Music by Nerds, for Everyone

The ways we are distributing our art is changing, and the new art revolution will again be carried by the work of creative nerds. You might remember that similar technological developments may have inspired the impressionists, since without the development of new pigments they could not have painted with such vibrant colors.*

Wired News: Filk Music for Nerd People:

"You want minors on the moon who need a labor union? We got songs about that. You want asteroid truckers with broken-down ships? We got songs about that. If you want cats in space we got that too," explains Mary Creasey, an organizer, producer, vendor and performer of filk music with her son Richard and her husband, John.

"We write about all the great fantasy topics ... dragons, unicorns, vampires, castles, wizards, witches, what have you," she continues in a soft voice with a hint of Appalachian drawl. "All the great contemporary hard science topics, too -- computers, space, time travel, nanotechnology, you know -- this 'n' that. And then, hybrids. Vampire computers. Vampire kittens. The computer necromancer who raises your PC from the dead."

Wired News: This Is No Two-Bit Music Player:

Part handheld danceteria, part art, the creation squeezes an album's worth of Perich's original electronic dance music onto a tiny, 8-KB microchip. The electronics and battery are housed inside a clear, plastic CD case, along with volume, power and track-skip controls. Perich, who is also a graduate student at New York University, hand-programmed each track. Listeners can plug headphones directly into the side of the case and get their groove on -- no iPod or CD player needed.

Kuro5hin.org: A Proposal for a Copy Optimized DVD Audio Format:

I'm writing to suggest the community work together to specify a standard for the format of DVD Audio discs that will be Free as in Freedom. There are a couple of competing standards proposals for DVD Audio discs that have the advantage of higher audio fidelity than Compact Discs (sampled at, say, 24 bits instead of 16) and that can hold more minutes of music, but it's quite clear that the companies behind the standardization efforts consider copy-protection their first priority.

*Why Do Classical And Contemporary Paintings Look So Different? "the Industrial Revolution from 1700 to 1900 gave a full palette of colors that were made by fusing metals together at high heat to create mixed metal oxides from cobalt, manganese, iron, cadmium, lead among others."

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