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Corporate Commissions + Their Discontents

Perhaps the bloom is off that brand rose. Back in July of last year, the band OK Go's Damian Kulash said the following, as reported in adage.com:

"As a band it's a lot easier to work with brands and marketing agencies than record labels. Because record labels, they know what they want a band to be doing. They want a band to be making these very particular types of things. Whereas brands, generally, if you find the right relationships, they want the same things you do. What we want is maximum engagement with our fans."

One complicating factor, as OK Go has learned, is when those relationships aren't right. As macrumors.com, among others, is reporting, the band is now accusing Apple of using the idea behind one of its videos:

"Speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek, OK Go manager Andy Gershon claims the band met with Apple to discuss the concept for its music video in hopes that Apple would collaborate on the project. Apple declined, and OK Go made the video along with production company 1stAveMachine. Released in June 2014, the video won a Video Music Award for best visual effects and has accrued over 10 million views on YouTube. Following the talks between Apple and OK Go, Gershon claims Apple also hired 1stAveMachine and even employed the same director that worked with OK Go on its hit music video to produce the video for the company's iPhone launch event."

For comparison, here's OK Go's video:

And here's Apple's:

#sounds of brands #brands of sounds #Apple #OK Go

Corporate Commission: GE + Ladytron's Reuben Wu

This goes back to late last year, when Reuben Wu of Ladytron was hired by GE to produce a short audio-visual tribute to the network of shipping containers.

Interview with Wu at gereports.com:

TK: The machines seem to be playing a melody.

RW: Yeah, I was able to break the sounds down into musical elements as well. I found that a lot of the sounds of the cranes moving across the yard, for example, were almost melodic. They produced hydraulic hums and vibrations, which I thought worked on a different level than the percussive sounds.

Found via adweek.com.

#sounds of brands #field recording #transportation #shipping

A Compact Reader of Marketplace Music Social Engineering

At The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker does a short overview of how sound influences consumers. The piece is also a small trove of links, including the DJ of Chipotle (Chris Golub), the mid-2011 end of the Nordstrom department store piano player, volume and beer consumption, and the influence of French and German music on wine purchases. The end result is a small reader of the role of social engineer that music plays in retail spaces.

#sounds of brands #retail #soundscape #score

Signs of Death: iPod Classic

As reported at 9to5mac.com and macrumors.com, the iPod Classic has not survived the recent upgrade to the Apple online store, which suggests it has been discontinued.

Given the centrality of the iPod to the logarithmic growth in Apple's consumer product line, it's hard to imagine it would pass without official notice, but for the moment that appears to be the case.

Oddly (see below) the classic circular "click wheel" interface remains the distinguishing factor in the icon for the iPod category on the store site:

#brands of sounds #iPod #Apple #gadget

Corporate Commission: Delta Faucet + Glenn Kotche

This goes back a year, to 2013, but in light of the James Murphy / GE and Matthew Dear / GE items, it seemed worth getting into the feed. Glenn Kotche of Wilco makes music from faucets. A few hundred years ago, presumably it would have been Handel:

Here's the resulting commercial:

And here's a behind-the-scenes segment:

#sounds of brands #jingle

Corporate Commission: IBM + James Murphy

James Murphy, of LCD Soundsystem, makes music, at the invitation of IBM, from data at the U.S. Open tennis competition:

Side note: That elegant suitcase synthesizer he has is an EMS Synthi AKS.

More at usopen.org/ibmsessions‎.

#sounds of brands #jingle

Corporate Commission: GE + Matthew Dear

Electronic music made at the request of a corporation — Taylorism finds its natural development into a kind of sequencer.

Every machine has its own acoustic signature - a precise frequency that indicates whether that machine is operating at peak performance. GE engineers monitor and record these sounds to perform real-time diagnostics on airplane engines, locomotives, power turbines, and medical equipment. Musician Matthew Dear and GE Acoustics Engineer Andrew Gorton teamed up to collect and compose thousands of audio emissions from the world’s most powerful machines. The result is an original track of music titled “Drop Science.”

Here's the track:

Here's a short documentary:

#sounds of brands #jingle

Apple + Beats, Honeymoon Period

Just two quick notes about the Apple-Beats nuptials, courtesy of macrumours.com. On the software side, the Beats Music App is now listed among the "Apps Made by Apple", and on the hardware side, the Dr. Dre line has a dedicated section in the online store.

#sounds of brands #brands of sounds #Apple #Beats #Dr. Dre #headphones #audio streaming

Viv, Daughter — or Younger Sibling — of Siri

Steven Levy at wired.com gives a thorough overview of the people behind Viv, an new AI by the people who gave us Siri:

“Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story,” says Dag Kittlaus, one of Viv’s cofounders. He should know. Before working on Viv, he helped create Siri. So did his fellow cofounders, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham.

A little room for gradated improvements would be appreciated. The story opens with a memory of how the original Siri launch was followed quickly with broad amazement at its seeming sentience, and then: "Over the next few months, however, Siri’s limitations became apparent."

Now, describing what is essentially Siri 2.0, the article speaks of the new service's "almost limitless capabilities." And: "the end result will be a digital assistant who knows what you want before you ask for it," which seems to bypass speech-to-text for something closer to telepathy. Whatever the doubtless ongoing improvements in speech recognition technology, hype is our lingua franca. And despite the big promise of the benefits of such AI, most of the examples come down to getting assistance buying things.

Still, lots of fascinating stuff here about the initial development of Siri, and how Viv builds on it.

And a fantastic visualization of Viv's AI in action below by latigre.net:

More on Viv at viv.ai.

