Juan Maclean – Feliz Casa (Ian Breno dub)
Matthew Burton – Open Your Soul
Nufrequency – Go that Deep (feat Shara Nelson – Kemistry Shack Music mix)
Bruce Springsteen – State Trooper (Trentemoller remix)
Manuel Tur – Carambole
Matthias Heilbronn – Brooklyn Sub (Soulflower dub beats)
Scope – This Rhythm (Nick Harris remix)
DJ Nkokhi & DJ Pex – Lest We Forget (Le Fixx dub remix)
Floppy Sounds – Late Night (Faux Real Mix)
Streetlife Originals – Lara’s Theme
MAASA – Sound FX
Franc Spangler – Forever & A Day
Pathfinders – Fine Point
The Juan Maclean – Feel So Good
Speakdeep – Trust Me (original mix)
Fish Go Deep ft Tracey K – A Dream (dub)
Matthew Burton – Natural Attraction (Jay Shepheard remix)
Bob Marley – Is This Love (Half Inched DnB Bootleg)

Download: http://www.sothisis.co.uk/music/purple/SoThisIs_Simon-DeepFreeze53-290910.mp3
106Mb @ 192 kbps

The Tornados – Telstar
Joe Meek and The Blue Men – Entry Of The Globbots
Kim Roberts – Love Can’t Wait
Diane and The Javelins – Heart and Soul
Joe Meek and The Blue Men – I Hear A New World
John Leyton – Johnny Remember Me
Joe Meek and The Blue Men – The Bublight
Pamela Blue – Hey There Stranger
Glenda Collins – Something I’ve Got To Tell You
The Tornados – Aqua Marina
The Blue Rondos – Little Baby
Heinz – Just Like Eddie
The Thunderbolts – Lost Planet
Screaming Lord Sutch – Jack The Ripper
Glenda Collins – I Lost My Heart At The Fairground
Joe Meek and The Blue Men – Valley Of No Return
The Moontrekkers – Dance Of The Vampires
The Honeycombs – Have I The Right?
The Tornados – Exodus

Every year, as the Summer draws to a close, a bunch of audio researchers, from both academia and industry, get together from across the world to share their latest ideas on, and developments in, digital audio effects. The fact that I’m often one of those researchers is one of the many reasons I love my job. This year The 13^th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (or DAFx10 for short) was held at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics at the University of Graz in Austria. For four days we heard presentations, key-note talks and saw posters discussing everything from transforming the emotional content of speech through to accurately modelling the shape of the plucking finger for a physical model of a guitar. We also ate and drank very well.

Although there were no jaw-dropping, standout moments this year, there was a lot of really good stuff. Axel Robel, head of the analysis-synthesis team at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris, which is probably the most widely known and respected music technology research institution, presented a new set of plugins called ircamtools. Although they’re not cheap (over £1k for the whole bundle!), the set incorporates all of their accumulated knowledge and expertise in sound transformation and acoustic space modelling. There’s some serious stuff in here for so-called ‘higher level’ transformations of sound (such as changing the age and gender of a voice or making a flute solo more breathy). Most impressive of all though was a demonstration of some ongoing work not yet included in these tools. He demonstrated taking a spoken phrase and changing the emotional content – from relaxed to angry, for example. The human ear is so used to hearing and extracting information from speech that it can soon spot if a voice has been tampered with, coming up with voice processors that sound remotely natural is very hard, especially when you are altering the sound so drastically. The transformations he played were superb – meaningful and plausible.

