The second release in my thing-a-week discipline is Tweet and Shout. Tweet and Shout monitors twitter for buzz about bands, ranks them, and lets you see what people are saying about an artist. For example, you can see that Coldplay is one of twitter’s most talked-about bands, or note that most of what people are saying about Britney Spears is gossip. You can see which twitter users have recently commented about an artist, and which artists a user has mentioned. Each artist’s page also shows how they’ve done over the past few days (on twitter as well as amazon mp3).

I’ll be the first to admit that this app isn’t groundbreaking or thought-provoking. The fact that it’s interesting at all is due entirely to a few simple things:

1. Recency. Twitter posts are only interesting for a few minutes; then they get old and obsolete. Grouping posts by subject helps you get a sense of recent sentiment on that subject.
2. Relevance. Most random twitter messages are irrelevant. Normally, you filter out irrelevant twitter content by only reading tweets from your friends. But with a list of band names and summize, you can find content relevant to music in general.
3. Pictures of people. I love stating the obvious: it’s fun to see a lot of faces and suvery, or imagine, the range of attitudes they express. In tweetandshout, this goes for both twitter users and musicians. Without pictures, I’d be hard pressed to generate some amazing statistical reports to make the site informative. With pictures, the tone changes completely; it’s enough to just browse and people-watch.
4. Bands we know. The world of music is dominated by a few hundred extremely well-known artists. It might be more interesting to see what people are saying about local, not-yet-famous artists, but it’s a lot easier to just look at and talk about a single popularity contest.

The app is built on Summize, an excellent search engine for twitter. Tweetandshout stays relatively current by pulling a few hundred Atom feeds from Summize every hour or two. The list of artists comes from AmazonMP3’s top 400 rankings, which are updated daily.

It might be interesting to see an app like this targeted at a topic area other than music. A generalized summize+ranking+trends app could help you capture the buzz about, say, your local restaurants, the town where you live, a set of geeky events, or just a few friends of yours. Maybe Summize will incorporate that as a feature of their product. (Note to summize: I might be available for some consulting work. )

Reflecting on the Week

Tweet and shout wasn’t my original project for the week. I had started out trying to build a little MP3 streaming program for my BlackBerry. See, my BlackBerry Curve has wifi and, according to the API documentation, the ability to stream music over the network. Maybe if I hacked things right, I’d be able to use my BlackBerry as a sort of wireless headphone system at home, streaming music stored on my PC.

I released oraclebot last Tuesday (the 13th) and then started studying the Blackberry environment. By Thursday, it was clear I couldn’t complete any significant mobile app in under a week. I’d worked through some tutorials, read a book and a half in PDFs downloaded from RIM’s developer center, installed the SDK, and gotten a customized “Hello World” program onto my BlackBerry. But I didn’t know the basic UI APIs, and many of the BlackBerry’s APIs (e.g. the ones that talk over the network or launch the browser) require the developer to sign their code with a cryptographic key that costs $100. Plus BarCamp Boston was coming up, and as an organizer, I’d be 120% occupied during the event on Saturday and Sunday.

So I switched gears to a simple app I thought I could release. I worked on it for most of Thursday and Friday and spent the weekend at BarCamp. Exhausted after the event, I took Monday off — had a long lunch with some friends and watched a movie. I mostly wrapped up the coding on Tuesday, and meant to ship and announce this morning. But between hitting a bug in _elementtidy.fixup on my server, adding a last-minute tweak to attempt reasonable searches for bands with names like “The Who” or “Yes”, and writing this post, it looks like I’ve soaked up most of today as well. Oh well, at least it’s done. Better late than… even later.

I sing in a Georgian music choir called Nateli, and we have a performance coming up next Sunday. It’s a 30-40 minute set of songs performed in small (3-6 singer) ensembles. The performance space is rumored to have excellent acoustics for our music and I’m rather looking forward to this concert. If you’re in the area, check it out.

Night Prayer, 30 minutes of chant, prayers and meditation
Sunday, February 11th at 8:30 PM

Episcopal Parish of the Messiah
1900 Commonwealth Ave
Auburndale (Newton) MA
617.312.8328
map

The choir I'm in, New Century Voices,
has a concert coming up this Sunday 6/19. It's at the Swedenborg Chapel
in Cambridge, MA. Swedenborg Chapel is located at the corner of Quincy
and Kirkland streets near Harvard Square. The suggested donation is $10.

New
Century Voices is dedicated to performing new works by local composers.
The performance will include the premier of Michael Veloso's "All
Natural Male Enhancement," a piece written on texts from e-mail Spam.
Other local composers represented will include Elizabeth Knight, who is
a student at Longy, Krishan Oberoi from Rhode Island and Jeremy
Jennings. We also include works of some better known composers, Randall
Thompson, Edward Elgar and Paul Hindemith; the "Six Chansons," on texts
by Rainer Maria Rilke.

If you like choral music, there is
definitely something here you'll like; if not, there are a few things
you'll at least laugh at. I hope to see many of you there.

