Great documentary on ARTE about the Life and Work of Hans Zimmer. German only…

Great summary at CDM of all the Music and Sound Nominees for this years Oscar.
Read the  whole post here.

Another reason to love TED – Benjamin Zander on music and passion:

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

Nice article on visualnews.com about the piano in modern music.

A fixture of both classical and modern music, the piano has been around since the early 1700s, and its predecessors, the harpsicord and clavichord, for much longer. Originally invented because it was able to produce more varied tones and volumes than what came before, it revolutionized music. However, it was only recently that the way a piano could be played was re-imagined, giving it far more tones… and in some cases, bringing into question whether it is even still a piano.

via [twitter]

Beautiful Opener for the Kurz und Schön Shortfilm Festival.

Production: Feedmee Design
Sounddesign: Loy production

Nice way to demonstrate the power of music and the way it affects our habits.

via [soundbrandingblog]

Impressive sculpture by Federico Diaz:

beginning on october 23, 2010, MASS MoCA in north adams massachusetts, will be showing fredrico diaz’s ‘geometric death frequency—141’, a sculpture made from 420,000 black spheres made and assembled by robotics. the final sculpture will measure 20 feet by 50 feet and sit in the courtyard of the museum. the installation is precisely crafted from robotics, milling and assembling the entire sculpture sphere by sphere, completely void of any human interaction. diaz developed this process for building on his own using CAD software and
manufacturing techniques along with pure data and algorithms based on particle physics. with this system each sculpture is completely untouched by human hands from concept to materialization.

via [designboom]

Congratulations to Markus Wagner and Markus Wipplinger!

Their project Bloadboad won the infoscreen award at the vienna content award 2010. I had the pleasure to score this beautiful stop-motion piece. You can find more information here.

Thanks to steff for the pic.

The austrian TV Broadcaster Servus TV is going to air two of my recent projects:

Free Solo
sunday | 12.09.2010 | 23:35 Uhr

Eiszeit: Reflektion einer Expedition
sunday | 26.09.2010 | 22:30 Uhr

I think of this project as being very much inspired and coming out of the techniques that I have developed and learned scoring classical music.  But learning to score and write music in the 21st century is already a primitive thing.  Electronics have been a part of it for a while with many composers.  I grew up listening to Philip Glass and The Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Steve Reich using tape loops in his pieces. In a way the definition of orchestration has different standards already.  At the same time, with the first project and this one, it’s music written for stereo headphones or a stereo speaker system.

via [CDM]