Hey, you're always asking me where I find stuff...
Monday, July 31, 2006
Little Link List 18
For those that are interested - I live here;
This is part of what original musicians in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia are up against - note-perfect exploited Filipino musicians;
Why my rent is so expensive.
This is part of what original musicians in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia are up against - note-perfect exploited Filipino musicians;
Why my rent is so expensive.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Sonic Graffiti - turning the city into a soundscape
Sonic Graffiti is a wonderful idea for turning the cityscape into an interactive soundscape.
The basic idea is using a number of electronic devices graffiti artists create musical pieces as they paint graffiti pieces. They can upload their finished pieces to a central location and geotag it. Other people with special receivers can point their receiver at a piece of graffiti and then listen to the piece of music that goes with the graffiti.
(Mind - you this is all just an idea - it doesn't really exist yet.)
I find ideas like this really interesting - the idea of being able to move through an environment and select a feature and get information (music, text, ads, video, data) from that feature via a wireless device is great. Our cities could become so much richer - a whole new layer of experience and information could lie across our environments.
Come on future - happen!
tags: music | sonicgraffiti | graffiti
The basic idea is using a number of electronic devices graffiti artists create musical pieces as they paint graffiti pieces. They can upload their finished pieces to a central location and geotag it. Other people with special receivers can point their receiver at a piece of graffiti and then listen to the piece of music that goes with the graffiti.
(Mind - you this is all just an idea - it doesn't really exist yet.)
I find ideas like this really interesting - the idea of being able to move through an environment and select a feature and get information (music, text, ads, video, data) from that feature via a wireless device is great. Our cities could become so much richer - a whole new layer of experience and information could lie across our environments.
Come on future - happen!
tags: music | sonicgraffiti | graffiti
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
New Job
This is the first and last time I'll ever post about work, but after a nice break of about 6 months, today I accepted a position with a company here in Hong Kong. The holiday is over...
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Little Link List 17
Video of Andrew Duracell playing drums and synth at the same time - awesome;
There are a lot of ships on the ocean - and here's a way to track them;
And finally - to celebrate our first paid gig - Bone Table!!!
There are a lot of ships on the ocean - and here's a way to track them;
And finally - to celebrate our first paid gig - Bone Table!!!
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Music by the numbers
The number one musical style in Hong Kong is Cantopop - Cantonese pop music. It's been around for a long time and will probably continue on for a bit longer. And I really don't like it. It reminds me of Japanese pop, Korean pop and Taiwanese pop. Aside from the difference in languages all of these styles are essentially interchangeable - they all sound like bad 80's music. The melodies are so obvious that I've often found myself humming along to a song I've never heard before and still being able to get the tune right with about 70% accuracy.
Today I realised why I don't like Cantopop - it reminds me of the music theory classes I had to take when I was in high school. Learning about music theory is learning about how music is put together - scales, key signatures, tempo, cadences, intervals and so on. It's quite dry and I wasn't that good at it. I didn't mind studying theory and some of what I learnt has certainly helped me, but there was a point at which I wasn't able to understand what I was doing. In a typical exercise we'd be given a melody and told to write the accompanying chords. There were a set of rules that we could follow - it was all quite mathematical, but I could never remember the rules. One thing I did notice though was that all of the exercises came out essentially the same. The same chord progressions would be used over and over, and everything sounded well-ordered and predictable.
And I think that's what Cantopop is - Cantopop is what you get when you have a number of songwriters all applying the rules they learnt when they were studying music theory. There are a lot of music schools here in Hong Kong and lots of students have to pass the various levels of music performance and theory exams that prove that they can ... pass music exams. In the West a lot of people take the same exams, but interestingly a lot of popular music is written by people who haven't studied any music theory at all. I find Western popular music is much more inventive than Cantopop, J-pop, or K-pop and I think a big part of that is due to so many musicians not learning any music theory - they are freer to try things because they don't have any rules to follow.
Now, comparisons can be odious and often are completely useless. So I'm not saying that Cantopop is better or worse than Western music - I'm just saying that I don't like it, and I think I've figured out why.
tags: music | cantopop | hongkong
Today I realised why I don't like Cantopop - it reminds me of the music theory classes I had to take when I was in high school. Learning about music theory is learning about how music is put together - scales, key signatures, tempo, cadences, intervals and so on. It's quite dry and I wasn't that good at it. I didn't mind studying theory and some of what I learnt has certainly helped me, but there was a point at which I wasn't able to understand what I was doing. In a typical exercise we'd be given a melody and told to write the accompanying chords. There were a set of rules that we could follow - it was all quite mathematical, but I could never remember the rules. One thing I did notice though was that all of the exercises came out essentially the same. The same chord progressions would be used over and over, and everything sounded well-ordered and predictable.
And I think that's what Cantopop is - Cantopop is what you get when you have a number of songwriters all applying the rules they learnt when they were studying music theory. There are a lot of music schools here in Hong Kong and lots of students have to pass the various levels of music performance and theory exams that prove that they can ... pass music exams. In the West a lot of people take the same exams, but interestingly a lot of popular music is written by people who haven't studied any music theory at all. I find Western popular music is much more inventive than Cantopop, J-pop, or K-pop and I think a big part of that is due to so many musicians not learning any music theory - they are freer to try things because they don't have any rules to follow.
Now, comparisons can be odious and often are completely useless. So I'm not saying that Cantopop is better or worse than Western music - I'm just saying that I don't like it, and I think I've figured out why.
tags: music | cantopop | hongkong
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