Late night at work last night by here’s Ear training day 26 & 27. Today I’m trying something new the melody exercises! It’s like the melodic intervals listening to 3 or more successive notes and guessing the distances. Even though I’m great at melodic intervals this is a challenge which I have accepted and will conquer!
Today is day 25 of ear training and I’m continuing review of Harmonic intervals or guessing the distance between two simultaneous note. The goal is 90% and I got an 83% today
Hey guys! Didn’t get to post my ear training results to wordpress because I didn’t get to my computer after work until it was really late but I did post to instagram (@jamesrevelscomposer) if you want to see the ear training results fresh off the press.
So I’ve been doing doing chord progression recognition of the Major scale particularly the I,ii,IV,V scale degrees. Yesterday I got a 65% which was a huge jump from the 48% I had but today I normalized with a 56% with my goal for each type of training being 90% I still have looads of work to do
Here is day 12 of ear training and day 5 of harmonic interval training where I guess the distance between two simultaneous notes. My goal is 90% accuracy.
So Day 8 of Ear training but my 1st day of harmonic interval training which is listening to simultaneous notes and guessing the distance between. My goal is 90% and I got a 42%…44 correct and 60 incorrect. Can’t wait to see how I progress throughout the week.
Here’s a great hip-hop beat titled Zodiac by Monte Booker. It starts with an unnerving yet interesting electronic/glitchy sample then slowly progresses into a catchy, and funky hip hop beat. It’s a great journey aurally and definitely worth the share. Know anyone who makes cool music? Shoot me a link to their soundcloud, youtube or bandcamp page and if I like what I hear I’ll feature them. I’ll have another eargasm for you tomorrow at noon so stay tuned!
There is something I’ve noticed when I was young and reminded about recently while listening to music albums. I have this nagging feeling that most albums, especially mainstream albums, tend to lack a sense of unity and cohesion. I understand that music isn’t like a film or video game where you need an overarching plot, characters etc. What I don’t understand is why there aren’t very many album that have a central concept. We even have a separate term for albums with central themes called “concept albums.” Why is this? My answer is that it’s the current way the music industry is set up. (No conspiracies I promise)
Currently, the market is a “single-based” system in which a couple of singles from an upcoming album play on the radio (if anyone still listens to that) to get everyone hyped up for the album. This is fine, except sometimes the single takes up so much of the artist/labels time and effort that the rest of the album sounds like a watered down version of the single or a random mess. Not to mention the dissonance is compounded by the fact most songs are written by teams of people,sometimes different for each song.
I don’t think all music need to be cohesive and have a main theme, but I think musicians as a whole are missing out on giving listeners a more memorable and enjoyable experience by tending to ignore the design principle of unity when crafting their albums.
What do you think? Am I right or am I just talking BS? Leave your comment below.
The Good, The Bad & The Ugly – Tidal Music Streaming Service
So recently, Jay-Z and friends (Kanye, Rhianna, Daft Punk to name a few) started a Spotify-esque music streaming service named “Tidal” (probably because of the waves of money invested in this project). Tidal’s main goal is a way to get music artist payed, probably sparked by Taylor Swift denouncing Spotify for it’s pennies per stream policy that it pays artist. Will tidal crash it’s competition or be washed away in the tide? Let’s explore the good, the bad and the ugly.
The Good
Tidal offers high fidelity, loss-less audio. For non-audiophiles, lossless audio is the equivalent to 5k resolution in the TV world. If you listen to an mp3 your are listening to a compressed version of the original song giving you the equivalent of 1080p or 720p quality sound. This compression is mostly needed to reduce the size of the file, especially for the advent of mp3 players when 512MB mp3 players or less were the norm.
The Bad
Tidal has no free option. You can pay $9.99 for the same quality audio as Spotify or pay $19.99 for the loss-less audio mentioned above. I think this will hurt early adoption of this platform.
Not to mention, the loss-less audio itself has a couple major flaws.
1) Most people won’t be able to hear the quality difference.
Most people won’t be able to hear the difference in quality either because of physical or equipment limitations. Most people’s ears aren’t trained to hear the minute details of loss-less and most speakers or headphones that an average consumer gets isn’t designed for loss-less but for the mp3 standard that dominates the market.
2) Data usage
Since loss-less is uncompressed it takes up WAY more space. In my experience loss-less Wav files are usually 10 times bigger than mp3 files. Meaning a normal 100MB album could end up being 1GB if streamed lossless via Tidal. So, if Tidal creates a mobile version I doubt it would be able to play in loss-less or else users will get mad and wonder how they used up 2GB of mobile data in one sitting.
3) Reduced Library of Music
Since Tidal is just starting out it will have a smaller library of music than Spotify although I’ve heard that, regardless of this fact it had a massive launch library that should have all of the more popular jams.
The Ugly
As for Tidal’s main goal, compensating artists fairly, I’ve heard very little on this. Most, I hear about is the loss-less audio. I’ve heard rumors that the pay structure is similar to Spotifiy’s pennies per play but I haven’t confirmed anything yet. That’s why this is the ugliest thing about Tidal. If it was created to give artist control shouldn’t they be advocating the benefits of the service to the artist as well.
Final Verdict
Tidal, as it’s been portrayed currently, is going to fail. No free trials, hi-fi audio that average people can’t use.and obscure benefits for artist that aren’t Jay-Z et al. Tidal has no competitive edge.
Audio SeXXX 