I’ve always loved flamenco - I think the style matches my temper and moods better than any other music styles I know of. I’ve never had a go at the guitar, but I’ve been dancing for a while now, enough to dare call myself a bailaora, and I’m slowly getting into singing as well. Recently, flamenco has also entered my work interests. A couple of colleagues of mine - Antti Jylhä and Cumhur Erkut - have developed a hand-clapping based interface, that will be presented at CHI2009: "A Hand Clap Interface for Sonic Interaction with the Computer". Recently, I’ve been working together with them on an extension of that work, contributing among other with insights from flamenco. The first part of this work "Exploring self-induced sonic interactions in the context of performing arts" is being presented at the Workshop on Sonic Interaction Design and its relation to Film and Theatre sound design, at the University of York, 2. April 2009.

I was actually searching for info on similar projects, but instead ran across this very well written piece by David Rubin on creating flamenco sounds for your audio project: desktop flamenco. It’s a valuable read for anyone who works on a piece in need for some authentic-sounding Flamenco, as it covers the major principles of the flamenco style, and provides reviews of a bunch of sample libraries containing flamenco effects. Nice work bringing all that info together on one page!

The Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society Teosto is a copyright organization for composers, lyric writers, arrangers and music publishers in Finland. Teosto provides licensing products for performing and reproducing music that in their words "meets the needs of music using customers, and distributes the royalties to the rightholders - the music authors."

Teosto is commonly known to have a stiff structure, and consequently Teosto agreements may sometimes present problems for composers who e.g. want to cross between paid and unpaid work or, for example want to showcase their works online. Also, Teosto’s apparent lack of procedures for handling the lifespan of game music (the game itself, marketing material, derivatory products like soundtracks, their marketing material, etc.) and a narrow understanding for the particular practical conventions of the industry (for example, some game companies only hire musicians who will provide the game music as commissioned work) has made life hard for Finnish game sound people.

Teosto appears already to have unofficcially accepted certain common practises, overlooking instances such as when artists publishing one’s own music on private webpages. (Even so, commercial-but-private spaces like MySpace have been a problematic thing and may be so even in the future.) Teosto is also known to have made some individual agreements with musicians, but according to my understanding these private agreements have been a pain to negotiate and even still, the solutions have been at most inventive workaraounds to tackle the dated structures of Teosto agreements.

Now, the situation may be changing. According to a recent article in taloussanomat (in Finnish) Teosto is apparently reconsidering the limitations their deals put on musicians. The article tells us that the board of Teosto will meet as soon as April, to consider the new terms of agreements. I’m hopeful this meeting may at least put in black-on-white the unofficcially accepted practises, but even better would be if Teosto really took it upon themselves to reconsider the way the whole music licensing thing should be conducted. Either way, these are promising news for game composers. Let’s hope not only empty promises.

It’s official - the 4th Audio Mostly conference will be held in Glasgow, Scotland on September 2-3 and it will be hosted by Glasgow Caledonian University. The theme this year will be "Sound and Emotions".

The call for papers can be found here.