CD coverThe debut of Jennifer Lopez’s J to Tha L-O! The Remixes at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart earlier this year was just another notch on the career bedpost for the multimedia Latina. But for the art of the remix, it was a milestone: the first time an album composed entirely of remixes hit No. 1 in the United States. Serendipitously enough, Lopez’s collection followed directly on the heels of her onetime beau P. Diddy’s We Invented the Remix—an album whose typically grandiose title, you won’t be surprised to hear, is so much hooey. We Reinvented the Remix as a Marketing Ploy would have been more accurate.
1Xtra’s ‘Remix Kid’ Seani B uncovers the origins of remixing…
How has the art has changed over the years?
First developed by Jamaican reggae producers in the 1960s to create dub music, remixing was picked up by hip hop pioneers and disco DJs to develop new styles.
P Diddy is one the most famous remixers of all time – if that title is in your sights, listen up for Seani’s tips on how to put together your own remix track.
Who’s the remixer of the remixers? How has remixing blurred the boundaries between different musical genres in the UK?
The ReMIX project aims to design an original memory architecture for both storing very large indexed data structures, and allowing fast information retrieval.
Technology
The ReMIX project combines two technologies:
FLASH memories: to provide a large data capacity together with a fast access
FPGA devices: to tailor indexing search to the memory
Applications
Applications focus on content-based search, especially in the field of genomics, images ant text processing.
Status (mai 2006)
A ReMIX system of 512 Gbytes of FLASH memory is currently tested. 8 RMEM boards of 64 Gbytes each are plugged into a 5 node cluster.
Blast[41], [42] has steadily become the reference software for exploring genomic banks. Large databases can be quickly and easily screened to detect similarity with a query sequence. This type of algorithm, and many other algorithms such as patternhunter[95] or chaos[54], proceed in two steps: first they seek for anchors, then they extend them into alignments. The load balancing between this two tasks depends on the quality of the anchors. Since the alignment extension can be time consuming, the goal is to limit the number of hits by providing anchors of good quality.
Looking for a place to live last year, Paul Rademacher pored over Silicon Valley rentals on craigslist, the popular online classified-ad site. But the 3D-software engineer grew frustrated that he couldn’t see the properties’ locations on one map. So Rademacher hacked his own solution — a Web site that combines craigslist rentals with search engine Google Inc.’s (GOOG ) map service. The listings on HousingMaps.com appear as virtual pushpins on maps of nearly three-dozen regions around the country. Click on one, and up pop the details. Since its public debut in April, the free site has drawn well over a half-million unique visitors.
In these days it’s trendy to collaborate, share data and information over the Web. It seems to me like the Web has quickly morphed into a giant global operating system which allows to remix the Web via mash ups.
Over a period of nearly two years I posted more than 200 entries on my personal blog. The increasing amount of posts made it necessary to apply new ways to look up existing entries and to extract information quickly with precision.
CD coverThe rise of the mash-up and of easy, cheap sound-processing software means that remixes—especially hip-hop remixes—are all over the Web. There are dozens of homemade, online remixes of Jay-Z’s The Black Album alone. The concept has even migrated to literature, images, comic books, and beverages—Coca-Cola is now issuing an annual “remix” flavor of Sprite.
But as pop culture has merged with remix culture, the literal remixes of alternative pop that brought the idea to the public have gradually been vanishing from record stores. So, there’s something funereal about Depeche Mode’s new three-disc Remixes 81-04 (Mute/Reprise—there’s also a one-disc condensation). The British new wave group has been inactive for almost four years, and even if it hasn’t quite broken up, the dates on the new collection might as well be engraved on a tombstone: Depeche Mode were present at the beginning of the synth-pop remix era in the early ’80s and rode it to success a few years later, and now they’re eulogizing its end.
The wireless, Bluetooth-based Wii controller is fast becoming the music control hardware of choice. The latest addition: Yann Seznec’s Wii Loop Machine, a free, Wii-controller looper for Macs. The software is built in Max/MSP using my current favorite way to interface with the Wii controllers, the free aka.wiiremote external for Max. Load in any samples you want, boot up any Mac with Bluetooth, grab your Wii controller, and you can sync, control, manipulate, and muck with loops.
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — In a classroom at a community center near a slum here, a street-smart teacher offers a dozen young students tips on how to improve their graffiti techniques. One floor below, in a small soundproof studio, another instructor is teaching a youthful group of would-be rappers how to operate digital recording and video equipment.
Students practice drawing because of graffiti’s connection to hip-hop.
This is one of Brazil’s Culture Points, fruit of an official government program that is helping to spread hip-hop culture across a vast nation of 185 million people. With small grants of $60,000 or so to scores of community groups on the outskirts of Brazil’s cities, the Ministry of Culture hopes to channel what it sees as the latent creativity of the country’s poor into new forms of expression.
The program, conceived in 2003, is an initiative of Brazil’s minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, who will be speaking on digital culture and related topics on Wednesday at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Though today one of the country’s most revered pop stars, Mr. Gil, 64, was often buy cytotec ostracized at the start of his own career and so feels a certain affinity with the hip-hop culture emerging here.
It is good to see Brazil in the news for a positive reason: today’s New York Times talks extensively about a government program investing on hip hop culture as an incentive to keep kids in school. I had not read about the program before even though it was conceived by minister of Culture Gilberto Gil in 2003, but I highly agree that the government needs to open its eyes to finding new and improved ways of giving a chance to kids and teenagers growing up in empoverished areas. I am sure that in Brazil many conservative taxpayers have an issue with funding rap and graffiti art, but as Mr. Gil put it “you’ve now got young people who are becoming designers, who are making it into media and being used more and more by television and samba schools and revitalizing degraded neighborhoods.” Sometimes all it takes is a little creativity and less prejudice to make a difference.
WHAT do flying plastic pigs, dancing daisies and robotic Barbie dolls have in common? An iPod.
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Lars Klove for The New York Times
With more than 90 million players sold worldwide since its introduction in 2001, the iPod has spawned a lucrative accessories industry. At least 3,000 types of iPod extras have received Apple’s blessing — mostly no-nonsense options like cases, earbuds and amplified speaker systems, including the $300 SoundDock line made by Bose.
But another trend is developing, one more playful and not always with Apple’s approval or knowledge.
Call it iSilly, a growing number of products in which fun is emphasized over function, and cute or irreverent often trumps wow. All of these items, some costing as little as $10, have been created to plug into an iPod — or, in many cases, any audio source that has a standard 3.5-millimeter headphone jack.
