Musician Taryn Southern Is Composing Her New Album with Artificial Intelligence: Hear the First Track

in Music, Technology | September 21st, 2017

“Break Free” is a new song by Taryn and Amper. The for­mer, Taryn South­ern, is a musi­cian and singer pop­u­lar on Youtube. The lat­ter, how­ev­er, is not human at all. Instead, Amper is an arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent music com­pos­er, pro­duc­er and per­former, devel­oped by a com­bi­na­tion of “music and tech­nol­o­gy experts” and now put to the test, being the engine behind Taryn’s sin­gle and even­tu­al­ly a full album, ten­ta­tive­ly called I AM AI.

To under­stand what is Taryn and what is Amper in this project, the singer talks about it in this Verge inter­view:

The way it works is to give the plat­form cer­tain input like BPM, instru­men­ta­tion that I like, genre, key, etc. The plat­form will spit a song out at me, and then I can iter­ate from there, mak­ing adjust­ments to the instru­ments and the key. I can even change the genre or emo­tion­al feel or the song, until I get some­thing that I’m rel­a­tive­ly hap­py with. Once I have that, I down­load all the stems of the instru­men­ta­tion to build actu­al song struc­ture.

What Amper’s real­ly good at is com­pos­ing and pro­duc­ing instru­men­ta­tion, but it doesn’t yet under­stand song struc­ture. It might give you a verse or the cho­rus and it’s up to me to stitch these pieces togeth­er so that it sounds like some­thing famil­iar you would hear on the radio. Once I’m hap­py with the song, then I write the vocal melody and lyrics.

The key sen­tence for cyn­ics is the sec­ond to last one. Amper deliv­ers the famil­iar, or rather, Taryn makes Amper work until she gets some­thing famil­iar. AI is not at the stage yet where it might sur­prise us with a deci­sion, except in the cas­es where it goes spec­tac­u­lar­ly wrong. Right now it’s very good at learn­ing pat­terns, at imi­tat­ing, at deliv­er­ing a vari­a­tion on a theme. (That’s why it’s real­ly good at imi­ta­tion Bach, for exam­ple.)

We could imag­ine, how­ev­er, a future where AI would be able to take a num­ber of musi­cal ele­ments, styles, and gen­res and come out with a hybrid that we’ve nev­er heard before. And would that be any bet­ter than hav­ing a human do so?

By the way, you can try out Amper your­self here. Your mileage may vary.

via Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear What Music Sounds Like When It’s Cre­at­ed by Syn­the­siz­ers Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Two Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Chat­bots Talk to Each Oth­er & Get Into a Deep Philo­soph­i­cal Con­ver­sa­tion

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Ridley Scott Walks You Through His Favorite Scene from Blade Runner

in Film | September 20th, 2017


The open­ing Voight-Kampff test that turns explo­sive, the flight over the high-rise rooftops and past the tow­er-side video geisha of 2019 Los Ange­les, Roy Bat­ty’s dying mono­logue on the rainy rooftop, Deckard pick­ing up Gaff’s origa­mi uni­corn: like any oth­er movie mer­it­ing clas­sic sta­tus, Blade Run­ner less pos­sess­es mem­o­rable scenes than com­pris­es noth­ing but mem­o­rable scenes. Fans have, of course, argued for their favorites, and if you have one your­self you can now com­pare your judg­ment against that of the film’s direc­tor Rid­ley Scott, who talks about which Blade Run­ner scene he holds in high­est esteem in the new video from Wired above.

Scott picks the scene when Deckard, Har­ri­son Ford’s hunter of the arti­fi­cial human beings known as repli­cants, vis­its the offices of the colos­sal Tyrell Cor­po­ra­tion that invent­ed them and inter­views an immac­u­late­ly put-togeth­er young lady, almost a vision out of film noir, named Rachael.

But that’s no lady — that’s a repli­cant, at least accord­ing to the Voight-Kampff gear he breaks out and sets up for the pro­ce­dure. “To Rick Deckard, it’s just a job,” says Scott. “He appears to be obliv­i­ous to the beau­ty and is unim­pressed by what he sees. At the end of it, he says, ‘How can it now know what it is?’ He calls her ‘it.’ So obvi­ous­ly she’s a race apart.”

