Quiet morning

Always follow the cats for the warmest spot in a house. 🥶 at -28c outdoors…

Unlocked Achievement

Archive has a few — 22,000… — albums ripped as mp3s for use. Comes out of a US copyright legislation affecting releases prior to 1972, and no longer in print.

Got a few tunes, with warning the signal to noise ratio can be quite poor. These are all ripped from vinyl to the usual pops and clicks are to be expected.

One song I found is quite different on the album compared to the radio version we are all accustomed to. Mixed quite differently, with very different structure. Fun times!

https://archive.org/details/unlockedrecordings

Mother of all demos

Via someone I follow, cmcmck, I ran down the rabbit hole of 60s era synths. Moogs for the win.

One of the interesting items was the recollection of Dr Moog playing the last piece of a then to be released album to a conference in 1968. The recollection:

In 1968, not long before the album was released, Dr. Moog gave a paper at the annual Audio Engineering Society conference, where he played one of Carlos' completed recordings: "At the end of the talk I said to this fairly big audience, 'As an example of multi-track electronic music studio composition technique, I would like to play an excerpt of a record that's about to be released of some music by Bach.' It was the last movement of [Wendy]'s Brandenburg No. 3. I walked off the stage and went to the back of the auditorium while people were listening, and I could feel it in the air. They were jumping out of their skins. These technical people were involved in so much flim-flam, so much shoddy, opportunistic stuff, and here was something that was just impeccably done and had obvious musical content and was totally innovative. The tape got a standing ovation.”

I’m reminded by the mother of all demos that occured the same year — luckily captured on videotape. I can only guess at how revolutionary that was, compared to the music presented at the time — and unfortunately the presentation would not have been captured on video.

A short 10 years later in both cases, computing started to become more mainstream, and electronic music also.