Friday, November 9, 2012

Blogs now in WNYC Archives site

Dear friends, lately I have not posted much in this here blog but I have not been idle: I do all my blogging now on a bigger platform, the WNYC Archives blog. You can see all my entries here. Have fun and follow me there!

Thursday, December 9, 2010

ARC Sale


Our good friends at the ARChive of Contemporary Music are having their holiday record sale. This is where I get virtually all of my LPs and most of my CDs: Incredible selection, great prices, and your purchase helps a good cause. What's not to like? If you are in NYC next week, take the 1 to Franklin St, or any train to Canal, and stop by 54 White St. The sale goes from Dec 11 to Dec 19.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Homemade cylinder player

Don't try this at home with your precious cylinders!

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Free hearing conservation workshop tonight!

To all my NY Peeps: AES is bringing Benj Kanters (of my alma mater, Columbia College Chicago) to NY for a presentation on hearing loss. I caught part of Benj's presentation at AES this year and it was fascinating --and he is a very engagingand dynamic speaker. Details below.

The Audio Engineering Society - New York Section
invites audio engineers, students and all those interested in audio to a most interesting evening

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Join us for a Meet & Greet at 6:30pm, Presentation at 7:00pm
Note Special Venue For This Meeting
New York University
Steinhardt – Music Technology
35 West 4th Street, Between LaGuardia Place and University Place, 6th Floor
New York, NY

This meeting is open to the public.

Let Building Security know you are attending the AES meeting.
Hearing Conservation Workshop
Host: Doron Schachter, Interval Music
Presenter: Benj Kanters, Associate Professor and Associate Chair,
Audio Arts and Acoustics Department,
Columbia College, Chicago IL
The Hearing Conservation Workshop offers a new approach to promoting awareness of the ever-increasing problem of noise and music-induced hearing loss.
This program is specifically targeted to students and professionals in the audio and music industries, using the same language and principles as those governing audio systems, music and acoustics.
The workshop is a two-hour presentation, including images and animations reflecting the latest in hearing research. It is divided into three distinct but interrelated units:

1. Hearing physiology, providing a basic understanding of how the ear translates acoustic energy (via hair cell transduction) into what we perceive as sound.
2. Hearing loss, examining the mechanics of noise-induced loss.
3. Hearing conservation, examining currently accepted noise exposure limits and, ultimately, what can be done to protect hearing. We look at everything from the latest developments in “high-fidelity ear plugs” to concert in-ear monitoring systems, both of which are finding a high degree of acceptance in the professional audio and music performance industries.

The Workshop has received funding from corporations and foundations that understand the value of this initiative. This enables us to offer the workshop at no cost to the host institution. Our goal is to make it easy for schools and other institutions to bring this important message to their constituents.

Additional information is available at www.heartomorrow.org

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Bit rot

Thanks to Tim Boyce of Masterdisk for bringing to my attention this irreverent (but for the most part solid) article on Gizmodo about digital data preservation. We are beginnig to realize the cost of keeping so much data in digital form. That is why my mantra is "prioritize, prioritize, prioritize"...

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Archives News!

Not one, but two articles on the first page of today's New York Times highlight archives. The first one is about the challenges of archiving born-digital material (in this case, Salman Rushdie's new exhibit at Emory); the other one, the very exciting news of the 160,000 hours of C-SPAN video now freely available on the Internet. It does not appear that C-SPAN has a viable business model for their web site yet, but I applaud the herculean effort that this enterprise represents. We live in wondrous times.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Coming soon: An 8-track museum

There is a cute article on the Wall Street Journal (thank you Andy Lanset) about an 8-track collector in Texas trying to build a museum. There are some errors in the article (for example, the idea that 8-tracks are sonically superior), but it is quite amusing.