But how to sig­nal that to the audi­ence, show­ing with­out telling? Scott speaks of mod­el­ing Rachael after Hedy Lamarr, the Aus­tri­an-born star from the gold­en age of Hol­ly­wood “who had a sever­i­ty which was spec­tac­u­lar.” Still work­ing at a time in cin­e­ma when “dig­i­tal does­n’t have a word,” he want­ed a way to dif­fer­en­ti­ate repli­cants from humans by putting an unusu­al “light in their eyes” (he ref­er­ences the leop­ard in the begin­ning of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). Spe­cial effects super­vi­sor Dou­glas Trum­bull (who’d also worked on 2011) came up with a cam­era-mount­ed half-mir­ror that would, just often enough, tilt to make a “gold­en light” reflect off the reti­nas of Rachael and the oth­er repli­cants. Scot­t’s ver­dict: “Genius.”

Many of us would say the same about most oth­er aspects of Blade Run­ner as well. But as with any artis­ti­cal­ly rich film, nobody, not even the direc­tor, has the final say about it. Scott may have an unam­bigu­ous atti­tude about the best part of Blade Run­ner, but then, he also has an unam­bigu­ous answer to the sto­ry’s cen­tral ques­tion of whether not just Rachael but Deckard him­self is a repli­cant. Will Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s soon upcom­ing sequel Blade Run­ner 2049 hon­or, ignore, or work around that answer? More to the point, will it, in the full­ness of time, con­tribute as much to our col­lec­tive mem­o­ry as did the orig­i­nal? Only one test, of the kind that hap­pens in the movie the­ater, will reveal that to us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

How Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Illu­mi­nates the Cen­tral Prob­lem of Moder­ni­ty

Blade Run­ner 2049’s New Mak­ing-Of Fea­turette Gives You a Sneak Peek Inside the Long-Await­ed Sequel

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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AC/DC’s “Back in Black” Played on the Gayageum, a Korean Instrument Dating Back to the 6th Century

in Music | September 20th, 2017

Every now and again, we check in on what’s hap­pen­ing in the musi­cal world of Luna Lee–a musi­cian who per­forms West­ern music on the Gayageum, a tra­di­tion­al Kore­an stringed instru­ment that dates back to the 6th cen­tu­ry. Over the years, we’ve shown you her adap­ta­tions of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile;’ David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World;” Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah;” blues clas­sics by John Lee Hook­er, B.B. King & Mud­dy Waters; and Pink Floy­d’s “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky.” To keep the tra­di­tion going, we bring you today Luna’s take on AC/DC’s 1980 clas­sic, “Back in Black.” Enjoy these four min­utes of met­al­ized Gayageum.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pak­istani Musi­cians Play an Enchant­i­ng Ver­sion of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Clas­sic, “Take Five”

Talk­ing Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” Per­formed on Tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese Instru­ments

Ultra Ortho­dox Rab­bis Sing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on the Streets of Jerusalem

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How a Recording Studio Mishap Created the Famous Drum Sound That Defined 80s Music & Beyond

in Music | September 20th, 2017

It’s not a sub­tle effect, by any means, which is pre­cise­ly what makes it so effec­tive. Gat­ed reverb, the sound of an airbag deploy­ing or weath­er bal­loon sud­den­ly blow­ing out, an airy thud that per­vades eight­ies pop, and the work of every musi­cian there­after who has ref­er­enced eight­ies pop, includ­ing CHVRCHES, Tegan and Sara, M83, Bey­on­cé, and Lorde, to name but a very few.

Before them came the pum­mel­ing gat­ed drums of Kate Bush, Bruce Spring­steen, Prince, Depeche Mode, New Order, Cocteau Twins, David Bowie, and Grace Jones, who turned Roxy Music’s “Love is the Drug” into a strict machine with the gat­ed reverb of her 1980 cov­er.

