph.D at the University of California, Irvine, doing research on quantum computing and music composition, while developing composition tools that use quantum computing in some way.

My first experiments with quantum music composition began in early 2019, and then later that year at the Qiskit Camp Europe, where I created the quantum synthesizer. There, I used a quantum computer to generate waveforms. The innate noise of quantum computation changed the shape of the waveforms, making them more complex. I also often work in the improvisational and interactive space; for one live-performed piece, I use a small quantum program, almost like a random number generator, to control audio effects or generate new sequences of notes based on certain rules or conditions.

[...] I learned that IBM had released a quantum processor available on the cloud, I started studying quantum computing more seriously, and decided to make it a core component of my research. Today, I'm a Ph.D at the University of California, Irvine, doing research on quantum computing and music composition, while developing composition tools that use quantum computing in some way.
My first experiments with quantum music composition began in early 2019, and then later that year at the Qiskit Camp Europe, where I created the quantum synthesizer. There, I used a quantum computer to generate waveforms. The innate noise of quantum computation changed the shape of the waveforms, making them more complex. I also often work in the improvisational and interactive space; for one live-performed piece, I use a small quantum program, almost like a random number generator, to control audio effects or generate new sequences of notes based on certain rules or conditions.

As a musician, learning quantum computing was challenging mostly because I had to go back to study the required mathematics, like linear algebra. Even today it's challenging, but I'm still learning, and will continue learning for a long time. But I feel like it's a great privilege to be doing this research at a moment in time where something so new is happening. I'm motivated to produce work that will serve as a contribution to allow researchers across different fields to converse and make this technology useful for everyone.

So, how can quantum computers be useful for music composition? Well, perhaps one day, a more powerful computational system will make certain computational processes faster — but we're not there yet. [Quantum machine learning maybe.] Today, I often think about how to recreate the processes I do classically, but now with very different tools. This different way of thinking about the act of composition is like the difference between writing down notes on a sheet of paper versus using a computer program to compose; the final result might be a printed sheet of music either way, but the process of getting there is different; in this difference, an emerging compositional paradigm might lead to new and different-sounding music (e.g. the way that today's electronic music sounds different from baroque-era orchestral music).'

https://medium.com/q...ng-db28c2aba7ac

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 09 February 2021 - 05:51 PM

'From the womb – where the rushing of maternal blood is heard loud and clear at 88 decibels – through myriad historical, spiritual and subcultural pathways, our connection to the drone runs deep. Many ancient instruments – didgeridoo, bullroarer, carnyx – produced sustained tones, while the ancient Greeks evoked the delirium of Dionysus with the drone of the Aulos pipes. Indeed, religious practice all over the world, from the sacred Buddhist Om to haunting Gregorian chant, continues, as it has done for centuries, to centre the drone as a sonic enabler of meditative transcendence.

In Monolithic Undertow, I trace the drone from those ancient beginnings through the 20th century, where it underpinned sounds of many divergent persuasions – not limited to the New York minimalist ley line that linked the Theatre of Eternal Music to the Velvet Underground; the vital influence of Ravi Shankar's sitar drone on the ecstatic jazz of Alice Coltrane and the Beatles nascent psychedelic experiments; the punk axis that leads from the Stooges to Sonic Youth; and the physical metallic bass weight of Earth and Sunn O))).

[...] the drone has bewitched for millennia, exhorting us to succumb to the joy of hypnotic immersion.

The Master Musicians of Joujouka, a group of Moroccan Sufi trance musicians from the foothills of the Rif mountains, make a joyous, hypnotic cacophony. Their sound dates back centuries, using techniques passed from father to son. Long associated with the beat poets, who gravitated to bohemian Tangier throughout the 1950s and 60s, [...]

[...] the annual Bou Jeloud festivities that celebrate the appearance in the 15th century of a Pan-like half-man, half-goat figure said to bestow fertility, a bountiful harvest and musical secrets. Each year a villager plays the Bou Jeloud: sewn into freshly slaughtered goat skins, he exhorts people to dance by whacking them with olive branches, while the music focuses on fever-pitch pipe drones, gruff call-and-response chants, ethereal flutes and frenetic handheld drums.

The Master Musicians of Joujouka strongly contest the notion that drone-based music is calming: theirs is an energetic, frenetic sound. Jones's sensitive post-production dub effects (mainly echo and reverb) were subtle, but add to the head-twisting psychedelic density of the music.'



https://www.theguard...tow-harry-sword

New LOVEBITES MV for their song Winds of Transylvania, which is being used as the opening theme for the new anime, VLADLOVE. In typical fashion, they don't make any compromises - it's pure pedal-to-the-metal LOVEBITES

'A 17,000-year-old conch shell [...] has been discovered to be the oldest known wind instrument of its type, after researchers found it had been modified by its prehistoric owners to be played like a horn.

