July 2009
33 posts
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Cats on YouTube playing Schoenberg’s Op. 11...
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Dodecaphony, or Cats Playing the Piano
A new work on YouTube by Cory Arcangel uses videos of cats playing the piano as source material. Using a software program that works not unlike the Echo Nest Analyze API used for this piece, Arcangel took Schoenberg’s famous Op. 11 and recreated it by stitching together various notes as played by cats in videos he took from YouTube. The result sounds incredibly close to the recording...
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Sound in the 20th Century (etc.)
This summer, I’ve been enjoying teaching a course in MIT’s High School Studies Program called “Sound in the 20th Century.” (It technically goes into the 21st century, but since we’re mostly talking about developments from last century and it sounds cooler, I went with “in the 20th.”)
For my students, I put together a little website that serves as our...
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Nothing Natural About Vocal Skill
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler writes about drag performance: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (175). By transposing the performance of female gender onto a male body (or vice versa), drag performers highlight how gender is performed in everyday life, and most importantly, how contingent genders...
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(via acousmata):
Anton Webern: “Orchestration of...
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Amerie’s “One Thing” featuring...
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Demoing the Computational Remix
The video above was produced using the Echo Nest Remix API to play every beat in “Boom Boom Pow” backwards. I have to say first, I am a big fan of the results. (And no, not just because I may have an unhealthy obsession with Fergie.) I think that for a demonstration of the Echo Nest’s beat-shuffling capabilities, a song so obsessed with the technological (the cliché...
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Pearls Before Breakfast
No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.
The Washington Post had Joshua Bell play a Stradivarius in the DC Metro to see if people would stop and notice. They...
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WatchLike the skateboard sequencing video from before, this time with a tree!
(via Designing Sound)
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Seriously: Dinosaur Jr.'s Farm CD Recalled for... →
A duplication error caused the new Dinosaur Jr. album to be 3dB too loud. Brings a new perspective to the loudness wars. (Although it reminds me of the story about how The Who performed the “loudest rock concert” ever due to an equipment malfunction. Can’t seem to verify that online anywhere, although I did dig up a Wikipedia page on the loudest band in the world.)
(via...
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Watch(via AudioLemon)
Richard Lainhart Performs Olivier Messiaen’s Oraison
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NWA - Straight Outta Compton (Kid606 remix)
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REM sleep, made into MIDI (related to this post)
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Cutting out the Middle Man
I just found a sort of wild paper (via Neurotopia) about an experiment to sonify (like, make into sound?) EEG data. Reading the paper (and totally not understanding the math parts), it seems that the trick here is to create mappings for various EEG parameters that convert them into musical parameters. (I’d post images/sounds in here, but Tumblr isn’t as great as it could be for...
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“Why do people like music? A possible answer is that the brain and music both...”
– Scale-Free Music of the Brain
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Discovery - I Want You Back
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WatchThe sounds of skateboarding made into a little ditty.
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80s Sax Solos →
This is just a fantastic collection of saxophone solos from the 80s, rated and categorized with labels like “Whole Notes” and “Mood Breaker.”
(via mrgan)