Latest news with #musicians
CTV News
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
National Youth Orchestra performing free shows in Waterloo ahead of national tour
The future of classical music was on display at Wilfrid Laurier University. CTV's Jeff Pickel takes a listen. The best classically trained young musicians from across Canada have set up residency in Waterloo this month. The National Youth Orchestra (NYO) of Canada, consisting of 91 musicians between the ages of 16 and 28, are using the Wilfrid Laurier University music faculty for rehearsals and as performance space. As part of their preparations for a national tour, the NYO musicians are putting on free shows throughout June and early July. This year the orchestra consists of several members with local connections. Manuel Galvez is a third-year music student at Wilfrid Laurier University. 'It's really nice to know that there's like-minded people, they're very passionate about what they do. They're very disciplined,' said Galvez, who plays the viola. Galvez and others look at the NYO as part of their path to a professional music career. 'There's a lot of connections to be made because you never know if the person you're sitting across from while you're eating lunch is going to be the future concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra,' said Galvez. Lauren Lee is a violinist from Kitchener, now attending the University of Toronto. 'It feels kind of new to me, seeing lots of talented musicians play together and the opportunity to watch everyone play in chamber and in orchestra,' Lee said. The Big Little Concert series runs until July 11th before the national tour begins on July 18th in Toronto.
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
A Hill to Die On - Frank McNally on celebrating the summer solstice at Tara
Even the great archaeologist George Eogan thought the monuments at Tara could be an 'anti-climax', although to people like him, they were 'quietly spectacular'. Visiting the hill for the solstice last weekend, I was reminded of what he meant by the first part, at least. Viewed from ground level, the Mound of the Hostages, King's Seat, and Cormac's House are not much to look at: just a series of grassy bumps and hollows. But their great antiquity exercises a magnetic pull, clearly, even on non-specialists. Hence the large crowd of new agers, old agers, and agers in between who gathered on the hill to witness the sun go down on the longest day of the year. Some had been there since dawn, or earlier. Beside a Meath County Council sign saying 'No Camping, by order', there were a dozen tents of various sizes. In front of one, a trio of musicians played traditional tunes. Up at the king's seat, meanwhile, a woman chanted religious songs in a language that may have been Sanskrit. READ MORE Most people, however, were just sitting quietly, on the bumps or on various parts of the west-facing side of the slope. It was not a vintage sunset, thanks in part to a bank of low cloud on the horizon. And the relative lack of spectacle, combined with the undramatic nature of the monuments, added a strangeness to the sight of so many people sitting on a hill, gazing west. They looked like the wind-watchers of whom a character in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman reminisces: 'People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are interweaved like ribbons at a wedding.' A round of applause rippled around the place at one point. It wasn't clear if it this was for the sun, or for the woman chanting. Maybe it was for a trick performed by one of the many dogs people had brought with them. While admiring the Mound of the Hostages earlier, I had stepped in a more recent mound of something, left by one of the four-legged visitors. 'I can tell you which one it was,' a sun-watcher who witnessed my misfortune said, offering tissues: 'His owner made a big show of looking for a plastic bag but he was only letting on.' Then the sun, although still 10 degrees above the horizon, sank fully behind the cloud, breaking the spell. It was like Meath going 10 points down with five minutes left in a football match. Suddenly, the locals were all heading for the exit, to beat the traffic. *** Somewhere among the babble of conversations at Tara on Saturday, the phrase 'prophesies of Jeremiah' floated towards me on the breeze. I had to look it up later to remind myself that Jeremiah was a Hebrew prophet of c.600 BC, who was indirectly responsible for one of the madder episodes in Tara's history. That was in 1899, when a bunch of eccentrics called the British Israelites started digging the hill up in search of the Ark of the Covenant. Among other things, Jeremiah foretold the Jews' Babylonian captivity, while also prophesying the rise of a New Jerusalem in a place unknown. For the British Israelites, or some of them, that place was Meath. It was even argued that the prophet had founded it himself, after relocating to Ireland and becoming high king. The funny thing is, the freelance excavators of Tara were Anglo-Saxon unionists and imperialists. It might have been preferable for them to find the Ark in England. But Tara had the right mix of history, myth, and monuments. Securing permission only from the landlord, they dug up a site known as the Rath of the Synods, over howls of protest from nationalists and conservation groups. Arthur Griffith and WB Yeats were among those who campaigned against the vandalism, until ordered off the land by a man with a rifle. Maud Gonne lit a bonfire the landlord had meant for the coronation of a new king, and sang A Nation Once Again around it, to his chagrin. Eventually, as criticism mounted, the diggers gave up in 1902. By a happy coincidence, Tara is the subject of an essay in the latest issue of Irish Heritage Studies, the annual research journal of the Office of Public Works, which landed in my postbox recently. The main subject is archaeologist R A S Macallister (1870 – 1950), who pioneered the proper study of the site in his decades as UCD professor of Celtic archaeology. A young Macallister was among the critics of the 1899 escapade, which he called a 'national calamity'. His work led eventually to a government and Maud Gonne-approved excavation of the Mound of the Hostages in the 1950s. That got the British Israelites excited again. But although the studies added to the bank of knowledge about Tara's ancient history, there was still no sign of an Ark.
