Peter Gabriel Wants You to Re-Shock the Monkey 312
PreacherTom writes "The party line for the music industry has been clear: discourage music downloads at all cost. However, singer Peter Gabriel is taking things in a different direction. In order to promote his own label, he is actually encouraging people to not only download his music, but also adapt it into something more modern. In doing so, he actually posted a sample pack of Shock the Monkey consisting of vocals and other pieces of the original multitrack recording. Some in the music business would call this the commercial equivalent of hiring kidnappers to babysit. In actuality, Gabriel is pleased with the results."
HIM! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:HIM! (Score:5, Funny)
I pwned that game with my l33t aimbot and wallhacks, n00b.
Been done by NIN already..... (Score:4, Informative)
see
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/04/16/1417205.
Re:Been done by NIN already..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Been done by NIN already..... (Score:5, Informative)
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In the 1990s Todd Rundgren released a disc for the CD-I system called "TR-1" that allowed you to modify the mix. You could choose change the producer, the mix, and the speed of the album on the fly.
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As have The Beastie Boys and Fatboy Slim (Score:2)
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Didn't Todd Rundgren do this a LONG time ago? (Score:2)
Anyone remember that?
Also done by Public Enemy, went a bit farther... (Score:3, Informative)
For Revolverlution Public Enemy not only had a remix contest, but it was before the album was even released. They had a couple tracks on their website, including the title track Revolverlution. The winner of the remix contest was put on the album. The cool thing, it's really a different track, the guy has a totally different flow than Chuck D., and definitly falls into the "using current song to create a new song" rather than just simple copying (like the label
i'm going (Score:5, Funny)
If I shock the monkey... (Score:5, Funny)
Someone help me out here.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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Anyone distributing tracks in mp3 format isn't releasing top-quality material. If you really want the real deal, you distribute non-lossy formats like
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Re:Someone help me out here.. (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and let's not forget the many 8-bit parallel port sound devices in the early 90s like the Covox Speech Thing, Disney Sound Source and others.
IAASE (Score:2)
And also, you may be surprised that not all songs are created by recording one instrument at a time each on it's own track and then mixed together by the Neptunes. There are occasionally musicians who are in the same room and actually PLAY TOGETHER and are recorded on the same mic (or pair of mics more properly).
Ask the nice Mr. Albini if you don't believe me.
Re:Someone help me out here.. (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody just spoke of losless audio on Slashdot without mentioning Ogg FLAC. What is this world coming to?
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Re: your first point about entropy -- the entropy in a downmixed tra
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Alright I fucking HATE this description (and I've heard it before) that notes consist of "tone" and "noise". That's just a really detremental way of looking at sound. Most of that "noise" consists of harmonics, as well as other resonating frequencies thrown into the mix, so many that it "appears" to be random. Fuck, how simple do you want to get? is anything that's not a pure sine wave, "noise"? Take my 20% pulse wave, that's pretty fucking "noisy". God, I had a first year electronic music professor use thi
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Your understanding is incorrect. Once mixed, track info is lost. You have a single stereo mix. Seperating out tracks would like trying to reconstruct a banana from a smoothie.
You can, however, run a soothie through a sieve to sort what's left by size. Lossy compression seperates out frequencies into those that can and "cannot" be heard.
KFG
A real answer for people curious about MP3's (Score:5, Informative)
First off, your idea that tracks are "seperated" is an understandable mistake! But, the deal is that it's not the tracks that are seperated, it's the component audio frequencies that compose the sound that make up the song that are.
Let's skip the boring stuff and get right to it. If this interests you, i'm sure that wikipedia will have a full explanation. Imagine three people are whistling (and that this makes up the whole, if somewhat boring, song. Person 1 is whistling at 700hz (hertz, or cycles per second. Human hearing is approx 20-20000 hz, rather like the specs you see on headphones, no coincidence). Person 2 is whistling at 703 hz (NOTE this is close to person 1 on purpose) and person 3 is whistling at 900 hz. So you hear, uncompressed three whistles. There are two things that happen to make an mp3:
1) If I can analyze this sound to find it's frequency components for a given "window" (or in mp3 speak, frame) of time, i can just record that. It would be easier (smaller) to say Persons 1, 2, 3 are whistling at 700, 703, and 900 then it would be to record the full sound of them doing it (think about that)
Still, music can be complex, and there are different qualities of MP3 you can make too (usually refered to as bitrate, like 128, 160, 192 Kbps (kilo bits per second) so we have
2) A principal not unlike optical illusions called Psychoacoustics. It basically says that if you have two signals A and B, and A is louder then B, and A and B are close enough in frequency, a person will only tend to hear A. Common sense time, if a headphone speaker is making a sound, and a big loudspeaker is making the same sound, you'll only hear the big loudspeaker. The question is, how much different will the headphone have to be before you hear it?
