Have Headphones Changed Your World?

How Headphones Changed the World by Derek Thompson - The Atlantic:

Science says we’re full of it. Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song — loud or soft — reduces overall performance for both extraverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music with lyrics to lower scores on concentration tests for college students, and other research have shown music with words scrambles our brains’ verbal-processing skills. “As silence had the best overall performance it would still be advisable that people work in silence,” one report dryly concluded.

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There is evidence that music relaxes our muscles, improves our mood, and can even moderately reduce blood pressure, heart rate, and anxiety. What music steals in acute concentration, it returns to us in the form of good vibes.

That brings us finally to our final cultural answer: Headphones give us absolute control over our audio-environment, allowing us to privatize our public spaces. This is an important development for dense office environments in a service economy. But it also represents nothing less than a fundamental shift in humans’ basic relationship to music.

Audio Branding: Company Logos Expand Into The Sonic Realm

I love exploring the fine thresholds between noise, sounds and music. I’ve shared The Effects of Sound, There’s Music In Every Sound and Disney’s Imagineers On Sound Design. Today we take a look, or rather listen to, a Marketplace segment on audio branding and how it is moving beyond television and electronics and into banks, appliances and other every day experiences as companies seek to build consumer allegiance through sound.

The Roller Coaster Up and Downs of Selling an Orchestra

Idea and concept by Creative Director Axel Eckstein, EURO RSCG, Zurich. This mission was directed and animated with Softimage XSI and NUKE by Virtual Republic. As President of Virtual Republic I want to thank Axel Eckstein, EURO RSCG and ZKO for this awesome mission and great and creative cooperation.

I saw and tweeted this spot for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra a few years ago. I found it clever and really engaging. All these years later I discover the making-of video by Virtual Republic, the animation and visual effects company that produced the ad. What stands out the most from the making-of video is the fact that Virtual Republic ended up developing software in order to create the roller coaster track animation. As someone who is currently working on ways to help a local chamber orchestra market itself I can’t help but wonder, how much was the budget for this thing? 

Uploaded by virtualrepublic on 2009-05-14.

Created by Virtual Republic

Animation Direction: President M. Klein

Producer: Gerhard Vetter

Technical Direction: Martin Chatterjee

Modeling: Martin Sobott

Animation: Marco Kowalik, Christian Marschalt

Compositing: Steffen Dünner

Data Handling: Morris Willner

(via artsjournal.com)

The Effects Of Sound

Last fall SoundCloud launched a film series exploring why sound is important to the way we connect with the world. In the second film in the series sound experts discuss the four ways sound affects us. 

On Conducting, Motion Capture And The Maestro's Mojo

One of my closest friends is a conductor. I’ve had the opportunity to watch him prepare for concerts, studying the score and making artistic sense of the musical notations on the page, often through much repetition. Watching a conductor lead an orchestra probably looks ethereal if one doesn’t consider all the preparation that goes into doing such a thing. 

Recently The New York Times set out to study how conductors do what they do.  

So in an attempt to understand what is going on, we interviewed seven conductors as they passed through New York in recent seasons with an eye to breaking them down into body parts — like that poster in the butcher shop with dotted lines to show the different cuts of meat — left hand, right hand, face, eyes, lungs and, most elusive, brain.

The conductor’s fundamental goal is to bring a written score to life, through study, personality and musical formation. But he or she makes music’s meaning clear through body motion.

In addition they had Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, demonstrate and discuss the role of a conductor while having all his motions captured for analysis. You can view the resulting “Connecting Music and Gesture” here.  

Below is a behind the scenes showing how the motion capture took place. 

In the end it must be remembered that the art of conducting is more than just semaphore. It is a two-step between body and soul, between physical gesture and musical personality. The greatest technician can produce flabby performances. The most inscrutable stick waver can produce transcendence.

(via The Maestro’s Mojo by Daniel J. Wakin, NYTimes.com)