Music – Connolly Design

April 8, 2015

Video highlights from Fluxible 2014

We’re roughly mid-way between Fluxible 2014 and Fluxible 2015. The Fluxible team is currently focused on our 2015 event, with speakers being announced and plenty of behind-the-scenes details being attended to. There’s some great stuff coming, and I’m sure that folks will be excited about this year’s program.

Right now, though, let’s take a moment to look back at Fluxible 2014. My conference co-chair Bob Barlow-Busch has put together this highlights video, which is a delightful celebration of the 2014 experience. Enjoy!

September 19, 2014November 1, 2020

The Festival of Interstitial Music, 2014 edition

This past weekend was the 2014 edition of Fluxible. I’ll write more about that shortly.

As any Fluxible attendee knows, music is a big part of the Fluxible experience. And we don’t announce anything about the music ahead of time. We do love our little surprises! We also want everyone to be able to experience the music free of any context and expectations.

But eventually we do reveal all!

This year’s Festival of Interstitial Music was an eclectic one, ranging from baritone saxophone improvisations, to a rousing tour of fiddle styles, to a looping extravaganza on multiple instruments, to a sultry and solo-format-defying duet. I’m grateful to all the musicians who play at Fluxible for sharing their music with us. That they make the Region (or nearby) home is a wonderful thing. Do get out and hear them play some time!

This post first appeared in a slightly different form at the Fluxible site.

December 15, 2013October 31, 2020

Open Ears and Little Match Girl Passion

I joined the board of directors of Open Ears earlier this year.

Open Ears is a “Festival of Music and Sound”, the next edition of which is coming in June, 2014. There will be some great stuff happening, and artistic director Gregory Oh has been hard at work putting together what looks like will be a fantastic program. Announcements will come as things firm up and the marketing train gets rolling!

I’m excited about the musical adventures that I am a part of in my role at Open Ears. The main activities have been a little on-site volunteer work at the Between the Ears festival last May 30 and May 31 (along with one of my sons), and working through planning for next June’s main Open Ears event.

There’s another Open Ears event coming in just a few days that you should know about as well.

David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion will be performed at Conrad Grebel College Chapel in Waterloo, at 2:30pm in the afternoon on Saturday December 21. You should really check out all the details, but the piece is based on a Hans Christian Andersen story about the dreams and death of a young girl, and draws musical inspiration from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Oh, and it’s the winner of a 2008 Pulitzer Prize and a 2010 Grammy Award!

Gregory told me last week that the performers have been moved to tears during rehearsals for Little Match Girl Passion, which is pretty amazing.

Tickets are available in advance online, and can also be purchased at the door. But really, why wait and risk disappointment? Get them online!

March 25, 2013October 31, 2020

Video highlights from Fluxible 2012

Some of you may recall that Fluxible is a user experience design conference that I co-chair with Bob Barlow-Busch. We ran the inaugural edition of it last September, and and currently planning the next edition for September 14 & 15 this year.

Here’s a video that we put together showing a few highlights from the first event, set to the toe-tapping tune “The Fluxible Song (More Than Users)”. Enjoy!

May 3, 2011November 3, 2020

My new/old wireless music player

I recently acquired a couple of pieces of technology that are pretty much at opposite ends of their respective lifecycles.

One is an Apple iPad 2, which I’ll write about another time.

The other is a product that represents a technology that was enormously disruptive to the music industry of its time. This product, and others like it, enabled anyone to listen to recordings of music in their home — no need to go out to hear live music, or to learn to play an instrument and make your own music.

I now have a Victrola manufactured by the Victor Talking Machine Co. in 1917! I’ve had 78 RPM records in the house for several years now, some of them in album form, and it’s great to have a portable (well, luggable), wireless device to play them on. It doesn’t use electricity — just wind up the spring-driven turntable, put the needle down, and listen! What’s striking to me is that my new/old Victrola functions as well today as it did when it was first built almost a century ago; I doubt that my iPad 2 will be able to make that claim.

I already knew that the steel needles that pick up the sound from the grooves of a 78 RPM record should only be used once, as they wear out and a worn needle will damage records. One fascinating bit of information that I didn’t know previously, though, is that different needles will produce different tones when playing records. Needle selection is an important, and personal, choice when listening to these records, and I guess technology lovers of any era love tweaking and tuning their toys!

