People who score high on intelligence tests are also good at keeping time, new Swedish research shows. The team that carried out the study also suspect that accuracy in timing is important to the brain processes responsible for problem solving and reasoning.

Researchers have now demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic accuracy. Those who scored highest on intelligence tests also had least variation in the regular rhythm they tapped out in the experiment.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

{ Supposed Hendrix sex tape is offered | NY Times | full story }

There’s a lot of money out there in the economy that people used to spend on CDs. The question is, where, exactly, did it go?

Even if you know nothing about the music industry, you probably know this: People don’t buy albums anymore. Everyone is aware of this, mostly because this phenomenon is reported on constantly. The soundtrack to High School Musical was considered a commercial success by selling 2.9 million units in all of 2007; seven years before, Britney Spears was able to sell 1.3 million copies of Oops!… I Did It Again in a single week. That disparity should be shocking, but it isn’t — by now, anyone who (even casually) follows the music industry is inundated with similarly grim statistics all the time. Interestingly, these stories tend to make music fans happy. People hate corporate record labels and love reading about how the industry is failing. As such, the media coverage of plummeting music sales almost always focuses on how labels are losing money. But this coverage usually ignores an economic element that is less tangible but more interesting: What is happening to all the money not being spent on music?

In 1999, the total revenue from all music sales (albums and singles) was $14.2 billion. By 2006, it was barely more than $10 billion, including downloads. (…)

There are two elementary reasons why the decline in revenue happened: a) illegal file-sharing and b) heightened consumer selectivity. File-sharing has been written about extensively, so there is no need to readdress it here. The term “heightened consumer selectivity” is really just a manifestation of iTunes — if someone is obsessed with the song “1 2 3 4″ but has no interest in the Feist catalog, he can acquire the single for ninety-nine cents instead of blowing sixteen dollars on a full album he’d never play twice. But here’s where the math gets less clear and more meaningful: These trends don’t involve everyone. Your grandma is not using LimeWire. The 2.6 million people who love the Eagles are still going to Wal-Mart to buy the physical CD. In practice, it’s only a select class of computer-savvy consumers who are making this dramatic revenue shift happen — almost exclusively music fans under the age of forty who a) used to buy a few albums every other Tuesday but b) now buy virtually none over the course of an entire year. This specific underclass was the collective beneficiary of the aforementioned $4.2 billion difference from 2006; that number represents money they would have spent on music in 1999, but were able to save. So I wonder: Where did all that money go? (…)

While we’ll never know exactly where all those bones disappeared, my specific theory is this: A lot of the money not spent on music in the twenty-first century is being used to pay off credit-card debt that was incurred during the nineties.

{ Esquire | Continue reading }

photo { superbomba }

{ “Unless you are extraordinarily supple, you cannot do this arabesque. The main point is that Grace couldn’t do it.” | Grace Jones photographed by Jean-Paul Goude, 1978 }

photos { Fone }

Apple is now the number one music retailer in the US.

The news was announced in an e-mail sent this afternoon to some Apple employees, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica. It includes a screenshot of an Excel file showing the top ten music retailers in the US for January 2008, and Apple is at the top of the list. The iTunes Store leads the pack with 19 percent, Wal-Mart (which includes the brick-and-mortar stores as well as its online properties) is second with 15 percent, and Best Buy is third with 13 percent. Amazon is a distant fourth at 6 percent.

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

related { New Kids on the Block reuniting }

In 2004, Ruby Mazur, creator of the Rolling Stones’ lips-and-tongue logo, received a call most artists only dream about. A native New Yorker and a Las Vegas resident since 2000, Mazur has been invited by the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to show a retrospective exhibition of his entire collection of paintings. “That’s heavy, man,” Mazur said Thursday.

His Stones’ logo was selected in 1971 after Mick Jagger asked Mazur to create it. “I did it over a weekend and when I took it to his house on Mullholland Drive (in Hollywood), I gave it to him outside by his pool. He got so excited he pushed me, and I fell back into the pool, fully dressed.” The logo remains the Stones’ emblem. “It made me,” Mazur said.

He’s done more than 3,000 album covers, including childhood pal Billy Joel ’s “Cold Spring Harbor,” Elton John ’s “Friends,” and the soundtrack album cover and artwork for the advertising campaign for “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”

{ Review Journal | Continue reading }

50 Cent has more than 1 million friends on MySpace, but if the rapper ever decides to leave the social network, he’ll be leaving behind those friends, too. So like a growing number of artists, he’s started his own social networking site.

On Thisis50.com, fans can create profiles and friend lists just like on MySpace, but 50 Cent has direct access to the site’s users and their e-mail addresses.

More and more acts, from Kylie Minogue to Ludacris to the Pussycat Dolls, are launching their own social networks, which are becoming a sort of next-generation version of artist Web sites.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

related { 50 Cent no longer supports Clinton }

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings.

{ International Herald Tribune | Continue reading }

Some people don’t know what the hell this is, because I posted it on the snopes.com message board (they know what this is about) and it spread unexpectedly. There is an 80s song by Tommy Tutone called “Jenny (867-5309)” about a guy finding a girl’s name and number on a wall and he wants to call it. The song led to telephone lines getting jammed when the song first came out, which led to the rumor that telephone companies don’t give the number out or discontinued every 867-5309 out there. As you can see, I proved this wrong.

Bold means that someone answered or they mention Jenny.
Italics means that they are voice mail messages or messages of note.

The numbers are area codes.

201: Rings, standard voice mail.
202: “Cannot be completed as dialed”
203: “The number you have reached is not in service.”
204: “Hi you have reached the Lownes(?)” [Girl answered]
205: “The number you have reached has been disconnected.”
206: “Cannot be completed as dialed.”
207: “Not in service at this time.”
208: Mailbox full, name is not understandable.
209: “Hey, this is Jenny and I’m sorry I missed your call, I’m in New York this month and should be back the middle of next month. Go ahead and leave me a message and I’ll give you a call as soon as I get back. Still love you all, okay, you know it. Talk to you later, Bye.”
(…)
610: “Disconnected.”
612: “Hi this is Paul with Gavick and Sons Plumbing and we went into the bathroom the other day and saw Jenny’s phone number on the wall and we took it and now it’s our number. If you’re trying to get great plumbing service then give us a call at our main number at [Number], otherwise Jenny passed away [Has to wait?].
613: “[Male voice] Hi, you reached Jenny at [Song plays] 867-5309 (867-5309) 867-5309 (867-5309) [Male voice] Leave a message.”
(…)
959: “You have successfully completed a test call to Connecticut’s new 959 area code.”
971: “Cannot be completed as dialed.”
972: “Thank you for calling Home Mortgage/Loans. We’re open from 8:30 to 5:30 Monday Through Friday.”

{ danstheman | Continue reading }

related { List of songs whose title includes a phone number }

The Technics SL-1200 is a series of turntables manufactured since October 1972 by Matsushita under the brand name of Technics. Originally released as a high fidelity consumer record player, it quickly became adopted among radio and club disc jockeys. Since its release in 1978, SL-1200MK2 and its successors have been the industry standard turntable for DJing and scratching.

Since 1972, more than 3 million units have been sold. It is widely regarded as one of the most durable and reliable turntables ever produced. Many of the models manufactured in the ’70s are still in heavy use. { Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Carsten Nicolai, bausatz noto ∞, 1998 | four technics sl-1210 turntables are integrated into a table. on each of these turntables rests a specially produced vinyl record with 12 endless grooves each of which provides the visitor with the opportunity to play several sound-loops endlessly. | more }