Are fan-co-created visuals the future of live music?AI is the buzzword of 2024, and it seeps into all manner of conversations in the music technology space. While some remain sceptical about what it might mean for the future of music, artificial intelligence is well and truly here to stay, with companies routinely releasing AI-driven production tools to aid the music production workflow, and tech giants like Google and Spotify embracing it to improve the quality of life of their user bases.
Yes, we hear a lot about the implementation of AI in the worlds of music production and streaming, for example, but what about live music? Well, there are some big things happening in the space, and ORIGIN STØRIES – in partnership with blockchain-based live video broadcasting platform Livepeer – is leading the charge.

READ MORE: “We’re taking power away from corporate networks, and saying, ‘No, we’re gonna reward our fans, not you’”: M. Shadows on Avenged Sevenfold’s new Fortnite-style Season Pass

ORIGIN STØRIES is pioneering fan-sourced, AI-generated visuals at live shows, and with them, is hoping to help usher in a new era of fan-artist collaboration and connection. Here’s how it works:
Prior to a show, fans can use the ORIGIN STØRIES AI generator to create visuals for community consideration, which are then voted for by other fans. The top-voted co-created visuals are then integrated into the visuals during the actual show.
And it’s not just limited to fans actually attending a show – as the ORIGIN STØRIES AI generator is built on Livepeer’s open video streaming infrastructure, shows featuring it are available to livestream, meaning fans can contribute AI-generated visuals to a show while they’re watching at home or anywhere in the world.
Credit: ORIGIN STØRIES
“Engaging fans as co-creators is crucial for deepening fandom,” says Sean Bradford, co-founder of ORIGIN STØRIES. “By allowing fans to have a tangible impact on the performance, artists can reward superfans in uniquely creative ways.”
”Livepeer enables a new wave of creativity in video production,” adds Doug Petkanics, CEO and co-founder of Livepeer. “We’re seeing truly groundbreaking examples of how AI can be combined with live streaming to create new pathways for artists to connect with their best fans.”
Additionally, in a bid to deepen artist-fan relationships, fans who have their visuals featured during a show have the opportunity to receive exclusive NFC-chipped merch with interactive features for artist engagement, like personalised playlists, for example.

We ask Sean Bradford why it’s more important than ever for artists to create engaging experiences for their fans, and how ORIGIN STØRIES helps achieve that.
“The amount of content required not only by artists, but the venues, the festivals, not just  IRL and online, is expensive to produce, requires a lot of quality control, and isn’t always designed for lasting impressions,” he explains. By finding new ways to allow the audience to tailor the experience in impactful but non-obtrusive ways opens up a realm of possibilities for co-creation and also co-ownership.
“What makes ORIGIN STØRIES especially unique is that it gives fans a reason to tune into the stream: to see their visuals displayed as part of the live show,” adds Doug Petkanics. “It becomes appointment viewing – and cuts through the noise of everything else competing for people’s limited attention.”
Example of fan-created, AI-generated content made via ORIGIN STØRIES. Credit: ORIGIN STØRIES
He goes on: “Artists are always looking for ways to engage their superfans. With AI co-creation tools, artists can tap into their communities’ creativity before the show to co-create visuals. Then those fan-created visuals can be combined with a livestream to reward those fans with a prominent place in the live experience – no matter where they are in the world.”
Thus far, it’s still a burgeoning technology, and so far has debuted only at select locations and shows, but Bradford is optimistic about its place across the live music industry in the future.
“We will partner with a few Stockholm and Amsterdam based projects to continue to ideate and refine what we are building,” he says. “There is a desire to aim towards a solution that is beneficial to multiple music industry players so we are looking at new ways to go-to-market. This could be through experiential brand collaborations that also support larger groups of artists in different cultures or genres.”
To learn more, head to ORIGIN STØRIES.
The post Are fan-co-created visuals the future of live music? appeared first on MusicTech.

