Post Music

Creative Commons Salon San Francisco

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

Next Wednesday evening in San Francisco come to the Creative Commons Salon sadly not featuring avant-drone-noise electric violin music played on a stage behind white sheets (apropos of nothing apart from listening to that now and not wanting anything else), but should be pretty excellent anyway.

I’ve wanted to do a one-time event like this for a long time, but Eric Steuer and Jon Phillips, who are curating the event and series to be are doing a far better job than I ever could have.

Also next week I’ll be presenting at the 2006 Semantic Technology Conference, then on to SXSW for a panel on digital preservation and blogs and silly parties, but leaving too soon to see the great Savage Republic perform on Friday (in two weeks). Perhaps I should change my flight and find somewhere to crash for two days?

My partner and I are also looking for a new apartment. Know of a great place in San Francisco around $2,000/month and not in the far west or south?

Update 20060303:

CC salon invite

Note Shine’s 1337 address.

Update 20060311: Success.

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Music, Semantic Web, SXSW | 2 Comments »

Lightnet!

Monday, January 9th, 2006

Congratulations to Lucas Gonze on the /Yahoo! merger. (Via Kevin Burton.)

Yahoo! made a very wise decision to be acquired by the light side rather than the dark side.

My favorite Gonze post: Totally fucking bored with Napster (more at CC).

Also have a listen to the best track on ccMixter (if you share my taste, probably not), also a Gonze creation.

I could gonze on, but enough of this!

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Music, P2P | 3 Comments »

Darkfox

Tuesday, December 27th, 2005

I hate to write about software that could be vaporware, but AllPeers (via Asa Dotzler) looks like a seriously interesting darknet/media sharing/BitTorrent/and more Firefox extension.

It’s sad, but simply sending a file between computers with no shared authority nor intermediary (e.g, web or ftp server) is still a hassle. IM transfers often fail in my experience, traditional filesharing programs are too heavyweight and are configured to connect to and share with any available host, and previous attempts at clients (e.g., ) were not production quality. Merely solving this problem would make AllPeers very cool.

Assuming AllPeers proves a useful mechanism for sharing media, perhaps it could also become a lightnet bridge– as a Firefox extension.

Do check out AllPeers CTO Matthew Gertner’s musings on the AllPeers blog. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but his is a very well informed and well written take on open source, open content, browser development and business models.

…

Songbird Media Player looks to be another compelling application built on the (though run as a separate program rather than as a Firefox extension), to be released real soon now. 2006 should be another banner year for Firefox and Mozilla technology generally.

…

Lucas Gonze’s original lightnet post is now near the top of results for ‘lightnet’ on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, and related followups fill up much of the next few dozen results, having displaced most of the new age and lighting sites that use the same term.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, Open Source, P2P, Programming, Semantic Web | No Comments »

Gymnast Worship

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

Last night for my partner’s birthday we saw ‘s . It struck me as a costumed gymastics exhibition, not a . That’s a good thing in my book, as my stereotype of circuses is not good–pure cheese. I was impressed by the performances, even moreso that they were done without injury. For some reason I found the jugglers’ take on playing catch particularly entertaining–with many objects in the air between performers at once. Maybe because it was about the only performance I could personally attempt, fail miserably at, and not become a quadriplegic in the process.

The musical accompaniment was tolerable, but I couldn’t help imagining from the start what the people who did or similar might do given such a troupe–add fire, cacophony, remove stage and seating. It would be great fun, but probably injurious.

Posted in Music | 1 Comment »

Redefining light and dark

Monday, November 28th, 2005

The wily Lucas Gonze is at it again, defining ‘lightnet’ and ‘darknet’ by example, without explanation. The explanation is so simple that it probably only subtracts from Gonze’s [re]definition, but I’ll play the fool anyhow.

Usually darknet refers to (largely unstoppable) friend-to-friend information sharing. As the name implies, a darknet is underground, or at least under the radar of those who want to prohibit certain kinds of information sharing. (A BlackNet doesn’t require friends and the radar doesn’t work, to horribly abuse that analogy.)

Lightnet, as far as I know, is undefined in this context.*

Anyway, Lucas’ definition-by-example lumps prohibited sharing (friend to friend as well as over filesharing networks) and together as Darknet. Such content is dark to the web. It can’t be linked to, or if it can be, the link will be to a name,** not a location, thus you may not be able to obtain the content (filesharing), or you won’t be able to view the content (DRM).