Roxy Music caught up quick­ly with songs like the love­ly “More Than This” on 1982’s Aval­on, but Jones was an ear­ly adopter of the effect, which—like many a leg­endary piece of stu­dio wizardry—came about entire­ly by acci­dent, dur­ing a 1979 record­ing ses­sion for Peter Gabriel’s eerie solo track “Intrud­er.”

On the drums—Vox’s Estelle Caswell tells us in the explain­er video at the top—was Gabriel’s for­mer Gen­e­sis band­mate Phil Collins, and in the con­trol room, record­ing engi­neer Hugh Padgham, who had inad­ver­tent­ly left a talk­back mic on in the stu­dio.

The mic hap­pened to be run­ning through a heavy com­pres­sor, which squashed the sound, and a noise gate that clamped down on the rever­ber­at­ing drums, cut­ting off the nat­ur­al decay and cre­at­ing a short, sharp echo that cut right through any mix. After hear­ing the sound, Gabriel arranged “Intrud­er” around it, and the fol­low­ing year, Collins and Padgham cre­at­ed the most icon­ic use of gat­ed reverb in pop music his­to­ry on “In the Air Tonight.” “Thanks to a hap­py acci­dent,” says Caswell, “the sound of the 80s was born.” Also the sound of the oughties and beyond, as you’ll hear in the 38-s0ng playlist above, fea­tur­ing many of the pio­neers of gat­ed reverb and the many earnest revival­ists who made it hip, and ubiq­ui­tous, again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

Two Gui­tar Effects That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Rock: The Inven­tion of the Wah-Wah & Fuzz Ped­als

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear the Pieces Mozart Composed When He Was Only Five Years Old

in Music | September 20th, 2017

A preter­nat­u­ral­ly tal­ent­ed, pre­co­cious child, bare­ly out of tod­dler­hood, in pow­dered wig and knee-breech­es, caper­ing around the great hous­es of 18th cen­tu­ry Europe between vir­tu­oso per­for­mances on the harp­si­chord. A young boy who can play any piece any­one puts in front of him, and com­pose sym­phonies extem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly with ease…. Few scenes bet­ter cap­ture the mythos of the child prodi­gy than those report­ed from the child­hood of Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart.

If Milos Forman’s Amadeus is any reli­able guide to his char­ac­ter, if not his his­to­ry, Mozart may nev­er have lost his boy­ish charm and exu­ber­ance, but his musi­cal abil­i­ty seemed to mature expo­nen­tial­ly as he com­posed hun­dreds of sonatas, quar­tets, con­cer­tos, and operas, end­ing with the Requiem, an aston­ish­ing piece of work by any mea­sure, despite remain­ing unfin­ished in the year of his death, 1791, at the age of 35.

While those fever­ish scenes of Requiem’s com­po­si­tion in Forman’s film may be ten­u­ous­ly attached to the truth, the sto­ries of Mozart the preschool and boy­hood genius are well attest­ed. Not only did he play with unbe­liev­able skill for “emper­ors and empress­es in the courts of Europe,” but “by the time he was six he had com­posed dozens of remark­able pieces for the key­board as well as for oth­er instru­ments,” notes Willard Palmer in an intro­duc­tion to Mozart’s most pop­u­lar works. “His first efforts at com­po­si­tion began when he was only four years old.”

He com­posed sev­er­al short pieces the fol­low­ing year, and you can hear them all per­formed above. At the Mor­gan Library’s site you can also see a scanned man­u­script image of four of those com­po­si­tions, writ­ten in Mozart’s father’s hand. Leopold Mozart—the dri­ving stage-parental force, as we know, behind Wolfgang’s child­hood career as a tour­ing marvel—notated these first attempts, cred­it­ing them to “Wolf­gangerl,” in what is known as the Nan­nerl Note­book, from the nick­name of Mozart’s old­er sis­ter, Maria Anna.