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Music and artificial intelligence: ‘AI isn't just a new sound. It's a new infrastructure baked into our products and services'
Artificial intelligence creates a dilemma for musicians. On the one hand it could help them develop as artists; on the other, it could seriously damage their livelihoods. Both possibilities are evident in the ways musicians are already using technology, says Martin Clancy. He is the founder of AI:OK , an Irish initiative to promote the ethical use of artificial intelligence in the music industry. He splits AI tools into two categories. The first is generative, which through applications such as Suno and Udio , can create lyrics, melodies, vocals and even complete songs almost instantly, prompted by lyrical themes and music styles that users suggest. The second is complementary, which enhances musicians' work through tools for mixing, mastering, session-player emulation and stem separation (which splits a recorded song into vocals, guitar, drums and so on, enabling users to remove individual components of the track). These tools, Clancy says, 'are now standard in the creative workflow, especially for younger or independent artists. Apple's Logic Pro is a digital audio workstation that comes with four AI-powered session players and stem separation, and is free on all new Mac computers. BandLab , which is used by over 100 million people, opens with a Create a Song with AI button. Another tool, Voice-Swap , allows producers to legally re-sing demos using approved, royalty-sharing artist voice models.' READ MORE Suno and Udio have gained tens of millions of users in the past 18 months, Clancy says. 'That's because the subscription model is cheap – for about $10 per month, Suno offers the user the potential to create 500 complete songs.' What does this fully AI-generated music sound like? One example is Carolina-O, an Udio-created homage to the writer Ernest Hemingway . Another is Verknallt in einen Talahon, which was the first AI-generated song to become a hit in Germany (where its problematic lyrics made a lot of people 'feel somewhat queasy', according to one report). AI systems create music by automatically extracting vast amounts of musical data from websites and other online sources – known as scraping – then analysing and emulating it. Ethically speaking, they should emulate other people's music only with consent from licensed or self-owned material. 'The artist or rights holder should be credited and paid, and the AI use should be disclosed to listeners,' Clancy says. 'Unethical use of AI would be music which is patterned or trained on scraped catalogues and publicly available data without permission,' says Clancy, who began his long career in music as a member of the band In Tua Nua in the 1980s. Artists now using generative AI in an ethical way include Holly Herndon , a Berlin-based American composer who creates music using Max , a visual programming language that lets users create customised instruments and vocal processes. Taryn Southern created her album I Am AI using several artificial-intelligence-based tools. The veteran musician and producer Brian Eno 's approach to creativity, Clancy says, is driven by curiosity and a commitment to experimentation. Are any Irish musicians following Eno's lead? 'There is a noticeable gap in artists doing anything interesting with this,' Clancy says. 'That's surprising and concerning, but it could be a 1975 moment, like it was before punk rock came along to shake things up. So far I'm not seeing it happening, yet I sense people are beginning to realise the possibilities.' Eno coined the term 'generative music', says Clancy. 'But he wasn't speaking about it in terms of AI systems – more in the areas of chance, randomness and order disarray. He views the recording studio as a musical instrument, as opposed to how most of us see it, as a technological processing plant.' Eno, Herndon and Southern use AI in principled and intelligent ways, valuing consent, creativity and copyright, Clancy says. Other creations have taken a different route, including Heart on My Sleeve, an AI-generated song from April 2023 that was written and produced by a TikTok user known only as Ghostwriter977 and features vocals that sound remarkably similar to Drake and the Weeknd . Both artists are hugely popular: the former has sold more digital singles in the US than any other artist; the latter set a record in 2024 as the artist with the most songs to have more than a billion streams on Spotify. Universal Music Group, to whose Republic Records label Drake and the Weeknd are signed, filed a takedown notice with multiple online platforms within two weeks of Heart on My Sleeve's release – by then the song was already a sizeable viral success, with more than 600,000 streams on Spotify, 275,000 views on YouTube and 15 million views on TikTok. For every use of technology that prompts a moral or legal dilemma, there is another with a more welcome outcome, such as the 'Abbatars' that stand in for the Swedish pop stars at the Abba Voyage show in London. The 3D projections of Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad are generated using motion-capture and machine-learning processes created by Industrial Light & Magic . The visual-effects company, which was founded by the film-maker George Lucas in 1975, put the four musicians in motion-capture suits, then used 160 cameras to film their movements and facial expressions. It fed its five weeks of data into a series of processing and modelling systems to create the digital (and de-aged) versions of the band in their 1979 heyday. Abba Voyage, which cost about €165 million to create (and also involved the work of 140 animators at Industrial Light & Magic), is a playful and transparent development of the live-concert experience, Clancy says. 