January 17, 2011November 3, 2020

Adding albums to the music mix

I spent some time over the holidays updating the music on my iPhone. That’s something that I do periodically, as it has far less capacity than would be required to hold my music collection and I like to vary what I listen to. The sources for the tracks are varied. Some I download from iTunes and other sources. I often digitize music that I have on CD. Less often, I digitize music that I have on vinyl albums or 45s, and doing so recently got me thinking about mix tapes.

I’ve created them, in the distant past, and enjoyed the reverence for the form in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (in both novel and film versions). Still, it had been many years since I made a mix tape, and even a few years since my last round of vinyl digitization. In the intervening time I had filtered from my memory just how out tedious it can be to digitize more than a few tracks. I retained only a fuzzily idealized notion of savouring each track while it is transferred to digital form (or, as I did in days gone by, cassette tape). That notion holds for the first few tracks, but the novelty does wear off! Here’s a simplified version of the steps required to digitize a track:

Connect the turntable to the computer.
Pull the record from it’s sleeve and put it on the turntable.
Start the turntable and drop the needle on the track; set recording levels to be loud but not so loud that distortion is introduced during the loudest passages.
Once levels are set, drop the needle again, but before the piece starts.
Start the digitizing/recording.
Enjoy the track while it plays.
When the track has finished, stop the digitizing/recording.
Remove the record from the turntable and replace it in its sleeve.
Edit the digitized track to eliminate any silence at the start and end of the track.
Add track to iTunes and add meta data to taste (Track name, Artist, sleeve art, etc.)
Repeat as necessary.

Obviously there are workflow optimizations available (e.g., record a batch of tracks, then edit them, then add meta data), but it’s still a laborious process. It was even more so in the past when the target was a cassette tape and the process included selecting tracks to efficiently fill a fixed length tape, manually minimizing silence between tracks, and creating cover artwork by hand.

Anyway, in the end I realized that I don’t at all miss the tedium of creating mix tapes the old-fashioned way, or digitizing analog formats. I do, though, love listening to the iPhone-age equivalent of mix tapes.

January 4, 2010November 1, 2020

Founder smashed like a bowl of eggs, company listing badly

It’s been a bit of an indulgence on this blog to write about movies that provide a good metaphor for a startup. Two of the movie ‘startups’ ended well (The Dam Busters, The Adventures of Robin Hood), while one was a disaster (King Kong). With today’s post, it looks like I have a series going!

Barrett’s Privateers isn’t a movie, but a ballad written and performed by the late Stan Rogers. It’s a rollicking sea tale that, to me, is a fine metaphor for a path that some startups end up taking.

Barrett’s Privateers features a founder (Captain Elcid Barrett) who has an idea, though not an innovative one on its own, (become a privateer — “A letter of marque came from the King”) to solve a pressing problem (England was at war with its American colonies) and to get rich (by cruising the seas for American gold).

Barret hires his team (“twenty great men, all fishermen”, including the song’s narrator) convincing them that his vision will lead to success (“We’d fire no guns, shed no tears”).

This particular startup is underfunded and poorly equipped (“The Antelope sloop was a sickening sight… She had a list to the port and her sails in rags”), but the team was ready and willing to work hard (“It was ninety one days to Montego Bay, pumping like madmen all the way.”) to deliver.

The team went to market (“On the ninety sixth day we sailed again”) and it looked like they had a chance to make an early success (“When a bloody great Yankee hove in sight, with our cracked four-pounders we made to fight.”). They redoubled their efforts (“But to catch her took the Antelope two whole days”), but the market place was a much tougher one than anyone had planned (“Our cracked four-pounders made an awful din, but with one fat ball the Yank stove us in.”).

The startup couldn’t survive in such a competitive market (“The Antelope shook and pitched on her side”). Things ended particularly badly for the founder (“Barrett was smashed like a bowl of eggs”), while the narrator (“And the main truck carried off both me legs”) and the rest of the startup’s team (“But I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett’s Privateers”) faired little better.

The bad ending for Barrett’s crew provides some perspective for a real startup!

By the way, there’s a great line-by-line exploration of Barrett’s Privateers by Dan Conlin that is well worth a look if you’re a fan of the song.

December 22, 2009November 1, 2020

Getting in tune with the UX Group

The December meeting of the UX Group was a great event, despite the appalling weather. Much as with last month’s Ignite Waterloo event, the meeting showed that when people talk about a product design that they are passionate about, the results are always illuminating and engaging.

