On the Schedule

Thursday:
Flix shows the excellent documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown bright and early at 6 a.m.

Encore WAM presents the Guided By Voices documentary The Electrifying Conclusion at 11:05 a.m. sharp.

VH1 Classic airs the thorough Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story at 2 p.m.

Kid Rock helps Jimmy Kimmel rock in his 1000th episode on ABC at 11:35 p.m.

Ferras and the American Idol finalists drop by the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on NBC at 11:35 p.m.

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By now many readers will have heard about a ghostly recording, made on April 7, 1860, of a woman’s voice singing a snippet from the traditional French song “Au clair de la Lune,” that was introduced on March 27, 2008, at the Association of Recorded Sound Collections conference in Palo Alto. The presentation was the work of First Sounds, a group of experts in the field of the earliest recorded sounds. Just ten seconds in length, the visual sound wave recording was made in Paris on a Phonoautogram by experimenter Léon Scott de Martinville (1817-1879); its sound was reconstructed from a paper tracing of the wave using a computer program developed at the Library of Congress.

Press reports about this rediscovered recording have been somewhat misleading. In the space of mere days, phrases like “Move Over Thomas Edison” have started popping up in headlines, suggesting that Léon Scott somehow scooped Thomas Edison. But this mis-characterizes the true significance of this discovery and what it means to the history of recorded sound, so some clarification is in order.

Thomas Edison never claimed to have invented sound recording. What he did invent was the phonograph — the first device of any kind capable of playing sound back. Edison did so because he was furious about Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876; Edison’s whole career up to that point was invested heavily in telegraphic technology, and that Bell had found a new wrinkle — transmitting a person’s voice in lieu of a telegraph key — was simply unacceptable to him. From that time Edison worked tirelessly to do Bell one better, and his “one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration” eventually led to the phonograph, built between August and December of 1877. But it wasn’t created overnight, nor in a vacuum.

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When a little-known DJ named Danger Mouse mashed Jay Z’s a capella vocals from the Black Album with bits of the White Album to make his masterful Grey Album, no one could have guessed that it would lead to such success (or so many spinoffs.) This little artistic endeavor gave him enough notoriety to get gigs producing Gorillaz and Gnarls Barkley, which ultimately won him a Grammy. It’s a good life lesson. With the right material and a good set of ears, your average Joe Shmoe who’s handy with the mouse can become a sought-after mega producer. If only you had a badass isolated vocal track to get started, that could be you, right? Gotcha covered, kiddo. Here’s a link to David Lee Roth’s raw vocal take from “Running with The Devil,” courtesy of Chunklet, and it’s a doozy.

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If you didn’t get the memo (or fax, email, or text alert), 2008 is already shaping up to be a year of revolutionary technological advances in the world of gadgetry. Enter the new limited edition Robot Guitar from Gibson. Ten years in the making, the new axe is equipped with a built-in digital system that automatically tunes itself. Turn a knob, strum the strings and the tuning pegs adjust themselves, resulting in a guitar with perfect pitch. (Watch it in action here.) Also, intonation troubles are easily found and fixed with the guitar’s internal circuitry, so struggling musicians don’t have to drop hard-earned cash on routine maintenance. The bummer is that if you’re trying to pinch pennies, you probably won’t be able to afford the hefty sticker price of $2,500. That’s too bad, because this seems like the perfect starter guitar for prepubescent paperboys that haven’t learned the fine art of tuning yet. But for the beginners with rich parents, here’s the best feature: by turning the control knob, you can scroll through six alternate tunings (open E, dropped D, DADGAD, open G, Double Dropped D, and Hendrix Tuning) or you can program and save your own customized tuning. You don’t even need to know chords anymore! With a little luck, Thurston Moore, the king of oddball tunings, will endorse one and encourage fledgling indie rockers to get creative with his preprogrammed settings. This is just a dream so far, but Billy Corgan and Muse’s Matt Belamy have already added these to their collection, so if the robot guitar doesn’t short circuit and go all Johnny 5, maybe we’ll see a limited edition of the limited edition sometime in the near future. How about a limited edition Captured By Robots Robot Guitar?

If you’re looking for the latest and coolest in music-making/media-controlling devices, you might want to check out Monome, creator of, well, the monome, a deceptively simple-looking device that can be used — among other things — to produce live electronic music. The Philly-based company was started by Brian Crabtree (who also goes by the name “tehn”) and Kelli Cain, who hand-make the monome in four sizes: the 40h, the one twenty eight, the two fifty six, and the sixty four, the latter of which sees its first release the 25th of this month. Besides using as-local-as-possible materials in the manufacturing, Monome provides all its computer applications for free. However, its lack of distinct purpose allows it to run with sequencers like Ableton or other user-generated programs, which you’re encouraged to share on the site. (Confused? Don’t worry. Both Monome and Ableton host discussion forums where owners can ask questions or share tips.)

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At the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show — the huge gadget and tech trade show currently underway in Las Vegas — the high-end audio company Monster Cable has just announced their partnership with Interscope Geffen A&M Records chairman Jimmy Iovine plus legendary hip-hop producer Dr. Dre. Their collaborative creation is Beats by Dr. Dre, a $400 pair of high-performance headphones that will be made available this spring. Dre personally tuned the headphones in order to “capture the sound that makes me go ‘now THAT’s the shit!’” and, by saying so, gave CES that rare press release filled with both street knowledge and swears. (No doubt that Dre-worshipping rapper the Game has it on lock [read: preorder] and no doubt the bass is deep.)

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The Sundazed label has built a stellar reputation for licensing classic — and sometimes obscure — titles and releasing them with great sound on heavyweight, high-quality vinyl LPs, and beautiful sounding CDs as well. Need we remind anyone of their stellar wax-only reissues of items in the Bob Dylan or Byrds catalogs or of the first Stooges album? But it’s not only classic rock; Sundazed has also re-released all-but-forgotten and legendary entries of tail-whipping surf, blistering blues, scorching soul, psychedelic-garage romps, and finger-poppin’ jazz-funk titles as well.

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Musical milestones, both technical and artistic, are tough to pin down; once you think a date is set in stone, someone makes a discovery that re-designates your pet milestone as “asterisked,” if not thrown out entirely. But the invention of the Decca Tree, a disarmingly simple device used in stereo orchestral recording and currently in Surround Sound sessions, is traceable to one man, British engineer Roy Wallace, who passed away in London at 80 on August 18.

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