This is the science of psychoacoustics. Basically, the more compressed an mp3 is, the more will be "stripped" out - that is as the bitrate gets lower, the amount seperating A and B is allowed to increase. On the flip side, if the bitrate is high enough, there is no practical difference to the human ear, because you just can't hear such a small difference anyway That's why a high bitrate mp3 is STILL five times smaller then a
Check on fourier transforms, psychoacoustics, and mp3 on wikipedia for more (and if anyone has a better example, well, typed this pretty quick, go for it!)
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If they aren't mixed together, how wou
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More accurate explanation (Score:2, Informative)
Re:More accurate explanation (Score:5, Informative)
You in particular have just mixed up HZ and KHZ and injected more bullshit like "It essentially tries to fit a curve to the master waveform".
Perceptual encoding is much more complicated than that.
It actually performs an FFT analysis and split the sound up into it's component sine waves.
Then, two methods are used to discard data.
Both known as perceptual masking. The first method deals with frequency masking, the second with time.
Human auditory perception cannot hear a quiet frequency when there is a louder one within a few hz of it.
So, you can discard all of them.
Humans cannot hear a quiet sound when a louder one immediately follows it. (Think of a bass drum, you do not hear the squeak of the pedal just before the beater hits.)
So you can discard all those too.
The watery effect of heavy MP3 compression is from too many transients being discarded by the second method, so the transients appear spread over time. The thin lack of depth is due to too many frequencies being discarded.
"the net result of a sound around 701.5 Hz coming in and out every 1/3rd of a second. It would basically sound like 3 beeps a second, though more like a siren than a beep. If the waves were at different amplitudes, the same phenomenon would still exist but there would not be complete silence during the destructive phases."
This is crap. The cancellation has ALREADY HAPPENED when the waveforms were mixed before you do the MP3 compression. So you just need to compress the result, not the individual tones.
Also, it will sound like an amplitude tremelo, not a siren which would imply pitch modulation.
Re:Someone help me out here.. (Score:4, Informative)
In short - No. A single track compressed will work better in mp3 than individual tracks mixed together.
The reason is that mp3 is designed precisely to compress single multi-instrument tracks and makes use of psychoacoustics to do this. The gist of which is, the more complicated a sound is (multiple instruments/frequencies) the less of each individual instrument (frequency) you are likely to be able to perceive. Thus, with all the instruments together in the one track, the mp3 algorithm can work better to strip out the subtler elements you don't perceive. If you are just compressing a single instrument there is less of that compression that can be done because, for example, it doesn't know that the rhythm guitar is being drowned by the kick drum at that point in time. Or as a corollary, compressing a single instrument will have to remove stuff you can hear just to hit the same bitrate as the compressed single track. So, combining individual tracks will lead to a worse outcome, all other things being equal, than compressing the already mixed track.
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Who told you this, and can you hit them for me? It would make me feel better.
Maybe I should create a Snopes Clone just for computer tech... unless someone has already done it.
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Monkey cruelty? (Score:4, Funny)
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Shock the monkey? (Score:2)
(NSFW link)
FYI (Score:2)
More like surprise the monkey.
Never thought of it that way... (Score:5, Funny)
I feel better already.
So? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Claiming that all "Real" musicians love having the music sampled is a bit overstated
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Maybe, but you sir can't take a joke!
When it comes to what music I appreciate I'm an old fart who grew up with the beatles, stones, pink floyd, ect. The one Rap singer I like is Eminem, not so much for his music but for the messages and humour it contains, I also appreciate the fact that he introduced the magical talent of Dido to a wide audience.
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I thought you said you liked Eminem?
Results have some merits (Score:2)
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Well, I wouldn't completely be satisfied unless he was able to go back and license Lamb Lies Down on Broadway... but that would mean getting through to Phil Collins, which would be a nightmare.
Whatever (Score:2)
What the major labels provide to an artist is massive promotion, and this artist has already been promoted. If you want to take down the RIAA, find some ways to connect to brilliant-but-obscure bands that don't have the mo
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Informative)
Peter Gabriel is British. He has converted a garden shed on his own property into a recording studio where he produces for his own label. He actually runs his own website.