There’s been a lot of focus in the last couple of years on using graphics cards for audio processing. Graphics cards (GPU) are very good at parallel processing (most CPUs can only process one thread at a time, although the emergence of dual, quad-core CPUs is changing this). This means that, if they can be adapted to use graphics processing instructions, then they can process many channels of audio simultaneously (in fact, at the Audio Engineering Society’s convention this Spring a GPU was shown running one million oscillators in real-time. Yup, one million). At DAFx the use of GPUs for filtering and room modelling was demonstrated. Amazingly, for filtering tasks it is not the GPU itself but the speed at which hundreds of channels of audio can be transferred to and from it via the PCI-express bus which limits what can be done. Other big areas included the simulation of guitar amplifiers by modelling the behaviour of the individual analogue components – it’s actually very hard to get a laptop to imagine its a Marshall stack! I think my favourite gadget was a pair of ‘foley shoes’ – shoes containing sensors so that you played them by walking. That may seem like an odd instrument to play, but not if you’re foley artist in the baking heat of California who’s been asked to provide the footstep sound effects for a documentary on Scott of the Antarctic – just pop the shoes on and hook yourself up to the sampler! Favourite paper title? That has to go to “Virtual Auditory Myography of Timpani-playing Avatars” (animations of musical gesture to aid musicians playing together across the internet, to you and me). I was there to present some work on improving the separation between frequency and amplitude information in cross-synthesis (aka vocoding) and played some examples of how frequency shaping (using Christopher Penrose’ “Shapee” algorithm) could be improved.

We always get well looked after and entertained. One evening we travelled over to The Mumuth, a brand new concert venue with a stunning rig for electroacoustic replay – a massive array of loudspeakers which can be individually remotely positioned. The standout piece of the evening was Natasha Barrett’s “Reality and Secrets No. 1”. Whilst the other composers had produced some interesting sounds on the rig, she is much more able to create a sense of actual objects moving around the space, objects that obey the laws of physics and are entirely real but you just can’t see them – children played around us, enormous chains were hauled above our heads and wisps of cello melody blew though us like bits of paper in the wind. She is a serious talent, someone with complete control over the tools she’s using to create convincing and involving music. Chatting to others after the concert it seems she smashes it pretty much everywhere she goes and she’d brought the house down at the recent Ambisonics symposium too. You can hear a binaural (surround sound via headphones) rendition of the piece at her website (www.natashabarrett.org). Another evening was spent in the city’s art gallery, for a private viewing of an exhibition called “The Human Condition” – not an amazing collection but some standout pieces including a beautiful short film, “Per Speculum” by Adrian Paci.

All in all a great week – although there was nothing this year that was totally new, there’s been a lot of consolidation in audio processing – making the results more believable and usable, and using new computing hardware in ways that allow more processors to run faster and better. Next year the conference moves to IRCAM in Paris, a place that I’ve dreamed about going to ever since I was a teenager watching documentaries on it, so I’ll definitely be going along. The year after that, it comes to us in York. No pressure, then.

http://dafx10.iem.at/

Harold Budd – Queen of Cydonia
Good Old Neon – Republic
The Beaufort Scale – Raytripper (Irresistible Force mix)
Bonobo – The Keeper
International Observer – Freyburg Place Mat
Ras Amerlock – Further East (version)
Peace Orchestra – Who am I (Broken Reform remix)
Daisuke Tanabe feat. Monday Michiru – No Answer
Monsters of Folk – His Master’s Voice
Gil Scott Heron – I’m New Here
Mick Ronson – Stone Love
Marc Doudin – Breather
n – Retrospection
Loner – Light Through Curtains
Minke – Wonderful
Bobbie Gentry – You’ve Made Me So Very Happy
The Beatles – I’ve Got A Feeling
Cinematic Orchestra – The Man With The Movie Camera
Sia – Little Black Sandals
The Mavis Project feat Cherilyn McNeill – 4.14
Weatherman – Gaelic For Beginners
Alucidnation – Widescreen View
All India Radio – Solstice
Animat – Throwing Shapes
+ bonus track:
Les Paul & Mary Ford – Bye Bye Blues

Paper Music Issue #1 – Downtime (Flash Atkins Nu Disco)
Roberto Rodriguez – Low Point
Audio Soul Project – New Plateau (Joeski dub)
Nick Holder – Time (instrumental dub)
Bizarre Inc. – Love In Motion (Underground Dub)
2020 Soundsystem – Ocean (Jacksonville remix)
Ian Pooley – Quatro
Plastic Avengers – Unkle Toms
Silver City – Elastic
Fish Go Deep – Indian Summer
Robbie Moroder – 12 Cascabeles (feat Oriol Farre, Kato Gimenez & Luis Vazquez)
KOT – Simon Says Bounce
Brothers Vibe – Alone
Manuel Tur – Stomp Your Feet
Andre Crom & Luca Doobie – Ebony
Speakdeep – Trust Me (Jimmy & Fer Ferrari Deep Class Remix)
The Rah Band – Messages From The Stars (Atjazz remix)
Ethyl & Flori – Lenox Ave
Maasa – Walking On The Moon

