On Oct. 6, 2020, renowned guitarist Eddie Van Halen passed away after battling cancer. As the namesake for the electrifying band Van Halen, Eddie was more than a musician. He was a moment — one that defined and defied genres.

His out-of-the-box thinking catapulted him into fame. On stage, his smile was just as infectious as his guitar melodies and rhythms. You could spend hours listening to the band and hear Eddie’s influence no matter what. From the iconic “You Really Got Me’ to the earth-shattering solo on “Eruption,” Eddie Van Halen made strides few have reached before.

He was 64 years old and his legacy continues to live on through his impacts on music technology.

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Hey everybody!

Tuesday, December 1^st is Giving Tuesday and Texas Music Partners is having a Giving Tuesday fundraiser from December 1 through the 5^th.  We will be closing our Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign with TMP’s first CHARITY GAME NIGHT on the evening of December 5th!  Please join us for either or both events.

This time we are raising funds to implement our Live Music in the Schools program, which we have had planned for a couple of years now (https://texasmusicpartners.org/products/live-music-in-the-schools/), we just need the funds to implement it.  Thanks to you, our Facebook fundraiser, last August, raised money for many of the supplies we need and now we need your help to implement it in the schools.

For more information or to donate early, please go to https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/tmp-giving-tuesday-fundraiser

For more information and to sign up for Charity Game Night, go to https://texasmusicpartners.org/how-to-help/game-night/.

Thank you.

#givingtuesday #steam #thinkingoutsidethebox #creativepassion

When able to think outside the box many problems can be solved.  Often to the betterment of oneself.

To everyone who has served our country, thank you for your service!

Indie music marketer and distributor Ingrooves Music Group announced it has developed a proprietary method of using artificial intelligence to detect trends in audience engagement with the goal of identifying potential streaming audiences for artists.

The new technique, which has been awarded a United States patent, was developed in-house by the company’s Chief Analytics Officer Dr. SK Sharma and a team of mathematicians and scientists focused on artificial intelligence.

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Romanna Flores is an IT Systems Analyst at Intel and since 2016 she is also the cofounder of Mariachi STEAM, a summer program for young Latinx musicians that is dedicated to connecting the dots between science, technology, engineering, mathematics and music.

Every industry that I entered started with a creative focus and then evolved to a more technical position allowing me to create innovative, digital interactions. My willingness to learn and experiment with emerging technologies was embraced by application teams who welcomed a different perspective to problem-solving.”

With Mariachi STEAM, Flores and her cofounder Richard Flores are hoping to cultivate the same encouraging, informative environment for Latinx students.

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I think we can all agree that one thing we can use more of in our lives right now is music. Thanks to services like YouTube and Spotify, we have more music at our fingertips than ever before and that’s great. A Tel Aviv-based start-up called JoyTunes wants to take it one step further.

While we are all mostly stuck at home or at the very least, spending significantly more time in our homes due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, JoyTunes offers a platform that uses cutting-edge technology we will get into later to help you learn to play a musical instrument.

The company has developed multiple applications for learning and practicing music: one for self-learning, another for use by music teachers in training students, while a third offers music learning for toddlers. The company recently launched a guitar-learning app, currently only available on Apple devices. The apps turn learning to play musical instruments into an intuitive, “gamified” experience. The system detects playing and provides instant feedback.

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A Virginia Tech undergraduate helped build software capable of communicating with a device that can translate finger pressure into sound and light.

Rachel Hachem, a senior majoring in creative technologies in music in the School of Performing Arts, served as a leader in a collaborative project between Virginia Tech’s Linux Laptop Orchestra and Sensel Inc., a tech company specializing in computer interaction.

The new software is an extension of a programming environment that provides easy access to the multitouch pressure data from the Sensel Morph, a multitouch controller that recognizes user input through a variety of methods.

Hachem was the first Virginia Tech student to select creative technologies in music as a major. This degree option is designed to explore the intersection of music, technology, industry, and research.

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Audio technology company Elk Audio announced a new service today called Aloha designed to make it easier for musicians to remotely play together from hundreds of miles, while also powering remote production, collaboration and education from even greater distances.

Three major mobile companies – Verizon, Vodafone and Ericsson – have been involved in Aloha’s development over the past couple of years, because of the service’s potential as a way to drive value for users of 5G-capable mobile phones as well as high-speed broadband networks.

“The goal was to create the possibility for musicians to play together, to have some sort of audio platform for musicians, where they became another piece of the Internet of Things ecosystem,” said Elk Audio founder and CEO Michele Benincaso, who is based in Stockholm, Sweden. “We have musicians playing together with over 1,000 miles distance in between. It’s basically science fiction.”

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Charles David Young was feeling a bit antsy in late May. It had been months since he and his fellow Foothills Phil musicians had shared a stage after rehearsals were halted in March because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Desperation is the mother of invention, and it was this that led me to propose to Bob Atwell, who has been composing amazing pieces for the Foothills Phil for many years, to write something for the times we are living through,” recalled Young, who has played trumpet in the orchestra for seven years.

The work, which 20 members of the 80-member orchestra recorded in June for a YouTube video that was released last week, is among the more ambitious projects undertaken by Tucson orchestras during the pandemic. It’s also one that shows that while the health crisis might have closed concert halls and canceled classical music seasons worldwide, it has not silenced Tucson orchestras and conductors.

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