United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, Russian Federation, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Portugal, Denmark, Argentina, Sweden, Turkey, India, Georgia, Chile, New Zealand, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Colombia, Romania, Czech Republic, Finland, Israel, Philippines, Austria, Bulgaria, South Africa, China, Indonesia, Ukraine, Norway, Singapore, Latvia, Korea, Tunisia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Serbia, Thailand, Peru, Croatia, Slovakia, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Egypt, Lithuania, Estonia, Puerto Rico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Algeria, El Salvador, Albania, Kuwait, Slovenia, Belarus, Luxembourg, Guadeloupe, Ecuador, Uruguay, Jamaica, Martinique, Iceland, Pakistan, Mauritius, Malta, Azerbaijan, Macedonia, Bermuda, Paraguay, Sri Lanka, Angola, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Qatar, Yemen, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Brunei Darussalam, Botswana, French Polynesia, Ethiopia, Guam, Panama, Jersey, Viet Nam, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago, Myanmar, Armenia, Haiti, Reunion, Oman, Nicaragua, Montenegro, Monaco, Sudan, Iraq, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Tanzania, Djibouti, Cote D’Ivoire, Bahrain, Barbados, Netherlands Antilles, Antigua and Barbuda, Andorra.

There are parts of South America, Africa and the Middle East not represented here, but otherwise this covers just about the entire world. Being a musician in the future is weird.

Chapman examines the impact that Timbaland has had on popular music production, and what his significance is to the broader culture. While Timbaland himself is no longer the tastemaker he was at his peak ten or fifteen years ago, his sonic palette has become commonplace throughout the global pop landscape.

The first generation of hip-hop producers built tracks around samples of vinyl funk, soul and jazz albums. These samples were imbued with all the sonic ambiance of 1960s and 1970s recording: warm-sounding equalization, reverb, analog compression, and all the small performative imperfections resulting from people playing live in a room. Timbaland uses such samples too, but very rarely. He typically builds his tracks “from scratch,” using drum machines and synthesizers. Timbaland favors the highly artificial sound of the Roland TR-808 and other synthesized percussion sounds. He pairs these sounds with otherworldly synthesizer pads and out-of-context ethnic sounds. For example, in “Get Ur Freak On,” a track he produced for Missy Elliot, Timbaland mixes koto, a tabla beat, a droning synths and American-sounding kick drums and rimshots, a combination that places the song everywhere and nowhere. He adds to the placelessness by dropping in some meaningless snippets of speech in Japanese and Hindi.

Chapman aptly describes Timbaland’s sound as “two-dimensional.” The sounds are bone-dry, without reverb, delay, or any of the other usual methods for giving music a sense of space. Also, there is no extraneous between-note noise; Timbaland’s tracks use a backdrop of total silence. When I was learning Pro Tools, I was urged several times never to allow any silence — to avoid “digital black.” Empty spaces in digital recordings are customarily filled with ambient noise to create the illusion of a continuous recording made by humans in a physical place. Timbaland violates this custom, makes conspicuous use of digital black. The spaces between the beats and fragmented samples are startlingly empty. Furthermore, the spaces are precise enough in their arrangement and duration to be crucial rhythmic elements in their own right.

There is widespread anxiety in the popular music world about the “artificiality” of digital production techniques. Even musicians who make extensive use of software synthesizers, quantization, Auto-tune and the like are often anxious to conceal that fact. In the rock world in particular, significant effort goes into making digital recordings sound “real.” Timbaland is afflicted with no such cognitive dissonance. He puts his techniques’ “fakeness” front and center, even in his treatment of vocalists. The chorus of “Work It,” one of his biggest hits with Missy Elliot, centers around backward-masked lyrics, the least “real-world” sound imaginable. Yet millions of  fans have embraced Timbaland’s seemingly cold and inhuman style, and his songs are a reliable way to get a dance floor moving. How can this be?

Chapman’s assessment is that Timbaland is giving musical voice to the contemporary condition using Paul Virilio’s concept of “telepresence,” which he describes as

the radical realignment of social relations catalyzed by the widespread use of contemporary communication technologies. The notion of telepresence invites us to think about the ramifications of a world in which the privatized virtual space of electronic communication comes to replace the face-to-face interactions that have historically constituted the public sphere… [T]elepresence might serve as a useful analogy for a production aesthetic that, in its evocation of a two- dimensional sonic environment, reinforces the retreat of R&B and rap lyrics from the domain of public interaction to a virtual non-place of private enjoyment.

Chapman finds the “flat, uninflected sonic space of post-Timbaland rap and R&B” to be anti-humanist, lacking interior depth or emotional experience beyond the confines of the body.

