Materi ini berisi :

• Definisi
• Teknik Pengambilan Sampling
• Distribusi Sampling

Materi untuk pertemuan Kamis, 26 Nopember 2009 jam 15.00 – 16.50 WIB

Download Materi 7 Sampling dan Distribusi Sampling

Ehemplo ng isang TNL?

Ilang gabi na ang nakalipas ng huli kong makita ang commercial ng isang condom kung saan binitiwan ni Robin Padilla and linyang:

“Ang tunay na lalake, gumagamit ng proteksyon!”

Habang sang ayon ako na dapat mag family planning ang mga mag-asawa bilang bantay populasyon at bantay budget na rin, at pag gamit ng condom para maiwasan ang maraming sakit, hindi ko naman mapigilang mapaisip kung ano nga ba ang isang ‘Tunay na Lalake’ (TNL).

Maraming beses ko na nakita sa TV si Robin Padilla na nabbibitaw ng mga linya tungkol sa pagiging TNL at pagiging ‘macho’. Uminom ka ng food supplement na ito kung lalake ka; Bumili ng tsinelas na ito kung macho ang iyong mga paa; Magsuot ng sando na ito para maging makisig at kung ano ano pa. Kung iniisip mo kung ano anong mga commercial binanggit ang mga yan ay tigilan mo na. Gawa gawa ko lang yan. Pero marami ang ganyan ang tema. Kung style ito ngmga mapera at demonyitong negosyante para tangkilikin ang kanilang produkto eh hindi ko na alam. Ang alam ko lang ay kung successful ang nasabing style, marahil marami sa mga kababayan natin ang naghahangad na maging TNL.

Ano nga ba ang batayan para masabing isa kang TNL?

Sapat na bang meron ka ng Ari ng Lalake (ANL)?

Kelangan mo ba ng tattoo?

Kung may tattoo ka na Kero Keroppi, isa ka bang TNL?

Ilang buwan na ang nakalipas ng magdiwang ang kumpanyang una kong pinasukan ng kung ano mang celebration yun. Tahimik lang ako. Alam ko naman ang lugar ko bilang baguhan at nasa pinaka ilalim ng ‘corporate ladder’. Basta may pagkain, keri na. Observe observe. Bonus pa ang konting inuman. Present din ang ilan sa mga bosses, at alam naman ng marami na basta boss ka, center of attraction ka sa isang company gathering, mapa social blah blah man ito o pormal na pagtitipon.

Nagsimula ang tagayan.

Boss: Haluin mo na yang alak. Matapang ba yan?

Employee: Ay opo boss! Eto try mo. *sabay abot ng alak*

Boss: *tumagay* Hindi naman matapang! Pang bakla! Pang bakla naman pala to eh!

Oh diba? TNL si boss. Alam nya na bilang isang TNL, hindi dapat binibigay sa kanya ang mga inumin na hindi malakas ang tama. Hindi ganyan ang iniinom ng isang TNL. Dahil ang TNL, umiinom ng sobra sobra hanggang sa puntong hindi na nya kayang umuwi ng mag isa. Magmamatapang habang nakainom, sisigaw sa mga tambay, mananaksak ng kainuman, magmumura ng malakas, susuka sa kalsada, at sa bandang huli, magpapatulong sa mga kaibigang babae para lang makauwi. Oh diba? Yan ang TNL.

Bakit nga ba kelangan magkaron ng TNL?

Meron bang Pekeng Lalake (PL)?

Ang pekeng lalake ba ay bakla?

Hindi ba negatibo ang konotasyon sa salitang peke?

Ibig bang sabihin nito ay negatibo ren ang konotasyon sa mga PL?

Bakit wala pa akong naririnig tungkol sa Tunay na Babae?

Hindi ba sila napepeke?

Pinoy Big Brother. Isang magandang halimbawa, o pwedeng pagkunan ng halimbawa dahil most likely, ang mga tao sa loob ay nirerepresent ang mga tao sa labas. Sa mga tao sa Pilipinas. Parang sampling method sa Statistics. Parang pagkuha ng panalo sa isang electronic raffle pero may konting bias dahil mga gwapo’t magaganda ang papasok sa loob.

Scene: Nagpalit ng bahay ang girl housemates so kailangan nilang makisama sa mga boys ng magkabilang bahay.

Mga tauhan:

1. Rica – isang transexual. Biologically male, pero counted as a girl housemate.
2. Patrick – Married, may anal, isang TNL.
3. Rocky – Model, macho, dating construction worker, SUPER TNL.

Patrick: Parang naiimagine ko pa rin sila Yuri, Mariel etc. (mga dati nilang housemates) na nandyan sa sala, nakaupo..

Rocky: Oo nga. Iba na ngayon eh. Meron na tayong She-Man (pertaining to Rica) *sabay tawa*. Hindi ako komportable pag may ganyan sa paligid eh.

Hindi eksaktong pag kowt. Pero ganyan ang laman. Bukod pa dyan ay tinawag nila si Rica na ‘Beauty and Beast’ at ‘Samson at Delilah sa isang katawan’.

Kitang kita ang respeto ng isang TNL sa tingin nilang hindi TNL. Macho.

TNL ka ba pag magaspang ka magsalita?

Pag mura ka ng mura?

TNL1: Grabe pare! P^%#^&#%! Ang gwapo ni t&^%&@*^ng Piolo sa Lovers in Parin pare! Mamatay matay ako sa P#^&$$&($&*( kilig!

