Project : Music Industry

My project for this year’s English class will be on the changes in the music industry with the arrival of Internet. A whole new world of possibilities appeared as the accessibility and the power of computers kept rising. The idea of this project is to explain how the major music companies had to adapt to the changes and what impact it has on the bands.

Being a musician today is much easier, instruments are cheaper, you can easily share your sounds with the world on youtube and having a home recording studio is possible as the sound materiel is a lot cheaper . In fact two decades ago it was impossible to buy studio materiel for personal use, you had to sign with one of the major labels to produce your album or try to spread your music during concerts. Now almost anyone can record a decent homemade album and can share it on Internet without necessarily asking for anything in return. I will try to explain how industry and bands adapted to that new system and the positive aspects for the artists.

Some nice videos to watch :

_ A short video (10minutes) about the early story of music industry : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlqA4m4QYO4

_ A movie : Sound city studio. A movie produced by Dave Grohl (Nirvana’s drummer) on the sound city studio in LA well known for his unique sound quality. Many huge stars recorded their albums there (red hot chili peppers, Neil young, Santana, rage against the machine, johnny cash, metalica and many more). It had to close it's doors in 2011 due to economical problems in relation with the changes in the music industry.

_ Documentaries on youtbe : Seven ages of rock, which tells the story of the evolution of rock music and the changes in the way of thinking and sharing the music with the public. It’s divided in 7 episodes and covers most part of rock history.

The first episode : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPEmF23R_Bw

How I learnt (almost effortlessly) all the capital cities of Asia !

Dear fellow students,

A small post to warn you that my first series of articles about online learning, called: “How I learnt (almost effortlessly) all the capital cities of Asia !” is now complete!

It will acquaint you with an amazing online tool to help you learn long lists of items by heart.

Don't waste one more minute and go read the articles!


Part 1- Why learning by heart is essential

Part 2- Presenting Memrise in detail

 

Part 3- Analysing why this tool does such a good job at helping us learn

 

Don't forget to leave comments and tell me what you think!

Henri

Presentation : the social inequalities in India

Hi guys !

You can see there the presentation of my work about social inequalities in India :
http://socialinequalitiesinindia.blogspot.fr/

Bye

Project proposal: English poetry - Chaogang

The poetry is a good way to discover the richness of English and to see what this language can offer. There are too many great poets to talk about, Shakespeare, Whitman, Tagore... They are great poets and great thinkers at the same time. When we appreciate the beauty of their verses, their reflexion about the world and their love towards life touch the most profound part of our heart. Robert Frost says, "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." So how these great poets express their emotions and their thoughts through words? How powerful these words can be to inspire, to touch, to encourage people? I try to find answers to these two questions.

The methodology of this project is to study different poets and their works and to analyze English poetry through these examples. The project is carried out on a weekly base. Poems are regularly analyzed and published in my blog http://couriraveclevent.blogspot.fr/. Sometimes I would like to share some interesting quotes of poets, which for me are also a kind of poetry.

There are some good resources for this project. A collection of poems being read can be found in a youtube channel "Pearls of Wisdom". The website http://www.brainyquote.com/ provides a large collections of quotes.

Chaogang

An optimistic video about stress

At this time of the year while we are all tired and longing for a break, here is the video to watch to cheer you up.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend.html?fb_ref=talk

Short and interesting video about theater

 This video lasts 6 minutes so it won’t take you long to watch it and tell me what you think about it :)

http://www.ted.com/talks/patsy_rodenburg_why_i_do_theater.html

Project Proposal: the rise and never-fall of David Bowie

This project is about a chameleon of music: David Bowie. As a musician, he has kept active during so many years in different countries. His experiments and changes in music genres have given him continuous success during decades. At the same time he has also branched out into the movie industry. It is hard to define him as any single type of performer.

In consequence, to obtain a view or something more about David Bowie, this project will prioritize some aspects of David Bowie. First of all, his music, including different genres that he has explored, as these are the most important things to define David Bowie as a pop and rock star. His music has made him famous around the world. Secondly, associated with his music, he has had such an uncommon career distinguished by different periods. His stage personas are key factors to know him as a performer. Besides, his travel around the world and cooperation with other famous musicians has played an important role in his career. As an addition, Bowie’s acting career is not as successful as his music, but it is still one of his active fields.