As Virilio argues with respect to telepresence, virtuality fundamentally reorders the relationship between near and distant, bringing together private nodes of communication in the same moment that it severs its ties from the local and the public…We must be wary of a posthuman that is so eager to celebrate virtual space that it neglects the accelerating deterioration of concrete space and the bodies that occupy it.

I do not share Chapman’s anxiety. The internet has hardly replaced face-to-face interaction. Our mutual alienation in the posthuman world is a symptom of apartment and suburban living, long working hours in tightly controlled settings, a mobile population and many other social forces that work against communal and familial relationships. The internet goes a long way toward reducing our isolation.

If high-tech dislocation is a fact of our lives, it’s only natural that we would embrace music that speaks to our experience. Timbaland’s music may be conspicuously digital, but it is rarely cold or bleak. If it motivates us to gather together and dance, I see no reason to be suspicious of its supposed unreality or anti-humanism. What could be more warmly human than social dance?

From Rick Santorum’s Wikipedia entry:

A controversy arose following Santorum’s statements about homosexuality in an interview with the Associated Press that was published on April 20, 2003. In response to a question about how to prevent sexual abuse of children by priests, Santorum said the priests were engaged in “a basic homosexual relationship”, and went on to say that he had “[...] no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts”; that the right to privacy, as detailed in Griswold v. Connecticut, “doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution”; that, “whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether it’s sodomy, all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”; and that sodomy laws properly exist to prevent acts that “undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family”. When the Associated Press reporter asked whether homosexuals should not then engage in homosexual acts, Santorum replied, “Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality”.

Rick Santorum is guilty of hate speech. In a perfect world, Dan Savage would have addressed Santorum’s ignorance and bigotry in a loving, Gandhi-esque fashion, but I give Savage credit for creativity and effectiveness. His Google bombing campaign might be juvenile and vengeful in tone, but he’s fighting speech with speech in an exceptionally clever way, and has drawn a lot of attention to a worthy cause. What’s more moral than protesting hate speech nonviolently?

Santorum is a high-profile voice for one of America’s last widely acceptable forms of institutionalized bigotry. His hate speech has real-world consequences. Two days ago, a fourteen-year-old who made an “It Gets Better” video committed suicide after being bullied for being gay. Rick Santorum is in part to blame for the atmosphere of hate that gay kids have to live with. If the worst thing that happens to him is being made fun of on the internet, well, that sounds pretty just to me.

See also: Ethan Hein’s answer to Which SEO strategies could one use to get ricksantorum.com ranked #1 for “Rick Santorum”?

Original question on Quora

I started out using Delicious for its intended purpose, bookmarking. Then I discovered that between the tags and the notes field, it was a spectacular notetaking tool. Over time, I built up a network of around a hundred other people. My Delicious use became 10% archiving and annotating links I planned to refer to later, and 90% social linkblogging. The experience became almost Quora-like.

Not that Yahoo ever did anything to encourage the social aspect. Some people made it easy to identify themselves, and I was able to connect with them on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. But most people didn’t, and to this day there are users whose writing and linkblogging I followed on a daily basis, and who I have absolutely no way of contacting.

At some point, an informal tradition emerged known as “Delicious whuffie,” named for the reputation-based currency in a Cory Doctorow story. People started tagging their bookmarks “via:username” to indicate the source of the link. Someone even made a whuffie bookmarklet that automatically added the via tag. Then Yahoo made some behind-the-scenes changes, and the via tags stopped working. The social aspect of Delicious was at that point pretty much broken beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the social web continued to evolve. I now have some other tool for almost every Delicious use case. I use my blog to gather and annotate important links. I share trivia and amusing ephemera on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. I network with like-minded strangers on Twitter and now Quora. But none of them have totally replaced my Delicious network, which has been scattered to the four winds by Yahoo’s ineptitude.

One of my favorite finds on Delicious is C. Maoxian, an American finance guy living in China. Every day he posts dozens of items relating to finance, investment, real estate, and expat life in China. Just from reading the headlines of his posts and his witty comments, I get an excellent overview of these topics that I know little to nothing about. Every so often I’ll click through a link and read the whole story, but mostly Maoxian’s summary is enough. Since he uses the same handle on Twitter, I follow him there, too, but it isn’t the same — 140 characters just doesn’t do it for his style of writing.

So what do I want the YouTube guys to do? Make Delicious more like Quora. Make it social. Make it personal. Make it fun. Introduce voting and reputation. Make it like Twitter but with depth. Introduce archiving of pages you link to, so if the original page gets taken down you can still access its contents. Let us log in with Facebook or Twitter or Quora identities. Keep innovating and iterating. Be the anti-Yahoo.

Original post on Quora

Historically, search engine results were ranked based on the frequency and proximity of keywords in the page text. But as the web grows, there are tons and tons of pages out there with the same or similar keywords. Any Google search on any remotely mainstream topic is going to return thousands and thousands of hits, most of which are useless to you. Another problem is that the keyword system is easy to game. Unscrupulous web designers can load up a page with invisible keywords repeated over and over, by putting them in the same color as the background off to the side of the page.

