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Friday the 29th of March 2024 03:20:45 PM

November 14, 2007

Stumble It!Stumbling Upon Ambience

Filed under: Fun Stuff — Eric Ptak @ 1:50 am

About a month ago, I was poking around the internet, looking at various website and blogs. One thing that I noticed on a great number of blogs and sites were digg, StumbleUpon, reddit, del.icio.us, and other social networking/rating/bookmarking sites. Now, a few months back, I had a bad experience with digg. Well, not terribly bad, but frustrating. I put digg links on my site, and within a matter of a few days, almost all my bandwidth for the month was gone, and it was only the 10th of the month. You want to talk about pissed off? I didn’t mind the exposure, mind you, but when 1000 people look at one page on your site, and only one page, it’s a waste of time. When it happens over three days, and people are still averaging less than one page-view per visit, something is very wrong. So I got rid of the digg.

Anyway, I was looking at these different sites, and StumbleUpon intrigued me. You can install a toolbar into Firefox or IE, and by clicking a button, have new sites brought to you at random, based on your individual preferences. I was thinking, hey – what a cool way to surf the net, so I installed the toolbar. I’ve been seeing some pretty cool sites ever since.

Saturday night, I’m surfing a bit, and I Stumble Upon this photographer’s site – etienne-delorme.com. He’s apparently a French photographer who has put up on his site pictures of some cute models. I looked around his site for a while, admiring his craft and his skill in selecting beautiful women (man, do I wish I were a photographer of models!). The thing that intrigued me the most about his site was the little music player he has installed from zanorg.com, and the music that was playing. It was dreamy, kind of new age-ish, and the girl who was singing had a voice that simply pierced my soul like an arrow through an apple.

The artist was someone I had never heard of before – Astoe. Cool music, but who were they? Their website gives you nothing but “astoe . . . ” which is a whole lot of no help. Whois didn’t tell me a lot, except the chicks name who owns the web address. So I blingoed “astoe” and found them on music.download.com. It was the same three songs, but now I could download them and listen whenever I wanted. I also noticed that the band is considered “Ambient” music – a form of techno with new age, jazz, international, and classical flavorings.

A few weeks ago, I was searching for examples of ambient music, to go along with the midi files from Kyodai Mah Jongg, so I could fill out a disc and listen to the music at work. I had found a site with some horrible examples of the genre. low-budget experimental computer-generated music that sounded like it was produced by a fifth-grader on an Atari 800. I didn’t even bookmark the site, and I was ashamed that I had wasted my time downloading that garbage. nfortunately, I cannot get that fifteen minutes of my life back.

So here I am, and serendipitously, I hit the motherlode! I forgot completely about music.download.com. Thousands of mp3s, all for the taking. Sure, they are 192 bit-rate, but who is going to bitch about free? Not me. So I figured I’d download some examples. I kept downloading similar artists, based on the seelctions provided, and then downloaded similar artists to those, and downloaded similar artists to those . . . pretty soon, I had downloaded over three discs worth of music. Oops.

I wasn’t listening to any of it. I just wanted a wide variety of the genre, so I could make a determination of how good the music is, and which artists were the best, and not just Brian Eno and what was already out there in the “mainstream”. I then noticed a link on one of the artist’s pages where you could list all artists, and then on that page, I realized you could rank them by popularity. So I turned to downloading all the best-rated artists.

When I was done, I had filled up six blank discs with music – over fifty hours worth of music by several hundred artists. now, I was ready.

I’ve started listening to them. Some of the musicians, like astoe, are very good. Some of them are fair to middling, and some are really bad. Overall, most are decent and listenable. Some of the artists will make it to these pages, as I listen and figure out who’s who and what’s what. I even thought of getting software, and creating some of my own music. It’s a nice idea, but probably won’t happen. I barely have the time to do stuff now, and have so many projects on the back burner, it isn’t funny. It’d just be another thing that I wouldn’t have time to get a round tuit.

So go ahead, Stumble. Find new and interesting things, and enjoy. You never know what kind of pleasure it will bring you.

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