A few songs a day keep the doctor away | Health Tech – CNET News According to research out of the University of Belgrade at Serbia, listening to music every day might also be good for the heart. Predrag Mitrovic just presented his study of 740 patients to the European Society of Cardiology 2009 Congress, demonstrating that 12 minutes of music a day reduces blood pressure, heart rate, patient anxiety, as well as the likelihood of reinfarction and sudden death in acute coronary syndrome patients.
Let me get this straight. People should listen to music for their health. But, there is no money for music education in school. That is seriously wrong. (Thanks for the link Carol)
Yesterday morning I dressed Bella in a fresh t-shirt. It said “Reading is Fundamental”, although the meaning is probably lost on her. Then I biked to have my weekly breakfast with Jon.
Here is an interesting twist that I have only seen on SoundCloud. You can enter timed comments, that is comments that are tied to a particular place in the music. Clicking on the link below the soundfile will take you to the file’s location on SoundCloud.com. Instead of writing “I like the riff that starts @ 2:54 minutes into the music” you just click on the blue bar and enter your comment. And then it should show up on the embedded player above!
It would be interesting to create an internet-based music album, where different media is attached to the music in a similar fashion. For example, a few words of poetry are linked to a particular moment, followed by a photograph linked to different moment, or even video.
I can hear you say, that’s called a movie, and maybe it is. I should try Adobe Premier or Apple’s Final Cut to create what I imagine… Can’t somebody combine Keynote and a video editing program?
Then again, does that further ruin our sense of hearing? Vision dominates hearing. However poetic and interesting such an album might be, it would distract from the experience of the music. Or, as Jon pointed out to me after I mentioned this, when he turns the lights out while listening, the music always seems to become twice as loud.
And what about my solo-concerts and the imagery I project alongside? Those of you who have come to one of my solo performances where I used projection – how do you feel about it? I feel a conflict, but I also like the experience. Performing music while projecting images – it seems to be connected to the present, this moment in cultural history, and possibly to the struggle I have with giving my eyes and ears each their due.
Here is another quote on the same subject from Trent Raznor, this time in the latest New Yorker magazine:
Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor: The New Yorker Walk into a Best Buy and everyone’s obsessed with the highest possible resolution for their TVs. 1080p versus 1080i resolution, hundred-dollar HDMI video cables . . . yet everyone still walks around with those terrible quality white iPod ‘earbuds.’
Seeing dominates hearing…
That reminded me of my rants about the subject from the mid-Nineties, especially Rant #8 and Rant #9.
Anyway, if you feel like leaving timed comments, feel free to do so. I believe you will have to open a free SoundCloud account to do so.
I have always enjoyed seeing the change of a landscape over time and these are nice examples from Hong Kong:
Here is a direct link to the Flickr photostream and here is a link to the Old-New Hongkong slideshow.
Nice screensaver clock for Macintosh (((including the new 10.6 OS))) and Windows.
Simon Heys » Word Clock Word Clock is a typographic screensaver for Mac OS X and Windows. It displays a fixed list of all numbers and words sufficient to express any possible date and time as a sentence. Word Clock displays time by highlighting appropriate words as each second passes.
There are two display modes; Linear which is shown above and Rotary which has a nice relationship with traditional analogue clocks.
Don’t use this with an old CRT screen as I imagine it will cause burn-in.
And…
A few songs a day keep the doctor away | Health Tech – CNET News According to research out of the University of Belgrade at Serbia, listening to music every day might also be good for the heart. Predrag Mitrovic just presented his study of 740 patients to the European Society of Cardiology 2009 Congress, demonstrating that 12 minutes of music a day reduces blood pressure, heart rate, patient anxiety, as well as the likelihood of reinfarction and sudden death in acute coronary syndrome patients.
Let me get this straight. People should listen to music for their health. But, there is no money for music education in school. That is seriously wrong.
(Thanks for the link Carol)
In the evening: practicing guitar, then listening to Till Fellner play Bach and then a couple of hours in the Studio, mixing another Lava track.
Wednesday morning I got up at 06:00 to take care of Bella who had surgery on Tuesday. The old girl is doing well, but looks a little bit like Frankenstein’s bride. Her back is shaved and features a long sewn-up scar.
Then I rode the Mariachi Bullitt to my acupuncturist.
I used to have acupuncture at every season change, and have gone to the same acupuncturist for twenty years, but had not gone in a while. I felt I needed a tune-up, though, and sure enough, the kidney meridian was running backwards. Another acupuncture session next week and I should be in good fighting shape. After acupuncture I rode to the Treehouse cafe for breakfast. Then home, but not before I bought more wieners for Bella – to hide her medication in.
