Patenting the use of all episodic media on the Web might sound absurd, but the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted just such a patent, to a company called VoloMedia. It’s a significant issue, one that could threaten the freedom of all media distribution online. Wherever you are in the world, you can help.

Intellectual property law was created in order to protect genuine inventions and innovation from exploitation. But predatory patents, based on bogus claims and attempting to stake out broad rights, threaten to do just the opposite.

Here’s a new idea: fight back.

Lawyers are the heroes this time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s patent-busting project aims to take down unfair patents that threaten common-sense uses of technology. A number of these have applied to music and audio. The EFF has already won a big victory against what had been the worst offender – media giant Clear Channel actually successfully patented recording live shows. (No, really — recording a live gig, then burning them on the spot. The EFF was able to bust that patent.) The advocacy group also scored significant victories against patents on sending and receiving online streams and encoding media. (If someone thought they could patent your ears and charge you royalties for hearing, they probably would.)

Lawyers alone haven’t won these battles. The EFF’s clever twist is to crowd-source its case, by getting people like you to help the group document “prior art” – in plain English, to prove that something existed before the patent. (Without basic chronology, I could claim to have discovered electricity.)

In short, you can help save the freedom of online content.

The veil between the living and dead is growing thin, and I… uh, have some free music for you. Sorry, it turns out I don’t have a clever lead for this story, and my segue makes no sense. So let’s get to it!

Friend of the Site Liz McLean Knight aka Liz Revision aka Quantazelle of subVariant has put together a special, exclusive mix for CDM of 117-119 bpm musical goodness, excavated from the “_blippy” folder of sketches on her USB drive. Matt Moldover, who has been working on his CD-as-electronic-instrument album, lent his laptop. (Watch him assembling CDs in the video after the break.)

It’s all in celebration of a Halloweeen party Saturday night in Chicago, headlined by Josh Davis (BitShifter). Party ringleader Liz joins Josh on behalf of subVariant to represent the IDM-glitch-minimal-tech-house side of things, and Mr. Automatic (Front 312) and Onefiftyone (Chicago Workshop) will be joining in. If you’re in Chicago, this looks like the place to spend your Saturday. If, like me, you’re not, well, we have some music and videos for you to bring the party home.

Chicagoans:
Going.com Chicago event link + discount
Presale tickets on FractalSpin

And yes, while Josh is working on Game Boys in 8-bit, our CDM mix is fully 16-bit, baby! I’m telling you, 16-bit is totally the future.

Play this track:

Download MP3

Now, for a bit of Josh tearing it up in glorious 8 bits:

Record is now shipping, and the beta closed – and now is a perfect time to talk about learning.

Okay, let me explain something. Propellerhead doesn’t want Record to be called a “DAW,” for Digital Audio Workstation. I personally overcame my own distaste for the strange acronym today because, well, there’s not another good name for a related set of tools.

But I do think Record is different. Workstations are usually defined by being all-in-one environments, for hosting other third-party instruments and effects, and adding in additional features like notation and video scoring. Record is none of those things. You can even treat it like a virtual mixer or rack of processing tools and load it into your existing “DAW” of choice, or take something like Ableton Live and load it into Record for mastering.

But then, Record is the exception that proves the rule, isn’t it? Aggressively geared to be the anti-DAW, to avoid trying to be all things to all people, Record illustrates the variety of ways you can get your music making done.

We’ve had a good, healthy debate on this topic, so no reason to resurrect that. Instead, I have two pieces of news: one, Record is now actually shipping. Two, if you’re interested to learn how to use it, or just to see what they’ve done, the Props have assembled a terrific set of learning resources. For beginners, “Record U” promises to cover the basics of recording tasks as well as the software. (So far, the first episode, “Recording Guitar,” is available.) You can add that to lovely ReWire tutorials from the folks who developed the technology, and mini-tips on how to use the tools. Whatever you think of the software, it’s an exemplary learning site, just the kind of thing you’d hope developers would do.

Basics video
Record U
Tutorials Page
Micro Tutorials and iTunes podcast link

I’ve chosen my favorite so far. Love it or hate it, I think this illustrates some of the vision of Record. It makes moving tracks and devices as easy as racking up instruments and effects in Reason, and makes mixing and matching audio uncommonly easy. That could make Record a nice tool to have around for trying to take your pile of recordings and productions and turn them into finished tracks and albums. (A lot of this “love it or hate it” phenomenon seems to depend on your feelings about Reason, so Reason fans will also want to take a look at the Reason – Record integration video.)

For many, mobile technology and developing for the iPhone and the iPod touch is a fad and a Gold Rush. Good designers, though, take a longer view of how interaction can be expressive. And there are few people with a better sense of the big picture of small devices than Dr. Ge Wang. The co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule has a background that goes well beyond the latest Apple platform. Along with Perry Cook at Princeton, Ge Wang is the co-originator of ChucK, a real-time programming language for synthesis so efficient some people use it live onstage. (ChucK, as an open source project, now has a terrific team of people behind it.) ChucK is the sonic engine that powers Smule’s projects. Ge Wang also teaches at Stanford, working with students and fellow researchers to explore new ways of interacting with music technology.

Ge Wang joined me for a lengthy phone conversation recently. He really contextualized why the iPhone is important in the grand scheme of things, but also how the people at Smule and Stanford (and Princeton) can approach technology for musical interaction, focusing on what devices are rather than what they’re not.

(The audio here, believe it or not, is extensively edited – Ge Wang is that easy to talk to. I hope the next time it’s over beers rather than Skype.)

The full interview can be played below, or downloaded directly.

Play this track:

Download MP3 of the interview

Thanks to KORG and the Nano Series for their support of programming on createdigitalmusic.com.

Lastly: a video of the Smule team headquarters and playing around with Leaf Trombone for a Zelda duet!

More information:
The Mule Chronicles [Smule Blog]
http://smule.com/
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University

Previously, for more on Ge Wang and CCRMA:
Make:TV Meets Stanford Musical Inventors, Feedback Piano

Video + Audio Subscriptions, iTunes Podcast

CDM is now launching regular audio content on the artists and inventors we cover as part of our series CDM Sounds. You can subscribe (and review the podcast) via iTunes, where you’ll also find our new video series:

cdm Sounds Podcast [audio]
cdm TV [video]

Or using your software of choice, subscribe directly to RSS. (I like to follow podcasts with Banshee and Winamp this way.)

We’ve fixed some transcoding issues for iPod touch/iPhone on the video podcast. Please do test this and let us know if you have any issues on your software/hardware.