TUNING

CANINE CRITICS

Why Dogs Don't Enjoy Music- [Scientific American]
Dogs can only dis­criminate resolutions of one third of an octave. They must fucking love house music.

DIAL A GOATHERD

Telemegaphone Dale is a seven metres tall wind powered loudspeaker on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway.
Call +4790369389 to have your voice piped through the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale below.
They've naturally been getting quite a few calls , so give it a couple hours to reset if you don't get through at first.



Here's a Greenwich Meantime Map of Norway (with city and telephone info.)

Ironicly, Not Farts

First Sounds "is an informal collaborative of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists, other individuals, and organizations who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time."
Thrill to the sound of the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad from 40 feet away (1878 Phonautogram) and barely decipherable French people played back at different speeds.
This is history folks!

Rappin and Sleepin

If you care to let's have luncheon, every day here just the same, but sweetheart-if you talk in your sleep, don't mention my name
"If You Talk In Your Sleep"- by Sammy Fain ,The Singing Composer

Somniloquy or sleep-talking is sleep disorder that usually occurs during the 4th stage of NREMsleep. The fourth stage of NREM ( non REM sleep) does not produce as many dreams as REM sleep, and dreams in this state are not as vivid as in REM sleep.

The content of dreams produced in this Slow Wave Sleep mode tend to be disjointed.
Parasomnias, or sleep disorders,- including sleepwalking, sleepeating, sleep sex, teeth grinding, night terrors, rhythmic movement disorder, REM behaviour disorder and restless legs syndrome occur in this state, and any number of these can be an adjunct to Somniloquy .
Sleep-talking has been reported in 50% of young children, who usually outgrow it by puberty,with about 5% occurence in adults, where it tends to run in families.

Sleep- talking appears to be of interest only if it is loud, profane or both.
One of the loudest and profanest of sleep talkers was Dion Mcgregor whose songwriting partner Mike Barr managed to record over 500 somniloquies in exchange for giving Mcgregor a place to sleep.
The choicest sleep talk sessions were released as an LP on Decca called “The Dream World Of Dion Mcgregor”, with cover art by Edward Gorey. A book of dream speech transcriptions.with illustrations by Gorey again was published at about the same time.

In Febrary of 1999, Tzadik Records released Dion McGregor Dreams Again, an additional ten dreams by Dion.
Torpor Vigil Soundworks spat out “The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor “ in 2004.

There are several prolific modern- day somniloquists who tend to be self-explotative like:
The Parasomnial Order who couches his morphic utterances in an almost impenetrable faux gnostic schtick
Sleep Talking On The Mic who is quite certain that his sleep disorder is evidence of demonic possesion
Somnography of Somniloquy - Dandan's Sleeptalk who seems to have a healthy handle on it- after all, the colophone to his blog is: “I talk in my sleep. I say weird things. I record it.”
Nate at Night who thinks it’s kinda fucking hilarious
And Ngram .net who just hopes it’s poetry.

Other Resources:
I Talk When I Sleep Support Group
Somnioloquism and the Sleeping Dimension episode of Educational Showdown hosted by Jamie and Adrienne on WRUV 90.1 Burlington Vt.
Dion McGregor On Myspace
Index of choice DM cuts[via Ink Mathematics]

Five Not So Great Auditory Illusions

The comments section says it best about New Scientists' Music Special: Five great auditory illusions .
The popular science mag's website presents 5 examples of supposed fuck -with -yer head-itis that have been artificially created to fool the human ear and brain.
Except why do I feel like it's 1975 and I'm sitting with some balding prat with an over ambitious moustache in a fern bar whilst he tells me that quadrophonic sound is the future?
Cock your fourth ear to these examples and see if you hear what they're telling you you're supposed to.

Ron Murphy Talks About Cutting Records

Lies, Lies Lies, Yeah........... The Secret World Of Vinyl Data

The reliably sporadic , yet never boring kempa.com unearths the fascinating world of Vinyl Data.
What's that you ask? These days, record companies try to get you to buy their product outright by offering dubious CD Rom only content if you buy the prepackadged disc rather than downloading it either legally or illegally.
Apparently, this extra data thing has been going on since the mid -80s with the exception being that the data was packaged as a special edition promo rather than tacked onto existing content, by and large.

In the case of the vinyl data, interested parties would record the specific selections to tape , which could then be interpreted by the mighty Sinclair ZX Spectrum personal computer (with a whopping 48K!).

The article mentions a lot of has beens and never- were's who have added data to their vinyl records (anyone up for a stirring round of the Shakin' Stevens game?) but gives special mention to a full on video game vinylized especially for that purpose by none other than none other than stunting great floppy haired limp -wristers The Thompson Twins. (screen capture pictured at left)
The author admits to not having played it enough to see how it ends, but does mention that "If you go north from the first screen, the Thompson Twins drown en masse. "
A fitting denoument to any game featuring the Thompson Twins, I should think.

The article is replete with emulators and browser playable versions of games and er, things... by artists like the Stranglers, Pete Shelley, The Freshies (Who get a sound critical thrashing, and quite possibly the most thorough history of said group in the proccess) , Information Society and Isao Tomita .

A very thorough overview of something I thought didn't deserve a second glance.
I mean, I knew about the spectrum -bending laser etching on side two of Split Enz "True Colors" album, but this shit is way off the charts- assuming there are charts for crudely drawn stick figure adventures that are hard to translate to a usable medium.

How Vinyl Records Are Made

I find this crap endlessly fascinating.
It's really great how the narration removes any sort of hip cache from the preceedings.
It's really just geeks going through an elaborate process to make something only a handfull of fellow geeks are going to truelly appreciate.
It's almost like the time I had to listen to the guy who ran Chicago's Jazz Record Mart go on and on about lathe settings and vinyl weights just so I could sort through a jumbled up carton of Novelty "cut in " 45s.
What was interesting about the box of 45s was that there where about 400 of them, and none of them were by Dickie Goodman. I don't know why I thought this was historically signifigant, or how this parlayed into me giving a shit, but it was the nineties. Anyway, the record making process is cool;

But Wait, there's more...........

You Don't Know The Score

Unusual musical notation on display here and here

An Academic Memorial

Musicologist Phil Ford explains why why James Brown was so goddamned funky
A fine piece of writing that makes you want to immediatly listen to the artist in question. It's kind of like that stream of conciousness paragraph describing Johnathan Richman's "Roadrunner" in Greal Marcus' "Lipstick Traces", only you've never heard of Phil Ford, so you won't let overwhelming hatred overcome your enjoyment of the piece.
Not that you should start hating Phil Ford, he seems like a decent guy- save your ire for Simon Frith or somebody like that.