Lightnet contnet is light to the web. It can be linked to, retrieved, and viewed in the ways you expect (and by extension, searched for in the way you expect), no law breaking or bad law making required.

* Ross Mayfield called iTunes a lightnet back in 2003. Lucas includes iTunes on the dark side. I agree with Lucas’ categorization, though Ross had a good point, and in a slightly different way was contrasting iTunes with both darknets and hidebound content owners.

** Among other things, I like to think of magnet links and as attempting to bridge the gap between the web and otherwise shared content. Obviously that work is unfinished. As is making multimedia work on the web. I think that’s the last time I linked to Lucas Gonze, but he’s had plently of crafty posts between then and now that I highly recommend following.

Posted in Bitzi, Creative Commons, DRM, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Open Source, P2P | 8 Comments »

Fusion vs. eclecticism

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

I usually run away screaming when I hear a description including the word “fusion”, e.g., of food or music. I’ve never heard that word applied to the ‘s eclectic works, though their ability to fuse the string quartet with other forms is nearly foolproof. Yesterday’s performance with Bollywood singer and (Chinese lute) player was a case in point.

Terry Riley‘s The Cusp of Magic filled the first half of the concert. Judging by that performance only, one would have to believe that a pipa/violin/violin/viola/cello quintet was a standard arrangement. Wu Man played beautifully and in unity with Kronos, never triggering an annoying thought of “oh, now we hear the ‘eastern’ bit.”

The second half, featuring songs by performed by Asha Boshle, Kronos, Wu Man, and Debopriyo Sarkar on tabla, was equally successful, with the musicians ably replacing an entire orchestra. A few seconds after Boshle started singing Nihcole whispered to me that “she’s the one we hear in all those films.” I haven’t really seen all that much Bollywood, but it’s true, her voice is immediately familiar. Supposedly she has recorded 20,000 songs in her sixty year career. That’s almost one song every single day for six decades. Hard to believe. She looks and sounds nothing like 72.

Each time I hear Kronos perform I am happy, both because I love their music and they make me feel a bit sentimental. The first musical event I ever attended of my own accord was their early 1989 performance at the Krannert Center, where I believe they played Riley’s In C, ‘s Cat O’ Nine Tails and Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze. When I finally bought a CD player, also in 1989, Kronos’ Winter Was Hard was one of my first discs (I bought the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim and Bongwater’s Double Bummer+ at the same time).

Other reviews at SFist and memestream.

So, why does fusion denote abomination and electicism beauty?

Posted in Music, Peeves | 1 Comment »

Apartheid for Musicians

Monday, April 25th, 2005

David Byrne writes about the denial of visas to foreign performers. His journal does not have permalinks, so look for the April 16 entry. Boing Boing posted a relevant excerpt, but to get a feel for how hard it is to plan a U.S. tour with non-U.S. citizens, read Byrne’s full post.

Byrne chalks it up to “cultural censorship” and writes that “this has less to do with Homeland security and more to do with keeping the American public ignorant and free of foreign influence and inspiration.”

There may be something to that, but the reason musicians and other performers require special hard to obtain visas (P visas and O visas) has more to do with protecting American musicians from competition. In the early 1900s the American Federation of Musicians successfully lobbied to restrict admission of musicians into the US.

Statutory protection of a set of workers determined largely by birth, a familiar story.

Of course the system is ripe for abuse. Cultural censorship is bad result, but there is much worse (I understand that sadly this movie is accurate; eventually I will write a post about it).

End restrictions on the ability to travel, live and work where one pleases. Apartheid is unacceptable within national borders and should be equally unacceptable across national borders.

Posted in Apartheid, Music, Politics | 1 Comment »

H C

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005

This music had every cell and fiber in my body on heavy sizzle mode.

Thurston Moore on mixtapes, could be describing me listening to early Sonic Youth or one of my many ecstasy-inducing 120 minute cassettes that I’m mostly afraid to touch, really need to digitize. Yes, Moore relates it all to MP3, P2P, etc., sounding like he’s from the EFF:

Once again, we’re being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it’s not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing – by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along – is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.

[Via Lucas Gonze.]

I’d like little more right now than to have Sonic Youth or one of Moore’s many avant projects to release some crack under a Creative Commons license. Had they already you could maybe find it via the just released Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons. (How’s that for a lame segue?)