To make its results more useful, Google tries to rank its keyword-based search results in the order of their relevance. They do this using a complex proprietary algorithm called PageRank, the real heart of their search engine. One of PageRank’s most heavily weighted factors is the number of links pointing to a page. If more people link to your site, presumably that’s because it’s more useful or authoritative. PageRank also recursively factors in the number of links going into those pages that link to you.

So the key to a higher Google rank is getting other pages to link to you. The question is, how do you get those precious inbound links?

The first step is to do a lot of linking to yourself. Using blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr and other social networks, you can link to your own site with impunity. A single Twitter post is a full-fledged web page unto itself and any links within it count just as much toward your Google PageRank as any other.

Internal links from one page within your web site to another all count towards your PageRank total. This is why blogs are so great for SEO. They create tons of internal links automatically: tags, categories, previous/next post links, and so on. WordPress users can get even more SEO benefit from plugins like Random Posts, Calendar and Most Commented.

Another way to get your URL out there is to comment on other people’s blogs. Nearly all blog platforms give you a chance to add a link to yourself when you post a comment. This SEO strategy has given rise to the automated blog-commenting spambot, a program that generates a human-seeming comment from keywords in your site with a link back to some online vitamin seller or what have you.

In addition to links, you still need to make sure your keywords are in place in your page copy. What search terms are people likely to use when looking for your site? Put yourself in the shoes of a stranger out there on the internet. Do some Google searches in character as this stranger. Make sure the phrases that you’re searching with appear verbatim in your page text.

Freshness of content matters too. Google ranks newer material higher than older material. This is yet another reason why blogs are better than static web sites for getting yourself noticed. Twitter is even better for keeping your presence up-to-date.

Plain-English URLs and page titles help too. Notice that the addresses of the posts in this blog spell out what the post is about. If your page titles and URLs give some indication of what’s on the page, that helps both humans and the Google robots identify them properly.

SEO companies have all sorts of esoteric methods and tricks, technical stuff like alt tags and XML sitemaps. By all means, try these things, they can’t hurt and might marginally help. But fundamentally, SEO is all about having well-written content that’s genuinely useful or interesting to other people, and having lots of links pointing at your site. These more basic approaches take time and effort, but ultimately, they really work.

In the modern world, most of the music you encounter is in recorded form. Adapting or customizing music is going to continue as it has for uncountable centuries. To adapt or customize a recording usually requires sampling. As it stands, the law is in the way. We need open-source music like we need open-source software.

Folk music is by nature open-source (that’s folk in the “public domain/traditional” sense, not the “pop music played on acoustic guitar” sense.) You’re free to take public-domain material and rewrite or rearrange it as you see fit. There are more Frankie and Johnny and Sweet William songs than you can shake a stick at. Amazing Grace was sung to twenty different melodies before it settled into the one we’re all familiar with. Musically, the American folk tradition draws on a narrowly limited toolbox: I-IV-V chord progressions, major and minor pentatonics, circle of fifths root movements and the like.

Blues is an especially good example of an open-source form. It belongs to no one and everyone. Historically, at one point it belonged to African-Americans in the deep south, and some might feel that it still belongs to them. But as a practical matter, blues belongs to anyone who can sing or play an instrument and who’s willing to learn the vocabulary. There are a wealth of practitioners, teachers, recordings, books, videos and web sites to help. To really play blues with mastery takes a lot of practice, but there’s a low barrier to entry, and you can play it on just about any instrument, or just sing it a capella.

If you want to learn any improvisation-based music like blues, jazz or rock, an excellent strategy is to transcribe other people’s solos from recordings. Once you’re a sufficiently experienced musician, you can figure out pop songs in a few listens. But complex jazz and classical music can be impenetrable to the best of us when it’s rushing past in real time. Without a score to guide me, a lot of the inner logic of John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk would be beyond my grasp. Transcribing from recordings is a tedious, labor-intensive process. Fortunately, there’s a piece of software that helps you, called, appropriately enough, Transcribe. Click to see it bigger.

The top part of the screen shows about eight bars of “Afro Blue” as played by Coltrane. Two bars are highlighted. Once you highlight a section, you can play it back as a loop. You can also hear the loop slowed down to half or quarter speed with the pitches intact. This feature is invaluable for figuring out the twistier passages. I added the little green measure markers and red section markers by hand. You can stick these markers in from the keyboard during playback, it’s a lot like conducting. At the bottom of the screen, the software is guessing which pitches are included in the sample. The sharp peaks at the right show that the soprano sax plays A flat, B flat, C and E flat during the loop. The software has a harder time figuring out the pitches in the more crowded/muddily recorded lows and mids, but when you give it shorter samples to work with, it gets more accurate. If you give it a single cleanly-recorded piano chord, it can usually identify the individual notes  accurately. Helpful! Transcribe helps you uncover the source code of the music, so to speak, making it much easier to repurpose it for your own creative use.