Yes, he's a big act, but since leaving Genesis he's been as much as possible an independent big act publicly at the forefront of not paying too much mind to copyright issues.
When his "people" came to him all upset that people in India were pirating his records his response was (paraphrasing):
"You idiots, book me. If they're not paying for what we're trying to sell they're at least demonstrating a demand for what we can sell that they can't pirate."
He has a long, personal history of being the good anti-Metallica.
KFG
Stupidest phrase ever... (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, no. It just letting listeners remix already recorded segments into something they like.
Really.
Journalists are stupid. Sometimes.
As Peter Gabriel and Metallica, respectively, show (Score:2)
Not the first (Score:2, Informative)
Not just web release, but tracks... (Score:2)
Music + Video? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Closed Source Development: The irrational belief that ineffectual middle-management suckups can produce a working program.
Maybe, just maybe... (Score:3, Interesting)
With any luck, more artists will start taking these kinds of steps, and eventually the RIAA will not be watching their own dinner from last night being digested.
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They would rise, of course. Think about it.
Re:Maybe, just maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is how it should be (Score:5, Interesting)
The good thing: it is inevitable that we deal away with copyright. Modern exchange of information demands it (read, networking in the sense of distributing information based on the network model, as opposed to the broadcast model). The information exchange is much more powerful than the copyright law, and it is only bound to get stronger as networking is more and more part of everyday life. The first signs are already apparent. We've got a company called Google who is most likely among the biggest copyright infringers on the world, operating freely. Why? Because Google provides an essential service. To index information, thus make information accessible. Furthermore not only it is an essential service, but it is _good_ for content creators aswell. The fundamental clash is this: copyright and networking is incompatible. Networking/nature is not aware of copyright and can't be made aware of, because copyright itself is a fuzzy, arbitary and ultimately conflicting view on information. Copyright is the 8 ton gorilla. Networking is the 8000 ton meteorite. Networking is simply so useful that we're not going to give it up and networking cannot be fixed to obey copyright law. Copyright is not only detrimental to an information society, it is not needed and ultimately incompatible with future technological advancement. Networking implies free flow of information and creating derivative works. So like it or not: copyright goes away.
The bad thing: it is likely to be a long, slow process and change is only going to come when the situation becomes really, really unworkable.
The outcome: content creators will get paid for creating the given work, but won't be given a tax and monopoly on distribution for x amount of time. This is how most people would expect to get paid for a job. After all, why is it that while creating and printing a book in the 18th century was much more expensive and longer, the copyright law guaranteed less benefits for the authors than it does now. We're simply rewarding content creators too much for too little work.
Of course you could argue that copyright provides incentive. But this is a false argument. The correct way to phrase that is: copyright provides income, which is the incentive. Now, you might argue that in the 18th century, copyright was the most straightforward way to provide that income to content creators, but today it ain't so. Again, our wonderful networking age obsoleted copyright on that field. It is now possible to setup a worldwide micropayment system on the internet (it is just a matter of time until someone implements it), to sponsor the creation of most works. Still, you could say, what about big budget movies? Well, what about them. There will be companies willing to finance the creation of the movie just like now (of course actors would be paid fixed sums of money as royalties won't exist) and they'd make profit not from the copyright fees coming from distributing the work, but from using the given content to sell their product. Tv stations already do this, they give away movies for no financial compensation so that you watch the advertisements their income is from. Just from now on, your movies ticket would pay for the experience you're given in the cinema, not the copyright fees. People would still go to the cinema, but cinemas would actually have to compete on the best viewing experience, not at what you're actually able to view.
It might sound strange, but from a certain viewpoint, advertisements have it right: they are the means, not the end. As in, they exist as means for companies to influence you, not because they want to make a profit on advertisements. The profit is indirect. If all content would be used like that commercially: to help sell a product (cinema seets, a book, etc), as in not as advertisement, but as a necessary component, then we wouldn't have to pay outrageous profits to media cartells, just what they des
This is not quite, however, the way it will be (Score:2, Interesting)
Your argument is interesting, but after further examination, somewhat akin to early Communist and Socialist economic models. It looks good on paper, but might not really manage to create a situation where many content creators would be motivated to do so, or even in a position where they could make the commitment of both time and resources necessary for them to come up with the music at the level of sophistication that a Peter Gabri
Okay, this is what copyright actually IS... (Score:3, Informative)
So, instead of arguing, I'm going to educate - this is copyright 101. So please pay close attention, and you'll understand what is going on a lot better. I'm going to start by describing what copy
Re:My World:By A beautiful Mind-a novel in six boo (Score:2)
Eno & Byrne - My life in the bush of ghosts (Score:2, Informative)
Afro-Celts (Score:2)
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I think the AfroCelt app was called Noodle - they did a couple of versions with different tracks and was great and fun waste of time to play around with.
