GET YOUR DRONE ON
Download here (38mb).
When I was studying South Indian classical music in college, one of my TAs distributed a recording of an Indian drone to use for practicing vocal exercises.
That drone became useful in many ways. Read more »
CELLPHONE VIBRATIONS
There’s something so cool about the vibrate function of cellphones.
When I was a kid, I used to hold my headphones against the side panel of my wooden desk; the miracle of sympathetic vibrations turned the desk into one huge speaker for whatever was spinning on my discman. Read more »
VINYL RECORDS — BUYING A TURNTABLE (PT 2)
So you want to listen to some vinyl. What equipment do you need? Let’s start with the most obvious item:
A record player. Read more »
BLAME IT ON THE RAIN
I love listening to the rain. Like many parts of the country right now, New York has recently been blanketed with water falling fromt the sky. Yesterday I walked one block in full rain gear and was already soaking wet, that’s how crazy it is here. But there’s something aurally beautiful about the sounds water makes in stormy times.
I awoke yesterday morning to the sound of rain pounding against my window. In the hallway outside my apartment, Read more »
“ON HOLD”
I know it’s strange, but for some reason I love the music they play when you’re on hold. It’s always totally crappy, but it’s a very different kind of crappy background music from the typical muzak you hear in the elevator or at the dentist’s office.
My favorite hold music is when you get these horrible quality instrumentals that sound like midi files that came as free samples with windows 95 Read more »
AIRPLANE MUSIC
Boarding my flight home on Sunday after a brief vacation thanks to the long Easter weekend, I noticed something strange:
Between when I found my seat and when the flight attendant made her first announcement, 3 muzak songs played over the public address system. I didn’t recognize the songs, but I did notice that all three were in the same key.
What made this salient was that the hum of the engines was perfectly matched Read more »
VINYL RECORDS — WHY YOU SHOULD CARE (PT 1)
Listening to and collecting vinyl records might seem out-of-date to some and pointless to others. These days, we’ve got iPods, mp3s, and sometimes even a CD or two. So why spend time and money on heavy, old records? Read more »
SOUND-ISOLATING EARPHONES
So I realized it was time to get some new earphones. The earbuds that come with an iPod sound great when you’re listening in a silent room, but walk outside and suddenly you lose a lot of clarity due to background noise. Take them on the subway, suddenly you’ve got the volume up all the way, and you’re killing your ears to still barely make out what you’re listening to.
A friend recently bought the Shure E4’s and was raving about them, so I decided to look into it. Read more »
MUSICAL MEMORIES FROM A COMMERCIAL CHILDHOOD
A Senior Honors Thesis by Sivan Cotel
(Free Full Album Download here.)
In 2005, while a senior at Wesleyan University, I wrote a music thesis discussing the music of commercial jingles. As part of that project, I arranged and composed a suite of jazz compositions loosely based on commercials I performed as a child. These tracks represent the performance component of that project, available free in the downloads section. A two disc (CD/DVD) hard copy set is also available, free by e-mail request.
The Band: Read more »