Melodyne 2 changes everything
Doesn’t this guy just look like the kind of guy that would invent something crazy and completely game-changing?
This man is the creator of Melodyne, which has been one of the most creative and amazing pieces of music production software since it came out years ago. I remember seeing a demo of it way back in… what was it, 2004? I was at the Taxi convention (on behalf of Focusin) and the Melodyne demonstration simply blew me away. Melodyne basically lets you treat audio signals like MIDI– that is, you can take a preexisting recording and it will separate musical and spoken events into, say, syllables, and you can manipulate them to your heart’s content by changing their pitches, timings, and durations.
A number of other pieces of software let you do this (that’s why every piece of pop music on the radio has every single bit of imperfection sucked out of it- pitch and timing correction, baby- but that’s a story for another day). However, while you could, say, cut up a guitar performance chord by chord, you couldn’t take each of those chords and look inside them and change their constituent notes. And that’s exactly what Melodyne 2 and its ‘Direct Note Access’ (DNA) ability claims to do.
This is amazing stuff, kids. Many, many very smart nerds have been trying to do this for a while (I met many of them while getting my Master’s) but as far as I know, none have come up with as successful an implementation as Melodyne’s. Peter does say that you will probably have limited success in splitting a full recording back into its constituent tracks (like if you wanted to pull out just the drums from your favorite Blink-182 recording… not that I’d want to do that) but… well, I know quite a few people that are salivating to see just how far this software can be pushed– I am one of them!
The picture of Peter links to a 14-minute video in which he describes what he’s been cooking up and how he’s done it (to some extent). Enjoy.
MTV gets it! (kinda)
in a similar vein to The Meatrix– there’s a series of videos featured on mtv.com about factory farming, ravaging the environment, and all that good environmentalist / sustainable table stuff. If only the commenters realized that these were more than just sad videos about fictional animals getting mistreated:
omg
that is so mean i did not like that at all omg that goy is so mean and i luv animals i never wanna watch that again
anyhow… enjoy. the video’s only viewable on mtv.com, d’oh:
belated july 4th
dave, this is a security cam feed from your july fourth party, right?
an extraordinary nut s(n)ack
2 fun youtube bits:
1) i guess i’m not the only one that heard ‘extraordinary nut sack’ at the end of this commercial:
2) david lee roth’s a capella vocals from ‘running with the devil’. if i was ever tracking these vocals i’d cut out 90% of them. shows how square i am.
TRUE LOVE! REPEAT AFTA ME!
this is very interesting and quite eye-opening documentary on the rev. moon’s influence on america– which apparently is only growing!
one of his many many children was in my grade in high school. he was a nice kid but i remember him asking some bizarre questions about female anatomy and reproduction in the locker room in middle school… and this video shows why. the last time i saw him (Moon’s son) was after he mysteriously left our high school senior year and I bumped into him in a Toys ‘R Us in Tarrytown with what appeared to be his very pregnant wife. ack.
(BTW– see around 10:44 in the film for where the title of this post comes from.)
naked cowboy arrested in san francisco!
san francisco !<3 naked cowboy
i walk by him every day on my 3:30 coffee walk. maybe that means my 1.5 block walk to starbucks will take less than 10 minutes today… although I’m sure the tourists will find something else to gawk at. like, say, MTV 44 1/2.
I heard he drives a Jaguar.
WordPress for mah ifone
This is me testing the iPhone wordpress app. Now I can blog from anywhere! Joy.
a week with the jebusphone
In the past week since I’ve waited on line at the AT&T store in Times Square for and successfully received my iPhone 3G, my activities with said iPhone have included but are not limited to the following:- made bennettz first beatz like this and this with Beatmaker, which is such an cool toy it’ll merit its own post some time
- got bob to make webclip icons for hobo audio and vice stevens, and added them to my home screen
- took some pictures of the Colbert Report set after seeing a taping on Monday (AMAZING).
- while on the walk home, took (blurry) pictures of celebrities like Aaron Eckhardt, Michelle Williams, Morgan Freeman, and the tween-paparazzi outside of the AMC Lincoln Square Theater at the premiere of Batman Returns
- made ringtones for emily, jordan, owen, glen, jon, bob, andy… let me know if you want one of your own (note those linked files are in apple’s ringtone (m4r) format, so you’ll probably have to ctrl-click to download and you’ll probably have to play them in itunes. it’s worth it.)
- deleted hundreds of contacts that were auto-imported from my gmail account (basically everyone that i had ever sent an email to from that account). d’oh.
- tested midomi by humming my best rendition of Oops, I Did It Again and having it being recognized correctly… Midomi is a very, very cool free app that lets you identify songs in a number of ways, from query by humming to holding your iPhone up to the speakers at the bar and having it tell you what song’s currently playing. If only Al Bundy had it.
- made my girlfriend jealous and resent my love for technology always and forever even more
- made my boss roll his eyes and forbid me from speaking of the iPhone any more
vide-oh!
I am a sucker for pixar as well as good sound design, so the fact that Ben Burtt is doing the sound for Wall-E…. damn.
Also, thanks to Erik, here’s a video of what is most likely the only time a Beatle has ever performed A Day In The Life live… with an amazing surprise ending and Yoko Ono in the crowd strangely looking like Kim Jong Il.
And I found some links to the Sgt Pepper’s 40th anniversary stuff on BBC online here… or since I’m so nice I posted the radio broadcast with all the tracks and behind-the-scenes banter here. you’re welcome.