How To Remix Anything

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

Incidentally, I have indulged in nothing American today. My focus has been on German and Japanese music. As probably none of you know, I have a thing for creative blends of complex and simple things. If it helps you understand, my two favorite types or music are baroque and techno - one is usually intellectual, while the other is usually visceral. As a result, these two genres or music are practically incompatible. Here's one of the very rare exceptions I've found:

Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings remixed by DJ Tiesto.

The classical chord progression is not something you would ever hear in techno music but it's easy to follow, loops well, and resolves to the tonic note, making it perfect for a techno remix. The genius is not in the song itself, but in Tiesto's ability to recognize what made Barber's piece exploitable.

Now let's go an a journey and actually do a remix of our own.

Here's the opening for Neon Genesis Evangelion, an enormously popular but otherwise mediocre anime.

This song is called A Cruel Angel's Thesis:

For a theme song, this is actually pretty good. The chords progress in some unexpected ways in the verses which help it sound unique, but it still implements plenty of musical tricks common to popular western music which makes the sound simple and predictable enough to be accessible to a young and modern demographic.

But wait...Here's George Frideric Handel's Passacaglia:

OMG! It's the Evangelion chorus written 300 years in advance!

Like techno and classical music, the fan base of anime generally does not overlap with the fan base of baroque composers. In other words, if you've heard one of these songs, you probably have not heard the other one. These are the gaps that I absolutely love to see bridged. Unlike techno and classical however, these two songs are not inherently incompatible (because they are almost the same song). So let's be pioneers and unite disparate audiences.

...

...

...

Done! I've blended Eri Kawai's a capella version of A Cruel Angel's Thesis with a low-tempo, piano version of Handel's Passacaglia:

A Cruel Angel's Passacaglia.mp3

My point here that all things overlap somewhere, even if the overlaps are as rare as with techno and classical music. It's the exploitation of these overlaps in art that I personally find very interesting whether in music or any other creative form. The two songs I just combined were already very similar but the principle is the same as in Tiesto's remix or Barber's Adagio: hunt for the elusive overlaps and then....

....blow them up to make something new and beautiful. :)

Experiencing the Internet

Ever get bored? Me neither. I never waste time doing stupid things on the internet. I especially would never watch this:


I just moved into a new house and due to the despair haunting this place and the shock of the sudden change I have neglected to devotedly unpack my things. Much of my time has been spent sleeping to recover physically and emotionally from the move. But since I'm fascinated by Internet culture, some of the remaining time has been spent going through this list made by (incidentally) a Portland man:

GREG RUTTER'S DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE ALREADY EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU'RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING

I was perusing one of my new roommates' bookshelves and found a book about Internet culture. Naturally I picked it up and immediately checked the copyright date. 1997. Ouch. Rutter's list (combined with his sequel) is a pretty comprehensive list of Internet phenomena since the rise of the Web 2.0 at the turn of the century. Before the media and user interactivity that defines Web 2.0, the Internet culture available was limited to hyperlinks, chain emails, and the occasional forum. Here's a timeline for your consideration:

• 1998: Google is founded
• 1999: Napster is launched
• 2001: Wikipedia is launched
• 2003: 4chan and MySpace are launched
• 2004: Facebook and Flickr are launched. World or Warcraft is released
• 2005: YouTube is launched
• 2006: Number of live websites hits 92 million

That's right. YouTube - a site that contributes more to your vitality than some of your organs - is only five years old! Dynamic Internet culture has just blossomed in the last ten years. We are witnessing groundbreaking history in the making! My point is that this will be in your kids' sociology (hyper)textbooks, so you have valid reason to stop whatever you're doing (be it unpacking, laundry, church, homework, showering, parenting, or whatever) and educate yourself with stupid crap like this:

10 Reasons To Leave Facebook

Well, I'm leaving Facebook on the 23rd to reappear occasionally here. Most of the things I write in status updates are thing I would prefer to expand upon anyway. I may return to FB, but probably not for a while. And by then a better networking site may be up. My first few reasons for leaving are personal. The last three are practical.

1. Boredom. There is a negative correlation between how interesting I find a person and how often they update. Maybe it's just my friends, but the truly cool people seem to spend their time away from the computer using their face-keyboards (mouths) to tell people what they've been doing. What's left is a news feed full of frivolous descriptions and/or esoteric song lyrics.
2. Depressing people. Facebook has allowed me to watch people I know start to settle down and become stagnating adults. I find it disheartening to see 20-25 year-olds manually plateauing the rate of change they experience in their life be it with a steady job, a new baby, a wedding or any other restrictive, long-term obligation. Their lives have basically ended less than half way through. It is possible that the place they've arrived at is the place at which they think they will be happiest and those people are lucky to have found their purpose in life so early. But if an entry-level job and a pregnant girlfriend are the things that retard a person's motivation to accomplish more with life, I don't want to read about this tragedy.
3. Facebook is a social crutch. My social life is practically non-existent save for the interactions I have with people on Facebook. It is one of the only things preventing me from spiraling into fits of despair and loneliness. Without it I will struggle for a while, but the struggle should lead to a more self-motivated social life and ultimately to happier and stronger bonds with the people I meet. Facebook is a flotation device when what I really need to do is learn how to swim.
4. Not enough incriminating photos. Of me. Other people have plenty but 99% of my own photos are practically identical. Seriously:
   
   This is not a criticism of Facebook. It's a criticism of how I spend my time.
5. The Open Graph API enables every web page you visit to became a page you can "like." Web developers just add some tags to their web page that Facebook can read and then convert into something that can be displayed on your news feed. At first I thought this was a cool, Open Web-type advancement because web pages can become FB fan pages with almost no effort. But you know that little plugin you installed a while back? It and the Open Graph protocol are specific to Facebook, meaning nothing else uses those tags and you do not get that awesome interconnectivity of websites unless you already have a Facebook account. Facebook has implemented Open Web ideas, but made them proprietary. Real Open Web development would read the page as-is and wouldn't require a separate plugin. Which brings me to my next point:
6. The Facebook Plugin. Downloads for internet apps to work? Seriously? That's an old and outdated trick and is not where the modern web is going. Granted, we still thrive on things like Java and Adobe's Flash Player, but the difference is that those things are made to be useful in ways limited only by the creativity of the people developing for them. The Facebook plugin, however, is only useful on one site: Facebook. Today's web is actually moving toward totally online applications like the Picnik photo editor or the Aviary audio editor. Google has embraced this idea in their Chrome OS:
    
   and it's a perfect example of the concepts web developers should be pursuing here in 2010.
7. Privacy has always been a major issue for Facebook, especially recently. But none of these issues actually bother me. I'm just adding privacy to the list to look cool. Hosting personal information and pictures in a public place and then expecting total privacy is naive. (If you don't want people to see your drunken spring break pics, don't store your photo album in the county library!) In addition to those personal privacy concerns, there are concerns about how Facebook itself collects information about you for its own use. For example, bots occasionally scan your profile pages looking for keywords that they can use to choose which banner ads you see as you browse. Most people disagree with me when I say this, but I like targeted marketing. It makes it more probable that the ads I see will actually be of interest to me. I could go on a whole rant about privacy vs marketing but it's not one of my reasons for abandoning Facebook, so I'll end here.

If anyone is reading this, I hope to see you in my Facebook-absent future.