Cher And Cher A Like X-Factor Adopt Auto-Tune for 2010

The X-factor frequently produces lowest common denominator pop acts such as (long live the king of the charts) Joe McElderry, but shouldn't we have a chance to judge for ourselves as to the merits of the participants? As some times something worth while does appear.



(Gamu Nhengu's audition on the first X-factor of the year which has received controversy for having auto tune applied to it.)

Even though i am not keen on acts spawned from shows such as x-factor and alike it is true that, once in a while, an act with staying power and heaven forbid even critical merit is uncovered though these competitions. As a case in point i look suggest that Will Young who's break came x-factors older brother Pop Idol and has subsequently carved out a long and acclaimed career, and to a lesser degree acts such as Leona Lewis or Alexander Burke (who i am sure are really the same person, but any way) have also made a place for themselves in the music industry.

By adding auto tune to the vocals of contestants auditions i feel the potential Will Young's and Lenoa Lewis', who could potentially have long lasting careers as a result of their first few performance, are being robbed of the opportunity to exhibit their talents in comparison to other contestants. And we are left with performances which take their musicality from modern post-production techniques which can now be implemented on the fly.

On another note, although we are all aware that the out come of these competitions is heavily orchestrated by the relevant production teams, it also prevents viewers from making an informed decision as to the skill of the contestant.

It is true that nearly all music in the charts at the moment has been auto tuned to some degree and todays audience is perhaps unconsciously used to it's presence but these are either artistic or record label decisions for a final product which is ultimately sold. Perhaps some people may see auto-tune as an intrinsic part of their act as might be said of T-Pain or Cher's track "Believe", which are now both synonymous with auto-tune, but shouldn't these people be persuaded to make it known to the public before hand or otherwise try out for Britons Got Talent rather than the X-factor which is first and foremost a singing competition.

Hopefully in light of the subsequent furore since the broadcast of X-Factors first episode of the 2010 series the producers will have chosen to drop auto-tune from their competitions. Especially the Auditions.



(T-pain and Ellen demonstrate auto-tune in it's most drastic form)

Alejandro Cover by me nd eric

 Alejandro (Lady Gaga Cover) by Piccco

Delphic at Evolution.

As a massive Delphic fan i was really excited to get the opportunity to see them at Evolution Festival this year, not only this, but i got to photograph them for Ballad Of.  The electro/guitar rock outfit really pulled the crowds and really showed me why i fell in love with them when they broke onto the scene 6 months ago. It really it so fantastic to see an act like this cut it live as well as in the studio.

Like you would expect Paolo Nutini, Ellie Goulding and Calvin Harris were amazing but the acts that really caught me off guard were Eskimo Twins and Benga. If you get the chance to see either of these guys live your in for a treat.

Look out for my photos from the weekend in Ballad Of magazine. You can pick up the mag from Harrods, Selfridges, Tate Modern and other good stores.

Check out the website here

Or my website here

Ballad Of Magazine

what?

Ballad was born out of frustration. Frustration and a few dirty beers. We love art, we love pretty, we love edgy, new, intelligent, retro and informed creativity, and we wanted to see more of it… Ballad Of… is a community of emerging and exciting artists with the shared goal of collaborating to produce outstanding work for publication, portfolios and events.
Balladof.co.uk is the heart of everything we’ve got going on. Everything that we love, do and find flows through it. Ballad Of… in print is published bi annually, and Ballad Of…Presents holds regular events, exhibitions and collaborations. It’s all about getting what we love, seen. And it’s all about you lot getting involved.

where?

We are stocked in the following… RD Franks,Jumbo Records (Leeds), The Tate Modern, Compton News, Selfridges, Harrods (Waterstones), Terrys News Stand, Rococo, Lauries, M2 (Covent Garden), Press Bureau, Magma (Covent Garden), Artswords Bookshop (Shoreditch), Soho Original.

who?

Ballad Of was founded by Lindsey & Claire (ballad@balladof.co.uk). The magazine design is iamanoctopus (erd@iamanoctopus.co.uk), the online editor is Olly (olly@balladof.co.uk), the advertising sales director is Simon (07836322711 – simon@balladof.co.uk), Camille is Music Editor (Camille.music@balladof.co.uk) and Yasmine (Yasmine.events@balladof.co.uk) is Events & PR.