TNL2: Eh ga*% ka palang hayup ka eh! Akin si p^$(@#@& Piolo eh!

Oh diba? Ang tapang ng dating. TNL.

Marami ata ang hindi nakakapansin na nabubuhay na tayo sa 21st century. Lalo na sa ating bansa. Meron na tayong electric stove, kung iisipin mo nung unang panahon hindi pa natin alam gumamit ng apoy. Napapagalaw na natin ang hagdan at tinatawag natin itong escalator. Mula abacus hanggang calculator. Ang governor, dating Terminator.

Ang punto ko lang, gaya ng pag evolve ng mga bagay sa paglipas ng panahon, sana kayanin sumabay ng ilan sa ating mga paniniwala. Lalo na kung patungkol ito sa pakikipag kapwa tao. At pagtrato sa kapwa ng tama.

Isang maiksing mensahe  para sa mga macho nating kaibigan:

Hindi natin kailangan na patunayan na tayo ay isang Tunay na Lalake dahil walang Tunay na Lalake. Kung meron man, sya ang unang dapat makaalam na wala syang karapatan para gumawa o magdikta ng basehan sa kung sino ang dapat tawaging Tunay na Lalake.

Ayos ba mga tsong? Pakiss nga.

Raja Nee – Turn It Up

Ännu en låt jag plockat från den mängd höjdarlåtar som spelas på webbradion Funk365. Det hela är producerat av Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, men tyvärr så verkade inte det hjälpa Raja Nees karriär nämnvärt då hon bara släppt ett album där den här låten ingår bland annat. Sen bidde det inget mer, varför har jag inte en aning om, men det kan ju bero på att konkurrensen på marknaden vad gäller kvinnliga hip-hop och R&B-artister var tämligen brutal i mitten på 90-talet.

Annars så andas den här låten väldigt mycket samma känsla som Naughty By Natures Hip Hop Hooray som kom ett par år tidigare. Medan Naughty By Nature nöjde sig med att sampla lite trummor till sin låt så samplade herrarna Jam & Lewis desto friskare till den här skapelsen.

Isley Brothers – Make Me Say It Again Girl

Ja, eftersom det var bröderna Isley som det samplades ifrån så står även bröderna Isley med som låtskrivare på Raja Nees Turn It Up. Så de bör ju ha fått in en och annan cent i royalty utan att behöva göra speciellt mycket mer än att låta recycla en av sina gamla låtar från 1975.

Själv så föredrar jag då Raja Nees låt som ger mig så mycket av den där 90-talskänslan som man trodde man hade glömt bort. Men jag inser att jag mer och mer börjar intressera mig för det decennium då mycket musik flög förbi utan att jag registrerade vad det var för nåt utan bara diggade för stunden. Har ju t.ex återupptäckt tjejtrion SWV som spelades friskt på radio och klubbar i Sthlm under de åren jag bodde där.

Tjillevippen

notbugs

UK producer DaVinche shares some of his sampling techniques.

PortaMod by Syphus, mentioned earlier, is now announced for the public here! It’s a new player for older music formats, which offers alot more than performing/visualizing recorded music. It’s basically a library for Processing to play MOD/XM/S3M, currently presented in a few different forms, for example the Chipdisco. It offers two decks for DJ-action, and is also a great way to perform your own music live. You can tranpose songs, tempo changes, automatic beatmatch, loop quarters of patterns and jump inbetween them, mute individual channels. And you can use either keyboard, mouse, or MIDI. Chipdisco also allows you to navigate through songs with the cursor keys. Left/right changes the song position in the pattern list, while up/down goes a step up or down in the current pattern playing.

The source will be shared, so it will be interesting to see what the future holds for MOD/XM/S3M performances/visualizers in Processing. (For those using Supercollider, you can use Fredrik Olofsson’s redMOD and redXM here.)

Super-Wolf – Can Do It

Fick ett underbart löjligt leende på läpparna när jag hittade denna på YouTube. Hade aldrig hört den innan men fastnade direkt för den på grund av att jag ju kände igen beatsen som han använt sig av . Därtill har de snyggt producerat in lite egna gitarrer och övergångar så det inte bara är en ren ripoff.

Denise LaSalle – I’m So Hot

Ja, det är den här gamla pärlan som fick släppa till takten till Supervargen. Den här låten är extremt starkt förknippad med Mayday Club för mig. Den är nämligen med på den enda kassett jag ägt med liveinspelning av DJ-setet från en kväll på Mayday. Lite otippat att just denna spelades på Mayday med tanke på att den är rätt tunn i takten så det är ingen låt som man vädrar ur ett par jordbävningshorn med precis.

Men det här fyndet av Super-Wolf drar igång en massa idéer i skallen om att man skulle samla ihop alla liknande projekt som kom på den tiden då detta med att låna beats var tämligen nytt. Vill inte kalla det sampling eftersom sampling är så starkt förknippat med digitala samplers. Annars så kan man väl rent tekniskt kalla det sampling oavsett hur det har gått till väga.

Inser dock att jag varken har tid eller ork att sitta och samla ihop och försöka styra upp en samling med låtar och deras ripoff-projekt. Nöjer mig istället med att det säkert kommer dyka upp flera såna som jag kan ta med på bloggen istället.

