MusicTech Rewinder - Issue #22

ENJOY READING AND HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND!

Cheers,

Matt

If you want to make a sound shorter, you can play it faster. Doing this also makes it higher pitch unfortunately. If you want to make a sound longer, you can play it more slowly. This also makes it lower pitch though. Sound length and pitch are tied together and there's no way to change…

This week, a programmer mimicked Jay-Z’s voice and cadence so effectively that his agency, Roc Nation, got SoundCloud to take the track down. Then, yesterday, OpenAI released Jukebox, an algorithmic system able to generate music — complete with lyrics — in the style of famous musicians like Elvis and Frank Sinatra.

Speech synthesis, the use of computers to generate realistic human speech, is rapidly entering the ‘uncanny valley’ – creepily almost-realistic. Recent approaches have used neural networks, trained using only speech examples and text transcripts, to generate human-like text-to-speech synthesis.

Today's issue spans a wide variety of perspectives on the evolution of music and tech — from the quietness around Spotify's artist-donation links, to the future of the music avatar economy, to the littered past of mistakes around conflating celebrity appeal with user experience in media-tech apps.

Abid Hussain gives an overview of recent legal cases that may well impact the way sampling is used in the future – video from Ableton Loop 2018 in Los Angeles

In the 1960s, a group of Indian students accidentally invented minimal techno – and hoped their synths could cure disease. A new documentary unearths their story

Analysts at Goldman Sachs expect the online streaming market to capture 1.2 billion users by 2030, up from the 2019 level of 341 million paid subscribers.

Amber Coffman, Of Montreal, and Zola Jesus gave VICE their thoughts on asking for donations on the multi-billion-dollar platform after coronavirus put them out of a job.

Twitch’s head of music explains why channel subscriptions and so-called “tipping” on the Amazon-owned platform could open up a significant new revenue stream for artists in the future.

MBW has previously covered the convergence of the music and video games businesses – and how artists will likely benefit from the collision of these two worlds.