First unearthed in a richly decorated cave in the Pyrenees in 1931, the large shell was initially overlooked by archaeologists, who assumed it was a communal "loving cup" used by the Palaeolithic people whose wall art adorns the space.

But a re-examination of the conch[...] has revealed that it had in fact been carefully drilled and shaped to hold what experts now believe was a mouthpiece.

Remarkably, a skilled horn player enlisted by the multi-disciplinary team of French scientists was able to produce three clear notes of C, D and C sharp from the artefact, offering a tantalising hint of how it sounded to its original owners.

The conch, the team discovered, had also been decorated in its inner whorls with red pigment marks strikingly similar to fingerprint artworks on the walls of the cave. "We are supposing that the shell was decorated with the same pattern as was used in the cave art of Marsoulas, which establishes a strong link between the music played [by] the conch and the images on the walls," [...]

"That, to our knowledge, is the first time that we can see [evidence of] such a relationship between music and cave art in European prehistory."

Societies from Oceania to Europe, India to Japan have been known to use conch shells as musical instruments, calling devices or sacred objects. But while bone flutes were used as early as 35,000 years ago[...] no known example of a conch instrument dates to such an early period.

[...] The outermost lip of the shell had also been trimmed, potentially to allow a player to insert his or her hand to modulate the sound.

Traces of a brown organic substance were also detected around the apex hole, which the researchers believe may have been a form of glue used to attach the mouthpiece.

[...]

The team hope to experiment playing the conch in the cave where it would first have been sounded, which Tosello said he expected would be "a moment of great emotion".'

https://www.theguard...wind-instrument



Almost bought this library when it was on sale, but it seemed to disturb my elderly cat too much (and she needed her sleep...):

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 11 February 2021 - 05:10 PM

'the rat-a-tat rumble of "Blitzkrieg Bop" accelerated into something called the blast beat: an all-out rhythmic carpet-bombing over which vocalists would groan about Satan, Ronald Reagan, and the resemblance between the two. [...] blast beats also reflected a new technological landscape: "They were like the sound of a defective or damaged compact disc in one of the early players, a bodiless slice of digital information on jammed repeat."

Today, no drum kit is required for musicians to glitch and twitch with terrifying intensity. Open up any audio-editing software, pull a few sliders in one direction, put the resulting ugliness on loop, and there you have it: a headbangable hell-scream into eternity. Such sounds are everywhere online these days. On TikTok, I recently came across a series of videos [...] a harsh digital pounding[...] like a car alarm outfitted with a subwoofer—but for some reason, it beckoned to be played louder, rather than to be shut off.

These TikToks deployed a remix of music by [...] 100 Gecs, which has helped pioneer this era's emerging misfit aesthetic. [...] a prankish, postmodern collage of Skrillex, Mariah Carey, Blink‑182, Nelly, Linkin Park, Kenny Loggins, eurodance, and ska. What glues together such clashing influences isn't just a sense of musicality—though Brady and Les are excellent songwriters—but a fascination with amusicality. The vocals are manipulated to achieve the whininess of SpongeBob SquarePants. The grooves fracture and reroute habitually. The harmonic textures evoke train cars on rusted tracks. Confrontational and bizarre, this sound brings in almost 2 million listeners a month on Spotify.

Though 100 Gecs' music rejects classification and formulas, a fungal burst of artists with like-minded approaches has erupted in the past few years, and Spotify has started using a new genre label: hyperpop.'

https://www.theatlan...yperpop/617795/



Bought this today (on sale):

'"The drum needed a blood sacrifice": the rise of dark Nordic folk

Heilung jam with Siberian shamans and play with human bones, while Wardruna record songs submerged in rivers and on burial mounds. Now this vibrant undergound music scene is finding a wider audience

In 2002, holed up in an attic studio on the majestic Norwegian coast, Einar Selvik had a vision. He would create a trilogy of albums based on the 24 runes of the Elder Futhark, the world's oldest runic alphabet. The multi-instrumentalist's epiphany kicked off what is now one of the world's most vibrant underground music scenes.

Calling on [...] with whom Selvik had played in black metal band Gorgoroth, he created the band Wardruna [...] Runaljod: Gap Var Ginnunga (Sound of Runes: The Gap Was Vast) [...] had taken seven years to research, write and record. Each song told a story behind Nordic culture and traditions, via dark and ambient folk, played on ancient string and horn instruments, as well as animal hide drums.

