✖️ Designing the future sound of everyday life
✖️ Designing the future sound of everyday life
And: The rise of TikTok; Deezer invests in Dreamstage; YouTube usage shifting to connected TVs; Sounds of Change in conflict territories; Spotify's speech-recognition software
Sound and silence play large roles in the organisation of social and culture life. How you react to loud music, for example, helps you negotiate your identity. But when were you last confronted with silence? Perhaps when you last saw an electric car you will have noticed the absence of sound, the absence of engine noise. Right now, sound engineers work on shaping how electric vehicles communicate their presence to their surroundings. There's basically two major lines of thinking:
to replicate the sound of the internal combustion engine
to construct a new sonic palette, a different set of sonic properties, that we will learn to recognize as vehicles in the future
To see how electric cars should sound in the future I will first look back at how the first engineers worked on the inevitable sonic power of the car. I will then look at what experiments engineers and composers at Audi work on to shape the future sound of cars. In both past and future the role of marketing shapes the tensions between car makers and everyday citizens.
TECH
📱 This is a great look at TikTok and how the business has grown and its profile has risen.
🎮 Speaking of fans as networks or communities, Playstation invests in and integrates with Discord. Fresh of the heels of the potential $10 billion Microsoft takeover bid, it looks like Discord tries to further solidify their own network as it will probably look to IPO.
🎨 You probably follow the court hearings between Apple and Epic, right? Did you see that Epic acquired Artstation yesterday? Artstation is an artist community and market place that includes musicians and audio engineers as well as many other types of creators.
📺 More and more people are returning to the big screen in their home for their content fix. YouTube just announced that in the US more than 120 million people watch via their connected, or smart, TVs. To build on that the company has announced a host of advertising tools to help provide interactive ads on the TV screen. More on this development in last week’s Music Tectonics podcast with JP Evangelista from Vevo.
🌾 I was unfamiliar with Stardew Valley, the game. I love Norihiki Hibino though, and this combination of game and and composer does sound like a match made in heaven. A great example of gameplay and music strenghtening each other.
X
SOCIAL: Seed and Sounds of Change collaborate on a project that involves psycho-social support through non-verbal communication [i.e. music] in conflict territories.
👁️ CORONA: Post-pandemic livestreaming is sure to remain a feature of the overall business. Such thinking gets solidified when Deezer invests in Dreamstage. I had the pleasure of being on a panel with Dreamstage CEO Thomas Hesse once, and they are one platform that does a lot right making this partnership one to keep an eye on.
🎸 CORONA: ‘Musicians going back to work’ could’ve been the headline here. Still crazy that this is something that’s special and exciting…
🎤 SOCIAL: Quite a few musicians and music organizations have banded together to write a letter to Spotify asking them to stop developing their speech-recognition software, which they patented earlier this year.
🏟️ CORONA: Some interesting perspectives on how industries dependent on live audiences - like music - will come out of the pandemic. Will they all survive?
MUSIC
Lego white noise, what more could any lego-enthusiast want?