kottke.org posts about Music
Johannes Kreidler took the data from recent stock charts, fed it to Microsoft Songsmith, and produced melancholy tunes. It’s like the Visualizer in iTunes, only backwards. Ben Fry says of the project:
My opinion of Songsmith is shifting — while it’s generally presented as a laughingstock, catastrophic failure, or if nothing else, a complete embarrassment (especially for its developers slash infomercial actors), it’s really caught the imagination of a lot of people who are creating new things, even if all of them subvert the original intent of the project. (Where the original intent was to… create a tool that would help write a jingle for glow in the dark towels?)
When evaluating records, music critic Robert Christgau used grades ranging from A+ to E-.
An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.
[…]
An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.
(via 43f)
Amazon has hundreds of free mp3s available for download, including tracks by Brian Eno & David Byrne, Ani Difranco, and Reverend Horton Heat. (via the millions)
A list like this could spark endless debate: a ranking of all the songs by The Beatles, from #185 (Revolution 9) to #1 (A Day In The Life).
To novice Beatles fans, I warn you not to believe the hype about “Revolution 9.” I’ve listened to it many times over the years, waiting for the light in my head to switch on so I could unlock its mysteries. All I’ve ever gotten out of it is the vague feeling that immediately after listening to it, something is going to rise out from under my bed and butcher me in my sleep.
Each choice is extensively annotated and defended; start here if you want to work your way through them all.
For whatever reason, Bono writing a series of op-ed columns for the NY Times seemed like a bad idea. But I really enjoyed reading his first effort about the new year and Frank Sinatra. The advice is probably a little trite but you can’t say that Bono doesn’t have a way with words…the piece is more poetry or lyric than prose.
I think about this now, in this new year. The Big Bang of pop music telling me it’s all about the moment, a fresh canvas and never overworking the paint. I wonder what he would have thought of the time it’s taken me and my bandmates to finish albums, he with his famous impatience for directors, producers — anyone, really — fussing about. I’m sure he’s right. Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed “record” is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.
(thx, mau)
Songsmith is a piece of software by Microsoft Research that automatically creates a musical accompaniment to a singer’s voice. (The intro video is priceless.) A MetaFilter member took David Lee Roth’s vocal track from Runnin’ With The Devil and put it through Songsmith…the results are pretty great. (thx, shay)
According to this extensive chart, names of heavy metal bands fit into five main categories: death, deadly things, animals, religion, and badass misspellings. (thx, janelle)
I’m really enjoying The Hood Internet’s third mixtape. They take pop, indie rock, & rap songs and mash them up. For instance:
Jay-Z (feat. Lil Wayne) vs Xiu Xiu
Flo Rida (feat. T-Pain) vs Hot Chip
T-Pain (feat. Chris Brown) vs TV On The Radio
Lil Kim (feat. Missy Elliott) vs MGMT
Their version of R. Kelly’s I’m a Flirt mashed with Broken Social Scene from their first mixtape was one of my favorite songs of 2007, far superior to the original IMO.
Mixtape vol. 3 track listing and downloads here.
A five-minute rap video that summarizes all five seasons of The Wire.
Police chief, yeah, his rank is proper
‘Cause of the window, he starts a war with Frank Sobotka.
MIA’s Paper Planes is still my favorite Wire-inspired song, but this is pretty sweet. (thx, about 2000 people)
A company called Fandrich & Sons buys cheap grand pianos mass-produced in China, upgrades them so that they sound more like expensive hand-made European pianos, and sells them for a reasonable price.
With his higher-end grands — which the Fandrichs named “HGS” for “Holy Grail Scale” — they start with pianos built in China. He and his workers gut the piano, replacing the hammers, felt and bass strings with German and American parts. They reinforce the underbelly of the piano by installing short ribs — spruce beams between the existing main ribs.
Using a computer program designed in-house, the keys are reweighted across the board to eliminate friction and even out the response. The reweighting gives the Fandrich pianos their signature touch, one that some players have described as buttery, effortless.
In automotive terms, the Fandrichs are “trying to upgrade a Hyundai to run like a Bentley, for the price of a Honda”. (via girlhacker)
Researchers at Georgia Tech are working on a system to track the motion of fish in their tank in order to make music from their movements.
[Video removed because I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the annoying autoplay. Go here to watch it.]
It works through a camera that uses recognition software that tracks objects based on their shape and color. The software then links each movement to different instruments that change in pitch and tempo as the fish patrol the tank. Fish that move toward the surface have a higher pitch. The faster they move, the faster the tempo.
The idea is to create audio aquariums for the blind. (via clusterflock)
I Am Sitting in a Room is a piece by composer Alvin Lucier. It consists of an audio recording of Lucier sitting in a room reciting a few lines. That recording is played in the same room and recorded. Then that recording is recorded. And so on.
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
Here’s a recording of the original performance:
Listening to it, I wonder how much of the distortion at the end is due to the “resonant frequencies of the room” and how much is just artifacts of the rerecording process. (via djacobs)
Upgrade: It’s the Larsen effect in action.
The frequency of the resulting sound is determined by resonant frequencies in the microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker, the acoustics of the room, the directional pick-up and emission patterns of the microphone and loudspeaker, and the distance between them.
(thx, eric)
Beeker from The Muppets sings Ode to Joy.
Meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep, meep meep…
Gonzo, Camilla, and the rest of the chickens sing The Blue Danube Waltz.
