20 minutes into the future

The Second Man To Land On The Moon

Perhaps it’s a tribute to Buzz Aldrin’s Magnificent Desolation. “The twin demons of depression and alcoholism emerged–the first of which Aldrin confronted early and publicly, and the second of which he met with denial until it nearly killed him. He burned through two marriages, his Air Force career came to an inglorious end, and he found himself selling cars for a living when he wasn’t drunkenly wrecking them. Redemption came when he finally embraced sobriety, gained the love of a woman, Lois, who would become the great joy of his life…”

Napalm Death accomplishes the opposite of Ligeti’s goals. (Thanks to yoni191 for showing me this video.)

Someone time-stretched Eduard Khil singing Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой without the lyrics.

This is not a true example of micropolyphony. The most well-known example is probably György Ligeti’s “Requiem” which was used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Alex North wrote an original score for the film, which Kubrick decided not to use!)

The slow, eerie drifting of harmonies is a side effect of time-stretching algorithms. The simplest way to speed up or slow down a sound is to rescale its time parameter, e.g. by spinning a phonograph record at the wrong speed or playing a digital file at the wrong sample rate. Those methods multiply the tempo and all the frequencies by the same factor.

By contrast, a time-stretch algorithm attempts to keep the pitches unchanged while changing tempo. The distinction between tempo and frequency is mainly perceptual, so time-stretch algorithms are essentially clever audio illusions. Such trickery was a key feature of early versions of Ableton Live and Sony ACID audio software. (Both have since evolved into full DAWs, and many other programs now have comparable time-stretching abilities.)

Just about anything can be time-stretched to create accidental micropolyphony. Even Justin Bieber sounds like Brian Eno if it’s stretched enough - and almost everything sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks when played at double speed.

REBLOG from stuft

Flyer for Drexel University’s radio station, WKDU, from the mid-1980s.

This is one of the stations that helped me escape from mainstream radio as a teen (another being WSRN, Swarthmore’s station) because we didn’t have the internet, also, we had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow barefoot carrying an entire set of encyclopedias.

Artwork by Matt Marello

I don’t know who Mattson Lights is, but this is hilarious.