Once you’ve got your bars and beats identified and looped in Transcribe, you can export them as samples with just a few mouse clicks. You can use these samples as the basis of new tracks in and of themselves. I usually drop my samples into Recycle for further slicing and dicing. It’s no coincidence that Transcribe should be such an excellent sampling tool, not just a transcription tool. It reveals the inherent similarity between both practices.

The recorded music industry is generally unfriendly to sampling, since in its present form it depends on ownership of and exclusive access to music. The software industry is coming around to more of a folk music attitude. On the Google blog, Jonathan Rosenberg says this about the virtues of openness:

The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. There are different tactical approaches — razor companies make the razor cheap and the blades expensive, while the old IBM made the mainframes expensive and the software … expensive too. Either way, a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system.

Open systems have the potential to spawn industries. They harness the intellect of the general population and spur businesses to compete, innovate, and win based on the merits of their products and not just the brilliance of their business tactics.

Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term.

Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

As music comes to live increasingly on the internet, it too is going to continue to become more open-source in nature, with or without the blessing of copyright holders. Any sufficiently motivated kid with a computer can find and dissect anything that’s ever been recorded with some diligent web searching and software experimentation. The result is a lot of surprising new hybrids. Sampling, the internet and mp3 player shuffle combine with immigration to completely decontextualize musical memes, freeing them to recombine in ever-more unpredictable ways. This article gives the example of Mexican-American DJs who sample Bollywood soundtracks in a mistaken attempt to get an Arabic sound, resulting in something that sounds better than if they sourced the sounds “correctly.”

Some hip-hop musicians have embraced the open-source attitude. Kanye West gives away mp3s of the stems for “Love Lockdown” conveniently separated by track for your remixing pleasure. I hope more musicians follow his example.

Click around, it’s fun. The different colored squares on the right are all different instruments. The one on the bottom is a drum machine.

I’ve played around with a few web-based music apps, and this is by far my favorite. It’s a software version of the Tenori-On that boils the drum machine and sequencer interface down to their barest essentials. If you’ve never made electronic music before, the iNudge would be a great introduction. The software that I use for my tracks is more complex, but the core functionality is the same.

The iNudge was made by Hobnox, makers of Audiotool, a much bigger and more complex web-based music program. I find the Audiotool to be interesting and graphically attractive, but too complicated and not discoverable enough. Part of the problem is that the Audiotool emulates electronic music production hardware. That’s fine if you’re familiar with the gear it’s emulating, but it’s a mystifying bunch of knobs otherwise. Propellerheads’ Reason suffers from the same problem. It does a great job of emulating a variety of hardware devices, but as a visual metaphor for a computer program, it’s annoyingly counterfunctional. The “hardware” turns into a bunch of decorative elements that take up valuable screen real estate and attentional resources from the screen regions that actually do stuff.

The Tenori-On is a terrific visual metaphor and it translates well to the computer screen. If you’ve mastered the mouse or touchscreen, you know all you need to know. Audio software is most discoverable when it abstracts away from hardware and represents its different modules as simple boxes connected by arrows, like Max/MSP. The ideal interface for the signal chain would be a flexible network visualization tool like Omnigraffle.

Another nice feature of iNudge is the way it presents pitches to you. The adjacent rows on the grid aren’t mapped to the piano keys. They’re mapped to the D major/B minor pentatonic scale. You’re limited exclusively to that scale. You lose access to many notes, but you also can’t do anything that sounds bad. Vertically the grid limits you to straight eighth notes. As with the harmony, it restricts your choices but also prevents you from doing anything unmusical. If I were to extend the program one step more complicated, I might include a palette or pull-down menu with different rhythmic grids and scales.

Some other noteworthy music-making tools on the web:

The Daft Punk console let you remix “Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger.”

JS-909 is a drum machine in the browser.

Indaba is full-blown audio recording, mixing and editing in the browser with a social media component. I haven’t explored it too thoroughly yet, but I’m impressed by its ambition and scope.

Another in-browser audio recorder and editor I haven’t tried yet is Myna.

Ways to embed mp3s and playlists in the browser:

Facebook – when you post the URL of an mp3 file, FB automatically posts it in a neat little player.

Tumblr – same as Facebook.

Soundcloud – The best band-centric mp3 hosting and sharing service I’ve come across. Nice interface, including the option to comment on specific regions of songs.

The groovy WordPress mp3 plugin that I use throughout this blog.

Twitter with its associated third-party music add-ons like Blip.fm.

I think the merging of music-making and social media is an exciting development. Anything to bring more audience participation to the game is a good idea. If you guys can point me at some more fun tools and toys, hit the comments.