This project consists of discovering a lot of articles and documentaries if possible, to really get to know this English pop-rock star. And communication with other Bowie fans is also expected as a good way to know how other people view him and the reason they love him. This could be a complement to learning basic and objective facts about Bowie.

Shaking up education !

Shaking up education !: "Shaking up education !
Together, let's try to catch a glimpse at what the future of education will look like!"

This is Henri's project blog.... have a look... he explains:

"How I learnt (almost effortlessly) all the capital cities of Asia ! "

Any comments?
Have a good weekend.
james

PS:
When you post your project descriptions how about adding the label: "Projects"(as well as any others you think pertinent...)
 That will make it easy to sort the posts to just show the different projects you're working on.



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My projet : Improvisation

My project will be about improvisation.

I'm a musician and I play mostly jazz and free improvisation ("free" meaning that we can play any note we want at any time, without thinking about whether it will sound good or bad with the notes that the other musicians are playing. It is a kind of discussion between musicians (or non-musicians (see "SoundPainting")). So I'll be interested in learning more about improvisation in music.

But I'm also interested in how improvisation takes place in everything. There's improvisation in theater ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTqeVUpcK3k ), in movies (there's a film with Vincent Gallo where almost every dialogue was improvised, I'll try to remember the name), in art, in everyday life...

I'll try to see how one can improvise — how does a musician know he wants to play a C (Do) and not a C sharp (Do#) or a D (Re)? What can one do to guide these improvisations? (In jazz there's a written melody at the beginning of a tune, then there are written chords and we improvise on that base, in theater there is usually a given theme..) I'll also try to answer the question, "What concretely is improvisation?"  (John Zorn and other musicians describe improvisation as "instantaneous composition"...).

Julien

A french improviser : Sylvain Rifflet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXLsGJvcLso
 Here is an interesting video of a french saxophonist and clarinetist (Sylvain Rifflet).
He plays mainly his compositions with different band (one of his recent band  is called "Alphabet").
When you listen to interviews of him, he describes his music as "Jazz", but it seems quite different of what we usually associate with Jazz.
First the band composition is different (usually we can see a double bass, no violin ...), and the structure is different from usual (first they play a written part, then the guitarist improvises, then another written part, some improvisation, again some written part..).
While the written part sounds more like contemporary music than jazz, the improvisation part plays with jazz idioms and shows how well Sylvain Rifflet knows  the history of jazz and knows how to play with harmony.

What I think is interesting here, is the "french" sound in this tune. Especially the guitar improvisation sound a bit like other french improvisers ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwwm6A7m7mU Marc Ducret for example). I think it's kind of cool to see how french musician have developped their own interpretation of this american music, and how we can here that "french sound" in a lot of musician.

Julien

▶ What are the secrets of a great WikiTalk? Phil Waknell - WikiStage ESCP Europe - YouTube

▶ What are the secrets of a great WikiTalk? Phil Waknell - WikiStage ESCP Europe - YouTube:

You might enjoy this talk about giving talks!
What do you think? How about a comment?
(BTW he's slated to speak this coming Sunday at the WikiStage event at the ENCP.
Are you going to buy a ticket and go? I might see you there!)





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Comment on Yannick's "Simple Introduction to Cryptography" SIC

First, a little story...
I didn't write down the URL of Yannick's videos, but I did remember the name of the website: gobblin.se. So I went to gobblin.se, and clicked on an arbitrary video, and I get an URL like this: http://gobblin.se/u/c3c3dille/. So my guess was that, the "u" stands for "user", and c3c3dille is the user name. So I tried to replace c3c3dille by "yannick", and I didn't find anything. Then I replace it by "sic" (word Yannick used to abridge "Simple Introduction to Cryptography"), then I found what I was looking for...Not so hard to hack, is it?

For those of you who can't find his videos, here is the URL: http://gobblin.se/u/sic/

In general, I like Yannick's videos a lot. His text is well written, well organized, and easy for cryptography beginners to understand. As a student of Télécom ParisTech, I certainly have heard of many concepts of cryptography, but they faded out of my mind as time passed, so Yannick's videos have reminded me of those old stories, which is sweet...

But I think it would be nicer to have subtitles, since some words are hard for the general audience to understand (but he has taken care to add text like "RSA" and "AES", which was important). Secondly, as a Chinese speaker, I'm very sensitive to French accents in English... So, subtitles would be nice.

Funny moment: Yannick's bed is sometimes well made, sometimes a mess, LOL.