#brands of sounds #artificial intelligence #speech to text #Apple #Viv #Siri #AI

Sennheiser Gets the Beat

There's way too much activity in headphones to track even a small percentage of it, unless that's all you're doing. But Sennheiser stepping up its design is worth taking note of. As engadget.com's Billy Steele puts it (the photo is from the site, too), this new line is taking aim at Beats.

#brands of sounds #design #headphones #audio equipment #Sennheiser #Beats

How Silent Is the Silent Meal?

It seems fair to say that a meal without good conversation is never going to be a great meal. It's arguable that good food is, in fact, just part of a good meal. But there's another point of view on the topic. A New York City restaurant, named Eat, via bostonherald.com, is emphasizing food in exclusion from conversation, with an emphasis on a kind of monastic experience (well, monastic aside from the cost of entry). Eat, based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, holds a "silent meal" one Sunday each month, organized by the restaurant's Nicholas Nauman.

As Richard Morgan points out in The Wall Street Journal, the individuals doing the dining aren't the only source of noise, and Eat is onto this:

In a New York magazine essay in July on the “Great Noise Boom” at city restaurants, food critic Adam Platt pointed out the on-purpose loudness of top-dollar spots including Babbo and Le Bernadin, noting that Midtown’s Lavo restaurant “was measured at 96 decibels, louder than the whine of a suburban lawn mower.”

Perhaps, though, the patrons themselves are as much to blame as the establishments, with their awful offal blather and endless prattle about every nuance and sub-nuance of the food. And that’s not to mention the all-too-familiar smartphone zombie meal, where diners are glued to their iPhones and Androids.

Mr. Nauman’s goal was to call out dining’s sound and fury on both sides of the kitchen.

There's also some great listening notes in Morgan's piece: "At 8:12, the first muffled sneeze. At 8:20, the first throat cleared."

And Julia Kramer in Bon Appétit notes that silence can lead to other forms of civility:

While guests at the Brooklyn dinner were reportedly texting, making paper airplanes, and sustaining conversation through hand gestures, there was absolutely none of that at the silent dinner I attended.

Hermione Hoby at theguardian.com mentions Honi Ryan's traveling silentdinnerparty.com feast as a point of comparison, and touches on what could be perceived as a resulting alienation from the world:

for the next 90 minutes, the only human voice I hear comes from a woman talking loudly into her phone as she walks past on the street. If she had happened to have looked to her left, she would have seen an illuminated restaurant and 21 silent heads turned to look at her.

Perhaps the diners were merely turning their heads at the intrusion, though it seems like a kind of received righteous indignation — external quiet apparently doesn't always lead to internal quiet.

Details at eatgreenpoint.com.

#sounds of brands #food and beverage #restaurants #dining #Honi Ryan

The Biggest Vinyl Manufacturer in the Czech Republic — and the World

The image above is one from a photo essay by Filip Singer, of the European Press Agency, covering what Dustin Drankoski of mashable.com describes as "the world's biggest vinyl record producer," having reportedly pressed 10.5 million last year. The GZ Media factory is in the Czech Republic.

#brands of sound #vinyl #record industry #music industry

The Imminent Ads of Rdio

Via nytimes.com, the Rdio service is, like SoundCloud, looking to advertising supported model:

In the face of growing competition in the streaming music market, Rdio, a four-year-old service that charges for online subscriptions, has moved into a new phase with abundant free music — as well as free music’s ever-present companion, advertising.

Having grown up on advertising-supported radio, I'm finding this less anxiety-provoking than others are.

#brands of sounds #streaming #music industry #record industry #Rdio

A Range of SoundCloud Ad Reactions

From Peter Kirn at createdigitalmusic.com:

While we’ll have to see, I wonder if the more formal relationship between SoundCloud and labels will stop the brute-force approaches to content takedown. That is, I would have the opposite reaction to the apocalyptic Cory Doctorow take. Now if SoundCloud has sorted its licensing deals with majors – or if this advertising model could open up such deals, it may mean they’re free to keep uploading their content, and the rest of us can share our own productions. The challenge for SoundCloud is the business challenge they’ve always faced: they have to keep the service useful enough to us that we keep paying for it. For now, that’s money I’m glad to spend.

And from the "apocalyptic," in Kirn's term, Doctorow, at boingboing.net:

that indie radio DJs who upload their sets get kicked off Soundcloud altogether (for violating the company's "three strikes" rule), while BBC radio shows that are equally infringing are left untouched

#brands of sounds #music industry #record industry #copyright #SoundCloud

The Monetization of SoundCloud

SoundCloud has announced changes with an eye to increase revenue, and address concerns of copyright holders: " the company has announced a three-tiered monetization strategy that will introduce advertising to the platform for the first time, as well the news that SoundCloud has received more than $100 million in funding since its 2007 launch." Via billboard.com

#brands of sounds #SoundCloud #copyright #music industry #record industry

Will Siri, the Mobile-First Siren, Leap to the Desktop?

Evidence is mounting for Apple bringing Siri to the Mac, via engadget.com:

According to a patent application filed in February ... Apple's considering bringing the iPhone personal assistant to its desktop OS. The 92-page document details how you'll interact with Apple's "digital assistant," a term that occurs 574 times in the patent app (the name Siri never makes an appearance, however)

#sounds of brands #always on #always listening #Apple #Siri

Armadas of Hydrophones

On the sonic aspects of naval intelligence:

"Basically, any instrument that can digitally eavesdrop on the military's stuff is of concern, including seismometers, which measure vibrations so low most wouldn’t typically consider them sound."

From an article by Matthew Braga at theatlantic.com, via the great 5 Intriguing Things email list by Alexis Madrigal, an editor at The Atlantic.

#sounds of brands #brands of sounds #military #oceanic life #surveillance

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