Leopold, Kapellmeis­ter of the Salzburg court orches­tra, rec­og­nized not only Wolfgang’s musi­cal tal­ents, but also those of Nan­nerl, and he devot­ed his time to over­see­ing both his children’s train­ing. For sad­ly obvi­ous rea­sons, the elder Mozart did not con­tin­ue to per­form, and the note­book named for her does not con­tain any of her com­po­si­tions, only Leopold’s exer­cis­es for the chil­dren and her broth­er’s first orig­i­nal work. In addi­tion to Mozart’s ear­li­est pieces, it may also con­tain music com­posed by him at 7 or 8 years old—more exten­sive works that might, says Mozar­teum researcher Ulrich Leisinger, bridge the short, sim­ple first pieces and his first major com­po­si­tions.

Nonethe­less, we have dozens of Mozart’s com­po­si­tions through­out his child­hood and teenage years. Sev­er­al of those ear­li­er pieces come from the so-called Lon­don Note­book, a sketch­book kept dur­ing Mozart’s time in Eng­land between 1764–65. Here, writes Ele­na Abend, we find him “extend­ing his musi­cal themes com­pared to his ear­li­er com­po­si­tions.” And yet the music “almost always has a play­ful­ness about it.” It’s a qual­i­ty that nev­er left Mozart’s work, exclud­ing the awe­some Requiem, of course, but then this final mas­ter­work was com­plet­ed by oth­er com­posers, none of them with Mozart’s light­ness of spir­it, which we can trace all the way back to that first piece, “a court­ly lit­tle com­po­si­tion.” Writes Abend, “grace­ful­ness is essen­tial in per­form­ing the piece.”

via Cmuse

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Eye­wit­ness Account of 8‑Year-Old Mozart’s Extra­or­di­nary Musi­cal Skills

New­ly Dis­cov­ered Piece by Mozart Per­formed on His Own Fortepi­ano

Hear All of Mozart in a Free 127-Hour Playlist

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

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Laurie Anderson Introduces Her Virtual Reality Installation That Lets You Fly Magically Through Stories

in Art, Technology | September 19th, 2017

While the sci-fi dreams of vir­tu­al and “aug­ment­ed” real­i­ty are now with­in the grasp of artists and game design­ers, the tech­nol­o­gy of the adult human brain remains root­ed in the stone age—we still need a good sto­ry to accom­pa­ny the flick­er­ing shad­ows on the cave wall. An artist as wise as Lau­rie Ander­son under­stands this, but—given that it’s Lau­rie Anderson—she isn’t going to retread famil­iar nar­ra­tive paths, espe­cial­ly when work­ing in the vehi­cle of VR, as she has in her new piece Chalk­room, cre­at­ed in a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Tai­wanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang.

The piece allows view­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to trav­el not only into the space of imag­i­na­tion a sto­ry cre­ates, but into the very archi­tec­ture of sto­ry itself—to walk, or rather float, through its pas­sage­ways as words and let­ters drift by like tufts of dan­de­lion, stars, or, as Ander­son puts it, like snow. “They’re there to define the space and to show you a lit­tle bit about what it is,” says the artist in the inter­view above, “But they’re actu­al­ly frac­tured lan­guages, so it’s kind of explod­ed things.” She explains the “chalk­room” con­cept as resist­ing the “per­fect, slick and shiny” aes­thet­ic that char­ac­ter­izes most com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed images. “It has a cer­tain tac­til­i­ty and made-by-hand kind of thing… this is grit­ty and drip­py and filled with dust and dirt.”

Chalk­room, she says, “is a library of sto­ries, and no one will ever find them all.” It sounds to me, at least, more intrigu­ing than the premise of most video games, but the audi­ence for this piece will be lim­it­ed, not only to those will­ing to give it a chance, but to those who can expe­ri­ence the piece first­hand, as it were, by vis­it­ing the phys­i­cal space of one of Anderson’s exhi­bi­tions and strap­ping on the VR gog­gles. Once they do, she says, they will be able to fly, a dis­ori­ent­ing expe­ri­ence that sends some peo­ple falling out of their chair. Last spring, Chalk­room became part of an ongo­ing exhib­it at the Mass­a­chu­setts Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, a “Lau­rie Ander­son pil­grim­age,” as Mass MoCA direc­tor Joseph C. Thomp­son describes it, that also fea­tures a VR expe­ri­ence called Aloft.

