"He's dead." I think that's the problem. He's revered so much like a god at Apple, you *can't* go against his last wishes. You'd be branded a traitor or an infidel. You cannot counter a god's last dying wish. The only one who could would be Steve Jobs himself and well, he's dead!

That's the theory at least. Hopefully it won't be like this but I think we're all wondering how much of a corporate cult Apple had turned into.

Hmm... I'm familiar with this having played first and second violin in at least one very good orchestra as well. The idea being that the conductor is there to alter the performance as he sees fit. I remember us being told not to rush, or to play other passages in a certain way. However, the whole reason for doing this was that we were going to put forth a live performance, where we had only one (per performance) chance to play it as close to as directed.

However, what I'm proposing is slightly different. Think of it as instead of a theatrical performance, it's a movie, where people can do as many takes as necessary and you can actually do each take slightly different and the director can put it together differently later. (Or even worse, alter your performance with CG! heh) In this way, you could perform once and screw up, and then submit a better performance (or partial performance) later. It would be a continual iterative process, and thus the Open Source analogy.

I think we sort of already do this though, especially with those boy bands who can't sing; they get auto-tuned until it sounds in tune. You can get better music with less skill. As awful as that sounds... 8) Maybe it's better to say that we can extend the skills of even the best of us and allow people to choose.

By the way, in terms of remote conducting, they did already try this with a Russian conductor in Vancouver conducting an orchestra in Moscow Red Square in real-time during the closing ceremony of the Vancouver Olympics. http://mariinsky.rt.com/news/gergiev-orchestra.html I don't think it worked out just 'okay' but it would be interesting to explore how technology can continue to influence something like classical music.

Anyways, thanks for the discussion from everyone. This has been very fascinating.

So, a system that can do this would also deliver more information than just the tempo. And in addition, there may be further information that's required by the concert master, or other leaders of other sections. Actually, this may require special people who can conduct without hearing the music first. And that may not be an easy thing to do, although it doesn't sound like an unsurmountable challenge.

In any case, whether this turns out as Frankenmusic or good music, we won't know until we try it. And then perhaps fix it.

I've heard enough poor student orchestras or even extremely famous conductors screw up so badly I have a feeling I wouldn't mind listening to something like this.

By composer, you mean the guy who compiles the ensemble, rather than the more traditional meaning of composer, right?

I imagine that over time the performance would continue to get better with people's contributions. So indeed an initial musician can play the entire part, but someone can come in and re-edit his performance. Or cut in parts where other people have played it better. This does feel like Frankenmusic to me when I first think about it though, but I believe the continuous improvement (assuming there's enough interest) should help.

I would think that the composer part is the same too. People would create 'ensembles' from the various tracks and other people would vote or create their own. It's all about crowd-sourced, open and continuous improvement.

I was just thinking about this problem too. And I think the solution is that the 'Conductor' would also be one of the 'pieces' that are required to put together the entire ensemble. This would essentially be the framework with which all the other performances can time themselves to; by watching a video of the conductor at work.

Now this would be a bit harder than real conducting; either the conductor would have to listen to another performance and 'conduct' or conduct while imagining the music. The video doesn't have to be continuous; it can be spliced together too, nor does it even have to have any semblance of prettiness, only that the timing is plainly obvious. In fact the conductor doesn't even need to be human; it could be a bouncing ball, with some words to indicate who and where people should play with what flavor.

The open source analogy would be a framework with which other developers can use, but I think a more appropriate analogy would be the use of an animatic while making an animation. (Or some movies these days also use it.) An animatic consists of the entire movie compiled together but with rough draft or even quickly sketched scenes. The scenes are slowly replaced with the finals until the movie comes together. In this way, the director can already see how the movie will play out, especially with respect to time. (A storyboard gives a good indication to story, but gives no indication with time. That would be like just having the sheet music, for example.)

I was wondering if the Open Source analogy is correct and then I had this idea.

If we're talking about free collaboration, which is what Open Source is supposed to mean (rather than copyright-less or public domain works) then could we have say an entire orchestral piece played one instrument at a time by individual musicians. When you put all the tracks together, excluding weaker performances and always including stronger performances (based on individual tastes, of course) then... isn't this the ideal Open Sourced Music method?