MJ is in the middle, with his songs in the first ring out. The next ring shows songs that sampled MJ. The outer ring shows the artist who did the sampling. Most of the information comes from the Rap Sample FAQ and wikipedia. I included MJ quoting “Soul Makossa” and Björk quoting “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” even they aren’t technically samples, but I figured, musically and legally it’s the same thing.

I got the idea to do the Michael Jackson map when I was walking down the street in Park Slope. This was a few months before he died and was not much on anybody’s mind. Barbara, the singer in my laptop band, was always playing his tracks, but it’s not like you were hearing him out in the world much. So I was surprised to hear a guy drive past on his motorcycle, with the speakers booming out what I thought was a crazy remix of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” It was the “Mama se, mama sa, mama coo sa” chant, but in a deep bass voice over an afro-funk beat. I thought someone had taken a sample of MJ and slowed it down or something. I looked it up on the internet to figure out who it was, and it turned out not to be a remix at all, actually the exact opposite. The song was “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango, MJ’s original inspiration for the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”

I started the map on March 26th and posted it on Flickr a few days later. I also talked it up a little on Facebook and Twitter. It got a few dozen views and a couple of nice comments. I had thought to include the Jackson 5 on it too, but it would have made the map too unwieldy. So a few days later I did a separate map:

My first sample map to get wider internet attention wasn’t any of the Michael Jackson ones, it was the Wu-Tang Clan one. (The hipsters on Tumblr love Wu-Tang.) Meanwhile, the MJ map continued to get a few views a week or so, more than most of the stuff I post, but not a whole lot more.

Then on May 26th, the MJ sample map was viewed over three thousand times. The next day it was viewed more than thirty-five thousand times. I had no idea why this was happening until I got a Flickr message from Forumz1:

Hi,

I was the one who originally submitted the MJ map to Reddit. I found it via a MJ forum. Just wanted to say that your maps are great! I’m a pretty big MJ fan and was excited to hear people sampling him in such creative ways in the 90′s and early 2000′s, but after a while I felt it got out of hand and this old Onion article started to become true:

www.theonion.com/content/node/32563

It didn’t take off that well on Reddit, but I think Digg’s best user found it and submitted it and it skyrocketed. I’m glad it got exposure, and your work got a lot of exposure!

The Digg user who posted it is MrBabyMan. Thank you MrBabyMan, wherever you are. The Digg post generated most of the views, directly and through aggregators. It also produced a bunch of comments that, between them, represent a perfect cross-section of the internet’s feelings about MJ in the months before his death, about sampling, and hip-hop and race relations in America generally.

The first few comments are ignorant one-liners about how hip-hop isn’t music. Then someone asks:

I confess, I need someone to explain it to me, as if I were a 4 year old.

MrBabyMan helpfully responds:

From the center out:
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson song
Song that was covered/sampled using the Jackson song
Artist who sampled said song
i.e. Public Enemy’s “911 is a joke” samples “Thriller” by MJ

A couple of people use “4 years old” as a hook for pedophile jokes. Others jump to defend MJ’s musicianship, in spite of his troubled personal life.

He might be a crazy freak show, but ya gotta admit – the man knows how to make music.

Someone announces:

I doubt highly that he is the sole composer of all that music.

He isn’t. MJ is the sole composer of some of his songs and co-composer or arranger on most of them. Quincy Jones wrote some of them. A British musician named Rod Temperton wrote “Thriller” and “Rock With You.” Two of the guys from Toto wrote “Human Nature.”

One commenter is dismayed by the current state of hip-hop:

So Michael Jackson indirectly helped spawn an entire industry of mediocre music and inflated egos? MJ’s music actually was pretty good, rappers just got lazy.

My observation is that some hip-hop musicians are lazy, some are fanatical workaholics, same as in any other profession. The ones who are really good at it tend to be the ones who practice the most, same as in any other profession. But a lot of Digg users equate sampling with plagiarism, and doubt that it takes any skill:

If you showed me how I bet I could do it pretty decently, after all, I have most of the music these guys are cutting from!

I say, go for it. The software is easy to learn. Finding musical uses for it takes a lot of trial and error.

Some commenters don’t take issue with the basic musical validity of hip-hop, but they are concerned about the violation of intellectual property rights.

It may take technical talent but there’s hardly anything musically artistic about borrowing someone else’s beats as a backer for spoken poetry. Let’s face it, if you can’t play an instrument, you can’t read or compose music and you can’t sing, then your musical talent is dubious at best. That’s not to say that rappers don’t have talent. After all, finding creative new ways to incorporate various bodily orifices and functions into spoken poetry isn’t easy. I’m just suggesting that calling them musicians might be a bit of a stretch.