'The technology dazzles but the event is firmly in service of nostalgia and showmanship, and it also employs a 10-piece live band. It's a recent example of how the marriage of live music and AI can work.' Clancy also points to virtual concerts by late artists such as Tupac Shakur, at Coachella in 2012, and the more recent hologram-generated shows featuring visualisations of Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston and Elvis Presley as further examples of AI establishing itself in popular culture. Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of our daily lives, Clancy says. 'AI isn't just a new sound,' he says. 'It's a new infrastructure that is baked into pretty much all forms of our products and services, which makes it intuitively personal.' Our smartphones are crammed with forms of AI that we already take for granted, such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, predictive text, facial recognition, customer-service chatbots, banking apps and Google Maps. (Possibly less usefully, Mercedes-Benz and have developed Sound Drive , an AI-powered in-car entertainment system that will remix your tunes and create 'musical expressions' of your acceleration, braking and steering.) 'The idea of human beings viewing AI technology as, possibly, an existential threat to their existing work, but also saying, 'Let's do something interesting with it,' is important,' Clancy says. 'That, however, takes an imaginative leap.' This won't happen of its own accord. Clancy hopes that AI:OK's 'literacy programme', a first-step educational tool based on the recommendations of the Government's Irish Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council, will, for example, help to create accelerator programmes to provide artificial-intelligence start-ups with funding, resources and mentoring. Clancy understands why some people are apprehensive about artificial intelligence. 'But the one thing you can't do is to think you can stop it,' he says. 'The positive argument, the positive message, is that AI is just a new technological development. It's business as usual, so don't worry.'
CTV News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony announces return with new season, ‘Resurrection'
The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony is ready for their encore as they announce their big return to performing. — The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony is ready for their encore as they announce their big return to performing. The organization was left in turmoil after the 2023/2024 season was abruptly cancelled. An email sent to patrons at the time cited financial challenges and claimed it was 'simply not feasible to continue with our previously planned performances.' Soon after, the symphony filed for bankruptcy. The decision kicked off months of uncertainty for fans and musicians alike. Some people launched fundraisers to save the beloved arts institution, while other components of the symphony, like the youth orchestra, found new ways to keep the music going. Some musicians refused to fall silent and played more intimate concerts at St. Matthews Centre in Kitchener. But a release on Tuesday announced the symphony was being revived with a 2025/2026 season. 'We cannot overstate our gratitude to the musicians of the KWS who have continued to perform at St. Matthews Centre this past season,' Bill Poole, chair of the KWS Board of Directors, said in the release. 'But we are now ready for the KWS itself to return with a full season of performances. Our orchestra is back: strengthened in spirit, and profoundly grateful for the community that has stood by us.' The new season is being called 'Resurrection.' Officials said the symphony will expand into new performance spaces, instead of returning to their former home at the Centre in the Square. More details about the upcoming season will be released at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
The Independent
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
U2 guitarist explains why it took him 60 years to become an Irish citizen
U2 guitarist The Edge, real name David Howell Evans, has secured Irish citizenship after living in Ireland for over 60 years. Born in England to Welsh parents, Evans moved to Ireland at one year old and co-founded the Dublin -born band U2 in 1976. He described the citizenship as "long overdue" and expressed deep pride in Ireland, stating he always felt Irish. The conferring ceremony took place in Killarney, County Kerry, as part of an event where more than 7,500 people were expected to become Irish citizens. Evans highlighted the significance of the timing, feeling an even deeper connection with his homeland. U2 guitarist The Edge becomes Irish citizen in 'long-overdue move'
