Conductor Keith Lockhart wore a specially constructed "conductor's jacket" (more of a shirt, actually), equipped with sensors that measured his heart rate, muscle movements, and other physiological responses as he led the orchestra.…
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Two scientists from McGill University—Daniel Levitin, a cognitive neuroscientist, and Stephen McAdams, a cognitive psychologist—and a professor from the College of New Jersey joined forces with the conductor and five members from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, not to mention 50 audience members, this past weekend to attempt to measure how people process music.
Running counter to the music industry's paranoia concerning the perils of modern digital technology, some musicians want you to share their music—within limits. GarageBand.com, which bills itself as "the world's largest musician community," announced June 7 that it now offers the Creative Commons Music Sharing License as an optional tag for all songs uploaded to its website.
Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org), a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to the "creative reuse of intellectual works—whether owned or in the public domain," has drafted a license that not only allows fans…
Streaming multiple channels of music has proven a big hit with satellite customers, so it seems natural that DMX---a subsidiary of TCI Music (soon to be renamed Liberty Digital), and the company responsible for bringing audio to 2.6 million dish owners---would move to the Internet. Last week, DMX announced a multi-year, multi-phase global distribution agreement under which the DMX music service will be transmitted on Lycos' network of websites.
As part of the alliance, DMX says it will be prominently featured as a major music programmer for the Lycos Radio Network, "enabling millions of…
In a ground-breaking article from May 1990, Robert Harley uncovers the real digital story with "CD: Jitter, Errors & Magic." Confusion about CD tweaks leads RH "to conduct a scientific examination of several CD 'sonic cure-all' devices and treatments. I wanted to find an objective, measurable phenomenon that explains the undeniable musical differences heard by many listeners where, at least according to established digital audio theory, no differences should exist."
Are audio salons really an endangered beast in the Internet age? In his "As We See It" from the May 2004 issue, "House…
Chip manufacturer Cirrus Logic announced last week that it has introduced two audio, high-performance, digital-to-analog converters (DACs) that it claims will enable manufacturers to bring more DVD-Audio players to the mainstream consumer market.
According to Cirrus, the new CS4340A and CS4341A provide "an easy upgrade path" for manufacturers and include the 192kHz decoding required for DVD-Audio. The company adds that the new chips "enable digital entertainment equipment manufacturers to bring new technologies and attractive new capabilities to consumers at mass-market prices."
The…
Dolby Laboratories founder and chairman Ray Dolby has been formally inducted into Britain's Royal Academy of Engineering.
Dolby accepted his fellowship at a ceremony in London on Monday, November 15, approximately six months after an induction into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. At the London event were the Duke of Kent and Lord Broers, president of the Royal Academy. Dolby was one of 37 new fellows elected to the society this year.
"We invited Ray Dolby to become an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Engineering in recognition of both the invention of his…
Editor's Note: Richard Hess has recently spent time remastering several CDs and wrote about the experience for an engineering newsgroup. We think Stereophile's online readers will find his comments about the process interesting.
I've had a lifelong love of and involvement with audio, and have often been frustrated by the lack of quality. The following are some real-world examples of the struggle for quality sound from my personal work.
Marie-Lynn Hammond, the Toronto-based singer-songwriter I'm working with, had released five albums by the time I met her. I've re-released albums 1…
In an effort to smooth the way for websites that wish to legally reproduce copyrighted music, BMI announced last week that it has now become the world's largest online digital rights management company with the launch of its Digital Licensing Center (DLC) and "Klick-Thru" online copyright licensing system. The company says that the DLC is intended to help Internet companies digitally obtain a music-performance license through BMI.com, allowing them to publicly "perform" any of BMI's 4.5 million copyrighted works from its 250,000 songwriters, composers, and music publishers.
BMI's Frances W…
On June 27, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Metro-Goldwin-Mayer (MGM), agreeing that peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as StreamCast Networks and Grokster could be held responsible (read: be sued) if they encouraged their users to infringe copyrights. This will return the "MGM vs Grokster" case to a lower court, where it will be determined whether or not the P2P companies encouraged their users to violate copyright laws.
Justice David H. Souter wrote: "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by…
An old adage has it that one common type of fool believes that anything new must be better.
Little noted during the past year's hoopla about the success of Apple Computer's iTunes Music Service and its slew of online competitors was the real cost to music fans. During the first week of April, reports appeared in Wired News, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere exposing the fact that many recordings cost more in virtual form than they do as physical products.
Apple hyped its service at 99¢ cents per song/$9.99 per album, but it has been charging $16.99 for the popular Fly or Die by…