Tjillevippen

notbugs

I discovered something about myself this morning….  I am a sucker for a sample, as in the type that is mixed into another song.  Perhaps I am living in the rose-coloured-glassy past (like my father who believes that footballers today don’t measure up to footballers of yesteryear!).  Or perhaps it is just some longing for the familiar; but it occurred to me that I have spent many an hour searching out an original song which has been mixed into something new. 

Last weekend I was at my niece’s ballet concert and there was an up-tempo dance set to a mix of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.  As it started I was reminded of how much I liked the song “When I Get You Alone”, by Robin Thicke, when it came out in the early 2000s and featured a sample of the mix (yes, I have truly pathetic taste in music!).  Similarly, I love love lurved Alicia Keys’ 2005 release, “Karma” which sampled Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and was reminded of this today as I was watching RAGE and an old clip of Stevie appeared before my eyes.  I recalled (after hearing “Karma” and its addictive beat) going online to buy and download the original 30 years after its release.

A year or so ago I remember being entranced by Craig David (and not just cos he suddenly looked less like a boy band member and very sex and buff!) sampling David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” in a song-that-went-nowhere-but-was-very-boppy, “Hot Stuff”.  And, though I am no huge fan of rap, I have found myself appreciating everything from Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” mixed with “Under Pressure”; to 2Pac’s “Ghetto Gospel” and “Changes”; to Nas – a huge fan of the why-reinvent-the-wheel, mixing “Carmina Burana” and Beethoven into his music.  And finally, cos I am a sucker for the clichéd and love the original, another favourite of mine is Coolio’s “I’ll C U When U Get There”, featuring Pachelbel’s Canon.

 Everything old is new again, it seems.

The menu for Saturday’s Thanksgiving tasting is now final. Here’s what we’ll be serving up:

Appetizers & Snacks:

1. Crab-stuffed mushrooms and Old English Cheeseball. Pairings: Estancia Pinot Grigio, Belhaven Scottish Ale.

2. Barbecued Bacon Canapes, Early American Cheeseball, and Sausage-stuffed Mushrooms. Pairings: Sterling Vintner’s Collection Chardonnay, Brother Thelonious Abbey Ale.

Main:

3. Roasted Turkey and gravy, Savory herbed dressing, Homestyle Grand Marnier Cranberry Sauce, and Sweet Potato Casserole. Pairings: El Portillo Pinot Noir, 14 Hands Merlot, Sam Adams Boston Lager.

Desserts:

4. Pumpkin Roll and Pumpkin Praline Cheesecake. Pairings: New Gewurz Gewurztraminer, Sam Adams Winter Lager.

5. Turtle Cheesecake. Pairings: Bailey’s on the rocks, Young’s Double Chocolate Stout.

This should be a great time and a great tasting experience. Stop in tomorrow between 2pm and 10pm, and bring your friends!

I’ve been a fan of Kool Keith from back when he was a member of the Ultramagnetic MCs.  I first heard Funk Your Head Up in 1995 and was pretty much hooked on him ever since.  Tom Waits, however… I never really got him until i saw this video.

Everything about this track is excellent.

This is what I wish people thought of when I mention hip-hop instead of Lil’ Wayne, 50 Cent and so on.

Ah well.

Chopping up a breakbeat in the Fruity Slicer or Slicex or Recycle etc. and rearranging it is a lot of fun. You can make the break your own, instead of just looping it. Even better, making one-shot drum samples from breaks and making huge velocity mapped multisample drumkits will let you mix and match between breaks and get relatively more realistic results. I was going to make a video about this, but I can’t be arsed, so I’m just going to put up a crapload of pictures. WordPress is pretty annoying, because it likes to format pictures on the page randomly and never does what you want it to do.

The first step is to find a breakbeat, or any recording of just drums. Load it into an instance of Edison, probably on the master mixer channel, and open another Edison directly below it. The first Edison is going to be used to find each individual drum sound, and then the second is where they’ll be edited, fine tuned and saved. It’s useful to methodically chop out all the kick drums first, and then the snares, or however you want to do it, sometimes it can be hard to remember if you’ve already sampled that tiny snare or not. Before you do anything, right click in the Edison windows and go view- display settings and un-check fancy mode, unless you really like it; fancy mode is less accurate and just looks fancier. Also, right click again and go edit – and at the very bottom, make sure Click-free (smooth) editing is off, this ‘feature’ automatically fades any of your edits, so while you can’t screw anything up, you also can’t do anything useful.

Preparation

So, select the first kick in the first Edison. I’ve found that selecting more than the whole hit is better than trying to get it exact the first time, since it can be trimmed down later very easily. Copy n’ paste it into the second Edison, and trim it down so you’re left with only the stuff you want. Ctrl-Delete will delete everything except what’s selected, which is useful. Now you might think you’re done, but not quite. Since it’s chopped from an actual beat, the drum’s decay was interupted by another sound, like a hihat or something. This sounds bad because the tail of the drum just cuts off abruptly. We could fade out the end of it, but that wouldn’t really fix the problem. Bathing the whole thing in reverb might help, but might sound really bad as well. The best way that I’ve found to remedy this is to copy and paste the whole drum sound next to itself, reverse the second one and fade it out. This can give the illusion of a natural decay, and it’s faded out before you hear the ‘Schhwwwwooop’ sound.