Posted in Creative Commons, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, P2P, Semantic Web | 3 Comments »

SXSW & Etech

Saturday, March 12th, 2005

I’m in Austin now through Monday for SXSW and in San Diego Tuesday through Thursday for Etech. I’m sad that I won’t be around for any music showcases this year and that I have to leave Austin for one of my less favorite places, but Etech is the better conference.

I’m helping Matt Haughey with a SXSW panel, The Semantic Web: Promising Future or Utter Failure (I’ll be the SemWeb technologies advocate) and an Etech session, Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild.

Creative Commons will have other events and a party at SXSW.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, Semantic Web, SXSW | 3 Comments »

CodeCon Sunday

Tuesday, February 15th, 2005

I say CodeCon was 3/4 (one abstention) on Sunday.

Wheat. An environment (including a language) for developing web applications. Objects are arranged in a tree with some filesystem-like semantics. Every object has a URL (not necessarily in a public portion of the tree). Wheat‘s web object publishing model and templating seem clearly reminiscent of Zope. In response to the first of several mostly redundant questions regarding Wheat and Zope, Mark Lentczner said that he used Zope a few years ago and was discouraged by the need to use external scripts and the lack of model-view separation in templates (I suspect Mark used DTML — Wheat’s TinyTemplates reminded me of DTML’s replacement, Zope Page Templates, currently my favorite and implemented in several languages). I’m not sure Wheat is an environment I’d like to develop in, but I suspect the world might learn something from pure implementations of URL-object identity (not just mapping) and a web domain specific language/environment (I understand that Wheat has no non-web interface). Much of the talk used these slides.

Incoherence. I find it hard to believe that nobody has done exactly this audio visualization method before (x = left/right, y = frequency, point intensity and size = volume), but as an audio-ignoramous I’ll take the Incoherence team’s word. I second Wes Felter’s take: “I learned more about stereo during that talk than in the rest of my life.”

i-Brokers. This is where XNS landed and where it might go. However, the presentation barely mentioned technology and left far more questions than answers. There was talk of Zooko’s Triangle (“Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Memorizable: Choose Two”). 2idi and idcommons seem to have chosen the last two, temporarily. It isn’t clear to me why they brought it up, as i-names will be semi-decentralized (like DNS). In theory i-names provide privacy (you provide only your i-name to an i-name enabled site, always logging in via your i-broker, and access to your data is provided through your i-broker — never enter your password or credit card anywhere else — you set the policies for who can access your data) and persistence (keep an i-name for life, and i-names may be transparently aliased or gatewayed should you obtain others). These benefits, if they exist in the future, are subtler than the claims. Having sites access your data via a broker rather than via you typing it in does little to protect your privacy by itself. You make a decision in both cases whether you want a site to have your credit card number. Once the site has your credit card… Possibly over the long term if lots of people and sites adopt i-names sites will collect or keep less personal information. Users, via their i-brokers, may be on more equal terms with sites, as i-broker access will presumably be governed by some you-have-no-rights-at-all terms of service. Some sites may decide (for new applications) they don’t want to have to worry about the security of customer information and access the same via customers’ i-names. However, once a user has provided their i-broker with lots of personal information, it becomes easy for sites to ask for it all. Persistence is also behavioral. Domain names and URLs can last a long time; good ones don’t change. Similarly an i-name will go away if the owner stops paying for it. Can the i-name ecology be structured so that i-names tend to be longer lived than domain names or URLs? Probably, but that’s a different story. In the short term 2idi is attempting to get adoption in the convention registration market. Good luck, but I wish Fen and Victor had spent their time talking about XRI resolution or other code behind the 2idi broker.

SciTools. A collection of free to use web applications for genetic design and analysis. Integrated DNA Technologies, the company that offers SciTools, makes its money selling (physical) synthesized nucleic acids. I was a cold, tired, bio-ignoramous, so have little clue whether this is novel. (Ted Leung seems to think so and also has interesting things to say about the other presentations.)

OzymanDNS. DNS can route and move data, is deployed and not filtered everywhere, so with a little cleverness we can tunnel arbitrary streams over DNS. Dan Kaminsky is clearly the crowd pleaser, not only for his showmanship and the audacity of his hacks (streaming anime over DNS this time). More than a few in the crowd wanted to put DNS hacks to work, e.g., on aspects of supposed syndication problems. PPT slides of an older version of the talk.

Yesterday.

Posted in Music, P2P, Programming | 2 Comments »

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