The connection to nature is palpable: melodies are overlaid with the sounds of gurgling water, howling wind and crackling fire. When recording Laukr, named after the rune for water, Selvik delivered his vocals while standing submerged in a river. Meanwhile, the recording sessions for the band's new album, Kvitravn (White Raven), took place in forests and on burial mounds.'

https://www.theguard...R1xmgz6HXU00Y5w



Could use more crow bell... seriously though, I love that crow.

Wonder how accurate the subtitles are.

'Veiled and dwellingggggggggggg
Let me ask!
Lend me a feather [Lend meg ei fjør - sounds a lot like the English]
I will turn it into white wings [wait why do they have to be white?... err... this is supposed to be dark dark, not inviting white supremacists to seize the shadows dark!]
Let us fly, wide on winds [Lat (let) oss (us) flyga (fly) / i (in) vide (wide) vindar (winds) - and "ravn" is "raven"! wow Norwegian is easy... j/k]
[...]
Lend me your wide-sight [Lend meg vidsyn]'

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 16 February 2021 - 11:39 PM

'What will the next decade bring? Here are 20 predictions from trend forecasters

[...]

19 No-melody music
Stripped-down rap with no melody is perfect for soundtracking viral TikTok videos; the trend of stripping out elements may expand widely into various categories of music and media.

20 Death of music genres
Spotify's move toward mood-driven instead of genre-driven playlists has been successful to the point of suggesting that musical genres themselves will be increasingly outmoded in the coming years – or at least completely illegible.'

https://www.theguard...O4WVL8RRjQ3gDxQ

'"Lottery," though, is not your typical pop tune — in fact, it's the last thing you'd ever expect to blow up the way it has. Stripped-down to hi-hats, kick, clap, surging bass, and exhale sound effects, it's shockingly minimalist. Outside of TikTok and the Internet, it's gained virtually no traction. It's nowhere on the charts. The average music fan finds music like this — dark, dissonant, lacking melody and harmony — grating and unlistenable. [Plenty of relatively popular counterexamples to that claim I think... and most musical traditions, through most of history, have not made much use of literal harmony, even though people who grow up listening to modern Western music are conditioned to think of chords and so forth as 'natural'.]



[Also, there's clearly a melody in the bass-line.]

'TikTok is fundamentally changing how young people enjoy music, trading fully-fledged songs for bite-sized morsels of sound. Each clip is only 15 seconds long, so the music must match the rushed intensity of the video.

[...] from a creator's perspective, everything — the room, the people, the music — must jump out if they want to hook helpless #ForYou page drifters. It's Mad Men-turned-Gen-Z: only the best ads conquer the algorithm.

In this paradigm, what music wins? Bass-driven rap. [...]

[...] grisly bass-rap dominates TikTok. And it's not just one or two tracks. The swarm of brutally stark aggro-rap is growing exponentially.

Before TikTok, this music, sometimes called "no-melody" rap — or "no-mels" — was niche. It found modest popularity on SoundCloud and in local scenes, like South Florida and Texas. The Lone Star state is where Splurge, Quin NFN, 10k.Caash, GUN40, TisaKorean, and a legion of other no-melody rappers hail from. Spotify statistics point to Dallas, in particular, as the genre's epicenter.

We can trace the sound as far back as 2015, when XXXTentacion and Ski Mask the Slump God unleashed classic industrial-screamo bangers like "Take a Step Back" and "Rip Roach." Raw and angry, these tracks felt like a direct backlash against melody's sugar-coated dominance of mainstream rap: the proliferation of Autotune, rappers singing as much as rhyming, etc. No-melody brought rap back to its roots but retained three crucial innovations of the 21st century: trap drums, bass distortion, and the shorter song lengths characteristic of the streaming era.

Since then, the sound has developed, becoming marginally more sophisticated. Rather than blow out your subwoofers, new artists place bass notes in such a way as to create a groove in the moments between each blare, instead of solely relying on a constant stream of noise to provide the bump.

[...]

No-melody feels like a logical continuation of Gen Z's infatuation with distortion. p,,,[ Initially, trolls and cheeky friends used distortion as a prank resource, from shock-gag screamers like "Jeff the Killer" to early YouTube poops — send the link to someone and obliterate their ear drums. It was the decibel equivalent of a rickroll.

[...] No-melody rap seems to be so popular on exclusively TikTok because it's a peculiar blend of meme and dance: you get the comedy and slapstick absurdism of blown-out bass and the extreme groove power that bass-boosted chords offer.

[...] Some of the more creative artists, like TOKYO'S REVENGE, LIL MAYO, and bbno$, incorporate lip sync elements into their raps, coming up with chanted catchphrase micro-memes like "Good morning, my name is Tokyo!" and "Aloha, yes, yes! I smoke gas no stress, yes!" [...]


