Music

2004-11-15
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Lacuna Coil

Hearing, Listening > Well-being > Entertainment >

Most of my historical introduction to and experience of music has been committed to archives. Though it's all difficult to dig back up, I feel it will be worth working on. I think sharing music is something we all would love even more than the music itself.

Contact Me for anything you think I'd like. YouTube channels, radio which shares song titles, playlists or other sources. I'm looking for curated content, not massive archives. I also don't want to host music, so the sources would have to be online if I am ever to re-share them.

See also:



Also see also:

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Table of Contents [hide]

Introduction ∞

Written before 2006-04

The entire concept of properly organizing music has been on my mind for a very long time. After finally ripping all my CDs to MP3s (back when that format was new), I had to go through the effort of categorizing things such that I could point a music player at a directory and have a theme of music play out. I think it's worked well so far.. I'll do some writing on all of this and more once I've got other stuff sorted out.

Everyone likes music, but there isn't, in my eyes, a proper system in place which allows people to very carefully categorize music. There are many concepts in existence which define all sorts of things about music, but nobody has created an actual accounting structure to make it real.

One goal of this project is to create such a system. This ties it closely to content management in that it will eventually be used as the genesis of a music knowledgebase with a unique perspective. Almost secondarily, but really just as important, is the concept of learning just what aspects of music can relate or differentiate certain examples. This second goal is seen in genre research and later this will be tied back to the first with explanations of music categorization and classification language.

During all of this I will, of course, happily pursue knowledge about specific artists and genres, in order to broaden my own perspective.

  • Until certain content management system concepts are developed, much of the greater purpose of this project will remain stagnant. Until such a time as the tools are evolved, I will merely be researching some artists and genres. Making the system myself is on the radar, although it's very very far away.

    • .. and even further away since I stopped programming. Some aborted/probing efforts were attempted using Ruby.

My love for music would not be possible without my MidiLand Inc MLi 65 Speakers. They're very simple little things, but the sound they produce is stunningly clear. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing with "better" speakers, but I've listened to others and this is the best I've ever heard from "mere computer audio".

When I moved to Linux, I was introduced to peer-to-peer software and ended up with Lopster which shaped a lot of my preferences. Being able to chat with people and get music recommendations really helped me broaden my horizons in ways that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

Without peer-to-peer, I would have gotten the maybe half a dozen recommendations over a few years. With peer-to-peer I got recommendations every month.

I've made it a point to directly-support artists wherever possible, especially by buying stuff at concerts.

Styles ∞

More genres will be added as I re-explore these ideas.

Artists ∞

Ancient notes:

  • Bush

  • Prince
  • moby
  • Sting
  • Michiru Yamane did a bunch of Castlevania heavy metal instrumental stuff.
  • Led Zepplin
  • Bon Jovi
  • Boys to Men
  • Celine Dion
  • Colin James
  • Genesis
  • George Michael
  • Sinead O'conner
  • david bowie
  • Beastie Boys
  • Roxette
  • REM
  • alanis
  • alanis morissette
  • philosopher kings
  • christina aguilera

  • Afterworld - Connecting Animals

  • Mother Mother
  • Vanessa Mae
  • I bumped into BlutEngel when I bought Angels' Delight 3 [2001] for cd2 #06's Lacuna Coil "Cold Heritage" and as an introduction to other similar artists. cd2 #01 had BlutEngel's Seelenschmerz, which I adore.
  • Adema: While searching for more music from Blutengel, I bumped into some metal fans. I looked into Amaduscia and also Adema. I fell in love with the haunting sounds in Adema's Speculum [2001, Adema].

  • I found Amaduscia while looking for more songs from Blutengel and found Adema on my journeys. This is pretty good stuff. Sortof a cross between metal and electronica. There are a lot of interesting dance/rave remixes for their songs too.

Instruments ∞

My tastes ∞

Likes ∞

  • Contralto

  • Female vocals for anything meant to feel.

    • Loss, hope, love.

  • Male vocals for anything meant to act.

    • Anger, outrage, awareness.
  • Electronica and anything with that oldschool computer feel.

  • Vocals which are in strong harmony with the music.

    • Though this often means a band has lost its grit and has gone "mainstream". Many songs (and bands) with this style have a terribly overproduced garbage sound to them. I might "like" something, but to me it feels soullessly corporate.
  • "Passion" in the vocals.

  • I try to pay attention to anything which isn't about relationships. Such songs are motherfucking rare.

Dislikes ∞

  • Too-altered voices, especially autotuned crap.

  • Over-the-top too-girly stuff.

    • Betsie Larkin is really pushing it for me. Still, a lot of that sneaks in.
  • Anything with heavy bass in it. Fuck off, dubstep.
  • Operatic vocals, with very few exceptions.
  • Some "chillout" type music.

  • The "chillstep" I've heard is unnerving as all hell.

Related ∞

Articles ∞

Shopping ∞

Places to buy music ∞

For download ∞

Those weird plastic disks ∞

Resources ∞

Note that just because a song is public domain doesn't mean a recording is.

Online Radio ∞

Music identification ∞

This could be a side project..

TODO ∞

  • Find historical texts on digital music
  • Find resources on digital music formats - mod, mp3, midi etc etc
  • Describe moods and how music can be organized
  • speak about invalid characters in directories screwing people up. Speak about asterisks and other similar chars requiring a "save as" to rename the file.

  • 1980s television series Robin of Sherwood, which featured music by Clannad

  • Go through the collection -- joint stereo is preferable to stereo when encoded by a real encoder (LAME), as it uses an intelligent algorithm sortof like vbr where channels themselves are compressed differently as necessary.

Music inbox ∞

there's a lot more floating around in notes

Lists to examine ∞

Last updated 2024-02-22 at 20:04:26

Footnotes

8 comments

8 comments on “Music”

  3. I'm now slowly getting back into my old music archive 'project'. I'm pouring over ancient notes, some of which are 10+ years old. Thanks to various technologies I've become more able to learn about the music I loved so much in the past. For example, Google's "typo suggestions" (the "did you mean ...") has corrected my largely-phonetic spelling and helped me find info on artists and songs which I never would have found without it.

    Reply

  5. This project is from earlier than 2004-12-31.

    2019-07-10 - On that note, I had to hand-edit a whole lot of filenames because of path length and character limits. A second time. What a pain.

    2004-12-31 - While I was at it, I added a storyline to each of the topics found within. I couldn't sleep and I was feeling creative after spending some time renaming Windows-mangled mp3 foreign-character-using filenames after an ext3 -> fat32 downgrade. Enjoy!

    Reply

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