The [Glee iPhone app] uses a special, gentle version of auto-tune, the recording effect that rounds off your notes to the nearest correct pitch. (Most pop singers today are, in fact, routinely auto-tuned during the recording process.) You’re also given generous reverb and other effects; it’s the high-tech version of singing in the shower.
But the app also somehow multiplies you, duplicates your own vocal line and assigns your clones to other notes. Now you’re singing in lush four-part harmony with yourself, with absolutely zero effort. If you can carry a tune, you can turn off the processing and go it alone.
The result — professional backup band, you processed to sound gorgeous and perfect — is exhilarating, no matter how rotten a singer you are. It’s pop-star fantasy fulfillment for a buck, and everyone who tries it goes nuts. . . .
What both apps teach you along the way is that to sound like a pop star, technical singing talent is not necessarily a prerequisite. (This is especially apparent when, ahem, you isolate Taylor Swift’s vocal track in her app.) With these apps, you now have the same support structure the pros do. You get all the benefits of state-of-the-art vocal processing — and even a taste of the public adoration — that comes with being a star.
Nate
: ?Here's the first of three excerpts about the initial reactions to early-20th-century experiments in avant-garde "noise music." While I think that Andy's comments in Culture Making about John Cage's most (in)famous work—that in the end it amounted to "a provocative but fruitless attempt to cut off the cultural tradition of music"—are certainly worth bearing in mind. Still, there is something thrilling about the passion evident on both sides of this particular audience dispute. In the next excerpts we'll from some of the more thoughtful (and less pugnacious) early listeners.?The first public performance of the noise orchestra took place on 21 April 1914 at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan. According to Russolo, the audience of conservative critics and musicians came only “so that they could refuse to listen.” As soon as the orchestra began to play, the crowd broke into a violent uproar. The musicians continued undaunted while fellow Futurists hurled themselves into the audience and defended the Art of Noises with their fists. In the end, eleven people were sent to the hospital, none of them Futurists, as belligerence was a central component of the Futurist approach to art and life, and many were talented boxers.
Nate
: ?From the flickr caption: "The Castle of Gourdon is close by Saint Paul de Vence, Provence, on the top of a mountain. Its gardens were designed by Le Notre, Louix XIV's gardener who also did Versailles park." I love the perspective—looking down from the cultivated area into the wilderness of the canyon—and how it shows the gardeners hard at work on the hedges (and careful enough to use a drop-cloth for the clippings). Cultivation indeed.?
Nate
: ?I just liked the look of this, and the great stream of associations—from apple pie to heavy metal—that are referenced by this contemporary, computerized take on old-style German blackletter calligraphy. [Andy cannot help adding: do my eyes deceive me, or do I see a reference to the Christian-subculture product par excellence, "Testamints"?!?]?
Nate
: ?Concieved as a modern-day Rosetta Stone, the Rosetta Disk aims to preserve linguistic knowledge for the long-term future, well after DVD and even paper may decay. This side contains the teaser: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The chosen text for the microengraved parallel translations: the book of Genesis.?
Nate
: ?This photo arrived in an email from a good friend who's in plant pathology grad school. I had to email her to ask what it was. Turns out it's just a field of plain old ordinary onions that've been allowed to mature and go to seed. She wrote, "Onions that have gone to seed are so cool -- you may have seen ornamental alliums around town, with big bulbous balls, often purple. A field of onion flowers looks like an outerspace commodity."?
Nate
: ?I'm not sure I'm as into this particular painting as this young woman in the photo, but I love the depiction of art-contemplation -- and the bodily symmetry: is the art falling into her, or is she falling into the art? I also appreciate the fact that she's away from the museum description on the wall, taking it in on her own (well, and the bench-placement-department's) terms.?
Nate
: ?Insight into the hard work of creativity -- not just coming up with or considering myriad possibilitys, but deciding which is the one worth pursuing and pruning away the rest.?Why is making a determination so taxing? Evidence implicates two important components: commitment and tradeoff resolution. The first is predicated on the notion that committing to a given course requires switching from a state of deliberation to one of implementation. In other words, you have to make a transition from thinking about options to actually following through on a decision. This switch, according to Vohs, requires executive resources. In a parallel investigation, Yale University professor Nathan Novemsky and his colleagues suggest that the mere act of resolving tradeoffs may be depleting. For example, in one study, the scientists show that people who had to rate the attractiveness of different options were much less depleted than those who had to actually make choices between the very same options.