January 2013
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In Industrial Design, Sound Is the Undiscovered...
“There’s gotta be a way to make bikes more visible — or maybe more hear-able.”
“Sound felt like an undiscovered country.”
These are among the thoughts expressed by the industrial designer Tory Orzeck about his Orp, a next-generation bike horn/light. Orzeck is based in Portland, Oregon. It’s currently in Kickstarter mode: kickstarter.com. As of this writing, it’s about 50% of the way to its...
July 2012
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Site Maintenance: Tags + Post Summary
Two quick updates.
1. There is now a tag cloud on the site, thanks to the handy code made available via rive.rs.
2. I’m planning on summarizing these posts on a regular basis — somewhere between once a week and twice a month — over at the disquiet.com mothership. Click through for an example.
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No Muting Gas Station Commercials... →
In Santa Barbara, Chevron stations have videos displaying advertisements at pumps while customers fill their cars up with gas. The videos have accompanying sound. A lawyer successfully stopped a city ordinance that would have required the installation of a mute button so that customers could opt out of hearing the ads.
One funny side note is the name of the Santa Barbara publication in which...
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The "Ad Hit" (theglobeandmail.com) →
Charting the changing impression by independent musicians of having their music included in advertising. The result is a sort of feedback loop of mutual promotion: band advertises product advertises brand.
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Beat Boutique (believermag.com) →
In her essay in the July/August 2012 issue of The Believer, Lindsay Zoladz makes a solid connection between the diminishing meaning in pop music of the phrase “selling out” and the legacy of the “music library.” In her definition: “Library music (sometimes referred to as ‘production music’ or ‘stock music’) generally refers to music that has...
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A Brief History of Library Music (bbc.co.uk) →
The link goes to a half-hour documentary: a survey of the varieties of source music, and background music, and theme songs, and all manner of music that was recorded or archived with the intent that it serve a functional purpose: “Never commercially available to the general public, this music was pressed onto vinyl from the 1950s onwards in short, limited quantities and then sent directly to...
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Is the Playlist the New Jingle?
Details at adage.com on plan by Spotify, the music-streaming service, to aid brands in collating playlists for its reported 10 million listeners. Brings to mind not only the playlist as the new jingle (i.e., the in-flux cloud formation of associative music in place of a single sound object), as well as such classic cultural sponsorships as Texaco’s relationship with the Metropolitan Opera....
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Mnemonic Sound Opportunity (indabamusic.com) →
The indabamusic.com site is a steady stream of open-call music-making contests, often in the form of remixes. This latest contest, with a due date of July 24, 2012, takes a different approach. Titled “Mnemonic Sound Opportunity,” the goal of it is to produce an original and memorable sound to serve as a “unique acoustical snippet that is associated with a brand.” The...
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Steven Heller + John Carlin on Sound + Design
Steven Heller interviews John Carlin on the SVA “Sound of Design” course that took place in 2012. This is one of the interview’s four questions:
Heller: Sound is obviously a medium to be reckoned with. How do you plan on introducing sound that is different from other programs?
Carlin: Sound is so ubiquitous that we often don’t stop to notice what is good bad or...
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The Tesla Electric Sedan: I Am Silent, Hear Me... →
This coverage of a 2012 Tesla electric car is worth noting as it provides evidence of shifting sensibilities about the perceived benefits and deficits of loud cars. Writes the author of pre-Tesla high-end cars, such as the Lamborghini: “At full tilt, those cars are like civil-defense sirens, if civil-defense sirens alerted you to the presence of awful men in gold watches and track suits....
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Toward Silent Computing (theatlantic.com) →
Piece I wrote in late 2011 for The Atlantic’s website about the more rudimentary and practical aspects of sound design in OS X Lion.
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5 Songs That Musicians Sued to Keep Out of Ads... →
Brief overview of complaints from Tom Waits, Eminem, the Beatles, the Band, and the Black Keys about advertising encroaching on their work. The Eminem was for a sound-alike. The others were for uses that the acts said they hadn’t approved.
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How the Attitude About Licensing Has Changed the... →
Overview of the several-decade transition of audience and musician perspective on the licensing of songs for commercial use, from the Beatle’s complaints against Nike, to David Bowie’s catalog bond, the Moby’s Play, to contemporary independent artists.
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Gone Commercial: Older Rock Stars Appearing In TV... →
John Lydon, Slash, Motörhead, and Madness among older acts venturing into advertising. The latter two are particularly interesting, for doing new, slowed-down versions of their songs (“Ace of Spades” and “Baggy Trousers,” respectively). Worth considering that it’s a wise way to profit without adversely affecting listeners’ associations with the original.
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Dr. Dre's Beats Buys Mog (adweek.com) →
“There is considerable speculation that Beats will look to pair Mog’s streaming service up with Beats’ high end headphones, which could introduce Mog to a much larger audience.”
Dr. Dre’s Beats headphone/audio company has purchased the music-streaming service Mog (2012.07.02). It’s interesting to think about the ramifications of a self-contained, pre-existing...
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The Curious Case of Sound-Alike Songs in... →
Complaints against Volkswagen by the duo Beach House touch on U.S. “right to publicity” laws and their British near-equivalent, “the ‘passing off’ provision.”
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Apple iTunes Post-Ping Pong (bloomberg.com) →
News of overhaul of Apple’s flagship music tool, following the lackluster Ping social service, with an emphasis on sharing.
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Prometheus Trailer Shares Sounds Heard in Original... →
The sonic cue as dog-whistle strategy.
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Scanner Helps Philips Wake Up →
A wake-up alarm with sounds designed by Philips. Evidence of when a company that makes alarm clocks stops taking their most basic element, the wake-up sound, for granted.
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VibrAcoustic® Hydrotherapy →
Kohler’s line of baths that have built-in sound panels. Sound is increasingly insinuating itself in all manner of consumer products.
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journal.robwalker.net →
The sound-tumblr mother load, from a good friend and the author of, among other things, Buying In.
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Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds
What does a brand sound like?