Good weblog post on digital music:
the music of sound » The Problem with Digital Music But these meandering journeys across the Internet soundscape can be taxing. The medium too easily generates anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes. Putting on an old-fashioned disk and letting it play to the end restores a measure of sanity. This may explain why the archaic LP is enjoying an odd surge of popularity among younger listeners: it’s a modest rebellion against the tyranny of instant access.”
This is well said: The medium too easily generates anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.
How about you? Do you ever just listen to music, or do you listen to music while doing everything else? Would you say 80% of your listening experience is background music? Less, more? Do you sit down to listen to a single track or an entire album? Does listening with headphones help shut out the world or are you comfortable listening with loudspeakers, while not doing anything else? If you mostly listen to music in the background, do you find that it is because digital music can be played continuously (((either streamed or from files you acquired))) while LPs needed to be turned over every 15 minutes – or do you think the cause is our addiction to multitasking?
Bought another album at HDTracks. Wanting to hear how ECM would produce classical piano, I purchased Johann Sebastian Bach: Inventionen und Sinfonien / Franzosische Suite V performed by Till Fellner, on the ECM label. Check out the Sarabande, part of the French Suite, track #33. That is one very beautiful piece, all 5+ minutes of it. I find it very interesting how Manfred Eicher has turned his interest from Jazz to Classical music over the years. His classical production have that same soundscape as the Jazz recordings and sound wonderful.
Found this on Vimeo yesterday:
Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn’t the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.
Please remember to add friends@ottmarliebert.com to your address book, so the password-emails don’t end up in your spam folder!
To find all of the music available for listening, please click on the music category in the sidebar, or HERE.
I usually upload two music files, often on Mondays, one file for listening within the journal that looks like this:
…and another, a high quality 320kbps file or the occasional 16/44.1 or 24/96kHz file, that can be downloaded and added to you music player, e.g. iTunes. The mp3 files should all line up nicely in album-form, at least in iTunes. They all have the same Ottmar-Friends cover and album title. Usually the download file is available for 60 days. I intend to bring the old download files back on their anniversary, maybe on Wednesdays. In other words next year subscribers will find a new music file on Mondays and a return appearance of a file, that was first available a year earlier, on Wednesdays.
the mind open with the inner ear « neo bohemia Poetry is not something you can order up – the beginnings of poems come unbidden and then one goes to work on them, always keeping a huge space of mind open around it. The trick is to listen with the inner ear. This is maybe the most rewarding sort of artistic work, but it would be greedy to expect to be able to do it all the time. – Gary Snyder
The same is true for music!
And check out this interesting post. Any correlation to the divorce-rate? What about the genetic health of children? Any correlation to genetic problems?
We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use. Beginning with ideas. Which ones can we take? Which ones can we take?
Must re-read that book, which I bought 27 years ago! (The reason I picked it up today will become apparent soon.)
A little more about the album Under the Rose:
The four of us came up with the song titles in my kitchen. One of my suggestions was Under the Rose. It is a Sufi expression. As I understand it, Sufi masters usually taught out of their home. Most traditional Sufi masters held down jobs, often masonry, since they did not ask for alms or taught for money. The only sign that would give away that a Sufi master lived in a particular house was that a rose would be fastened above the entrance. Apparently Sufis did not proselytize. If someone was looking for them, they could be found. 01 Under the Rose – Under the Rose webpage
Barrett came up with the title Spirit of Saladin. I had heard the name, but didn’t know much about him. Here is Saladin on wikipedia:
His chivalrous behavior was noted by Christian chroniclers, especially in the accounts of the siege of Kerak in Moab, and despite being the nemesis of the Crusaders he won the respect of many of them, including Richard the Lionheart; rather than becoming a hated figure in Europe, he became a celebrated example of the principles of chivalry, a rare distinction for a non-Christian.
The webpage for the album: http://ottmarliebert.com/rose should become available on or around September 15th – nothing there now. I hope at that time you will help me spread the word about the album. It is very easy to embed the music anywhere using the SoundCloud widget. Just go to the album, or click on any of the individual track and then click on Share and this comes up:
You can customize the player, I used red for the ones I embedded above, and there are shortcuts for many sites.
Once our webpage is up next week you are free to embed the music on your weblogs (((totally easy!))) and email the links to your heart’s content – and please link to the special ottmarliebert.com/rose page. Only a week to go.
