My new venture, Stems.cc, is taking its first humble steps. It is a site built around collaborative music making and remixing. A site that encourages openness in an industry plagued with protectiveness and copyrights. Because of the nature of Stems, all songs must be released under Creative Commons license. By the way, a stem, in musical vocabulary, is a group of instruments.

Anything dealing with music, other than listening to it, has challenges. Compared to a visual medium, music is a bit more niche activity. Everyone enjoys music, but there are less people who make music than people who draw or take photos. You can casually draw a doodle or take a photo, but it’s not as easy for anyone to just make music. Also, the file sizes when dealing with music are exponentially bigger; one minute of uncompressed audio is over 10 megabytes. The speeds of Internet connections and the cost of hosting has become more feasible to deal with large files, but it is still a pain to upload 100 megabytes of data that a song in stems form usually takes, though. Despite these challenges, I hope I’ll be able to build some kind of a community.

When developing Stems, 4chan founder Christopher Poole’s new site canv.as and their use of exploitables has been one source of inspiration. Someone posts a picture as a template and the community goes on wild and unpredictable tangents, like demonstrated with this blank-faced Charlie Brown. The aim of Stems is to provide something similar to this, but hopefully in a bit more professional manner.

There are three basic use cases I’ve envisioned:

1. Someone posts the stems to their completed song and allows the community to remix it or make songs inspired by some of its elements.
2. Someone posts a single stem, e.g. a guitar track on which the community collaboratively expands upon. One user adds a drum track, other sings some vocals and so on.
3. Someone posts a few random samples or found sounds and says “Make a track out of these sounds”

I hope to keep Stems as flexible a platform as possible, so the community can easily come up with different ways to use it. Maybe even calling the threads “songs” is a mistake when considering scenario 3.

My previous venture Chains.cc has currently a bit over 2500 users around the world and an iOS app is slowly under works, which will hopefully introduce Chains to a new crowd.

I was playing around in dropped-D tuning and the basic tune came out pretty painlessly. I also play an irish tin flute in the interludes. Semira sings beautifully as always and I’m really happy with the outcome.

Chain is very much in the development stage and will evolve rapidly.

It shares accounts with my previous app, Todo, so if you signed up for it, your login works with both apps. You can find it at siirre.com/chain.

“Your only job next is to not break the chain,” as Jerry says. “Don’t break the chain.”

The official post about the film can be found here. And below is the original song.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-ObsxZvEiM

Features include drag’n'drop sorting of todo items, expandable notes and an automatically saving notepad. It’s made with Ruby on Rails for those interested.

You can check out the app here (you must create an account).

This turned out to be a good decision, as the rubato tempo creates an interesting effect with the electronic elements. Usually electronic music has a fixed tempo, so the changing rhythm sounds unexpected and new. In fact, I think I liked it too much, because the beginning drags on a bit too long, maybe. No matter, it’s still pretty good, and this will probably be a technique I will study further.

Amazon released the third generation Kindle a while ago and I finally gathered up the courage to get one. After using it for a couple of days I’m positively surprised. Usually, I maintain an unfounded prejudice against digital over analog, but this time I’ll make an exception.

The first surprise came immediately after opening the package, when I saw the getting started tutorial on the screen. I thought it was a printed transparent sheet over the screen, as the device was turned off, but the way E Ink works is whatever you print on the screen stays there until you erase it, without consuming energy. It really looks printed on, instead of a screen.

I appreciate the fact that it’s technology that doesn’t feel like technology. It’s really natural to use and read, and the design is so neutral and boring that it doesn’t attract extra attention.

Electronic books seem to be in the same situation as digital music was years ago; The books have DRMs and they’re overpriced. eBooks are almost without exception more expensive than paperbacks and because they’re digital you can’t sell or give them away once you’ve read it. I hope that within a year publishers will realize that cutting the price and removing DRM will have a positive effect on sales.

Akateeminen Kirjakauppa has some readers for sale in Finland, but they are ugly and/or overpriced and their online store is horrible. Stockmann opened their new online store today, so hopefully Akateeminen will also be revamped soon. The biggest selling point for a Kindle is Amazon itself. They seem to be the only provider at the moment that is able to negotiate international rights for most of their books. Sony and B&N eBook stores, for example, are only available in the U.S.

I shot with my Pentax ME and Marko used his Hasselblad XPan. I wanted to use film cameras to get a casual feel to the photos, like they were shot by ordinary people, but still remain stylish enough to be used in advertising. The look is largely based on my personal snapshots and the handwritten, care-free typography by Jenni Juntunen plays an important part.

The print ads are comprised of short collaborative stories about Helsinki with thematically related pictures.

The campaign also contains two fridge magnet outdoor ads where people can arrange words that describe Helsinki. The magnets are free to take home with you. And if that wasn’t enough, we have a multi-user banner where five persons per banner can arrange virtual fridge magnets.

Fridge magnet outdoor ad

Fridge magnet multi-user banner

"For free" ad in stores around Helsinki

Post-it sticker ad

Marko hanging from the ground

Some of my photos allocated for this campaign