Studio A Audio Recording & Production

http://www.fyimusicnews.ca/articles/2017/10/02/submissions-now-open-2018-juno-awards

Key submission dates as follows: 

• October 2, 2017 – Submissions open
• October 20, 2017; 5 p.m. EST – Deadline for discounted early-bird submissions
• November 10, 2017; 5 p.m. EST – Deadline for submissions
• December 1, 2017 – Submissions for International Album of the Year and Album of the Year open
• January 4, 2018; 5 p.m. EST – Submissions for International Album of the Year and Album of the Year close

CARAS has also introduced the following changes this year:
 
Comedy Album of the Year

• CARAS is pleased to announce the return of the Comedy Album of the Year category sponsored by SiriusXM Canada. Eligible comedy albums must be available for national sale and recorded by a comedic performer or performers of any of the following disciplines: stand-up, sketch, improvisation, and musical comedy. The nominees and winners will be determined by a judge vote.

 Francophone Album of the Year

• The nominees for Francophone Album of the Year will now be determined by the equal weight of consumption and judge vote. The final round will be decided by judges.

 Rap Recording of the Year

• The winner for Rap Recording of the Year will now be determined by an Academy Delegate vote.

Album Artwork of the Year

• The Recording Package of the Year category has been changed to Album Artwork of the Year to more clearly define the classification criteria for those interested in submitting.

Submission eligibility:

Eligibility for the 2018 Awards applies to music released for national sale between September 1, 2016 and November 10, 2017. Albums available for pre-order online no later than November 10 will also qualify. Pre-ordered online recordings will need to be available no later than November 24.
 
Eligible musicians are Canadian Citizens, which are defined by CARAS to be that where a majority of the group members hold Canadian birth certificates, passports or are Canadian Permanent Resident(s) with residency in Canada during the last six months of the eligibility period.

Voting Process by the Numbers

330 Judges are responsible for listening to each of the submissions and voting for the best product in the genre. The judges change each year and are spread out in different facets of the music industry and different regions throughout Canada.

50 Nominating & Voting Committee Members maintain the integrity of the JUNO Awards. It is their responsibility to monitor any changes within the industry as it relates to the awards. The committee brings any necessary modifications to the attention of the Board of Directors.

190+ Music Advisory Committee Members are responsible for ensuring that each of the submissions in their particular genre meets the required qualification for the JUNO Awards. Each category has an associated advisory committee.

For a complete list of JUNO Awards categories, eligibility rules, and voting criteria, visitwww.junoawards.ca/submissions and a handy FAQ can be found here.

Those considering putting their hat in the ring should note that one can save up to 40% on submissions by signing up as a CARAS Academy Delegate at www.junoawards.ca/join.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/05/entertainment/rock-hall-fame-2018-nominees/index.html

The nominees for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 were announced Thursday.

This year’s group includes 19 nominees from all different musical genres.

They are:

• Bon Jovi
• Kate Bush
• The Cars
• Depeche Mode
• Dire Straits
• Eurythmics
• J. Geils Band
• Judas Priest
• LL Cool J
• MC5
• The Meters
• Moody Blues
• Radiohead
• Rage Against the Machine
• Rufus featuring Chaka Khan
• Nina Simone
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe
• Link Wray
• The Zombies

To be eligible for nomination, an individual artist or band must have released its first commercial recording at least 25 years prior to the year of induction which means the 2018 nominees had to release their first official recording no later than 1992.

Nine of the Class of 2018 nominees are first-timers to the list.

They are Nina Simone, the Eurythmics, Dire Straits, Judas Priest, Kate Bush, Moody Blues, Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

An international voting body of more than 900 artists, historians and members of the music industry will receive ballots and this year fans will once again have the opportunity to participate.

Beginning October 5 and continuing through 11:59 p.m. EST on December 5, 2017, fans can visit rockhall.com/vote to cast votes for who they believe to be most deserving of induction.

The top five artists selected will comprise a “fans’ ballot” that will be tallied along with the other ballots to choose the 2018 inductees.

Fans will need to log in with a Facebook account or email to vote and voting is capped at one ballot per day.

The list of 2018 inductees will be announced in December, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2018 Inductions ceremony will be held in Cleveland on April 14.

SiriusXM will carry a radio broadcast of the ceremony as well as special broadcasts throughout the year devoted to the Rock Hall’s Inductees — past and present — on Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Radio (Ch. 310).

HBO will broadcast the ceremony with broadcast details to be announced later. 