I actually think talking about bodily orifices and functions is a good thing. They’re part of life, I think it’s healthy to have a sense of humor and fun about them. I’m too chicken to do it in my own music, so I’m glad Missy Elliot is willing to stick her neck out on the rest of our behalf.

Not every Digg commenter is bent out of shape about the culture of appropriation.

The old blues musicians borrowed each others riffs all the time.. and they are considered the founders of Rock music. Go listen to a few Robert Johnson recordings compared to a few Leadbelly recordings, and you’ll find that without the vocal accompaniment, there is almost nothing to distinguish between them. What it comes down to, in my mind, is artistic relevance. If you rip off a song and have nothing new to add to it, then it’s bullshit.. regardless of law. I think this market should take care of itself. Either you’re relevant, or you’re not. When you consider the fact that there are only 7 notes in the western musical scale, the argument for originality falls apart… so what it comes down to is whether people support what you’re doing or not. In other words, it’s all politics.

Amen to that.

As a musician and a songwriter, I would be pissed if someone outright stole my song.. which does happen… but as an artist, I would be ecstatic if someone took my idea to another level.

Amen to that too. When was anyone ever original?

Of course, what I’m saying is highly subjective, but I don’t see anything wrong with borrowing and expanding on ideas, so long as it isn’t outright theft… which I don’t consider most sampling artists to be doing.

Seriously. “911 Is A Joke” uses a sample of “Thriller”, but I doubt anyone is going to confuse one for the other.

Sampling makes some commenters very huffy:

You’re comparing playing a recording of someone else to actually performing on a real instrument music composed by someone else? That’s the same thing to you? You’re lost.

In my experience, choosing and sequencing samples isn’t any harder or easier than writing on an instrument. “Lost” is a revealing choice of word, like samplers are breaking some kind of religious law. Music has religious overtones for  a lot of people, me and this guy included.

Too many artists take songs from good artists like Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson, etc and butcher them up. I actually become angry when they come on the radio.

The word “butcher” is pretty graphic. Like samplers are dismembering their source material? I’m going to play armchair psychiatrist and guess the anger here goes a little deeper than the state of popular music.

You don’t see 80′s bands remaking rap songs and putting them on the radio.

Which is too bad, because I’d love to hear Depeche Mode covering Kanye West.

One of my supporters is anxious about the sorry state of copyright law.

I love when information is organized like this. Hope nobody gets sued… That would be unnecessary…

I don’t think I have much to worry about. This is just factual information, nobody owns it.

The warmest pro-MJ sentiment is someone who quotes the Dave Chappelle jury duty skit.

Prosecutor: So, you don’t think Michael Jackson is guilty?
Dave Chappelle: No, man. He made Thriller.
[pause]
Dave Chappelle: Thriller.

There are requests for more sample maps. People want to see Zapp and Roger, “Amen Brother“, the Beastie Boys and Kraftwerk. There are also sarcastic requests for P Diddy and Will Smith, who are not much loved by Digg’s users. Some people don’t like my graphic presentation style:

What an awful, awful way to present this information.

Graphic design fail.

Not very graphic, I’m only seeing a lot of boring info.

Some of the design criticism is helpful.

I’m not suggesting a pie chart would be better. But maybe a legend even. Or make it bigger so it’s not all cramped. Or different colors for each section. Something. The whole point of an infographic is to make something easier to understand, but this honestly would be easier to follow in a list form.

The reason I did it so cramped is so it can all fit together on one screen. If I was going to do a wall-size print or a shower curtain, I’d use a lot more white space. What I like about it the map format is how it creates unexpected juxtapositions. [Update: I subsequently color-coded the maps.]

Digg has a humungous readership, and it feeds a ton of other blogs and aggregators. The map got reposted on Twitter, Delicious, and Tumblr, on Buzzfeed and Prefix Mag, on Highsnobiety and Posterous, on Sling Blog, Funkjelly, Laroushe, and Gearslutz. It was on Spike TV, Fiftyonefiftyone, Yepyep, a Polish blog called Infomuzyka, and Dutch and Italian MJ fan forums. Gigdoggy wrote a nice article about the sample map project generally, and even plugged my book.

While this was all starting to happen, I was reading “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. I felt like I was living the book in real time. Like a lot of computer nerds, I don’t get out much. It was a lot of fun making the connection with all thsse MJ fans, and even with the haters.

Then MJ died. Not much more I can add except, rest in peace to a great musician and a complex individual.

After that the map started to really get around. Otis Taylor from South Carolina’s The State interviewed me and ran a bunch of nice quotes in his Sunday article. The map has been on the MTV and VH1 blogs, MSNBC’s Clicked, Rachel Maddow’s Map Room and MJ’s official site. As of this writing, it’s been viewed over a hundred thousand times, by people in Poland and South Africa and Japan and Russia and Iran and France and most of the rest of the internet-using world. Somebody even did a remix:

I’m grateful for all the attention, though I wish it wasn’t driven by the early death of one of my lifelong favorite artists. My friends assure me that I shouldn’t feel guilty, I did the map out of love and everything. It’s been good to hear his music so much lately, I can say that.