Better business sense than you might think (Score:5, Insightful)
As in the terminology of the open source software market, in this context Gabriel's music constitutes what they call a "loss leader."
He puts his entire discography online, free for the taking. He doesn't make a cracker from that, and presumably he wouldn't plan to. He also lets people do the mashy thing as Bowie did. This generates enormous positive PR for him that he supposedly "gets the open source revolution." Then after a while, he either decides he's got bored sitting at home, or he wants to make some additional revenue...so he decides he wants to do a comeback series of concerts. He'd use his site with the free music as a point of sale for the concert tickets. Let's also say hypothetically that in the meanwhile, a particular one of the mashies of his music has become unusually popular. So he arranges for the author of this particular mashy to play at the concerts with him as a supporting act...Mashy Kid either does his thing solo, or better yet, he and Gabriel do a duet of sorts. Gabriel could also do something like a "very limited" run of autographed photos or CDs to sell at the concerts...which given the infinitely replicable nature of the music files, would hold particular appeal as unique objects.
Mashy Kid gets professionally discovered, so he's very happy...Gabriel's positive public image would be through the roof by this point...and he could also more or less surf home after the concerts on the tidal wave of cash that would have been forthcoming. (Assuming he still has a large fanbase of course, which I'm assuming he does...not to mention the additional demand that would have been raised by the chance of seeing Mashy Kid play)
This of course is only one of an infinite number of possible scenarios by which he could make a fortune with this.
So...yep, it's a crazy move, all right. Crazy like a fox.
Holy crap, this rules. (Score:2)
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Re:It's all about "a nice cup of tea" (Score:5, Funny)
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EVE cd-rom (Score:3, Interesting)
In the summer of 1994 I was hired by the Starwave Corporation in Seattle to be part of a small team developing EVE. The idea was pretty interesting -- pair the work of different contemporary visual artists up with songs from Gabriel, treating each as raw material, then create a framework in which people can explore, share and remix that material to create an integrated audio/video hybrid that is greater than the sum of its parts. I had just finished a graduate art program [rpi.edu] that had similar ideas, so I felt right at home.
We used the work of artists Helen Chadwick , Yayoi Kusama , Cathy de Monchaux , and Nils-Udo -- using high rez scans of their work as starting points. They were paired up with Gabriel's songs 'Come Talk To Me' , 'Shaking The Tree' , and 'In Your Eyes'. We had the equivalent of the sample packs that he has made available on-line for Shock the Monkey. These were professionally produced loops from the multi-track masters. Gabriel's recording process usually involves dozens and dozens of tracks, so these samples weren't mix-downs, but elements from a single track.
We created something called the Interactive Musical Xperience to bring these elements together. It was a kind of audio/video sampler that you could play with your keyboard, triggering sound and animation loops against a rendered landscape background. The software quantized everything so you would always be in time and you could work improvisationally or with a simple graphical timeline. The team developing it had a diverse background in software development, fine art and filmmaking. My job eventually became to create functional mockups of the interaction using Director 4....! The production team eventually relocated to the Real World studios in Box, UK which was an incredibly intense creative environment -- musicians, engineers, filmmakers, photographers, designers all working together in a bucolic 'campus' made from an old mill complex.
Although I eventually left Real World and Starwave to pursue my own artwork, it was a really great experience. The fact that the rest of the world has started to catch up to the ideas Peter Gabriel has been thinking about since the early 90's only reaffirms how resonant those ideas continue to be.
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Re:Put your publishing where your mouth is... (Score:5, Insightful)
-chris
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Because a song that charts at #29 is "crap?" I mean, it ain't like he's releasing some no-name b-side that nobody's heard of.
Re:suck 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:suck 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
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He's as much a nerd as the rest of us!
Some may not like his music, but he's a shrewd musician and his performances are always spectacular.
The best idea I've ever seen in the music business as well, was that he released the audio from the concert on CD. So for each concert, in each major city, there's a CD recording the night. It's not edited clips or 'the best bits' - it's local hecklers and the bits where he gets his tongue tied doing a link
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