The speakers are perhaps more Apple (AAPL) HomePod than Amazon Echo: In the announcement, Roku positioned them as high-powered audio devices rater than robot friends, saying they’re “meticulously engineered and calibrated to deliver powerful, premium” sound.
But they do come with a voice remote (as well as a tabletop one) that may help Roku device users get accustomed to conversations with their technology—and since Roku TVs come with audio apps, they might also induce users to keep them on, playing music as well as video programming. (The speakers are also Bluetooth-enabled.)
On World Beatles Day, it is useful to remember as this article says that “thanks to technology inspired, if not pioneered, by The Beatles, we can finally enjoy live performances of the seminal music of our time.”
“Without assembling a live orchestra, performing this song effectively live would be impossible without modern synthesizer technology. Paul “Wix” Wickens, Sir Paul’s keyboardist, uses a Yamaha Motif ES7 synthesizer, a Kurzweil controller and a rack of processors to recreate live what it took months at Abbey Road Studios to produce.”
Other smart home hubs like the Echo – and many similarly priced home priced home speaker systems – can’t hold a candle to what the HomePod is able to replicate sonically. It’s easy to see why Apple is leading with the speaker bit here. Unlike devices like the Echo and Google Home, audio part isn’t secondary functionality. I would actually use the HomePod as my apartment speaker movies and music. I can’t say the same for the Echo.
The HomePod is a very Apple approach to the home hub. It’s a premium device – both with regard to build quality and performance, as well as price at $350. It also keeps with Steve Jobs’ longstanding use of music as a means for launching new products and services.Come for the nice speakers, stay for the home assistant.
Melanfonie, out in January, was composed on a laptop "with really horrible cheap-sounding orchestra sample libraries programmed together with my mouse," she says. And after raising €25,000 (£22,250) from Kickstarter, Jolly could afford to hire a 50-piece orchestra and spend eight hours recording them in a former Communist Party studio in Prague. To give the music more of a dance feel, Jolly physically rearranged the orchestra. Usually the basses and violins sit on opposite sides of the pit to separate the high and low notes. But Jolly put all the basses in the middle, with a group of violins on both sides, to replicate the widespread high notes and central bassline of a Timbaland-produced track. "I tried to compose everything to be exactly how it would sound in the room so it can be performed live," she says.
This evening “Gwen Stefani’s "Make Me Like You" video will be acted out, filmed and broadcast live during a four-minute Grammys commercial break on CBS. It will be the first music video ever created on live TV. The challenging production will be directed by Sophie Muller of Jesse Dylan's Wondros Collective.”
Also, the trophies will bring another set of cameras to the event “As it turned out, the most practical way to build a Grammycam was to start with GoPro action cameras as an ingredient. The Recording Academy collaborated with GoPro's custom solutions team to put a custom version of the Hero4 Black camera and an antenna into each award's base, positioned for optimum signal strength. Using a GoPro technology called HeroCast, the camera can wirelessly stream video via RF to the broadcast truck where all the video feeds for Grammy Live and the TV broadcast get managed.”
And then there is what Intel is planning with Lady Gaga
Some band members and alumni were skeptical about bringing computers onto the practice field. One complaint: Students have for years rolled up their sheet music and jammed it into the horns of their instruments when they’re not playing, and you can’t do that with an iPad. Other, less specific grousing seemed to center on the concern that the use of tablets marked the first step toward a marching band full of robots. The band has worn the same uniform for 135 years; tradition is important.
Waters insists the iPads won’t change the core of the band’s performance. “This makes the process more efficient, but an iPad can’t perform a halftime show,” he says. “What they’re doing out there is an art form we’ve been perfecting for 135 years, and that’s not going to change.”
The iPod happened. Playlists happened. Pandora happened. YouTube happened. Spotify happened. SoundCloud happened. Shazam happened. I couldn’t believe them when I saw them. I couldn’t believe them when I heard them. But they are here, and they are changing everything about our relationship with music.
Still—like Fishbone said in a song I just heard on a streaming radio station—problems arise. Sometimes it’s a little too easy to get to a song: think, type, retrieve. What about calling up your friend, making him drive you to the record store, waiting patiently behind the guy who won’t move away from the “B” bin, and then flipping through to see what Beach Boys records (or Beastie Boys or Brothers Johnson or Buckingham Nicks) are left? All of that’s gone now. And, counterintuitively, because it’s gone, it’s harder and harder to truly fall in love with a song or album. What was your cost of entry? How hard did you have to work? Which leaves the ultimate question: How do you build a relationship with music? How do you find your way to those songs that draw you in and—like Eddie Floyd and Mavis Staples said in a song I heard just yesterday on a randomly shuffled playlist—never never let you go?
innocents is the 11th studio album from the electronic music iconoclast: a lo-fi, melodic meditation on vulnerability and humanity. What you make of it is up to you. Download new music from innocents. Then, enter your email to unlock 3 bonus tracks, 3 short films, art, and the album’s entire stem library. A song is only a starting point. You decide how the world will hear it.
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