Happy New Year! I haven’t posted too much here, but I expect to do better in 2006.

I often attempt to enter various remix and music contests, but I rarely have time to finish something. Peter Kirn at Create Digital Music came up with a contest I actually have the attention span for: creating a one-second composition for the leap second.

Here’s my one-second ode to the leap second in WAV format (172K). I created it in FL Studio 5 using various software synthesizers and samples. It’s a sort of techno arpeggio thing that reminds me of a computer startup sound, only faster. It has a good beat, and you can dance to it. (Very quickly.)

Peter is going to compile all of the one-second submissions into a single composition, which should be interesting.

Wired News has an interesting article about Pump Audio, a company I hadn’t heard of before. They’re a clearinghouse for licensing music to TV shows, commercials, and so on. Musicians send them CDs (they’ll take any genre) and they send out hard drives full of music to producers. The producer browses the selection, chooses a track, uses it, and a few months later the musician gets paid. (Pump Audio’s take is 50%).

This looks like a very smart business model that doesn’t hinge on the existing (and probably doomed) structure of traditional record companies. It’s similar to the deals I have with ad networks for web site advertising, where they handle the legal aspects so I can focus on creating content and hope it makes a buck or two.

It’s probably a long shot to make money this way, but I’m sure the odds are much better than getting a major-label contract, and their contract seems flexible enough that you don’t really have much to lose.

I’m definitely going to give this a try—maybe I can realize my lifelong dream of recording a techno song that gets used in a car commercial.

[via Seth Godin]

I always enjoy reading interviews with musicians I enjoy, especially when they talk about gear. Native Instruments, the makers of my favorite soft synth package, Reaktor, have just posted an interview with Trent Reznor that talks about his infatuation with their products. Not surprisingly, it comes across as an advertisement at times, but there’s some insight into his songwriting process and his thoughts on his recent experiment with remixable tracks.

The tech talk section at N.I. has tons of other interviews including The Crystal Method, Deepsky, and Junkie XL.

If you’re too young to have heard of a “player piano”, it was a piano that could play a sequence of notes encoded on paper rolls punched with holes. They were popular from the late 1800’s into the 1930s.

Terry Smythe has been using a home-built scanner and software to convert the contents of antique player piano rolls into MIDI files. As a result of this process he has posted almost 3,000 MIDI files, some of which even preserve the playing style of the original performance. Considering that the original paper is well past its sell-by date and already decaying, this is a great way to preserve a chunk of America’s musical history. And a source of tons of MIDI files to play with. [via Make]

I used to work with dot-matrix printers, and anyone who has heard them print can’t help but think they sound rhythmic, perhaps even musical. Paul Slocum certainly thinks so. He’s modified some Epson LQ-500 printers with reverse-engineered firmware to turn them into dot matrix synths.

The music comes from the vibration of the motors, the firing of the pins against the paper, and the printer’s error beeper. Best of all, it even prints while doing so. Check out the web site for details and MP3s.

Tom at Music Thing has done an excellent series of posts this week on Tiny Music Makers: the people behind those tiny 4-second sounds we can all immediately identify, like the Intel sound and the Mac Startup sound. He even spoke to some of the music makers. Here’s a roundup of all five articles:

• Part 1: The “Intel Inside” Chimes—I had heard the composers 1980’s hit and had no idea he composed this too.
• Part 2: The Windows 95 Startup Sound—by none other than Brian Eno.
• Part 3: The THX Sound—complete with Simpsons parody clip.
• Part 4: The Mac Startup Sound—used in most Macs from 1991 to the present.
• Part 5: The Channel 4 Jingle —The only one I didn’t recognize, living in America, but still interesting: “Every time that sequence was played, David Dundas was paid £3.50.”

This is an excellent series of articles, and I think some unsung heroes are finally getting a tiny bit of recognition for their tiny music. I’d love to see this continue—maybe Tom can track down the composer of the Duracell melody or the “Yahoo” yodel.