Bock bock bock bock, bock bock, bock bock. Bock bock bock bock, bock bock, bock bock…
Somewhat related: Beaker sings Yellow by Coldplay.
James Hook ran the theme song to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air through Microsoft’s speech recognition mechanism.
I pulled up to the house around seven or eight
And I yield to the cabbie your Halsey Smalley later
Look at my kingdom I was finally there
Consider my thrown as the prince of Bel air.
(thx, greg)
Songs boiled down to their essence…mostly “I want to do it with you”.
Led Zeppelin, “Whole Lotta Love”
I want to do it with you.
AC/DC, “You Shook Me All Night Long”
We did it yesterday.
Kings of Leon, “Sex on Fire”
I did it with you, and now it hurts when I pee.
If it’s funny, it’s gotta be McSweeney’s.
808s and Heartbreak, Kanye West. Everyone’s saying how good this is and I concur. Someone stomped on Kanye’s heart and out squirted a great album.
In a compilation of 64 videos all shown on the same page, one man recreates Thriller — the beats, the howling, the singing — all by himself. This is pretty awesome, like Christian Marclay on speed. (thx, christopher)
Brian Eno believes that singing is the key to a good life.
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
(via subtraction)
Peter Holsapple explains how a pretty good song turns into a flop.
Once upon a time, though, I think I wrote a hit. It was called “Love is for Lovers” and the dB’s recorded it for an album called “Like This” in 1984. It had (and has, I believe) an undeniable hook, the kind you’d find yourself singing in the shower or pounding along to on your steering wheel while driving. The performance, produced by Chris Butler at the old Bearsville Studio in upstate New York, has all the power of the best kind of rock: slamming drums, inventive bass, a solid riff and a fantastic solo.
This song is ripe for a contemporary cover.
When I was a kid, “oldies” music and movies seemed ancient. Even though I’m now in my 30s, the entertainment that I watched and listened to in my youth still feels pretty recent to me. Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn’t all that long ago, right? But comparing my distorted recall of childhood favorites to the oldies of the time jogs my memory in unpleasant ways. For example:
Listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller today is equivalent to listening to Elvis Presley’s first album (1956) at the time of Thriller’s release in 1982. Elvis singles in 1956 included Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, and Love Me Tender.
If you’re around my age, how old do you feel right now? Here are some other examples of timeline twins:
Watching Star Wars today is like watching It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) in 1977. It’s a Wonderful Life was nominated for an Oscar the following year along with Ethel Barrymore (b. 1879) and Lilian Gish (b. 1893).
Listening to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit today is equivalent to playing Terry Jack’s Seasons In The Sun (1974) in 1991.
Watching The Godfather today is like watching Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) in 1972. Modern Times was a silent film (Chaplin’s last).
Listening to the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) today…well, they didn’t really have rock or pop albums back in 1946. But popular songs on the radio were sung by Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, and Dinah Shore, as well as many performers and their orchestras.
Back to the Future (1985) —> To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Die Hard (1988) —> Bullitt (1968)
Radiohead, OK Computer (1997) —> Bon Jovi, Slippery When Wet (1986)
Hmm, I’ve never heard the nihilist interpretation of Row, Row, Row Your Boat before.
The lyrics have often been used as a metaphor for life’s difficult choices, and many see the boat as referring to one’s self or a group with which one identifies. Rowing is a skillful, if tedious, practice that takes perfection but also directs the vessel. When sung as a group, the act of rowing becomes a unifier, as oars must be in sync in a rowboat. The idea that man travels along a certain stream, suggests boundaries in the path of choices and in free will. The third line recommends that challenges should be greeted in stride while open to joy with a smile. The final line, life is but a dream, is perhaps the most meaningful. With a religious point of view, life and the physical plane may be regarded as having equivalent value as that of a dream, such that troubles are seen in the context of a lesser reality once one has awakened. Conversely, the line can just as equally convey nihilist sentiments on the meaninglessness of man’s actions. The line is also commonly sung as “life is like a dream” rather than “life is but a dream”, possibly to sound happier, less meaningful, and more appropriate for its audience of young children.
Two covers of Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole, the title song for The Wire: Tom Waits and Kronos Quartet and MIA and Blaqstarr. (thx, brandon)
Last.fm keeps track of all the music you play but they also keep track of the music that people don’t want the world to know they listen to: the Most Unwanted Scrobbles. The Beatles, Radiohead, Britney, and Avril top the uncharts. The Britney and Avril I can understand. The Beatles and Radiohead…perhaps the perception of overratedness leads people to keep those tastes private? (thx, graham)
Update: Ohhh, ok. Radiohead and The Beatles are so high on the list because 1) so many people have those two bands in their playlists that they get deleted so much out of sheer numbers, and 2) those two bands are no good for recommendation engines — you like pop music? I recommend The Beatles — so people exclude them. (thx all)
Love Lockdown + Reckoner. Kanye mashed up with Radiohead, I pretty much gotta post it. (via delicious ghost)
Here’s how to use the RJDJ iPhone app. You install the app, plug your headphones in, launch it, and press “Now Playing”. A song plays, the app starts to sample the sounds in your environment, and those sounds are remixed in real time and played back to you. It might be the coolest thing ever. Check out this video and this other video for a quick look at how RJDJ works. The first video shows some songs that use the iPhone’s accelerometer to modify and scratch the beat. (via waxy)
PS. It might only be the coolest app in theory…it’s also flaky as hell. It was working fine for me and then crapped out…there’s no music now, only sound sampling and it’s really quiet. Maybe you need to use the Apple headphones with the mic?
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