Month: December 2012

It’s been an unseasonably warm and dry winter here so far, but the current weather forecast says we’re likely to receive several inches of snow tonight. A white Christmas would be just fine with me.

My friend Dan has an excellent tradition of recording traditional Christmas songs as reworked versions of hits from the 1980s. He posted his latest yesterday: Holly Jolly Monday. Yes, it’s an unlikely but successful collision of Holly Jolly Christmas and Blue Monday. Click here to go to Dan’s site to hear it.

It’s worth mentioning that Dan records all of these songs from scratch–he doesn’t use any samples from the original recordings.

There’s a rather good interview here with Laurie Spiegel, one of my sources of inspiration. She’s a composer, musician, and programmer who started way back before computers were fast enough to generate audio signals in real time. In the interview, she touches on a number of interesting topics, including what it was like to be at Bell Labs in its heyday, how computer programming has become considerably more difficult over the last several decades, and how making music with software usually involves a layer of detachment not present when making music with instruments. It’s a good read if you have any interest at all in the history of the use of computers in music, as told by someone who had a not insubstantial influence on how this history came about. read more