All snapshots from 2011 – Music Thinking Weekly

This is the snapshot archive from every week of 2011 of ‘Music Thinking Weekly’.
It’s easy to browse all the weeks including all the articles posted with the hashtag #musicthinking via @MusicThinking
More info on Music Thinking: www.musicthinking.com

Co-creation, inspiration and the Global Jukebox

Can folk music be a model for setting up a co-creation culture?

In his book We-think: The power of mass creativity the author Charles Leadbeater is talking about a relation of co-creation and the habit of folk music that people borrow musical structures from a shared tradition and taking ideas from a shared pool of multipliers without concern for ownership. A climate of sharing and giving leads to mass innovation often with an individual touch and not mass production.

With this in mind it is interesting to watch the development of the new Global Jukebox project, a tremendous collection of field recordings, of Alan Lomax. The folklorist’s archive of 17.000 field recordings will begin to stream for free very soon, including music from Britain, Ireland, the US, the Caribbean and the former USSR.

Global Jukebox - Alan Lomax

Although Lomax’s name is not as well known as some of the musicians he helped discover, e.g. Woody Guthrie, his work continues to have an enormous influence. For example the soundtrack of the film O Brother, where art thou? is using samples from Lomax. He introduced Pete Seeger to The Lion Sleeps Tonight, recorded Vera Hall’s Trouble So Hard (made famous by Moby), and his recordings will even be featured on Bruce Springsteen’s forthcoming album, Wrecking Ball.

Besides the popularity to use this material for other musical inspiration it is also interesting to get more information on the system and categorization of the material. Lomax is talking about ‘cantometrics’, the term refers to a system for the measurement of singing style, like blue notes and sounds of animals.  The system was also applicable for pop music and he also developed ‘choreometrics’ for dancing and ‘parlametrics’ for speech.
The principles of ‘cantometrics’ are used in the Music Genome Project of Pandora.com a new automated music recommendation service comparable to last.fm and spotify.com

More info:
YouTube Channel:  http://www.youtube.com/user/AlanLomaxArchive/
Research:  http://research.culturalequity.org/

Music Thinking Weekly exists 1 Year! #musicthinking

Next week 28th of December 2011 * Music Thinking Weekly * will exist one year!

Make sure to tag your music inspired tweets with #MusicThinking to show up in the anniversary issue!

How does it look:  Music Thinking Weekly

MUSIC THINKING Everything where metaphors, tools, techniques, patterns, instruments, brands and behaviours are derived from music and used in other areas or in a surprising new way.

Paul Simon, Dave Brubeck and the power of Music Thinking with direct fan interaction

Just see this video of  a Paul Simon concert in Toronto, it has everything of the power of musicthinking: entertainment, spontaneity, participation, emotion and uniqueness.

Paul Simon fan gets invited up on stage to sing Duncan when she yelled out that she learned to play guitar with this song….a thrill of a lifetime!!

I got this story from:  A Paul Simon Feelin’-Very-Groovy Moment | Open Culture.

Here is another one this time with Dave Brubeck
During a visit to Moscow in the 80’s, Dave Brubeck met the faculty and students in Moscow Conservatory. While he was improvising on a “Ei, uhnem”, a Russian folk song, a young man downstage stood up to play Stéphane Grappelli-style violin jazz.

I got this story from: An Uplifting Musical Surprise for Dave Brubeck in Moscow (1997) | Open Culture.

See also: more on #musicthinking and how you can be a part of it

Darwin X – Köln, Performance 06 06 2009