Trimming

Zero Crossing

If you can’t see those buttons, you might have to resize the Edison window. Once that’s done, I hit Ctrl-A to select all,and then Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for the copypaste. The first section of the sound will still be selected, so click and drag near the beginning of the selection to the end of the second section of the sound. You might have to zoom out with your middle mouse button to see it. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any ‘inverse selection’ shortcut, but oh well. Once you have the second section selected, Alt-Left Arrow will reverse it. Zooom in to where the two sections meet, and if it looks weird, right click- tools – reverse polarity might make it look better. Since you faded them out, there won’t be any clicky sounds, and it might make the phase better or something, it probably doesn’t really matter, I guess I’m just OCD about things like that

Fading Out

Now that you have a ‘Pooschhssschwooop’ sound, you’ll have to fade out the ‘wooop’ part. I used to use the volume envelope, but now that I’m lazy, I just use the fade out button a few times, in different places. If it doesn’t sound good, you’ll have to undo and do it over again. When you’re happy with it, trim it down. The waveform view of the sound might be deceiving, so press S to go to the spectrum view and trim it where the sound really ends. Just to be safe, select a little bit of the end of the sound and fade it out again. You can EQ your little sound now, for the most part taking out the extreme low-frequency rumblies is all you’ll do.

Trimming and Eqing

If you’re making a kit in the FPC, which you should be, right click the little grey bar above the waveform/spectrum where it says ‘TITLE’ and give it a title. I would recommend something easy like Mydrums1_kick_1 or something like that, to keep it all organized. Edison doesn’t seem to support saving as 24-bit wave files, so you could change it to 16-bit if you want to by clicking the little ‘32′ box. If you know your sample is mono, clicking the box next to it will change it to mono. If you do this and it sounds weird, your sample wasn’t mono. We’re going to be dragging and dropping sounds, and if the sounds don’t have a title, FL will automatically name them “Dragged_Sample_68″ or something like that, which sucks. All of the sounds we drag will be saved in the Patches/Sliced Beats Folder, but we’re going to save them somewhere else later, so we’ll end up with duplicates, which is okay I guess, you just gotta clean out sliced beats sometimes.

 Open up the FPC, and using the Empty preset, click on the pad you want to be your kick drum (or whatever) and using the drag n’ drop button in Edison which is on the very right, under the ‘O’, drag and drop the sound into the sample zones place of the FPC. If everything worked right, you should see your sound in the FPC with the right filename, yay!

The next step is to do this over and over again for every drum sound you want from the break, dragging each kick to the kick pad in FPC, etc. Once you’ve gleamed pretty much everything you want form the break, it’s time to organize your multisample layers in FPC. Play through each sound by clicking on the waveform display and figure out which sounds are more aggressive and which are softer. The softer sounds will go at the top of window, using the up/down arrows next to the large ‘DELETE’ button, and the harder sounds will go to the bottom. Once you think you’ve got them in order, click the little button next to ’SPREAD EVEN’, and it will spread the layers evenly, as well as not let them cross each other, so only one zone will be triggered at a time. Sometimes, layering sounds together is fun, and if you want to have more than one layer uh, layered on top of each other, make sure that button isn’t glowing. Now we can adjust the velocities that each zone will respond to. Generally, I like to have the harder sounds closer together in velocity, and the softer sounds further apart.With a pad controller, play the pad and see if it feels right, if you don’t have a pad controller, it might be kind of had to know where to put them.

Drag n drop

When everything is completely set up, and you’ve tried playing the kit with your pad controller, and everything is nice, click the dropdown arrow next to the pad selector arrow things in the top left. Choose ‘Save Entire kit as pad presets..’ and give your kit a name. The pad presets should be saved to Image-Line\FL Studio #\Data\Patches\Packs\FPC.. if you put the kick drums in the pad that FPC wants you to, it will save it to the kick drums folder, etc etc.. Down in the corner of this window, make sure you check ‘Save wave files’, it will save the audio files in the same place as each pad preset, for easy portability and generally neater organization.

I could have gone into more detail, but I didn’t. This was pretty badly organized and stuff, but I don’t care that much. Read the Edison help files.

John Oswald's 'Plunderphonics'

So, I’m about to start my final year dissertation on the subject of plunderphonia and I thought I’d crack out a little post on the subject to get my juices flowing (if I weren’t determined on making this post a pure stream of consciousness I’d definitely replace the phrase ‘juices flowing’).  Plunderphonia is a term used to describe the reworking of existing audio material into something new (literally ’stealing sound’ in a little fusion of English and Greek) – it’s what most people would think of today as ’sampling’.  It’s a pretty interesting subject and even though the term plunderphonia is over twenty years old it is perhaps more relevant today than it ever was due to the increase ease of gaining music for free.  If people are streaming music on Spotify and You Tube for free then why can’t people take this ‘free’ music and go on to do something new and invigorating with it?

For many the idea of reworking existing sounds into a new composition smacks of a lack of authenticity – it feels cheap and half-arsed.  However, for some it is no different to hearing a nice chord progression and reusing that in a creative and original way.  The problem in both of these cases are the words ‘new’ and ‘original’ – what constitutes this ‘bettering’?  Is the reworking merely reusing the positive attributes of the old recording whilst adding nothing to it?  Clearly this is all very subjective and would be extremely hard to quantify by a selection of unbiased musicologists, let alone a judge in a copyright case.  At the moment though, even ‘bettering’ is apparently still not a justifiable reason for reusing someone’s music without first obtaining consent, paying royalties etc.