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Melodies help people find their voice: Stroke, dementia and autism sufferers are better able to communicate after listening to music

• Families benefit by feeling less isolated and neglected from their communities
• Music helps people communicate by allowing them to explore their creativity
• In dementia sufferers, music can help people find their identity, researchers say
• Researchers from the University of Plymouth analysed 25 ‘post-verbal’ people 

Making or listening to music improves stroke, dementia and autism sufferers’ ability to communicate, new research reveals.

It also benefits their families by making them feel less isolated and neglected from their communities, a study found.

Music may help verbally-challenged people communicate by allowing them to explore their creativity, according to the researchers.

Lead author Professor Jocey Quinn from the University of Plymouth, said: ‘What we have shown is that music can give people a voice, allowing them to explore their creativity as well as communicating both pleasure and pain.

‘Music can enable carers and families to see the full potential of the individual, while in someone with dementia, a person’s identity can re-emerge when families might have thought it had been lost.’

How the study was carried out

Researchers from the University of Plymouth analyzed 25 ‘post-verbal’ people who attended music sessions over 16 months.

Post-verbal people were defined as those who have difficulty communicating with words, such as sufferers of stroke, dementia and autism.

The sessions included 30 art workshops and four focus groups.

The researchers interviewed 44 family members regarding their relative’s experience of the music sessions.

Key Findings

Regular music sessions boosted the post-verbal participants’ ability to communicate both with other sufferers and ‘healthy’ people.

It also made both the patients and their families feel less isolated and neglected within their communities.

Lead author Professor Jocey Quinn said: ‘What we have shown is that music can give people a voice, allowing them to explore their creativity as well as communicating both pleasure and pain.

‘In post-verbal children, music can enable carers and families to see the full potential of the individual, while in someone with dementia, a person’s identity can re-emerge when families might have thought it had been lost.’

Debbie Geraghty, chief executive of the charity Plymouth Music Zone, which was involved in the study added: ‘This research really shines a light on the tremendous personal and social impacts music can have on individuals and, indeed, how to go about using music to achieve those changes.

‘Surprisingly for us though, it shows just how much those effects really ripple out among families’.

Playing An Instrument Makes Us Better Listeners

Playing an instrument makes us better listeners by altering our brain waves, research revealed earlier this month.

In the first study of its kind, researchers demonstrated making music significantly alters activity in the areas of our brain associated with hearing.

Study author Dr Bernhard Ross from Baycrest Health Sciences hospital in Toronto, said: ‘Music has been known to have beneficial effects on the brain, but there has been limited understanding into what about music makes a difference.

‘This is the first study demonstrating that learning the fine movement needed to reproduce a sound on an instrument changes the brain’s perception of sound in a way that is not seen when listening to music.

‘We saw direct changes in the brain after one session, demonstrating that the action of creating music leads to a strong change in brain activity.’

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The process to credit Ono on John Lennon’s 1971 hit has begun, decades after he acknowledged her poetic influence on it

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At the Georgia’s Institute of Technology, Shimon plays some marimba jams. Shimon is also not human, but a robot using deep learning and artificial intelligence to play music of its own creation. Being fed a variety of over 5,000 songs from Beethoven to Lady Gaga along with a library of 2 million motifs and riffs, Shimon is one of the world’s first synthetic musicians.

Mason Bretan, a Ph.D. student and Georgia Tech, perfected Shimon’s musical abilities after seven years, enabling him to comprehend music played by humans and extemporize over the pre-composed chord progressions.

“An artist has a bigger idea of what he or she is trying to achieve within the next few measures or later in the piece,” Bretan says in an interview. “Shimon is now coming up with higher-level musical semantics. Rather than thinking note by note, it has a larger idea of what it wants to play as a whole.”

As long as researchers continue to feed Shimon different source material, the music-creating robot will produce a different sequence that can’t be predicted by researchers. And the robot definitely has a style. A musician himself, Bretan says Shimon is a fusion of jazz and classical.

While Bretan fine-tuned Shimon’s musical brain, Gil Weinberg, Bretan’s advisor as well as a director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology, is Shimon’s original creator. Weinberg created Shimon to explore if robots could generate music that humans would find beautiful.

Shimon is only one of many robotic creations to come out of Weinberg’s lab, which have created robotic prosthesis for a drummer, a robotic third arm for drummers, and more other music-assisting robots.

If Bretan and Weinberg have anything to do with it, creating music may soon no longer be a human-exclusive talent.