This would probably be a cool idea...

"THE HOBBIT, frankly, did not look cinematic."

Is it because we are conditioned that the low frames per second represent a 'movie?' I remember seeing an FPS one time at 60 fps, not realizing right away that it was supposed to be a FPS and not a movie and my first and immediate response my brain gave me is, "wtf is this?!" It seems different frame rates make me think it's a different 'experience' of sorts, a game, a TV broadcast, etc. (Even say the 60fps black and white from back awhile ago... was it 60fps?) So I think I understand the feeling, even though I tell myself that I prefer the 48 frames per second. Because I then see the action in some other movies, say, Gladiator, at 24 fps and I see just how bad the action is represented.

I really *do* want to see more motion/information on the screen and I'm willing to put myself through reconditioning to do so.
But I'm not sure everyone else will, or even understands it this way.

Has anyone else noticed this effect?

"There's just one, small, minor problem. It causes cancer," the researches have admitted. "But we think sales for this will take off in the next 2-3 years. We've already applied for the patents and I've already bought my yacht." .. I think I'm just being paranoid here. But there's always this feeling that any new material or substance will 'cause cancer,' most likely caused by reading too much junk news on bad reported science. 8)

By the way, I didn't notice this earlier, but for what it's worth, it seems they are reducing the use of coal and replacing it with liquefied natural gas, which is a little bit better, sorta. Although for most purposes both values are stilkl really large, around the 50M ton mark for each.

What is worrying to me is the near doubling of fuel oil and the *more than double* of crude oil. Let's hope they can find a way to keep that down. Although LNG reliance means more reliance on Russia, I believe.

They were talking about how much more Liquid Natural Gas Japan was burning last year just yesterday. There's some stats about how much more oil and coal they were burning too this year.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-16/japan-utilities-use-record-lng-in-2011-on-idle-reactors.html

Natural gas may be a bit cleaner, but the other two, oil and coal won't be nice to the environment in Japan. I wonder what effects this will have on the health of people as well.

*Sorry, that should be 'rights to privacy.'

> we don't even know the cost of the system or the cassettes, and I doubt either will be cheap.

This is Sony, right? The cost will be a sudden change in your ability to use it, or a compromise of your freedom to privacy and/or supporting them in their quest monopolize the market through proprietary standards.

Even if it's good technology, I think I'll find some other way to get my storage done.

One thing I've heard very recently, and this may be a slight exaggeration but I think this rejection of ACTA kinda shows it: Do the people fear the government or does the government fear the people?

If you think about it, why would the European politicians actually care about not passing ACTA? They get their bribes from interested parties for their support of course, but the difference must be that they fear the people will vote them out of the office. That's the only thing I can think of that prevents them from passing whatever people are against.

I don't live there, but I get the feeling that isn't true in the US. Maybe it's not fear, but even a kind of passivity from hopelessness will let those in control run roughshod over the people they purport to serve. And when you think about what's been going on lately, I get the feeling those in control have been driving up the fear and hopelessness in Americans.

IANAL, but is there some way to compel them to show up? Not to force them to prosecute their claims, but rather to compel them to answer for their frivolous lawsuits, for example?

I mean, lodging a lawsuit against someone causes emotional harm and waste of time and money if they did it with malice. Can there be restitution with any of their cases for the injured party? Although I know it may be very hard to prove...

It strikes me that this is more a problem with our society's mindset rather than it being a problem with auto-complete or related search terms. I think most of us on here can grasp how many people may have the same names, or rather, just because one term is popular with another doesn't mean you've found a correlation of what exactly you had in mind. But we skew very highly for technical people on here.

What about the population in general? I would say most people aren't familiar with the search and correlation algorithms data mining services uses. So it can lead to misunderstandings like this. But then the solution is not to take away the technology but to increase education. We shall not ban cameras but educate people on why photographs gives people what looks like 'devil's eyes,' for example.

But I really think this is going to be hard. The amount of information out there far outstrips our current brain's capacity to understand. And so we have things like selection bias. I think in the future we will need another device beyond the computer which will allow us to both process and comprehend all this data. Perhaps a brain implant. Like the factory to the industrial revolution, a device that accelerates the information revolution.