Audeze MM-100 headphones: More detail for fewer dollars$399/£399, audeze.com
Back in 2009, Audeze took the music production world by storm with its LCD-2 headphones. The LCD-2s showcased the then lesser-known planar magnetic technology to offer ultra-fast transient detail and impressive bass articulation, all with extremely low levels of distortion.

READ MORE: Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro X Limited Edition: Iconic studio headphones updated for the brand’s centenary

The experience of working with planar magnetic headphones is much like having a high-end set of studio monitors strapped to your ears. It’s no surprise then that the original Audeze launch helped spearhead a headphone mixing and mastering revolution. Engineers and producers could pair their planar headphones with virtual mixing software (e.g. Waves NX and Realphones) to check mix translation on a number of sets of studio monitors and in various different rooms. After all, if you can get close enough with a quality set of headphones and virtual studio software, then why spend countless thousands on monitors and acoustically-treated rooms?
Audeze launched its first MM model (the MM-500) in 2022, with the help of Grammy-winning producer Manny Marroquin, though just like the LCD range, the ‘500s have a price tag that’s out of reach for the majority. The new MM-100s also bear the Marroquin name but are destined to overcome the barrier to entry, with a more palatable $399 price tag.
The MM-100s
How comfortable are the Audeze MM-100s?
Fit and finish are really solid on these headphones. The grey magnesium and steel chassis is stylish and offers a rigid construction that has no sense of being flimsy. The headband automatically resizes to fit your head and the ear cups fit around the ears without much of a clamping sensation. As the cups aren’t as large as some other models, your ears do get a bit hot with extended use. All-in-all, quality and comfort are a definite step up from our daily-driver planar headphones – the $299 open-back Hifiman Sundaras – which feel more ‘clampy’ but do stay cooler during long sessions.
A soft, drawstring carry pouch is included, but it’s pretty huge. It’s likely that Audeze made a single case that would fit both smaller and much-larger headphone sets to help lower the cost for the end-user. It’s a minor issue as most buyers would surely invest in a more rigid carry case to protect their investment.
As a neat and flexible touch, the single mini-jack connector used to connect-up the headphones can be inserted into either ear cup, with the cable terminated at the opposite end with a full-size, 6.3-mm jack. This is ideal for plugging into headphone amps and audio interfaces, but to switch to mini-jack you’ll need to use the provided 6.3mm-to-3.5mm converter cable. This adapter oozes quality but that’s also its undoing. It’s heavy and could become cumbersome when using a mobile device, possibly dangling under strain, which would be annoying and shorten its life. This is particularly frustrating as the low impedance and not-unwieldy size of the MM-100s make them otherwise ideally suited to music-making out in the field.
The MM-100s in use
What do the Audeze MM-100s sound like?
As you’d expect with open-back planar headphones, there’s plenty of articulation in both ends of the frequency range. At the high end, this manifests itself in smaller details of the mix like reverb tails and edit points being easier to hear, alongside satisfyingly crisp snare and acoustic guitar transients.
In the low end, bass instruments are fast to speak so that you can be sure that any congestion or masking in the mix is actually there and isn’t the byproduct of an inferior playback system. Sound-staging is accurate, with wideness and openness in the stereo field; we’re able to hear the difference made by the smallest of stereo-widening tweaks made in Ozone’s Imager module in a mastering project.
The sonic signature of the high-end reminds us of the Genelec monitors in our studio. There’s a satisfying fizzy sheen that flatters vocal lines, while various parts of the high-mid range either stand out a little too much or appear scooped.
The MM-100s on a desk
Comparing the raw, unadulterated sound of the Audeze with our Hifiman Sundaras, the high-mids of the MM-100s are more brutal and brash, while the Sundaras follow the smoother contour of the Harman target curve (which approximates how speakers sound in a room) with fewer spiky resonances. We don’t know whether this voicing decision on the MM-100s was considered to be beneficial for spotlighting areas of harshness in the mix, but we do know that the smoother response of the Sundaras means they can be put to serious work with little or no EQ calibration.
Once this major difference in the high-mids between the two competing models is observed, we swiftly reach out for EQ correction for the MM-100s. Making use of the system-wide SoundSource by Rogue Amoeba, plus a calibration profile taken from community-sourced measured responses at AutoEq, improvements to the frequency response are immediately obvious.
Gone are the biting resonances and instead there’s a new-found richness to the entire mid range, while bass tones are subtly reinforced too. It really does feel like the studio monitors of our dreams are beaming straight into our ears as we peruse more our favourite reference tracks.
While the SoundSource method is a reasonably inexpensive fix at under $50, it’s not so easy to apply an EQ profile when you’re not using a computer, so this might ultimately affect your purchasing decisions.
The MM-100 headphones in use
Should I buy the Audeze MM-100 headphones?
For those who want to perform critical monitoring duties on headphones, be it for location sound, editing, mixing or mastering, the MM-100s offer the Audeze experience for less money than ever before. They are comfortable, relatively light and solidly built, with a low impedance that’s suitable for plugging into virtually any device when on the go, despite the potentially-dangly ‘big-to-little’ adapter cable.
The MM-100’s planar magnetic drivers offer great transient detail and rich low-end without the onset of distortion that could detract from critical details in the mix. However, gritty high mids mean the MM-100s really benefit from EQ to smooth things out. Once equalised, they’re a force to be reckoned with, but this tends to be more tricky to achieve on mobile devices. Here, you’d need to like the raw sound well enough to be able to live with it.
Key features

