Kano: ‘I’m definitely not a nerd’ | Celebrity squares
British rapper Kano thinks that we all rely on technology too much What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? Probably the Akai MPC4000 beat machine , because it's the machine that got me doing my own beats and producing new and different styles of music. When was the last time you used it, and what for? A few months ago, for a song called Mad. The Akai machine is very exposed on that track. What additional features would you add if you could? There is an MPC5000 that has a bigger screen, and you can see the wave as you hit the beat, so I'd like that.
Originally posted here:
Kano: 'I'm definitely not a nerd' | Celebrity squares
David Cope: ‘You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas’
Composer David Cope has spent the last 30 years teaching computers to create classical music • Hear an example from David Cope's Emily Howell project • Download an Emmy Bach-style invention Where does music come from? If pressed on this question, many of us would say it comes from the "soul", or from the "heart" of the person who composed it. That music is the clearest expression of human emotion, one person to another; that certain chords, certain melodies seem to communicate a whole language of feeling. When we listen to a Beethoven symphony or a Chopin sonata, we are hearing, we might say, the authentic expression of the composer's inner harmonies and discords, carried magically across the centuries. Could we ever be so moved by a piece of music written by a computer? We'd probably like to think not. David Cope, emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would beg to differ. "The question," Cope tells me, "isn't if computers possess a soul, but if we possess one." Cope, now 69, has devoted the past 30 years of his life to what amounts to an obsessive examination of that particular question. He began, almost by default, back in 1980, with a severe case of writer's block. One of America's most acclaimed young composers, whose music had been performed at Carnegie Hall, and won great critical praise, Cope had been commissioned to write an opera. For weeks and months he sat at his piano, or stared at a blank piece of sheet music; nothing came. He had a wife and four children to support. In desperation he started playing with a computer. What he found there changed his life and, perhaps, the course of musical history. Cope had long held the belief that all music was essentially inspired plagiarism. The great composers absorbed the music that had gone before them and their brains "recombined" melodies and phrases in distinctive, sometimes traceable, ways. We all have an internal database of musical reference; composers were those with the ability to manipulate it in new patterns. With the aid of an early computer, he realised he could put this to the test.
See the original post here:
David Cope: 'You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas'
Glastonbury festival: The full lineup as a spreadsheet
Glastonbury festival kicks off today, with Gorillaz replacing U2 as the Friday headliners. Check out the bands that will be playing and plan your weekend here • Get the data Glastonbury opened its doors to festivalgoers this morning. Revellers at Worthy Farm can look forward to a weekend packed with bands, including Damon Albarn's side-project Gorillaz, who hastily took a headlining spot after U2 were forced to pull out last month when Bono suffered a spinal injury. But Glastonbury is about so much more than the headline acts. Who else will be rocking Worthy Farm over the weekend of 23-27 June? Now the official Glastonbury site has put up the full timetable of acts - we've excised them for you and put them into a spreadsheet. Check out the embedded table, or download the spreadsheet, for the full line-up across all the main stages and venues. Last year, @RichardAblewhite created a magnificent visual mash-up by combining the Datablog's Glastonbury dataset with content from several other sites. He's created another excellent mash-up for this year's Glastonbury festival , which together with this dataset from Clashfinder General and the Orange GlastoNav app will enable data-savvy festivalgoers to plan their weekend with military precision.
Excerpt from:
Glastonbury festival: The full lineup as a spreadsheet
Lemar: ‘What do you need a butler for?’ | Celebrity squares
R&B singer Lemar thinks robots are a bad idea and we should do things for ourselves What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? I would say it's a close one between my BlackBerry and my iPhone. The BlackBerry changed my life majorly when I first got one – the fact I could get my emails immediately was the most impressive thing. Since then, the iPhone is amazing. I got it about a year ago, and the things you can do with it – all the apps and games and things – everything you can think of is on there. So I love the iPhone as well. When was the last time you used your iPhone, and what for? I was watching live TV on it yesterday afternoon, when I had a bit of time to kill. What additional features would you add if you could
Read the original post:
Lemar: 'What do you need a butler for?' | Celebrity squares
Science Weekly podcast: Libel Reform Week and the importance of being vague
Science writer Simon Singh and Tracey Brown from Sense About Science tell us about Libel Reform Week and the campaign to change Britain's libel laws and protect scientific freedom of expression. Simon is currently locked in a legal battle over a comment piece published in the Guardian . Matthew Applegate, aka Pixelh8 , is performing an audiovisual study as part of Cambridge Science Festival . We went along to the Institute of Astronomy to hear the telescopes he used as his musical instruments. Ian Sample speaks to Kees van Deemter about the importance of being vague. Kees is trying to program computers to be a little more ... erm ... fuzzy
View post:
Science Weekly podcast: Libel Reform Week and the importance of being vague
Imogen Heap: ‘Don’t blame the machines, it’s not their fault’
Why singer Imogen Heap wants to make electricity out of horse manure What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? I was going to say Macs, but everyone says that, so I'm going to go into geek mode. I have these wireless wrist microphones that I wear on stage – they are throat mics that I've adapted. The audio gets picked up and goes into my computer. What's great about them is that I can wander about on stage and grab any instrument – like the wine glasses I use – and the mics are in the perfect position to pick up the sound. They've completely transformed me on stage. When was the last time you used them
Excerpt from:
Imogen Heap: 'Don't blame the machines, it's not their fault'
Taio Cruz: ‘They need to test things better’ | Celebrity squares
Musician Taio Cruz wishes all new technology would work perfectly the firs time What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? My Mac or BlackBerry – probably my MacBook Pro. I use it to create music and to design stuff, and I use Firefox or Safari to browse for information and to do research. It's my access point for everything. When was the last time you used it, and what for? Right now – I'm using it to listen to music. What additional features would you add if you could? It's hard to improve on it, but some kind of replacement for the keyboard and screen – a virtual keyboard with optical recognition, something really futuristic like that. Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time? Yes, probably – technology moves so fast, who knows. What always frustrates you about technology in general? When something new first comes out there are always problems with it and you have to wait ages for a better version and for them to correct all the problems. They need to test things better.
