cityofsound

SimCity 4 Updates

There some new content at the SimCity 4 site - production details for the forthcoming game. A new promo vid, and mini-essays on the terrain editor (by Art Director, Ocean Quigley, which is of course the best name ever), on the buildings (featuring new decay!), and a day in the life of a SimCity designer (familiar mix of teamwork, meetings, personal intellectual challenges/frustrations, and compromises via deadlines - though on particularly fascinating work) ... Bring it on!

iTunes 3

Oooooh. They've been listening ...

"The most revolutionary new feature of iTunes 3 is the ability to generate dynamic Smart Playlists. iTunes 3 is in tune with your preferences and listening habits - so you can play your favorites again and again. Instead of having to create playlists manually by clicking and dragging individual songs, you simply indicate what kind of music you want to hear. iTunes 3 lets you set the parameters, indicating various attributes such as My Rating (the application lets you assign up to five stars to your favorites), Genre, Composer, Artist, Play Count (an 'audiodometer' that keeps track of how many times you listen to each song), Last Played (attaches a time and date stamp indicating the last time you listened to a particular song) and so on. iTunes then automatically finds the type of songs you�ve asked for and creates a personalized playlist - Smart Playlists can even dynamically update as you add more music to your collection."

iTunes 3

Random Experiences

Shuffle mode has become my preferred way of experiencing music. Save the odd bit of vinyl, I now listen to nothing but iTunes (on home and office macs and on my iPod, constantly shuffling songs between them) - I decided to sell all my CDs (except the handsomely packaged ones) some time ago, and have been 'Working For Bezos' on Amazon Marketplace for the last few months (hey, everybody wins at Marketplace!), and so, only rarely does my Mac find itself not chewing on 44.1khz of digital audio, churning out 192kbps of pure mp3 goodness, before I stuff the CD in the post.

I've now got 6000 tracks encoded, and counting. At this point, the numbers truly win out (again). The dizzying leaps between genres and times and places begin to get utterly compelling. As I noted previously, Echo.com had this ability to constantly surprise and delight (90% of the time), making suggestions about programming to you. With iTunes, you're even safer, in a world of music you've encoded or grabbed or swapped.

And yet, at those numbers, the experience is often breathtaking, and utterly delightful. Sometimes I skip through tracks barely listening, constructing tenuous narratives linking the random choices, as if iTunes knows ("Wow, Lewis Taylor followed by David Sylvian followed by Arthur Russell - some kinda Ethereal Crooner comp?"; "Hey it just segued Carter Burwell with John Barry! Must be a soundtrack-time-of-day ..."). It doesn't know of course, not like Echo began to know, and I'd be interested in how big ol' rating buttons could add to the experience (playlists are a smarter way of doing that, perhaps - UPDATE Apple just did this).

iTunes 12-second cross-fade ability is equally fabulous. I used to spend hours putting together minidiscs of densely-mixed out-there tunes, with 3 or 4 layers going at once. Now my Mac is beginning to do it for me.

Combined with the iPod, I'm listening to way more music than I used to.

I'm aware that the album-as-novel notion is threatened by this approach, but that concept only really applies in certain genres (and it's not like you can't override). But what I now realise I like about music is its breadth and richness, not the narrowness of focus on a particular artist/genre. Each randomly-sequenced track is like an aural postcard from another time, another place; each hits home, conjuring vivid memories, some real some false. Like walking down a busy city street, sounds come and go of their own volition. After years of listening to music constantly, I've suddenly got a whole new way of experiencing it.

Timestrreeeetttching

"9 Beet Stretch is Beethoven's 9th symphony stretched to 24 hours. Recommended is the 5th movement. It sounds like a fusion of LaMonte Youngs Second Dream and Gyorgi Ligetis Requiem ..."

Overheard on the lowercasesound mailing list.

Sounds like the aural version of Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho. Which wasn't quite as good as his "Vertigo" imho.

"None of us is as smart as all of us"

... being a Japanese proverb, which succinctly sums up the power of the network. From an interesting looking FirstMonday paper entitled "TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer".

"Get Your War On" book now available

From: David Rees [dr@mnftiu.cc]
Sent: 10 July 2002 16:38
To: gywo book list
Subject: Order "Get Your War On" today!

Hello,
I'm pleased to say you can now order the "Get Your War On" book.  This
signed and numbered edition is limited to 1,000 copies.
It's first come, first served, so please act quickly!
You can order by clicking here:
http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/GYWO_Order.html
(Limit five books per customer.)
If you order the book, you will receive a Thank You letter from
Adopt-A-Minefield with information about where your money is going.
However, you won't be put on a mailing list.
Many thanks for your patience and support.

Sincerely,
David Rees.

Elasticity

Jason Kottke makes some good points about the importance and relevance of elasticity versus stickiness, with reference to Google ("stickiness" was one of those terms which enabled you to spot cretins a mile off though - shame if it went, really ;)

But I like this notion of elasticity - it's a usefully evocative word, implying a 2-way movement, with varying degrees of tensile strength.

TouchGraph Google Browser

Information visualisation tool-du-jour: TouchGraph Google browser. There's also a couple of related apps: AmazonVista and GoogleSetsVista - all take advantage of Google/Amazon APIs etc. [Warning - may not work on older Macs]

[via Peter Marsh - thanks!]

Warchalking Updates

Lots of updates over at Warchalking.org. Fantastic stuff. Wired pour a little cold water on the venture, but a reality check is not a bad thing at this stage - and they do end up by pointing out its relevance at this time, due to the neat convergence of wifi, linguistics, and democracy within the idea.

Ray Brown RIP

Bassist Ray Brown, 75, dies in Indianapolis