Final installation

For the Northumbria University Viusal Arts Degree Show i am doing an installation which is made up of a sound scape in a corridor space that leads you towards an installation. piece situated around the corner. The audio track is complete as well as installing the speaker system and all that remains is the final touches to the installation.

Im not going to give away any more about the installation or the audio track as this would jeopardize the conceptual framework of the work, so you'll just have to come to the exhibition.

Others exhibiting include Heather Bray, Alex Harper, Fergus Newlands, Dean Charlton, Matt Varger, Matt Varger and Claire Cummings.

Information about the show can be found Here, and you can find out more about my practice on my website at www.christopherrichards.info

Northumbria Visual Arts Degree Show 2010

Special Preview: 11 June 2010
Exhibition: 12 June - 25 June 2010
The exhibition is the culmination of undergraduate studies for 2010 and, as in previous years, the exhibition will demonstrate an extremely high level of creative achievement with each student cultivating an individual practice that is distinctively their own, and that reflects the diversity of contemporary ideas and culture.

The Visual Arts Degree Show provides graduating students with an opportunity to showcase their work before embarking on careers in the arts and creative industries. Through their individual art works, our graduates demonstrate original and innovative approaches to art practice.

The event is open to staff, current and future students as well as the general public, enabling all visitors to view the new generation of artists as they make their distinctive mark on contemporary ideas and culture.

This popular event, which is eagerly awaited each year, attracts hundreds of visitors.

In 2010 the Visual Arts Degree Show will exhibit over 150 new art works by 70 artists and it is an ideal opportunity to wish our graduates every success in their future careers.

Save the date as this exhibition should not to be missed!

Gallery North, Squires Building and Squires Annexe,
School of Arts & Social Sciences,
Northumbria University,
Sandyford Road,
Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 8ST
Tel: +44 (0) 191 243 7222

For a little of what to expect check out the vid below:

Oh Newcastl, you precious little gem.

Nothing makes me smile more than watching drunks in the centre of newcastle, this guy was serious entertainment while i waited for my bus home after a day in leeds.

enjoy.

Artificiel: POWEr

POWEr, brought to us Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy, is an sensory explosion fueled with visceral electric energy. This experimental music display combines the sheer excitement of seeing energy jump through free space with a display which captures it's aesthetic beauty.

The range of emotion which Burton and Roy are able to produce by playing their tesla-coil is quite astounding, from the sheer shock factor of electricity cracking as jumps through the air, with it's incredible percussive element, to it's strangely melodic buzzing. The paradox this leaves us in is quite profound.

Although incredibly exciting, I was surprised to find that POWEr was capable of engaging the audience for a full 30 minuets. The use of high speed cameras and a high quality visual display created from these images makes the show work on many levels.

-Build your own teslacoil here
-Learn more about Nicholas Tesla here
-Visit Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy's Artificiel site here
-Take a look at POWEr below or search you tube for other tesla coil music here

What is Your Top 5 Podcasts?

I wanna know what people are listening to/watching on their way to work or during those precious moments when you just get to chill with a coffee. These are my favorite intellectual yet digestible podcasts, in order of preference:

1. Podictionary 

- Charles Hodson's brilliantly traces the history of a word a day in the most engaging manner. It's hard not to be seduced by his subtle humor and beautifully crafted etymological investigation, especially when you take into account the depth of knowledge and the sheer amount of research needed to bring these to our ipod day in day out. For Free! 

A brilliant new feature of this podcast is the fact that you can choose to digest it as word a day or 5 words in succession at the end of each week. Great if you have a short attention span or if you've got a bit more time to kill than usual.

2. Friday Night Comedy from Radio 4 

- To those who are fans of Radio 4's Comedy Night this needs no introduction. If your like me and hardly ever listen to the radio any more in it's previous guises it's great to be able to get all the best bits delivered straight to your ipod and listen at your own pleasure. For those who arn't as familiar it has Sandy Toksvig in the chair of The News Quiz and Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis in control of The Now Show. It's brought to us weekly and is consistently brilliant.

3. Philosophy Bites

- Now heres a tricky one, it so easily could have been at the top of my list if it didn't depend on who Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds get into talk. At it's best it is an outstanding portal into the daunting world of philosophy but on occasions it can quickly meander into a big pile of pointless. My favorite guests have included A.C Grayling and Onora O'neill who both benefitted from Nigel Warburton's interviewing technique. 