The original pioneer in the area of plunderphonia was Canadian composer John Oswald who coined the phrase ‘plundephonics’ and released an album titled thus.  The album contained reworkings of individual tracks or a selection of an artists work (e.g. a reworking of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or an amalgam of many different Metallica tracks).  Skipping aside much of the history, the album was disseminated for free to reviewers and radio stations but was eventually pulled by The Canadian Recording Industry Association despite Oswald’s ‘not-for-profit’ attitude. [The album is still available digitally from here].  Since then many prominent people have discussed the issue but there are still so many grey areas.  Even trivial question such as ‘how much borrowing is too much?’ can’t really be answered in any authoritative sense.  For example Justice’s album Cross is said to feature around 400 uncleared samples but they are apparently too small or distorted to be recognized and as such nothing has been done about it (source).

As was mentioned earlier, reworking an actual piece of music is for many viewed as cheap and inauthentic whereas tracks that feature many similar features but perhaps are considered more pastiche than reworking (one of a plethora of example being the ‘trance’ style although every genre has it’s idioms and conventions) count as original and new.  Yet, we are at a point where people such as David Cope can create computer’s known as neural networks that, when fed a collection of sheet music by say Chopin, can regurgitate a work in the style of Chopin that is (at least to my ignorant ears) nigh on indistinguishable from the original.  [See the album Bach by Design].  Such heretical replication of teh masters of classical music may worry some people but to others the computer is merely doing what our brain is doing in discovering these new permutations on a style. In John Oswald’s paper Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt he cites a section from the story Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson which reads:

Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create.   In fact they do nothing of the sort.   They discover.   Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system.   For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe–and telling ourselves that we ‘created’ them. (original)

Whilst this passage is by no means evidence that music is maybe ‘discovered’ (and that therefore that this idea of creator’s ownership is in fact more of an infantile game of ‘finders-keepers’) it does help to raise a few questions about the ownership of music to anyone who hasn’t thought about it.  Even such seemingly intricate areas such as timbres are, for the most-part, very much idiomatic and genre-specific and perhaps in the future we will see neural networks decide on what harmonics and filtering to put on fundamentals frequencies depending on what the computer is fed.  Maybe, in genres where timbre is more varied and widespread, a computer may interpolate between the differing timbers in ways which a human mind never could and perhaps create timbres the likes of which we would never have thought of.  All of this is fairly tangential to say the least (and pie in the sky to say the most) but nevertheless, it all helps to emphasise that the idea of musical ‘ownership’ is something which should at least be challenged (although I haven’t even started to get into the ways in which Western laws discriminate between right and wrong in this area).

On reflection I personally believe there should be much more leniency in the reworking of existing songs.  However, there is obviously a problem in this commercial day and age with the problem of not actually ‘bettering’ the songs and as yet it appears there is no agreed method for judging this.  Unfortunately, many people don’t feel a need for this change and as such don’t feel a need to spend time solving a problem they don’t want fixed.  And yet, the people who do want it fixed can’t seem to find a method to rally around.  Until this changes musicians will have to rework the songs of the artists who work under things such as the Creative Commons Licence, pay money to those artists who are not under CC or the like or use samples that are ‘unrecognizable’ (whatever that may mean).  However, without the use of so many ‘recognizable’ samples composers will be unable to make good use of all the strong and specific cultural associations that are tied to any one of these songs – a true shame.

The fine folks at Celemony just released Melodyne, their polyphonic audio note editor. Yes, you heard me right: you can now edit audio clips the way you edit MIDI! Once only a distant figment of my imagination, this feature is now actually a reality.

What will this mean? Well, for one, it will be easier to correct an acoustical performance. If you wanted to alter a chord of a recorded piano performance for example, it will be easier than ever. You can just load up that recording in Melodyne and drag around individual notes in a chord to reassign their pitch and time position. Somehow, a magic algorithm doctor made the special voodoo needed to make it possible.

It’s mind boggling, really. See for yourself in this nifty video.

I really think this is going to be pretty revolutionary for sampling. I don’t personally sample other artists (even though I’d love to) because I don’t want to hire a lawyer for the clearances. (Also I’m a chicken.) But I do know that some artists like to grab a snippet and alter it so much that nobody will ever know where it came from. This will be a godsend for them, and not just to make the sample fit their track better… If one was in court, suing for sample usage, and the sample that was used had completely different notes and timing — it would be hard to prove that someone ’stole’ the awesomeness from a prior track. And at the very least, it would make the case pretty interesting.

Some advances you just know will mark a watershed moment in production technology. This might just be one of them.

304351     วิธีสุ่มตัวอย่างทรัพยากรธรรมชาติ     Natural Resource Sampling Methods

เทคนิคของการสุ่มตัวอย่างที่ใช้ในการสํ ารวจเพื่อจัดการทรัพยากรธรรมชาติ วิธีการวิเคราะห์และแปลความหมายข้อมูล

(Forest survey and sampling techniques employed in natural resources management. Analysis and interpretation of the data.)

(304351 มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์)

It’s that time of year again! Time for our annual Thanksgiving Feast.

For those who haven’t been to one of our Feast events, it’s a rare treat.

We bring in an entire Thanksgiving Day meal, and choose wines, beers and spirits that pair well with each course. You get to taste the food and the drinks together, course-by-course. You’ll discover how much better it tastes when you put the right things together, and you’ll get to make your own informed choices about what to buy for your own meal.

The menu includes traditional Thanksgiving snacks, appetizers, main dishes, sides and desserts. And, not only can you taste, choose and buy the drinks you want to serve at your Thanksgiving – you can order any of the dishes you taste for pickup on Wednesday. It’s Thanksgiving made easy!