I thought I’d briefly share the products that I brought to the table.

First was a guitar capo. A capo is a device for holding down the strings on a fretted musical instrument, like a guitar, in order to raise the pitch. There are several styles and designs, ranging from a simple bar with an elastic strap, to more complex inventions. I’ve owned several, with designs optimized for cost (the aforementioned elastic strap) and preservation of tuning (though at the usability cost of requiring very precise placement) amongst them. The capo that I showed is made by Kyser, and is optimized for fast, one-handed operation. The easy to grab handle makes fast changes a breeze, and it can be easily clamped to the headstock when not in use. Mine works quite well and I’m happy with the results.

Next up was a compact tuner. Musicians have long lived with the need to tune their instruments. While being able to do so by ear is a great skill to have, not everyone has the ear to do so reliably when first learning to play, and even those that have developed their ear may need to tune in a noisy environment. Electronic tuners have been around for decades now, and they’ve been a great aid for getting an instrument in tune. My first electronic tuner, which I acquired years ago for tuning my guitar which I and still have, is a large device and has a great analogue needle that shows how far off a note is from being in tune. It’s clumsy to use with an acoustic instrument, though, but it is accurate. The newer tuner that I brought to the event, made by Intelli, is optimized for ease of use with fretted instruments. It clamps onto the head stock of the instrument and detects notes through vibrations transmitted via this direct contact. It swivels to make the display visible, the display is very bright and easy to see, it works with both acoustic and electric instruments, fits all my guitars and my mandolins, and it is small enough to easily fit in an instrument’s case. It’s not perfectly accurate, but it’s great for my needs.

It was fun to share these objects with the group, and I enjoyed the conversations.

December 10, 2009November 1, 2020

My November IgniteWaterloo talk

Ignite Waterloo has released videos of 16 talks from the November 25 ~~first event on Vimeo~~. It’s great to be able to watch the talks again, as it really was a wonderful night. I’m somewhat relieved to discover that my talk, entitled Metaphor in product design: Are you sure that’s an album?, turned out okay. Note that it started life as a blog post here, but the video expands on the post a little and is more fun!

October 15, 2009October 31, 2020

iPhone as infinite music generator

Many years ago I discovered Brian Eno’s ambient music through vinyl LP releases like Discreet Music, Music for Airports, and others. The generative aspects of these pieces were appealing to me, and I found the results to be quite beautiful. The only weakness in the pieces, for me, was the limitation of appearing on vinyl albums in short segments. I wanted the pieces to play uninterupted for much longer.

In the mid-eighties, the introduction of the compact disc provided an option that supported longer playing times, and Eno took advantage of that with Thursday Afternoon, a CD-specific version of music he had composed for a video project. That was a CD that I repeatedly played for hours at a stretch while I worked on various design projects. (More recently, the videos from the series have been released on DVD.)

Skipping ahead to the current millennium, last year Eno collaborated with Peter Chilvers to create Bloom, an iPhone app that provides an essentially infinite number of possibilities for ambient pieces. Bloom relies on the computer at the heart of the iPhone to generate music based on minimal input from the user/creator/listener. The results are wonderful, though I did notice that Bloom runs the battery down more quickly than simply listening to Thursday Afternoon does, for obvious reasons. Bloom feels like the ultimate realization of the promise of Eno’s earlier ambient pieces, and has the great advantage of working on a mobile device. As an aside, I think Bloom was the second app that I bought for my iPhone.

Recently I discovered that there was an update to Bloom available. I downloaded it right away, and discovered a few enhancements to the app. More intriguingly were the links to two new apps with a similar heritage: Trope, by Eno and Chilvers again, and Air, by Chilvers and Sandra O’Neil. I’ve bought both, as they are ridiculously inexpensive, and am slowly working my way through them.

What is that I find so striking about these apps? First, as I’ve already written, they seem to deliver on what has in the past felt to me like the unrealized potential of Eno’s generative music. Second, they play to the gestural strengths of the iPhone user experience to deliver a simple application that anyone can use to make music in collaboration with the creators of the apps. Finally, the simple update to Bloom provided a great way to let me know about the newly available Trope and Air.

A lot has been written in recent years, by more thoughtful observers than me, on the state of the music industry and its struggles with new technologies. These three apps feel to me like one way to address a new technology head on and create something new and vital in the process.