Excerpt from:
Taio Cruz: 'They need to test things better' | Celebrity squares
Celebrity squares: singer-songwriter John Otway says his Theremin is the greatest musical instrument ever
Singer-songwriter John Otway loves to wave his arms around on stage – to play his Theremin, of course What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? Thinking about it, my favourite would be the Theremin. I was given it as a birthday present. They're wonderful, I just love them – it's the greatest musical instrument because you stand there waving your arms around in front of it. It looks ridiculous, but it sounds great
Read the original here:
Celebrity squares: singer-songwriter John Otway says his Theremin is the greatest musical instrument ever
Twitter makes millions for Dell - but what does it mean?
According to Dell, the company has made $2m of sales directly through Twitter by offering discounts to computer buyers - but is it that simple? Dell stirred up a little commotion earlier today when it said that sales made through its DellOutlet Twitter account had earned the company around $2m. In fact, says Dell tweeter Stefanie N, it may be even more than that : We're also seeing that it's driving interest in new product as well. We're seeing people come from @DellOutlet on Twitter into the Dell.com/outlet site, and then ultimately decide to purchase a new system from elsewhere on Dell.com. If we factor those new system purchases that come from @DellOutlet, we're actually eclipsed $3 million in overall sales. This all sounds great for Dell and its public relations (it's going gangbusters , says the Register ), and equally good news for Twitter, making some wonder whether this is the sort of thing the site should be charging for . However, I think it's worth looking sceptically at the numbers. $2m is not even a drop in the ocean compared to Dell's overall sales of $12bn in the last three months (stat fans: Twitter is the sales channel for 0.008% of Dell stock) and overall the company's sales are taking a beating - down 23% for the most recent quarter. So it's worth considering whether this is actually about gaining customers, or just building a new relationship with customers Dell already has
See the original post:
Twitter makes millions for Dell - but what does it mean?
We must make e-books pirate-proof | Seth Freedman
Publishers must learn from the mistakes of the music industry and protect e-book copyrighted content from thieves On Monday, I said the traveller's prayer when getting on the bus, as I do every time I go on a journey out of Tel Aviv. Rather than carrying a prayer book with me, I have an e-siddur installed on my phone for just such occasions, allowing me instant access to the necessary text. Likewise, I don't bother buying a paper anymore, preferring to sit and read the news via my phone's LCD screen; over the space of the 40-minute bus ride, I'd devoured articles and op-ed columns from a plethora of publications with the greatest of ease. By using my phone in this way, I play my part in contributing to the slow death of both the media and publishing industries , not to mention all the related trades which suffer in the wake of their decline. Publishers of prayer books miss out on the revenue from potential purchasers who opt instead for free online versions; likewise, newspapers have lost control of their own content, and are paying a heavy price for their incapacity. As far as newspapers are concerned, there appears little that can be done to stop the rot, save for desperately trying to salvage some scraps of revenue from online advertising and subscription. For the publishing world, however, there is still time to address the potential catastrophe awaiting the industry, if only those at the helm of the flotilla are willing to chart a course out of earshot of the e-book sirens' song. It is no secret that the moment the music business sold its soul to the compact disc devil, the industry was in serious trouble. CDs, followed by MP3s, meant that the listening public now had access to high quality files of their favourite music, and could pirate copies at will, should their desire to save money prove more compelling than their sense of ethics. The music industry went into near-terminal decline in the Napster years, thanks to an inability to keep control over, or make money from, the copyrighted material for which the record companies had paid through the nose. The lure of forcing consumers to "upgrade" from vinyl to CD, then from CD to MP3, was financially expedient in the short term, but in the long term was a modern-day equivalent of Dorian Gray's fateful pact. The publishing world is teetering on the brink of a similarly suicidal drop today. With the advent of the Kindle , along with all manner of related new royalty systems and e-publishing deals, the industry is being lured into a trap from which it might never escape – and it's easy to see why they're tempted. Borders' latest financial results showed a 12% decline in revenue at its bookshops, largely due to the impact of the credit crisis, and in a climate where the public has less disposal money to spend, low-cost models such as e-book publications are seen as a natural way for publishers to ride out the economic storm. With resistance weakening towards the concept of e-books, Amazon reported a 24% increase in earnings in the first quarter of this year, driven in no small parts by sales of its Kindle e-reader
Originally posted here:
We must make e-books pirate-proof | Seth Freedman