#slow radio

[artjipson]

Thanks for being part of this radio and music community.

In the Margins of the Music: Why We Still Write Notes for Every Song

[freedformwriter]

BBC Radio 3 - Slow Radio, Meditations from a Monastery, Work

Five slow radio soundscapes, featuring themes from monastic life.

Lockdown: Day 19

Another laptop-free Saturday - hurrah! Spend most of the day collaging to Slow Radio programmes. The BBC have clearly realised that now is the time we want to press the pause button on life and have dug up this excellent collection of monks meditating on life and love. Basically, it’s little soundbites from a few affable monks, some Gregorian chants, and then Everyday Sounds. Love this episode. It includes wood cutting, hand weaving, and bread kneading.

[openaudio]

Sound of Changes - BBC Radio 3 Slow Radio, Friday 5 October, midnight

Iain Chambers draws on the huge recording archive of the pan-EU Sounds of Changes project, a collaboration between 6 major European museums to document the huge change within our acoustic landscape.

In 'A European Industrial Soundscape', Iain sets up dialogues between the sounds of obsolete industrial technology employed in manufacturing, communications, transport and agriculture.

Iain has worked with this sound archive for a number of years. His hoerspiel for Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 'The Eccentric Press', in which he used industrial sounds for a new composition, was a finalist in the 2016 Prix Palma Ars Acustica.

Here, the recordings are presented unmodified, but in a through-composed, meditative sequence. We hear weaving looms giving way to typewriters; ticket-printing machines and foundries;  obsolete computers and stationary steam engines. These previously-familiar, now long-forgotten sounds transport us back in time, evoking memories and sometimes demanding consideration as quasi-musical material.

When our era is described to our ancestors, the pace of change will surely rival the industrial revolution. Industrial Soundscapes documents this rapid change, as witnessed by the huge change in the acoustic landscape.

[roughlydaily]

Soothing sound at: "The BBC is getting into ASMR." (Plus- Cervantes, forced to take some time off) “Don’t just do something, sit there”*…

Muse on mindfulness at https://bit.ly/2NIT4bE

[gravitationandothergraces]

Gravitation and Other Graces is a 26 min audio essay  —  part audio documentary, part personal rumination, part fairy tale.  

[mikelebarcelona]

SCP Dj's @ Slow Radio 1 En breve volvemos con la segunda!

[rumblesan]

Being LAME and MAD, the trials of de/encoding MP3s

Reteaching myself C has been a pretty good exercise and, for the most part, has been good fun. A little frustrating at times, but there's lots of stuff that's just falling into place and it's generally making me feel much smarter.

This feeling stopped when I started trying to deal with MP3s....

Encoding with libLAME isn't too taxing thankfully. It took me a little bit of getting used to but I'm now happily reading WAV files, stretching samples and then pumping out MP3 files at the end. Encoding, however, is a different matter.

I'm using libMAD and I'm still finding it more than just a bit taxing to understand. I suspect that this is more likely my lack of knowledge than the library itself's fault but to be honest, that just makes it that little bit more annoying. On the plus side, it really does make me appreciate how easy all these high level scripting languages make things.

Anyway, enough of my whining, As far as SlowRadio is concerned, the project is steadily cruising along and things are looking pretty good. Thanks to some help from Paul I've been able to get a program that mostly recreates his algorithm. I haven't put in any of the onset detection but tbh I'm saving that for a bit later when the other sticky bits are done.

Once I can successfully read in MP3s the next step will be to wrestle with libshout and libcurl so I can go spreading my merry noise across the InterBlag.

Just got to keep moseying along, and keep track of all these buffers right?