#music-archiving

#music-archiving

The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines.

Radioposter has built what it calls Paper-fi: physical books with synchronized audio soundtracks that follow readers in real time as they turn each page. No chips embedded in the paper, no QR codes to scan. The system uses patented computer vision and other modes through a smartphone or smart glasses to track your place in the book and play the corresponding audio.

Spotify has launched a new feature called Page Match that lets you quickly sync your spot in a physical or ebook with an audiobook. Point your camera at a page, and the Spotify app uses computer vision to match text with audio. If you have to jump behind the wheel for a long drive, but didn't want to put down The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, you can just snap a pic to jump to the spot in the audiobook where you left off in the physical book.

Within a couple of years of ChatGPT coming out, I had come to rely on the artificial-intelligence tool, for my work as a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany. Having signed up for OpenAI's subscription plan, ChatGPT Plus, I used it as an assistant every day - to write e-mails, draft course descriptions, structure grant applications, revise publications, prepare lectures, create exams and analyse student responses, and even as an interactive tool as part of my teaching.

"A lot of these AI businesses are looking for readily available, structured databases of content," Robert Hahn, head of business affairs and licensing for The Guardian, told . "The Internet Archive's API would have been an obvious place to plug their own machines into and suck out the IP."

"Link rot" is the unfortunate phenomenon whereby online articles become populated by broken links - URLs that once led to active pages but now result in error messages or dead ends. A Pew Research study from 2024 showed that nearly 40% of links that existed in 2013 were no longer active. Such "digital decay" occurs across a broad diversity of webpages, from news and government sites to Wikipedia pages to tweets.

But to anyone tracking the data over the past few years, it was inevitable. In 2022, Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti redefined the market, driving Latin music's streaming growth to new heights. It later became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Grammy Album of the Year. The takeaway is simple: When you have accurate, real-time data, you don't guess where culture is going, you know.

When universities began to emerge in Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they soon became important centres of knowledge. Their libraries could hold hundreds of books, and many of the most valuable volumes were kept under close control - sometimes even chained to desks. We have few details about how medieval university libraries operated, but a revealing set of rubric headings survives from the University of Angers in western France.

Recently, AI decided that a painting long thought to be a copy of Caravaggio's The Lute Player is actually by the master, while another version of the same subject, previously thought to be authentic, is not. Both conclusions were disputed by the former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Keith Christiansen. A similar debate erupted in March 2025 when AI declared that portions of The Bath of Diana, also long believed to be a copy, could have been painted by Peter Paul Rubens.

If you're new to collecting LPs, there are a few rules. Never stack, always sleeve, and never ever touch the grooves by hand. Traditionally, a 12 by 12 inch square (except, of course, for your 7-inch singles), records aren't the easiest to store. Bookshelves are often too short or narrow, and keeping them on the ground often leads to unintentional scratches, warping, and dust build-up.