Machine Listening
Wow. A must-listen for experimental music fans: Eigenradio from the MIT Media Lab.
Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, "Music, what are you, really?" you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you. When you're tuned in to Eigenradio, you always know that you're hearing the latest, rawest, most statistically separable thing you can possibly put in your ear.
It's a project of Brian Whitman (aka Blitter), who describes his music research at further length here. AFAIK, Brian is brother to Keith Fullerton Whitman, aka Hrvatski, composer of some fantastically experimental music himself, and proprietor of the unbelievably unwieldily-named record label reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge1
1 Origin of the name, for the curious:
The name is a nonsense untranslatable German word which comes from when Wagner went to see a Hindemith Saxophone concerto and walked out ten minutes into it. Wagner said the concerto sounded like someone said "Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge." The late Nicholas Slonimsky, author of Lexicon of Musical Invective, dug up the anecdote and included it in his account of various critical assaults on composers, which is where I found it. The word roughly translates to "nonsense sound factory tools," for what it's worth. - Keith Fullerton Whitman
-- From Pitchfork Media
-- From Pitchfork Media