Also, this year we are being mindful of the economy and everyone’s general ambition to be value-conscious. So we have purposely chosen affordable wines, beers and spirits to feature. Wines are all under $15; and beers are under $10. You really can serve and enjoy great drinks without breaking the bank….we’ve done the homework to find the right choices for you.

We hope you’ll stop by Saturday and join us. It’s not very often that you get the chance to do a full-meal tasting in this way. And we have a lot of fun with it, too.

See you then! (Saturday 2-10pm)

Esloultimo.com es la última iniciativa de la empresa Guía de Tendencias s.a. con la que pretende ofrecer a usuarios inscritos en la página web la posibilidad de testear productos recién salidos al mercado.

Esloultimo es una tienda real o, como se definen ellos: “Es el centro de las innovaciones, donde puedes ver o probar lo más nuevo del mercado.” situada en Barcelona.

Los primeros días de lanzamiento de la tienda vieron el formarse de colas inesperadas con el consecuente agotamiento casi instantáneo de todos los productos.

Esloultimo se suma a las iniciativas que pertenecen al fenómeno llamado tryvertising (permitir a los clientes que prueben los productos en un entorno relevante y significativo, que permita apreciar sus cualidades. Se diferencia del tradicional sampling en que no se limita a regalar muestras de un producto/servicio, sino a integrarlo en una experiencia de uso real en un momento clave para el cliente.).

En Esloultimo los clientes no pagan los productos y las empresas no pagan por estar en el lineal.
Lo que es interesante es que la tienda se convierte en centro de investigación con encuestas, investigaciones al consumidor y estudios de mercado.

El beneficio de las empresas es claro: conseguir un buen feedback sobre unos productos que, a lo mejor, en una circunstancia de pago, los usuarios no habrían probado. Imaginaros la ventaja: si nada se paga entonces todos los productos están al mismo alcance y eso significa medir la atractividad de los productos en un contesto de igualdad económica.

Example of Non-Keyboard Sampler. Source: http://www.vintagesynth.com/akai/mpc2000xl.jpg

To many music purists, this post is going to seem like heresy, but sampling, whether you agree with it or not, has become one of the most popular ways to make catchy music. Most often associated with early Rap and Hip-Hop, sampling is often also used in Techno, House, and other musical forms. A good sample can be a great foundation upon which to build an innovative musical work.

How does one go about obtaining samples, and how can one use them effectively? In my own studio I use a Korg small studio keyboard, which has an optional sampler that I can plug in. The Keyboard interface for the sample is nice because I can then use the pitch bender and other adjustable knobs on the keyboard to manipulate the sample as I play. Keyboards aren’t the only way to use samples, however, many pieces of hardware exist that allow you to treat samples the way you treat a percussion instrument, which make for more rhythmically innovative uses of samples.

For those that don’t want to buy new hardware but want to use samples, a software solution is also available. Many times I’ve ‘cheated’ my way into samples by simply recording the sound byte I want from the internet into a ProTools session. From there I can then chop, repeated, pitch bend, stretch, and otherwise have precise control over what I do with the sample.

It may seem like kid’s stuff to those who insist every piece of music be derived from a ‘real’ musical performance, but non-trivial music innovations are possible with samples. Submitted for your approval is a small piece I put together in a single day using a Yo-Yo Ma sample I love. Listen and then respond with your own thoughts by taking the poll.

Ecstasy of Gold – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Soundtrack [Remix]

*Fair warning, the song goes from 0-60 in about 1 second about a third of the way through, so adjust your volume accordingly.

10. Computer  – It seems obvious but until recently there were still some die-hards producing music without the ‘impurity’ digitizing. In the last several years, however, the processing power of consumer PCs has made tremendous production capability possible at a price point most can afford. The latest generation software and hardware available for ammeter music producers is not only affordable but compatible with most home computers.

9. Sound Card – Regardless of what your creating your music on (piano, vocals, electric guitar, etc) your going to need a good sound card to get everything into digital format. There are many alternatives if you’re building a studio from scratch but for the less brave there are software/hardware bundles (such as ProTool and MBox) that give you everything you need.

8. Cables – Many enthusiasts debate over whether or not one needs to pay the market for Monster Cable, but for those who are more price sensitive there are affordable quarter inch cables available that will get the job done.

7. Audio Monitors – The sky is the limit with speakers, but fortunately many retails offer solutions at a wide range of price points (for example Rokit has a size and quality monitor option for just about every price).

6. Software – Many free music production software alternatives exist – Reason, Logic, etc, but in my experience and the experience of many professional colleagues, ProTools is still the definitive software for music production. Period.

5. Pre-Amp – This becomes extremely important for vocal recording. Often a microphone recording simply doesn’t have the output to compete with powered instruments (like an electric guitar). Amplification of the vocal within the recording path will enhance and warm any vocal performance.

4. Compressor – From bass guitars to vocals just about everything needs a little compressing from time to time to warm the sound and prevent variability in the volume level of the performance form damaging speakers (and ears).

3. Microphone – As with ProTools for software, there is only one brand that stands out in microphone technology. Sure microphone is known worldwide for their superior performance and sound quality. Every price point and benefit imaginable is addressed by at least Sure product. Start out with a $100 mic and work your way up according to your needs.