Open-back, planar magnetic headphones
90mm transducers
Magnesium/steel chassis
Auto-adjusting headband
Cable can be plugged into either side
18 Ohms
20 Hz – 25 kHz frequency response
Comes with detachable cable, 6.3mm-to-3.5mm converter cable and soft carry case

The post Audeze MM-100 headphones: More detail for fewer dollars appeared first on MusicTech.

SoundLabs & Universal announce MicDrop AI project SoundLabs' upcoming AI-powered plug-in will be capable of creating high-fidelity vocal models, and will allow artists to retain ownership and full artistic control over their use. 

Cardano releases 'Node 9.0,' paving way for upcoming Chang hard forkThe Cardano node GitHub page was updated with the new version, Node 9.0, which can be used to implement the upcoming hard fork.

BMI Appoints Executives to Leadership TeamBMI has announced the appointment of two senior executives who will lead major initiatives as the company advances its strategic growth plan. Tom Kershaw, a technology leader in Internet and Mobile communications, including work on mobile application development, advertising and marketing systems, data science and large-scale data, will join the company as Chief Technology Officer, and Justin Rohde, who has more than 20 years’ experience in strategic management and building growth opportunities for both corporations and consulting firms, has joined BMI in the newly created position of Chief Transformation Officer. Both Kershaw and Rohde will report to Mike O’Neill, President & CEO of BMI. 

"Tom and Justin have the experience and leadership qualities to enable us to enhance and increase the value we provide to our songwriters, composers and publishers," said O’Neill. "Working with our team, they will be instrumental as we carry out the key elements of our strategic growth plan, to continue to grow distributions, advance our technology and customer service and to seek new sources of revenue for our affiliates."

Kershaw

Rohde

Kershaw previously co-founded one of the leading open-source software organizations in the Internet community (prebid.org) and has  more than 20 years of experience working with businesses in technology-based markets, ranging in both size and geographic complexity. He joins BMI most recently from Travelport, a leader in travel distribution for air, hotel, car, and rail, and has also held positions at Google and Ericsson. He received his undergraduate degree from New York University and a Masters’ degree from London School of Economics. Kershaw is taking over this role from BMI’s Chief Information Officer, Mike West, who recently announced his retirement from the company. 