Increasingly, no-melody artists will start catering to the app and its users by TikTok-izing their music from the start. They won't bother with albums or even normal-length tracks, they'll churn out scores of TikTok-ready tunes of a minute or less, just a bass thud and maybe a hook. They'll test-run them directly in the TikTok community, as if presenting to a focus group. The sound might devolve into pure low-end noise — a sustained spasm of dirty bass.

[...] Like injecting a drug, TikTok offers its viewers an instant buzz: the music moves beyond any kind of build-up and goes straight to the climax'

https://www.highsnob...-no-melody-rap/

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 19 February 2021 - 01:43 AM

It's interesting, but a lot of the reason that seems to be happening (at least in my observation) in the instrumental is because there's way more melody (or at least micro-melodies) in the vocals. A lot of these dudes are kinda making single-line phrasings into hooks and then riding that hook (or 2-3) throughout the song. In these shorter 2-minute songs they also seem to eschew choruses a lot more often, but for almost like the opposite reason of lyrics-focused underground of previous decades. It's all hook, instead of no hook, even if it's all in the vocals and not the instrumental.

Band-Maid performing 'about Us' during last week's Online Okyu-ji. They wrote the song specifically to be debuted at the Nippon Budokan show that had been scheduled for the same day but which was, of course, canceled and replaced by the online show. It's one of their gentler songs. The online show, which was fantastic, is getting a limited blu-ray release in May.

'Rebel Riot: The punk soundtrack to Myanmar's anti-coup protests

Inspired by protesters in Hong Kong and Thailand, Myanmar's youth aim to grab the world's attention as they fight to remove the generals.

"It's not an easy thing as a woman here in Myanmar," said Hnin. "You have a lot of restrictions and you are not supposed to [be a singer in a punk band]."

The tattooed 23-year-old features in "One Day", a new film clip by Myanmar's foremost punk band Rebel Riot, delivering seething vocals over the top of a barrage of heavy guitars.

In the background, mohawked and leather-jacketed punks wave red and black flags and raise three fingers, a symbol of resistance derived from popular film series, The Hunger Games, and adopted by Myanmar's anti-coup protesters.

[...] the collective are known not only for their music but for street-level social initiatives, such as handing out food to Yangon's homeless.

Hnin says that being a part of Rebel Riot allows her to share her voice, which she says goes against the grain of what is expected from young women in Myanmar.

"One of the things is you can't get angry. You need to be quiet, you need to be patient, you need to be polite," she said.'

https://www.aljazeer...Z70G16dY6wAlkfg


[Edit: a traditional Myanma folk song:



]

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 20 February 2021 - 09:56 PM

DAFT PUNK has ended. I have a sad.

QuickTidal, on 22 February 2021 - 07:55 PM, said:

First thought they were

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 22 February 2021 - 09:00 PM

Aww, I can still remember the first time I saw that anthropomorphic dog walking around the city with a boombox.

This week I have mostly been listening to SCANDAL. I could never get into them until I heard the live version of Tsuki, below, and now I can't get enough of them, so much so that I've taken a chance and booked a ticket to see them in London in October.

'Brit Awards Change Eligibility Rules Thanks to Japanese-British Singer Rina Sawayama

Rina Sawayama's self-titled debut album is indisputably one of the most innovative pop records of recent years, a head-spinning fusion of nu-metal, Lady Gaga-style pop and ballads that is catnip for critics, fans of daring music [...] and prestigious awards like the Brits and Mercury Prize.

So there was no small outcry when Sawayama, 30, who was born in Japan and is not a British citizen but has lived in the U.K. since she was 4 and speaks with a pronounced British accent, was told she was "not British enough" to enter qualify for the awards, which meant that "Sawayama" was ineligible for the Mercury Prize last year.

After several months of social-media lobbying — including a statement of support from Elton John, who named the album his favorite of 2020 — and a meeting with the British Phonogram Industry, the rules have been changed: Artists who have been resident in the U.K. for more than five years qualify for the main prizes, according to the BBC.'

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 25 February 2021 - 05:44 PM

Herman Li of DragonForce had Miku and Kanami from Band-Maid on his twitch channel last night. It was so much fun. They chatted for about 90 minutes and then . . .

Friday by Rebecca Black reboot version. I hope you haven't eaten anything.



Has it been 10 years since the original? fuckin' hell.

'HasSak ethno-folk ensemble from Kazakhstan'

This week I've mostly been listening to Polkadot Stingray. They're utterly bonkers and I love 'em for it