It must be noted that the shining glory of this podcast is how Nigel Warburton filters the conversation of his guests, which is often saturated in intellectual jargon, and delivers it to the audience in a more understandable form without being condescending. Quite the feat.

4. Tate Shots

- The only Vodcast to make it into my short list because on the whole im not a fan of using the small screen on my phone, but when your looking into the world of a visual artist it helps to see what they're talking about. 

Being produced by the people at Tate your guaranteed the biggest names in the art world and every once in a while they dig out some real treasures that you might not have Heard of otherwise. Usually lacks a little in content but it can really depend on what your looking for art-wise.

5. Philosophy The Classics

Another one from Nigel Warburton and David Edmunds. This time it's these guys are presenting some of the key figures in western philosophy in their trademark way of presenting heavy weight concepts in a  understandable manner. If you really want the comprehensive guide your best getting the accompanying book, Philosophy The Classics, which is a fantastic read and handy reference tool.

If you'd like to get any of these podcasts or just find out more follow the links above or search for them in your itunes.

Sensory Void........

All this talk about the sleep cycle app has reminded me of a talk given by Dr Michael Hastings at The Centre for Life Newcastle about circadian rhythms i.e. our natural sleep cycles. This was part of Newcastle's brilliant science festival which happens every March. Sadly i dont think he covered what alcohol could potentially do to our sleep cycles.



Dr Michael Hastings mentioned an experiment devised and carried out by Michel Siffre where he emersed himself in a sensory void as to find out if our body is programmed to synchronize with the night day cycle or if we use sensory clue such as sunlight. The sensory void he chose to use was a cave, which he spent an incredible 63 days. In an interview with Siffre he mentions how his perception of time was severely altered during his stay in the cave:

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted an experiment in which she showed people a filmed scene of a bank robbery and asked them to estimate its duration. They overestimated by 500 percent. It seems that our subjective experience of time is highly variable. In the absence of clocks, how did you feel time’s passage?  

There was a very large perturbation in my sense of time. I descended into the cave on July 16 and was planning finish the experiment on September 14. When my surface team notified me that the day had finally arrived, I thought that it was only August 20. I believed I still had another month to spend in the cave. My psychological time had compressed by a factor of two. 

You can read the interview or find out more about Michel Siffre by following one of the links below.

Interview - From those guys at cabinet magazine
Wikki - General information about the guy

Out For The Count.

If any ones familiar with the iphone's sleep cycle alarm clock i thought they might be interested to see what happened to me the first night i used it.

Having bought the app i miraculously still managed to plug my phone in an position it so as to use the app on the first night i had it. Even tho i had been out to The Other Rooms, a club in Newcastle Upon Tyne, and carried on drinking late into the night. The Hawk eyes amongst you may have already noticed that i didn't get to sleep until 7am.

Any way, i thought i'd share the statistics from that night as i think it's interesting to note how drastic surprisingly little i moved until about 9.15 where i suddenly became really restless. Perhaps someone out there has some idea as to what the alcohol did to me during my sleep?

Get the App here

Art Review opens up to radio.

Lend your ears to Art Reviews new Radio series:

http://www.artreview.com/page/page/show?id=1474022:Page:1062112
"In the first of a new series for ArtReview, artist Charlie Woolley takes his Radio Show to New York. In this episode he is out and about in the city, talking to Kathy Grayson of Deitch Projects and artist, critic and art historian Svetlana Alpers."


If you want to find out more about Kathy Grayson go to http://www.deitch.com and the writings of Svetlana Alpers books can be found at www.amazon.com

Haroon Mirza - Sheffield Based Artist

Haroon is a prolific young artist that often uses iconography from the music industry/world of sound production, sounds cliche but its not. His work really sums up what great installation should be and like i fluttered over before he is interested in the role audio in society, which ticks all the right boxes with me. All considered its not surprising that he has had an amazing amount of press recently in magazines such as Art Review, a-n magazine and NY Arts.

His webiste is well worth a look at:
http://www.clickfolio.com/haroon/

Beyond crossed senses in synaesthesia

This is a post i stole from one of my favorite blogs mindhacks.com

Cognitive Daily coversa super-elegant study that helps us understand whethersynaesthesia is really just a case of 'crossed senses' or whether the perceptual blending effect requires the person to have processed some of the meaning of the triggering experience.

The traditional explanation of most types of synaesthesia is that the brain's sensory areas are overly connected, so activation of one sense triggers activity in another area which causes the experience. However, there has been some recent evidence that synaesthesia doesn't work purely at this basic sensory level.

