A Chartsweep for the 21st century

One of the great things about the current age of computer-aided audio processing is that the sky's the limit on what you can accomplish. Want to reverse every single quarter-note of "Stairway To Heaven" and reassemble the pieces in order? Check. Want to take Ted Stevens' incoherent definition of the Internet, make a loop of all his stutterings, and put it up on a Web page? Check.

And just recently NYU teacher R. Luke DuBois offered his computer-processed take on music with "Billboard", a 37-minute audio piece that samples the #1 hits between 1958 and 2000, 857 songs in total. Instead of containing a direct sample from each song (like "Chartsweep", another charts retrospective mentioned in an MP3 download post of yore), "Billboard" averages the song out to a statistical drone. As someone on the Negativland mailing list put it, "Sounds like I'm going to all my neighbor's houses and putting my ear up to their water pipes and air ducts." This example track (14.9 meg MP3 file) samples the hits from 1991 through 1999. Wired News included some compare-and-contrast MP3s in their recent report on the project. "Billboard" is apparently available for purchase at Amazon under the name Timelapse (I hope DuBois got sampling clearance for all 857 songs used in the piece),

While "Billboard" is interesting in a Kenny G sort of way, you might be more entertained by "Academy", another culture-crunching project of DuBois'. That project is a 75-minute film of highly compressed versions of the first 75 films that won the Best Picture Oscar. Check out the "Academy" site for one-minute versions of Wings, From Here To Eternity, The French Connection (with an insanely fast chase scene) and Titanic, pictured here.

Comments

[Parq]

Not for nothing, but the "example track" sounds a lot like that track that was posted months ago sampled from cars going over the old steel grid deck on the Brooklyn Bridge.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/06/the_sound_a_bri.html

[Mark L]

I'd love to see the full version of "Academy". Anyone know of a reasonably-priced place I could get hold of it?