Until now, [correcting pitch] was only possible with
single notes — an exaggerated example can be heard
in Cher’s 1998 hit, “Believe,” which used the competing
Auto-Tune system. For more than a decade, that software
has been the recording industry’s dirty little secret, fixing
any out-of-tune notes crooned by an individual singer
or played on any single-note instrument. But this
breakthrough takes that magic manipulation many steps
further, allowing engineers to create entirely new music
from existing recordings.
With this astonishing software, engineers can dig deep into
< a mix. For example, they could change each individual note
of a guitar chord, or fix one wrong note played by a musician
in a symphony orchestra. It’s like Photoshop for music.
The demo video is the coolest thing I’ve seen all month — and the song they use to demonstrate the software is pretty cool, too. Make sure to watch the part where they start completely shuffling around guitar notes plucked out of individual cords.
Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser make up the band MGMT. I’m addicted to the grinding bass and counter melodies in their catchy song “Kids”. Give a listen to the full song at Last.fm.
Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi is a cult film I think I might enjoy:
The film consists primarily of slow motion and
time-lapse photography of cities and natural landscapes
across the United States. The visual tone poem
contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its
tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. In
the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means ‘crazy
life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating,
a state of life that calls for another way of living’, and the
film implies that modern humanity is living in such a way.
Today, online, I saw the most beautiful bike I have ever seen in my life. Before I link to that, a bit about the man who makes these bikes. A certain Joshua Muir in Santa Cruz, California runs a shop called Frances Cycles. He builds your frame. From scratch. By hand. From steel (or something more exotic). The results are stupendous. Consider his innovative Smallhaul design, allowing one to carry large amounts of stuff in a cargo hold between the handlebars and (rather distant) front wheel. Using that design, you can do things like carry your dog with you on your bike (also… click that last link, seriously).
Certainly, introducing novelty into the monotony of bike design is a good thing. But taking the basic lines and functions of a bike and stripping them down to the core, the essence — that’s particularly cool… and it exposes Muir’s brilliant craftsmanship.
With that in mind: back to this bike I mentioned at the outset. The photo of it is titled “Stuyvie’s #3”, which I imagine means the third bike built for Stuyvie… I believe the bike is a “Bici Corta fixed-gear.” Feast your eyes upon the gorgeous simplicity of handcrafted, pedal-powered transportation.
Coachella is a three-day (formerly a one or two-day)
annual music and arts festival held at the Empire Polo Fields
in Indio, California. The event features many genres of
music including alternative rock, hip hop, and electronica
as well as large sculptural art
Now, I don’t know all those bands, but I do know that Slightly Stoopid has a flat-out fantastic song called “Collie Man.” Pull that one up on iTunes (don’t search YouTube, etc… all the live versions and covers of it kinda stink), you won’t be disappointed.
Rates of C-sections have been climbing each year in the
past decade in the U.S., reaching a record high of 31% of
all live births in 2006. That’s a 50% increase since 1996.
Around the world, the procedure is becoming even more
common: in certain hospitals in Brazil, fully 80% of babies
are delivered by caesarean. How did a procedure
originally intended as an emergency measure become
so popular? And is the trend a bad thing?
After Mykala described the ripping and tearing that can happen (ouch ouch ouch), I never really thought about childbirth the same. Compare a woman giving birth (the incredible pain, physical trauma, etc.) to an animal giving birth… I mean baby giraffes literally fall out and everybody keeps on truckin’. Anything that gives the mother more options is a good thing, as far as I can tell, as clearly the “natural” way needs some improvement. Keep in mind that the “natural” way also used to involve dying of all sorts of infectious diseases or making it to 40-something on average.
I wonder if any social stigma around preemptively choosing a C-section was an attempt by the author to fabricate conflict for this article.