A
reception will follow the concert. All proceeds go to the Swedenborg
Chapel. (The Swedenborg Chapel is the stone church on the corner of
Quincy and Kirkland streets, across the road from Memorial Hall and
Sanders Theatre.)

link

I finally received my pair of Shure E2C earphones. These are some strange puppies: in ear-canal phones. You put on silicone or foam sleeves and shove them right in. In addition to giving you added incentive to use Q-Tips every morning, this tight seal is supposed to improve sound isolation. Mainly, I bought them because I seem to be travelling a lot and read that they have superior sound isolation to noise-cancelling headphones. Also, I have a pair of Aiwa noise-cancelling headphones and when you turn on the noise cancellation the left phone gets very quiet and the right phone whistles.

So the idea of earplugs with a transducer attached sounded pretty good. Do they measure up?

They sound decent, but are not the best sounding headphones I've ever tried (I once sampled a pair of $900 Sony electrostatic phones; they are on the short list of stuff to buy when I make my zillions). To be fair, I haven't yet tried them on any truly high-quality audio sources. These are for travel, so the important quality is that they're well-insulated and comfortable. I'm still getting used to the comfort, but fairly certain I will get used to it.

The. Sound. Isolation. Is. Amazing.

Josh is ten feet away yelling obscenities or something—I can't tell. I am in a happy quiet place where I cannot even hear the sound of my own typing. I can't wait to try it on a plane this weekend.

Highly recommended.

More info: Shure E2C, list $99; paid $65 via Froogle. Feedster should have vertical search for product reviews. One review with pictures.

The choir I sing in, New Century Voices (our website has been updated!) has a concert coming up. It's going to be great. You should come. Let me know if you want to carpool or anything.

New Century Voices

performs music by local and well-known composers:
Stravinsky, Aguiar, Veloso, Tuggle, Hill, and others

Wednesday, June 23
8pm

Church of the Holy Name
1689 Centre St.
West Roxbury, MA

Admission is free, $5 suggested donation

My favorite pieces we'll be performing are a series called Rumors of an Aeolian Harp by local composer Elizabeth Knight, fellow chorister Scott Hill's Gloria, Stravinsky's Ave Maria, and local composer David Little's jazzy Jukebox Love Song.

A chorus I'm part of, New Century Voices, has a few concerts coming up. NCV is a group of about 10 singers. We sing 20^th and 21^st century music (but it isn't all weird or atonal).

8:00pm Tuesday, May 4, 2004: Pickman Concert Hall, Longy School of Music, 27 Garden St., Cambridge. The concert consists entirely of music composed by Longy students and several musicians/ensembles will perform. We will premiere a work by Elizabeth Knight called Aeolian Harp. Free.

8:00pm Friday, May 7: Room N1 at the Rey-Waldstein Building, Longy School of Music, 33 Garden St., Cambridge. This concert features Longy Continuing Studies students, including our director Allegra Martin. At this concert we will be performing Jukebox Love Song, a wonderful jazzy setting of Langston Hughes' poetry by David Little; Lapides Vivi, a quasi-chant by William Whitley; and 4 Cats by our own Michael Veloso, a set of short musical settings of cat haikus. Also free.

5:00pm Sunday, May 16: King's Chapel, 58 Tremont St., Boston. We will be one of four local choirs in the twenty-third Composers in Red Sneakers Choralfest. All choirs will perform twenty-first century music by Boston-area composers. At corner of School & Tremont Streets downtown, near Gov't Center, State St, and Park St T stops. $12 general admission, $8 students & seniors.

Stay tuned for news of an all-NCV concert in the next month or two, featuring a much larger slice of our repertoire.

link

Are iPods a culture? This article in Wired describes a trend of iPod owners approaching other people with iPods and trading music for a few moments at a time. This kind of spontaneous interaction is strange and delightful, and the great success rate (outside NYC, at least) of such encounters indicates that there are some interesting shared values characteristic of people who walk around listening to iPods:

Author Douglas Rushkoff suggested that iPod sharing is a legacy of online file sharing—essentially the same thing, except offline.

"It's kind of a stoner's ethic, really, the way you pass the joint at a Dead show," he said.

So what does this mean? If you see me walking around with an iPod, and you think we might both enjoy exchanging music for a few moments, what are you really supposing about me? Here are some ideas:

• I may have interesting taste in music
• I am open to interacting with strangers
• I think strangers might actually have something to offer me
• I'm not likely to turn to you and say that your racket is antimusical devil-chant, and you should be taken out and shot for your blasphemy, even if I dislike your music.
• Aesthetic pleasure can and should be shared.

These values imply a worldview that is highly trusting and open to connections, even with strangers. It is even kind of like the bonds that can be formed under oppression, where victims and their supporters can come together despite disagreement to protest war or civil injustice. But now, with the iPod, similar subcultural bonds can form through the enjoyment of music, which is both intimate and inclusive. In this regard it handily beats drugs, although one would look silly listening to an iPod at a Grateful Dead concert.

Approaching someone with an iPod may not be too different from approaching someone who's reading a book you like. But the particular techie-ness of the iPod, its style, and its iconic status probably make it more inviting. There are probably under 30 books that I would inspire me to approach someone on the subway, but from a distance, an iPod is an iPod is an iPod. And there is of course something special about music as an expressive medium that can transcend mood, education, and culture to help different people experience life together.