The Null Device

2012/8/27

There's a piece in the Guardian about the rise of crowdfunding, and how it shifted from a medium for art projects to a means of decentralised organisation of practical endeavours requiring money, and turned into a means for circumventing market failures:

Kickstarter itself is changing under the influence of digital culture. At first it was about making established forms of art. Film was big – documentaries about organic community vegetable gardens were not uncommon. Now that is changing. It is becoming a land of gadget makers and gamers.
This new communal instinct can do amazing things like route around the warping influence of capitalism and digital platform wars. Look at projects like Open Trip Planner. This takes a bit of unravelling but basically the benefit of good maps on smartphones became endangered by Apple's titanic battle for market supremacy with Google. Apple are attempting to strip Google products like maps from iPhones and this left users with crappy transport info – Open Trip Planner is the communal answer to a hierarchical fall out.
The article mentions OpenTripPlanner, an open-source alternative to trip planning systems which seems to be doing for trip planning what OpenStreetMap did for geodata, and the Pebble watch, a Bluetooth-enabled smart watch designed without the backing of a large electronics corporation, and the fact that Kickstarter is expanding to the UK.

In other crowdfunding news, Matthew Inman, who runs The Oatmeal web comic, recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise US$850,000 buy Nikola Tesla's old laboratory (put on the market by AGFA and expected to be bought by property developers); the campaign met its target in under a week and has since raised over a million dollars.

business capitalism crowdfunding here comes everybody internet society 0

Recent empirical examinations of the past half-century of pop music have suggested yielded some interesting conclusions. On the one hand, according to a Spanish study of music from 1955 to 2010, the diversity of note combinations in pop music has consistently diminished over the past 50 years, presumably as commercially-inclined producers discover the ones that sell, and the range of timbres has also narrowed (which sounds odd; given the potential of electronic instruments, you'd think that there'd be more timbres than back when sounds had to be made with physical vibrations).

The researchers used a dataset of 464,411 music recordings to analyse what has changed – and what has stayed the same – over the past half-century of song. "Many of [music's] patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for [this] period," they wrote. "However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenisation of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels."
The research team also confirmed the existence of the “Loudness War”, the trend to crush dynamic range out of recordings in favour of music that sounds ass-kickingly loud enough to compete with the other ass-kickingly loud tracks on the market, and whose sonogram looks less like a waveform and more like an angry, ragged-edged rectangle.

Meanwhile, another study of recorded music over the same period has found that pop music has been becoming less jauntily upbeat and more sombre or emotionally ambiguous:

Schellenberg and von Scheve found that the proportion of songs recorded in minor-mode has increased, doubling over the last fifty years. The proportion of slow tempo hits has also increased linearly, reaching a peak in the 90s. There's also been a decrease in unambiguously happy-sounding songs and an increase in emotionally ambiguous songs.
Unambiguously happy songs like Abba's Waterloo sound, to today's ears, "naive and slightly juvenile", the researchers noted. And whilst modern songs in a similar style, such as Aqua's Barbie Girl, can still enjoy huge commercial success, they're usually seen as a guilty pleasure and savaged by critics.
(Or, to quote the Pet Shop Boys, “make sure you're always frowning; it shows the world that you've got substance and depth”.)

culture music 0