Rohde brings extensive experience in process improvement, sales effectiveness, product development and global business management to BMI. He joins the company from Xplor Technologies, a private equity owned Global SaaS and Payments conglomerate where he served as both Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Transformation Officer. In that capacity, he was responsible for revenue growth, profit improvement and strategic initiatives across diverse areas of the business. Previous experience includes leading product development and growth strategies at Integramed America and management and strategy consulting at Bain & Company. Rohde received his undergraduate degree, Master of Science degree and MBA from Northwestern University."

BMIThe post BMI Appoints Executives to Leadership Team first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

2024 Business Card Challenge: A Very Annoying Business Card, IndeedUsually the business card itself is the reminder to get in contact with whoever gave it to you. But this is Hackaday, after all. This solar-powered card reminds the recipient to send [Dead Rat Productions] an email by beeping about every two hours, although the gist of that email may simply be begging them to make it stop, provided they didn’t just toss the thing in the garbage.
The full-on, working version of the card is not intended for everyone — mostly serious-looking A-list types that ooze wealth. Most of [Dead Rat Productions]’ pub mates will get an unpopulated version, which could be a fun afternoon for the right kind of recipient, of course.
That person would need a Seeed Studio Xiao SAMD21, a solar panel, plus some other components, like an energy-harvesting chip to keep the battery topped up. Of note, there is a coin cell holder that requires prying with a screwdriver to get the battery out, so there’s really no escaping the beeping without some work on their part. We rather like the artwork on this one, especially the fact that the coin cell sits inside the rat’s stomach. That’s a nice touch.

Valuations of startups have quietly rebounded to all-time highs. Some investors say the slump is over. Generative AI businesses aside, the last couple of years have been relatively difficult for venture-backed companies. Very few startups were able to raise funding at prices that exceeded their previous valuations.   Now, approximately two years after the venture slump began in early 2022, some investors, like IVP general partner Tom Loverro, are saying that the […]
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There are 8bn user-curated playlists on Spotify, 725m created this year alone, Daniel Ek saysThe streaming service has been working to make playlisting a more attractive feature for its subscribers
Source

Amazon, Apple, Spotify file legal challenge against Canada’s music streaming taxCanada's broadcasting and telecom regulator is planning a 5% tax on streaming revenue from non-Canadian companies starting this fall
Source

SoundLabs & Universal announce MicDrop AI project SoundLabs' upcoming AI-powered plug-in will be capable of creating high-fidelity vocal models, and will allow artists to retain ownership and full artistic control over their use. 

IK Multimedia offers FREE Mesa Mark III guitar amp this month
IK Multimedia is giving away a free Mesa Mark III and matching cab for new AmpliTube 5 Custom Shop (CS) users throughout July. AmpliTube 5 CS is the free version of IK Multimedia’s virtual guitar and bass workstation for Mac and Windows. Mesa/Boogie launched the Mark III in 1985, and the amp is a three-channel, [...]
View post: IK Multimedia offers FREE Mesa Mark III guitar amp this month

73K Fake Tickets worth $49M on sale for 5 DC Venues in last 6 MonthsFive Washington DC area venues were hit with 73,000 speculative tickets worth $49 million on sale by ticket resellers during the first half of 2024, according to an analysis by the Fix The Tix coalition.
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Hack All The Things, Get All The SchematicsWhen I was growing up, about 4 or 5 years old, I had an unorthodox favourite type of reading material: service manuals for my dad’s audio equipment. This got to the point that I kept asking my parents for more service manuals, and it became a running joke in our family for a bit. Since then, I’ve spent time repairing tech and laptops in particular as a way of earning money, hanging out at a flea market in the tech section, then spending tons of time at our hackerspace. Nowadays, I’m active in online hacker groups, and I have built series of projects closely interlinked with modern-day consumer-facing tech.
Twenty three years later, is it a wonder I have a soft spot in my heart for schematics? You might not realize this if you’re only upcoming in the hardware hacking scene, but device schematics, whichever way you get them, are a goldmine of information you can use to supercharge your projects, whether you’re hacking on the schematic-ed device itself or not. What’s funny is, not every company wants their schematics to be published, but it’s ultimately helpful for the company in question, anyway.
If you think it’s just about repair – it’s that, sure, but there’s also a number of other things you might’ve never imagined you can do. Still, repair is the most popular one.