For example, a recent study by neuropsychologist Jamie Ward and colleaguesreported that letter-colour synaesthetes needed to be concentrating on the letters to trigger colours - seeing them 'out of the corner of the eye' didn't work - suggesting there must be some involvement of focus and concentration and not just a reliance on incoming sensory information.

To test the idea further, it would be ideal to be able to separate out experiences where we process just sensory information and experiences where we also understand meaning but as we tend to deal with both at once, this is not easy to do.

But this new study managed to do exactly this in people with colour-speech synaesthesia, where affected people experience colours when they hear specific words, using a perceptual illusion called the McGurk effect.

It's an intriguing effect that you can see in action on the Cognitive Daily page, but essentially, it shows that seeing someone mouth a word affects what we hear, so if we are played the syllable 'gah', but see someone mouthing 'bah', the brain makes a compromise and we experience hearing the syllable 'dah'.

So the effect is a perfect tool to separate out sensory information and meaning, because the researchers can play exactly the same sound but change what word the participants hear simply by showing clips of people mouthing different words.

If colour-speech synaesthesia works only through crossed-senses then the McGurk effect should make no difference to the colours because the exact same sound is played each time, but if this form of synaesthesia is triggered by meaning, the colours should differ because the McGurk effect changes which words are perceived and understood, despite the identical sound.

This is exactly what the researchers found, providing additional evidence that synaesthesia is not just a sensory confusion, it is based in how the brain understands meaning.

It's an incredibly elegant study and the Cognitive Daily piece covers it equally as elegantly.

Link to CogDaily on 'Synesthesia and the McGurk effect'.
Link to PubMed entry for study.
pdf of study full text.

Nadine Shah @ o2 Newcastle

Nadine Shar was amazing last night at the o2 Accademy. If you get to chance to see her dont miss out because she's an astounding new tallent. If you'd like to her her music you can at:

 http://www.myspace.com/nadineshah

and her tour with Shakespear Sister continues up and down the contry. Take a look at the dates (on the MySpace) and see if you can make it to any of the shows. You wont regret it.

My new website up and running.

http://www.wix.com/piccco1/WebSite1-2

Northumbria Degree show!

Visual Arts Degree Show - Undergraduate
Dates: 11.06.10 - 25.06.10

The Visual Arts Degree Show presents the work of BA (Hons) Fine Art and BA (Hons) Contemporary Photographic Practice graduates.

The exhibition is the culmination of undergraduate studies for 2010 and, as in previous years, the exhibition will demonstrate an extremely high level of creative achievement with each student cultivating an individual practice that is distinctively their own, and that reflects the diversity of contemporary ideas and culture.

The Visual Arts Degree Show provides graduating students with an opportunity to showcase their work before embarking on careers in the arts and creative industries. Through their individual art works, our graduates demonstrate original and innovative approaches to art practice.

The event is open to staff, current and future students as well as the general public, enabling all visitors to view the new generation of artists as they make their distinctive mark on contemporary ideas and culture.

This popular event, which is eagerly awaited each year, attracts hundreds of visitors.

In 2010 the Visual Arts Degree Show will exhibit over 150 new art works by 70 artists and it is an ideal opportunity to wish our graduates every success in their future careers.

Save the date as this exhibition should not to be missed!


Image: Penny Grennan, graduate 2009, BA (Hons) Fine Art.

Exhibition Tonight!!

Between Us And This

April 17th-18th

Showroom at Curtis Mayfield House
formerly known as Globe Gallery
Carliol Square
East Pilgrim Street
NE1 6UF

An exciting selection of upcoming artists presenting new work in a variety of media.
The exhibition boasts an array of work over two floors in the Showroom at Curtis Mayfield House.

Artists involved include Rory Biddulph, Thomas Whittle, Theodore Harper-Davis, Robbie Hudson, Paul Kotter, Shona Macpherson, David Teager-Portman, Emily Harper, Fiona Morris, Cliodhna Murphy, Josephine Sutton.
With additional curatorial input from Denise Kwan.

Please join us for a private viewing on Friday 16th of April at 8PM.
Further more we invite you to an open discussion of the work and exhibition on Sunday the 18th of April from 2PM until 6PM, accompanied with tea and biscuits.

blogging!

can we get it to appear in my site?

Lets get this blog started.x