In other news

• A series of hymns celebrating the 60th birthday of Stalin resurfaced.
• Music director’s salaries are rising. The music industry was well moany about illegal downloads, and maybe they have a point because music sales are going down. Meanwhile Joss Stone advocated piracy and Wal-mart became the largest music retailer in America. Scooter Pietsch asks, is there still hope?
• The Chinese get stuck in with classical music.
• We heralded the era of the Classical club night
• The Times finally realised it’s not just Amy Winehouse on drugs. An oboist told us drugs are Ok, man.
• Hip hop chess fans united at WuChess. The hip hop part seems to have been downplayed though.
• Brokeback Mountain is to be made into an opera.
• The Beeb announced Maestro, a conducting reality TV show, and Last Choir Standing believed by some to be a calculated insult to the musical world.
• The BBC archives were flung open.
• We discovered Americans get to go to free rock concerts before killing foreigners. They also use rock music as a form of torture ‘lite’ in centers of judicial integrity such as Guantanamo Bay. The irony of this has so far not been commented upon.
• Julian Lloyd Webber increases his circle of power.

• I had fun with a box of LEDs.
• and got exited about Creative Commons sound effects.

Morse Code is perhaps the most obvious way to turn a message into an aspect of music, but it takes some skill to encrypt larger messages without making the music obviously coded. We know of short Morse Code messages like V for Victory (…_) at the beginning of Beethoven’s 5th, but very few compositions are based entirely on Morse Code, and very few spymasters would consider this method for important information for the simple reason that it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

This post is part of my Musical Encryption Series.

• Gramophone magazine announced they would publish all 85 years worth of music articles online. Particularly exciting is the article written by Rachmaninoff about contemporary piano playing.
• The BBC’s Young Musician of the Year Competition sent sparks flying, as any excuse to complain about the BBC should always be taken, naturally. This year Peter Moore was the youngest winner ever at just twelve years old.
• Opera in the cinema finally takes off.
• Scarlett Johansson released a jazz album and received mixed reviews.
• Britain came last in Eurovision. Again. Wogan raged.
• Amy Winehouse was compared to Raleigh by Cambridge students.
• MT9 was considered to become the an industry standard.
• Ian MacEwan writes an opera.
• Al Gore gets an Opera written about him.
• The genius of jazz musicians is scientifically acknowledged.

The new .MT9 music format tipped to be the next big thing in music reproduction offers unprecedented user control of the music they listen to, but what effects will this have on music tracks in the future?

The new file type, which is demoed on its company website here, allows the listener to adjust the levels of each track within the recording, changing the volume of each instrument or perhaps eventually adding effects or filters.  So you might listen to an a capella version of your favorite Bob Dylan, cut out an annoying drumbeat, or pump up the base and turn Your Beautiful into a crazy techno dance beat.

As part of my Musical Codes series, I have done some historical research into the uses of musical encryption through the ages. It didn’t really heat up until the Romantic era, but over boiled slightly in the twentieth century.

Musical encryption has been kicking around since at least the 1200s, possibly earlier. Solfège (doh re mi and so forth) was used to create cantus firmus for Latin mass settings from passages in the bible from its very inception. Leonard da Vinci saw the cryptic possibilities of this, creating surprisingly pretty passages from coded phrases and words - but the solfège system falls down a little when you use a language other than Italian, as the sounds Solfège uses don’t crop up too often in more Germanic languages.

In the 1500s, cryptologist Porta turned his no doubt liver-spotted hand to musical cryptography. He used a combination of note names and durations to create a basic substitution cipher: so ‘a’ might be a minim on G, ‘b’ a crochet on A and ‘c’ a quaver rest for example. Unfortunately, his system was incredibly unsly as it produced disgusting and dissonant music, but evidently the sort of people who hung about army barracks at the time couldn’t read music so musician cum secret agents got away with it.

Innovative use of water based percussion here: spray bottles, wine glasses, jar with water. I particularly enjoyed the wine opener used beater.

Interestingly, there seems to be an awful lot of IKEA things in the winning kitchen. And it’s yellow and blue.

ASIMO the short robot made by Honda conducted the Detroit Symphony orchestra last month. While readers with no doubt be impressed that the robot can act as a giant metronome, the robot can also walk about and shake people’s hands.

My wonderful brain thought of six ways to code messages into music last night when I was trying to get to sleep. I plan to update one section a week until they’re all covered.

• Introduction: Musical Encryption through History

1. Rhythmic Encryption
2. Pitching Cipher
3. The Interval Method
4. Articulation Secrets
5. The Leitmotiv Code
6. The Standards Gambit

While I doubt real spies haven’t thought of all these already, and I know certain composers who have used techniques like these to produce entire works, I haven’t seen a comprehensive document anywhere

There have been many complaints about this year’s BBC Young Musician competition especially from Susan Tomes who felt outraged enough for two articles: format, final. The complaints are only the latest in a series of gripes against the BBC’s attempts to popularise classical music, although why the BBC shouldn’t try to modernise its coverage is beyond me. I can only imagine the same people would have thought the advent of radio was dangerous because it would halt live performance.

Although even I have to admit that leaving the 12 year old winner standing by himself on the stage just after the result is announced while the insipid Gethin Jones ‘interviews’ the winner’s family was tasteless and ultimately boring, and that judges should be treated with at least some respect, not everything about this years contest was bad. I feels someone needs to speak up for the poor BBC’s efforts. Think how terrible it would be if ITV got the contract; Ant and Dec are annoying by themselves, put them in the same room as Aled Jones and you might as well kill me now.

Re the Indie lyric meme I completed a while ago, I’ve made my own program to simulate the process.

The Ivory Towers Random Indie Lyric Generator

How does it work?

I split some quotes I found at quotationspage.com into two parts and put them into two arrays. The program randomly chooses one from each and puts them together. To increase the possibilities, I took out all the abstract and common nouns, replacing them a randomly chosen possibility from another set of arrays. So effectively a random sentence structure is filled out with random content. As you can imagine, the lyrics that come out of it don’t make all that much sense, although sometimes it comes out with classics like “the problem with life is cockroaches listening to a barber shop quartet.”

On the one hand it’s great that insightful Indie lyrics are so easy to produce, but it’s also slightly depressing for those of us who spend several hours writing only to be beaten by a stupid javascript app.

I’m going to add more sentence structures and content arrays, so keep checking for updates. Eventually, I hope to make it customisable so users can contribute their own content to it.