Repair, Of Course
Asked to pay for a schematic? You can most likely find it elsewhere for free.
It’s an old chestnut that tech marvels of the past used to come bundled with schematics, and that’s no longer the case. Indeed, they are often top secret. For laptops and phones, one part of that is extensive NDAs that cover information on many a chip within them, including schematics. That said, somehow, this hasn’t stopped certain companies like Clevo, who has been seen putting their designs’ schematics right inside the service manual, for example, the P75xZM_ESM.pdf.
Still, schematics are a market; repair shops earn their keep from being able to fix devices, so a PDF is likely to leak one way or another, often it just takes time. For certain laptop manufacturers and series, this doesn’t happen, but most of all it seems to depend on popularity. In a way, schematics being leaked is a decent indicator that a product is popular enough to hit repair shops en masse, creating demand for underpaid workers to bring a loaded microSD card with them on a trip back home from the factory employing them.
I’m aware that companies sometimes can’t publish much, and, it’s still interesting how publishing schematics and other repair documents is not more popular with companies, despite everything it brings. During my call-in laptop repair days, travelling around with a tiny Asus netbook in my toolbox that used to be a makeup suitcase, I can remember one specific phrase I heard often: “yeah, we don’t like %BRAND%, we’ve had our %BRAND% device break and it couldn’t be fixed”.
Companies Who Publish Nevertheless
When it comes to publicly shared schematics, for instance, Framework laptops have adopted a “Raspberry Pi” approach – share schematics that concern external ports, where no NDAs could conceivably be involved, and even publish further specifications about these ports. This has created a vivid hacking and modding ecosystem around Framework, attracting a good amount of people, and this part in particular is something other companies could do as well. I’ve talked aplenty about the Framework ecosystem already, and I mention the schematic involvement there quite a bit, too!
It’s not just about connectors – there’s plenty of places in a laptop where failures are likely to occur, like power management. Intel might scoff at the CPU and Thunderbolt part pinouts being published, but schematics for these aren’t usually involved in a laptop repair anyway, what fails is usually power management, and chances are, just the schematic pages for that could be published without violating an NDA. Raspberry Pi’s schematics used to work in this way; sadly, RPF has given up on publishing Linux-powered Pi schematics due to being stuck in a perfectionism loop – the Pi 5 schematics are nowhere to be seen, and the USB-C-fixed Pi 4 schematics aren’t available either.
Pine64 is a strange case – their products are not open-source, in large part due to their operation’s scale landing them in a cloning-happy environment. Still, they publish a ton of the information that you might want. Pine64 publishes schematics for their products, and is forthcoming with things like – for instance, ever broke a barrel jack socket on your Pinecil? It’s a rare fault, but in case you somehow have, they stock replacement sockets. Of course, Pinecil schematics are available too, in full, same goes for PinePhone and most of their other products.
I was particularly active in the Pinecil community of the Pine64 discord, and thanks to schematics being accessible in a searchable way, we could help people fix their Pinecils on a community basis, across timezones, often quicker than the tech support could give them a response. In fact, because of the conversations happening in an official Pine64 community, Pine64 tech support could read the conversations in our channel, and avoid repeating many of the debugging steps with the Pinecil owner in question. It really helped that, everything they had to do over email, we could do over real-time chat! Schematics were a crucial part of that, from tracing what could it be that’d die from a reverse polarity what was shorting out the 3.3 V regulator, to the part numbers.
A good few failures were relatively common, and a few community members across different continents, including me, stocked up on some of the commonly involved parts and mailed them out to people in flat envelopes. Compared to the Pinecil sales numbers, the number of failures that we handled was pretty low, but we did help a good few people; generally, people were quite happy about fixing something they own, as opposed to getting a new iron and putting the broken one into a cupboard drawer!
here’s a trace you can cut to protect your old Pinecil from FUSB failure, and gain 24V support as a side effect