In August, Chalk­room appeared at the Louisiana Muse­um of Mod­ern Art in Den­mark, where the inter­view above took place. Watch­ing it, you’ll see why the piece has gen­er­at­ed so much buzz, win­ning “Best VR Expe­ri­ence” at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val and vis­it­ing major muse­ums around Europe and the U.S. “Most­ly VR is kind of task-ori­ent­ed,” she says, “you get that, you do that, you shoot that.” Chalk­room feels more like nav­i­gat­ing cat­a­combs, tra­vers­ing dark labyrinths punc­tu­at­ed by bril­liant con­stel­la­tions of light made out of words, as Anderson’s voice pro­vides enig­mat­ic nar­ra­tion against a back­drop of three-dimen­sion­al sound design. It’s an immer­sive jour­ney that seems, as promised, like the one we take as read­ers, pur­su­ing elu­sive mean­ings that can seem tan­ta­liz­ing­ly just out of reach.

via @WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lau­rie Anderson’s Top 10 Books to Take to a Desert Island

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Lau­rie Ander­son, David Byrne, Umber­to Eco, Pat­ti Smith & More

Go Inside the First 30 Min­utes of Kubrick’s The Shin­ing with This 360º Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Video

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Björk’s Hypnotic Music Video for Her New Song, “The Gate”

in Music | September 19th, 2017

FYI. Björk has just released a new track, “The Gate,” from her forth­com­ing album. And, with it, comes a hyp­not­ic new video, the prod­uct of a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Björk, artist Andrew Thomas Huang, and Gucci’s Alessan­dro Michele.

About the video, Andrew Thomas Huang has this to say:

The Gate picks up where 2015’s Vul­ni­cu­ra left off. It is the first glimpse into Björk’s utopia. The door­way lies with­in the wound from Vul­ni­cu­ra, which now appears trans­formed into a pris­mat­ic por­tal chan­neled between the chests of two lovers. Not lovers in the quo­tid­i­an roman­tic sense, but in a broad­er cos­mo­log­i­cal way. As a through­way into Bjork’s new album, The Gate is a dec­la­ra­tion of hope sung by a woman refract­ed and re-formed into a lumi­nous whole.

Björk’s new album, Utopia, is due out in Novem­ber. The new video is made avail­able by Now­ness.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Björk Takes Us Inside Her Cre­ative Process and Explains How She Writes a Song

Hear the Album Björk Record­ed as an 11-Year-Old: Fea­tures Cov­er Art Pro­vid­ed By Her Mom (1977)

A Young Björk Decon­structs (Phys­i­cal­ly & The­o­ret­i­cal­ly) a Tele­vi­sion in a Delight­ful Retro Video

Watch Björk’s 6 Favorite TED Talks, From the Mush­room Death Suit to the Vir­tu­al Choir

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How a Simple Email Survey Pulled Scripts Out of Hollywood Purgatory & Turned Them Into Award-Winning Films

in Film | September 19th, 2017

How did the Black List get start­ed? Not the Hol­ly­wood black­list that ruined the careers of count­less direc­tors, actors and actress­es dur­ing the 1940s and 1950s. No, we mean the Black List, cre­at­ed by Franklin Leonard in 2005, which has allowed more than 300 scripts, once stuck in Hol­ly­wood pur­ga­to­ry, to get turned into fea­ture films–films like Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire, The King’s Speech, Argo and Spot­light.  This all start­ed when Leonard cre­at­ed a sim­ple sur­vey, ask­ing near­ly 100 movies exec­u­tives to name their favorite scripts that had not yet been made as fea­ture films. The new Vox video above tells the rest of the sto­ry.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

When Aldous Hux­ley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Won­der­land

How Movie Stu­dios Reject­ed Scripts Dur­ing the Silent-Film Era: A Cold, 17-Point Check­list Cir­ca 1915

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