Here’s a mashup of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and “Soul Makossa” with many related and derivative works.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something Megamix by ethanhein

Imagine us sitting on stage left at Galapagos Art Space. Behind us is a huge screen. On the screen is a steadily updating feed of tweets from all over the world. People are text messaging twitter with the word #shorty in their text and is getting posted to the screen. It’s almost the main attraction. Some of the comments are about the band, that is to say, comments about us. Some texts are quite favorable, some others not-so-much! Gradually a real-time debate develops on the screen behind us about the merits of what we were doing. It was totally surreal. The brainstorm hits to begin incorporating the text from the screen behind us into the lyrics. It has an immediate impact on the screen behind us. “Did he just sing that woman’s comment?” One woman said that she was so bored she was going to slit her wrists! Clifton tells the band that he wants the next break. We give it to him. He whispers into the mike, “Please don’t slit your wrists.” In seconds, she posts again: “Sorry.” This happened over and over again creating a very different form of dialogue. There was a flurry of comments about us behind us that I would read back and put some spin on.

When I wasn’t singing or playing trumpet, I was encouraged to tweet from my iPhone from the stage! I posted things like, “The band needs beer” and “Clifton is going to start preaching. Listen now.” It appeared on the stage behind us. The world was watching and responding.

When I saw the first negative comment I had the obvious sinking emotional reaction. This was a pretty basic comment that was really the first piece of harsh criticism we had received — and in writing — and in front of an audience of the three hundred people — and in front of all the tens of thousands of people watching on line. Oh yeah, receiving written criticism about your performance while in the middle of that very same performance is a first and weird too. So, when I saw the line “This band Sux!” it kind of took the wind out of my sails a bit.

About thirty seconds later though I was excited and amused when I had a flash of insight. We had suddenly been thrust to the level where people with no personal connection to us were moved to appreciate, judge, talk about, defend, protect, haze, fall in love with, and diss . . . It felt suddenly like an enormous step in the right direction. I started to beam. And people were rallying to say great things about us too. No matter what it just started to make me happy. For the record: the positive responses to the band far far outweighed the disses. The negative stuff was good feedback too and often very funny. The positive stuff was very encouraging and we have many many more fans than we did before the event.

I’m finding myself totally intrigued by this experience. I’m especially intrigued by the idea of working people’s comments into the lyrics improvisationally. I’m sensing some big possibilities here in bringing audience participation back into music.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of music, what its evolutionary purpose is, and the awkward fit it sometimes makes with our present social circumstances. The most useful thing I’ve read on the subject is a book by Stephen Mithen called The Singing Neanderthals. This guy is a paleontologist, not a musician, but I think he hits the nail squarely on the head. He thinks, and I agree, that music predates language in humans, that it’s the bridge between the calls and body language of monkeys and modern human speech.

Monkeys communicate basic emotional states: contentment, fear, aggression. Music communicates those states in a more nuanced way — simple pitch ratios and repetitive rhythms convey pleasurable feelings, while irrational ratios and jagged rhythms convey anxiety and aggression. Language came about when the sounds and gestures of music detached themselves from specific and immediate feeling states and took on an abstract symbolic life of their own.

I devote a lot of my downtime trying to imagine what social life was like in the stone age. I learned in school like everyone else about the time scale of human evolution, but it didn’t sink in for me until recently just how brief and unusual modern civilization is in the broader context of our history. Let’s say that anatomically modern humans emerged a million years ago — that number is arbitrary, but it’s conveniently round. Agriculture and town life is ten thousand years old. That means that 99% of our history has been spent living as foragers in essentially chimpanzee-like conditions, and that our present circumstances are a bizarre little eyeblink.

Our bodies evolve a lot slower than our culture, and our emotional systems are still mostly equipped for stone age conditions. That means we expect to spend our entire lives with the small, closely-knit band of mostly blood relatives, very rarely encountering strangers. My guess is that music-making in this context mostly took place around the campfire at night, and was a group activity involving the entire tribe’s participation. I’m also guessing that it was mostly improvised. This idea of specialist musicians performing preset works for a passive audience seems to me to be a peculiar and unnatural aberration, a quirk of our present circumstances very much at odds with our emotional needs.

I care about jazz way more than I care about European classical, and I lately care more about hip-hop than jazz. For me, it’s a simple matter of audience participation. In classical music, the audience doesn’t even get to applaud at the end of a movement. In jazz, there’s more interaction, but the audience is still mostly a passive recipient of information from the band. Hip-hop is all about group participation. I’m not talking about big stadium shows or TV here; I mean hip-hop as practiced on street corners and in clubs, where the mic gets passed around the circle and anyone who has the nerve takes a turn rhyming. I think the hip-hop cypher is as close as Americans get to the group improvisation of the stone age campfire.