2. Devoted Friends – As with any hobby, your music will need a second (and third) opinion, over and over again. Each time you remaster tracks you’ll need another set of ears to keep you grounded. That means asking other to listen over and over again to new versions of the same song. Treat them to a beer every now and again to show your appreciation.

1. Time – As an ammeter, it WILL take you time to figure all this stuff out. Radio quality recording in one’s basement isn’t easy, it must be a labor of love you’re willing to make time for.

Hi there!
It has been a few days since my last post here, and you must be thinking: what has Stacey been doing that is more important than writing on her blog?

Well, I’ve been doing lots of different things, both related to cheese and not, but the most important time-consuming task has involved getting Taste of Cheese ready for the 2009 Gourmet Food and Wine Expo that starts this Thursday night at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre. The show is 4 days long and expects to see over 30,000 people walk through the doors! That’s a hell of a lot of people! We have been scrambling around finding things like table cloths, napkins, nice tasting trays, getting informational materials printed, choosing cheeses to sample… its like the work will never end! And this is all before the show even starts! Crazy!

I can only hope that we figure it all out by this Thursday!

Check out the Show website for more info and then come on down and visit us this weekend! We will be a refreshing sight in a show full of wine booths!
www.foodandwineexpo.ca

Street art involves a lot of appropriation (stealing) other people’s images from the mass media, art and elsewhere. Appropriation is part of the cut and paste, Dada to hip-hop, lineage of which street art is a part. A sample, appropriated from some other work of art or design, can be used creatively to create new and original works. (I could expand on the history of sampling in music, art and literature but this is not the point.) Appropriation, sampling, homage, tribute, plagiarism, copy, whatever you want to call it, are all the various degrees of lack of authenticity and originality. And this leaves the door wide open for many kinds of abuses.

Not a real Banksy

I saw a fake Banksy gangster rat on the street of Brisbane, I’m pretty sure that Banksy never went to Brisbane but if he did this would have faded in the sun by now. It has been copied from a photograph of a Banksy gangster rat but it has left out details on the ghettoblaster. This fake Banksy is different from the forgeries on sale in auction houses or on Ebay. (In April 2007 auction house Christies withdrew two alleged Banksy paintings from sale. And The Art Newspaper reported (1/10/07) that unauthorized Banksy prints with forged signatures are for sale on Ebay.) Legally it is hard to actually be a forgery when you are free and anonymously created on the street as no claims are being made about the authenticity and nobody is suffering any financial loss as a result of the deception.

Street art is frequently not just copying or sampling but plagiarizing with copies of copies of copies. (See my review of Swifty’s show and see his reply in the comments). I do not want to see another Warhol imitation or any famous high contrast black and white image reproduced in stencil-art. Copying Warhol is just repetitive and it does not make the copyist another Warhol. On a full colour sticker by Mask is a reproduction of Roy Lichtenstein’s painting of an artist and his girlfriend saying, “Oh Brad, soon all the galleries will be clamouring for your art”, only “Brad” has been replaced by “Mask”. This sucks all of irony out of Lichtenstein’s appropriation of the original comic frame. A copy of art will not alone make a work art.

Mask sticker

There are many reasons for copying: for learning and practicing, for ironic or satirical parody, for all kinds of reasons – but copying for it’s own sake is not one of them – it is just plagiarism.

I’ve spent the better part of the last few hours reinstalling my Ubuntu virtual machine from scratch after completely botching my previous install’s configuration. How? I was attempting to get Python 2.5 up and running with a few custom packages, and ended up accidentally removing everything Python-related, which included many rather important system packages. Synaptic then froze up, and most of the basic system operations stopped working.

Freaking awesome. Just how I wanted to spend my Saturday evening.

But now that I have it working again, I wanted to delve into my latest project: a semi-intelligent Twitterbot! There are three core components to this project:

1. Read the public Twitter timeline to accumulate posts.
2. Build a Markov Model out of all accumulated posts.
3. Use a cronjob to modulate the frequencies of #1 and #2.

I’ve posted about Hidden Markov Models before, and this is an example of theory put into practice. Granted, the utility of this application is questionable, but if for no other reason, it sure is entertaining. In fact, since activating my Twitterbot a little over a week ago, it’s already garnered a decent response. Here are some of my favorites thus far:

It’s endlessly amusing to me that so many people seem to think my bot is actually a person. At least a few also seem to be amused by its antics. Still others respond as though nothing is amiss. It’s also managed to flag down multinational Twitter users. And it’s even attracted the attention of other bots!

How does it work, ya say? Welllllll…

The underlying assumption of HMMs is that there is a hidden state that influences whatever the output we actively observe is. Within this context, it means we’re assuming there’s an unobservable pattern to the sentences Twitter users post that results in the actual words we can see. Thus, if we observe enough of these posts, we should, in theory, be able to infer those hidden states.

Yeah yeah, that wasn’t very simply put. Nevertheless, let’s move on.

The assumption my bot makes is pretty straightforward: each word that is observed depends only on the word before it. Put another way, this means that, given a single word, there is only a certain number of words that can come after it. Of these finite number of words that can come after it, some are much more likely than others.

This makes intuitive sense. Take any one of the sentences in this post, for example: after you read one word, you’re already expecting a certain word or number of words that could follow it (it’s how we read, in fact; ever heard that humans only actively read about 70% of the words on a  page? all the others are inferred by this same method). It’s basically a primitive form of contextual analysis.