Download: http://www.sothisis.co.uk/music/purple/SoThisIs_Simon-DeepFreeze52-150910.mp3
105Mb @ 192 kbps

Download here

Basement Freaks / Jam In The Jungle (feat MC Coppa) (Parker Remix)
Emmanuel / Flirtin’ (feat Terri Walker & Rodney P)
Nancy Wilson / I’m in Love (Mark Wayward Edit)
Jill Scott / Hate On Me (VeeKay Remix)
The Upstarts / Trouble
Kero One / Check The Blueprints (Japanese 12″ Remix)
Aloe Blacc / I Need A Dollar
Nas / Nas Is Like
Emmanuel / Heat (feat Mystro)
Marc Hype & Jim Dunloop / Predominant (feat. Mr Lif)
Smov & Dedy Dread / No Diggin’
Stickybuds / Come Together Lovers Haters
D-Funk / For What It’s Worth
Def Cut / B-Boy Stance
Slow Motion Replay / Think Better
Big M / California Soul
Funktomas / Shake Shot
The Funky Spanking / Sgt Peppa
Rye Rye / Bang feat MIA (Prince of Ballard Remix)
International Observer / London Dub
Billy Boyo / One Spliff A Day
Resonators / Sweet Dub Affair
King Tubby / Bag A Wire Dub
Massive Attack vs Mad Professor / Cool Monsoon (Weather Storm Dub)
Dawn Penn / Love Dub (Chris Coco Mix)
Dub Kweli / Words High
Ewan Hoozami / Poppycock
Dpek / Asleep Near You
Yaw / Where Would You Be?
Seu Jorge and Almaz / Everybody Loves The Sunshine

This Thursday (16th September) sees us embarking on a brand new (and long overdue!) show focusing on the sounds of hip-hop.  In the 30 or so years since its inception the genre has evolved and grown into a cultural phenomenon, its reach becoming worldwide and moving beyond just music, inspiring film, comedy, art, literature and even clothing.  As such, it really is about time we gave it a dedicated outlet on the station!

Obviously, as a radio station we can only really view hip-hop through the prism of the music, so every month from now on: that’s exactly what we’ll be doing.  Each show gives a different guest DJ the opportunity to dig deep into their record collections and put forward their own personal selection of hip-hop favourites.  You might hear crackly old Bronx rap, electro-infused b-boy breaks, lairy gangsta rhymes, 90s boom bap, laidback jazzy recliners, loud London grime, dubby Bristol riddums…and everything/anything in between.

Each show will only be an hour long, so we’re expecting a quality selection from each guest DJ every month – there really is no room for filler (especially considering the aforementioned lifespan/diversity of the genre).  Some DJs will play a broad selection, others may want to focus on a particular sound/style/producer/geographical scene/era.  It’s all down to whoever’s guesting…

…and that’s where you come in.  As ever, we’re looking for people to step up to the ones and twos and bring their own choice to our airwaves.  As much as we want quality, that quality is obviously subjective and it’s all about giving you the outlet to show us what you think hip-hop’s greatest contributions to music have been over the last few decades.

Reckon you’re up to it? Then head on over to the Hip To The Hop sign-up thread on the forum and tag your name up next to a date.

Fr-fr-fr-freesssssshhhhhh!

Purple Radio has once again picked up the gauntlet and entered the Internet Radio Awards 2010.

The Internet Radio Awards has been set up to provide a place where internet radio stations can compete against others to reach the coveted award titles. Each year, the listeners will vote for their favourite internet radio station and help that station reach the top spot.

Thanks to your help we nabbed the top spot last year – can you help us do it again?

To vote for us simply click on the image below… You can submit a vote once a week so don’t forget to keep voting!

If you got to this page from a voting link elsewhere, apologies for making you double click
- unfortunately the click does need to come from this site to be counted!