So when I read about Tin Pan responding in real time to messages from the audience, I get excited. For all the high-tech trappings, the Shorty Awards show feels to me like moving closer to the natural state of music-making. The big difference from the stone age is that the Shorty’s audience was mostly comprised of strangers. There’s a big yawning emotional distance there, it’s what presumably emboldened that woman to post that the band made her “want to slit her wrists.” Not the kind of thing she’d probably say to the face of her relatives, although who knows, maybe her family is that messed up. But so in the present world we’re doomed to mostly interact with strangers, or shallow acquaintances at best. At least Twitter is moving us in the direction of greater intimacy and emotional connection. That, to me, can only be a good thing.

Turning the concert experience into a literal dialog between the band and the audience feels like a big step forwards. I’m imagining a near future where concerts, karaoke, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revoution and hip-hop cyphers converge back to the group interaction that music should fundamentally be all about.

All the colors on a computer or TV screen are combinations of three colors: red, green and blue.

The pixels on the screen each have a red, green and blue subpixel. By illuminating each subpixel a certain amount, the screen can produce thousands or millions of distinct colors. To make bright yellow, you mix the maximum amount of red and green. To make white, you use the maximum brightness of red, green and blue. For medium grey, you also mix the three colors equally, but at a lower brightness.

The computer stores colors as groups of three numbers representing the brightness levels of red, green and blue. You could do it as percentages. Red is 100%, 0%, 0%. Bright yellow is 100%, 100%, 0%. Medium grey is 50%, 50%, 50%, and black is 0%, 0%, 0%. The green background on this page is 60%, 80%, 40% and the reddish-brown links are 31%, 6%, 16%.

The web convention is to use zero as the minimum brightness for each pixel and 255 as the maximum, giving 256 possible values. 256 might seem kind of random, but it’s a nice round number in binary, two to the eighth power, so it’s convenient from an engineering perspective. Using the web color system, my background green is 153, 204, 102 and my link reddish-brown is 79, 16, 42. If the web was coming into being today, the convention would probably be to encode these colors as #153,204,102 and #079,016,042 respectively. But in the early days of the internet, data transfer was agonizingly slow. Any reduction in the number of characters being passed to and fro made a noticeable difference. So instead of encoding colors as three-digit numbers, the web pioneers opted for two-digit hexadecimal numbers instead. Computer people like hexadecimal because it converts easily to binary, but for civilians it’s daunting. Let me break it down for you.

We habitually count in units of ten because we have ten fingers. What if we had sixteen fingers? We’d probably count in units of sixteen. Think about counting up to ten. Each finger stands for a one-digit number (the word “digit” itself comes from Greek for “finger.”) You’re effectively naming your index finger “one”, your middle finger “two”, your ring finger “three” and so on. If you had sixteen fingers, you’d get up to nine and then need a few more symbols. The convention is to use A for ten, B for eleven, C for twelve, D for thirteen, E for fourteen and F for fifteen. Counting in hexadecimal (base sixteen) looks like this:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F;

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, 1F;

20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D, 2E, 2F…

For me, the hardest part is the idea that in hex, ’10′ isn’t ten, it’s sixteen. ’17′ in hex isn’t seventeen, it’s twenty-three (sixteen plus seven.) ’2D’ is forty-five (two times sixteen, plus thirteen.) An analogy that helps me conceptually is money. Imagine if each digit was a denomination. In decimal dollars, there’s a $1 bill, a $10 bill, a $100 bill etc. (For the time being I’m ignoring fives and twenties.) In hexadecimal dollars, the bills go $1, $16, $256, $4096 and on up. The two-digit hex numbers that specify red, green and blue values on the web are like the amounts of money you can specify using just $16 bills and singles. To further aid your comprehension, the web is full of handy decimal-to-binary-to-hex conversion tools, like for instance this one.

The green background on this blog: 99CC66

red: 9 9 = (9 x 16) + (9 x 1) = 153
green: C C = (12 x 16) + (12 x 1) = 204
blue: 6 6 = (6 x 16) + (6 x 1) = 102

The reddish-brown I use for links: 4F102A

red: 4 F = (4 x 16) + (15 x 1) = 79
green: 1 0 = (1 x 16) + (0 x 1) = 16
blue: 2 A = (2 x 16) + (10 x 1) = 42

Now that we routinely toss millions of characters back and forth across our computer networks in the blink of an eye, the hexadecimal system is an anachronistic holdover, like the QWERTY keyboard. Like the QWERTY keyboard, we’re going to be stuck with hex for a while, so my feeling is, might as well try to enjoy it.