From a technical standpoint, this dependence on only a single previous word is called a “first-order” Markov Model. HMMs can go as high as you’d like. There is another similar Twitterbot built by a friend of mine which uses a “second-order” Markov Model, in that each word depends on the two previous words, resulting in a sentence that probably makes more sense than mine will. But for those of you who ahead of me, this also means much more of the original posts used to build the HMM will show up in the generated posts.

And honestly, I wanted my bot’s posts to be as random as possible while still kind of making sense Hence I purposefully implemented a first-order model.

My bot accumulates 800 posts from the public feed over 20 minutes, then uses those posts to build a first-order HMM. From that model, it then constructs a post by sampling from the model, and posts it to the Twitter account.

If you’re interested in following the bot, you can find it here.

I’m in the process of refining the current model, perhaps a hybrid first-second order HMM. I may also include some topics that are weighted more heavily than others, so the generated posts more accurately reflect the trending topics. And of course, I’m open to suggestions!

Yes, this bot provides a wonderful source of amusement, particularly since I am way over my head in schoolwork. Applying for jobs, applying to PhD programs, conducting research with Dr Murphy, and actually keeping up with my coursework is all proving very difficult to juggle these last few weeks of the semester. So it’s nice to have a new joke to read every 20 minutes!

I also want to mention that, a few days ago, my total hits on this blog surpassed 20,000. Thank you again to all those who seem to find something on this blog interesting

We have some fun and very nice drinks for you to taste this Saturday at Bourbon & Canal. And at some unbeatable prices, too.

As always, we “pop the corks” at around noon, and continue sampling all through the day and evening. We usually run out around 9-10pm. Stop in any time that’s convenient for you.

First up: Oliver Sangria

From Indiana’s most-popular and best-selling winery, a new ready-to-drink sangria. Semi-sweet red wine with fruit juices makes for a tasty, refreshing combo good anytime (don’t worry about food pairings, just pour and enjoy).

For beer drinkers: Fat Tire amber ale

This beer has a cult following across the country. It took years before they finally released it into Indiana a couple of months ago. It’s a really nicely done ale that everyone should try. And here’s the best part: to celebrate the (finally!) launch in Indiana, we have 12 pack cans of Fat Tire on sale for $6 off (sale: $10.99, reg. $16.99, while supplies last).

A special treat in spirits: Hangar One Raspberry

The team at Hangar One makes some incredible spirits; they are among our favorites of all time. Small-batch by-hand production, made with all-natural gourmet-quality fruit….they do it right. Their raspberry vodka is released only once per year, and it is made with raspberries from the Fraser River region, which are highly coveted by top-tier California chefs. You can really taste the quality difference, and we hope you’ll take a minute to experience it with us Saturday. And, another bonus: while this is regularly a quite-pricey bottle ($36.99 a bottle) on Saturday we will give it to you for a relative bargain of $29.99. That’s $7 off, which makes it less costly than Grey Goose (and a much tastier choice!). We only have an allocation of 15 bottles, so if this sounds like your thing we suggest you come earlier rather than later in the day.

That’s the scoop for Saturday. We look forward to seeing you!

"Hi, my name's Iggy, please purchase my music."

As a big music fan, I was not surprised to read that a new report shows that those who download the most music illegally also spend the most money on music. I know that from firsthand experience. However, while this “sampling” theory has been suggested for years, it has generally been rejected by the legal community and, unsurprisingly, the record industry.

Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but it is safe to say that thousands of albums are released every year, with only a few hundred making a big splash. Still, for somebody committed both to buying new music and to discovering new music, this is a daunting figure. While there are recommendation sources that can aid in the search, sampling is the most reliable and effective method for determining how to spend one’s money on new music. In my case, I would even go so far as to say it was essential: while I’ve purchased hundreds of albums in the past few years, I can count on one hand the number that I purchased without hearing beforehand. In addition, many of those purchases were of albums that I would not have thought I would like without first hearing. Without sampling, I would have chosen to spend less of my money or to spend it elsewhere. As a result, I believe that courts and legislatures should take this economic reality into consideration when analyzing copyright infringement. The law should not publish downloaders if (but only if) their behavior actually benefits the copyright holders.

Still, while sampling increases sales for the most voracious music consumers, it clearly does not increase the purchasing of the vast majority of listeners, who are satisfied with a smaller collection of singles and the occasional album. In those cases, sampling is an end to itself: once the song is downloaded to the computer, there is no longer an incentive to go out and purchase it. As a result, the industry should look to create a model where sampling is possible but controlled. Current signs point in this direction. Services such as Lala.com offer free streaming for many releases, from the most popular down to the fairly obscure. Taking advantage of this, audioblogs and music review sites have incorporated the streaming into their sites, offering simple previews that could replace illegal downloading as the most effective sampling tool. Lala is careful not to replace music purchasing by offering limited listens without purchasing either a very cheap (10-cent) streaming license or a slightly more expensive downloadable MP3.

But the best practice is to make it as easy as possible to hear new music. While Lala is promising, the industry should look to find a way to further leverage cloud computing into its model. This would not require breaking the iTunes stranglehold on music listening. Instead, the industry should push Apple to incorporate streaming music into the program. While the other option–convincing listeners to switch to using websites as their music library–is still a ways off from effecting true change because of a general reluctance to switch over to the cloud (but not for lack of trying), Apple could accomplish this with the program easily. Such a change would serve the interests of music buffs, casual listeners, the record industry, and Apple.

– Steven Reilly

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