It wasn’t just replacing components – together, we narrowed down a particularly common fault that would kill Pinecils or at least make their USB-C PD power input inoperable, and figured out a fix that, in the end, involved simply cutting a trace. The gist is, a pin of a specific IC on the Pinecil was connected directly to the power input rail, this pin specifically was sensitive to overvoltage, killing the chip in a way that sometimes would even pull down the entire 3.3 V rail. What’s interesting, it didn’t have to be connected to that rail at all! The community designed a fix, people have applied it for both failure immunity and also being able to use 24 V bricks. Later on, Pine64 applied the fix to a new batch of the Pinecil hardware, which is now immune to this fault.
Before the ability to just cut the trace was figured out by [Thanos the tank engine] and others, I managed to design an addon board that’d down-regulate the voltage with a Zener diode, and even published the files for it. After all, you can design a whole lot if schematics are available!
Build All The Cool Stuff
Hackers have long used schematics to design things like addons – physical board attributes, you can redesign with calipers in hand, but schematics capture everything else. All those consoles put into tiny formfactors, made possible because of the motherboard being cut down? Schematics were likely involved in one way or another.
having schematics how [Wificable] could figure out there are two separate PCIe links on this connector, and make a riser exposing them both at the same timeFriends of mine have done the same kind of schematic-inspired design, on a number of occasions – in particular, [Wificable] has designed an MXM reuse adapter and a good few MXM cards only thanks to available schematics, and her TinyRiser, an adapter that pulls extra PCIe from a particular lineup of Lenovo Tiny computers, was only possible because we could get find the relevant PDF in a Telegram group.
Got a technical question the manufacturer doesn’t expand on? A schematic is a reliable way to check.
It’s not just addons, it’s also finding information you can’t find otherwise. Wondering what your laptop’s USB-C port does, whether it supports DisplayPort, or charging input? The manufacturer’s website might not be helpful at all, but the schematics show it all instantly, on the page with the block diagram. I’ve seen a product being developed, an ExpressCard slot adapter housing an SSD, that researched laptop schematics to figure out 3.3 V current limits on the ExpressCard slot and how they were implemented in different laptops.
Tapping into the iPhone battery market to get a reliable source of slim batteries for your project? Use the schematics to find the battery connector pinout – and the connector part number. Remember the M.2 card with a 1:2 PCIe switch, that I’ve shown you the design process of? That one was only possible because of a laptop schematic we found featuring the ASM1182e chip. Schematics often contain part numbers, and these are super helpful – you could consult one of the connector bibles, or you could simply copy the part number for a connector out of a schematic PDF and get the exact part number necessary.
Remember that Sony Vaio P motherboard rebuild project I’ve started? I’ve just recently received the v1 PCBs of a motherboard I designed, now they’re waiting to be assembled, and I couldn’t have had done this without all the connector pinout information I found in the schematic. In particular, it might be that this motherboard replacement will be impossible to adapt to the second revision of these Vaios, since, as far as I’ve seen, that revision’s schematics haven’t leaked. Well, either way, expect an article about the new motherboard soon!
There’s way, way more you can learn from schematics as you go. One of my current projects requires learning a fair bit from the PinePhone schematic and specifically its LTE modem that boasts open firmware, as part of uncovering yet another series-worthy topic; naturally, you will hear about that one soon. Schematics keep a treasure trove of hacker-friendly information in them, and information deserves to be free.

How Musicians find sustainable success in a turbulent music business [Keith Jopling, MIDiA]A new study looks at how Musicians find sustainable success in the turbulent music business, their strategies to thrive in unpredictable times, and how chaos can even fuel stability.
The post How Musicians find sustainable success in a turbulent music business [Keith Jopling, MIDiA] appeared first on Hypebot.

Eraser #AI tool by #YouTube to delete the copyrighted music from their user videos without affecting speech. I doubt it would work if there're vocals in tracks. #MusicIndustry #Creators