You might not know Laura Escudé’s name, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen her work. As a live show programmer, she’s collaborated with Kanye West, JAY-Z, Logic and Charli XCX. She’s programmed music for Cirque du Soleil and American Idol.
And through her company, Electronic Creatives, she manages an entire team of programmers and playback engineers that’s expanded her client base even further, to include such artists as Drake, The Weeknd, Pentatonix and Harry Styles.
As one of the pioneers in live show programming — especially the use of Ableton Live software, now widely regarded as the industry standard — Escudé has helped reshape how the concert industry uses electronic music and digital playback across virtually every genre of music.
Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence make music composition easier than ever – because a machine is doing half the work. Could computers soon go it alone?
Most recently, producer Baauer – who topped the US charts in 2012 with his viral track Harlem Shake – made Hate Me with Lil Miquela, an artificial digital Instagram avatar.
“The first computer-generated score, a string quartet called the Illiac Suite, was developed in 1957 by Lejaren Hiller (MIT), and was met with massive controversy among the classical community.”
“Fast forward to 1980, and after an insufferable bout of composer’s block, California music professor David Cope began building a computer that could read music from a database written in numerical code.”
“YouTube singing sensation Taryn Southern has constructed an LP composed and produced completely by AI using a reworking of Cope’s methods.”
“Southern uses an open source AI platform called Amper to input preferences such as genre, instrumentation, key and beats per minute. Amper is an artificially intelligent music composer founded by film composers Drew Silverstein, Sam Estes and Michael Hobe.”
Our beloved DJ instructor DJ Knife is certainly a Boston hero. For one, his Fresh Produce clubnight has brought countless of legends to town and for two, his “Strange Brew” mix CD series has lit up eardrums for thousands.
And now DigBoston, the city’s long-standing alternative weekly, has chosen to shine the light on Fresh Produce 6… his newest mix which was released in collaboration with Down the Road Brewing. (Ironically, using a recipe from the now-sober Knife).
It’s like playing a video game over and over again until you beat it and get it perfect. That’s the only way I can describe it. I’ll probably practice that full hour 30 times.
Mount Kimbie take the reigns of the DJ-kicks series with a 23 track mix that includes one of their own new exclusives. Out now, it’s a snapshot of exactly what the UK duo sound like in the club right now and is accompanied by a DJ-kicks tour that takes the pair to DJ and live dates all round the world.
