music
terrasig | October 20, 2009Science journalist, Steve Silberman, just brought to my attention that Rob Walker at The New York Times wrote an article that last week on the method behind Pandora online radio. The article, The Sound Decoders at Pandora, made me go back through my archives to my own visit three years ago with Pandora founder, Tim Westergren.
Tim, together with musicologist Dr Norman Gasser, has applied science to music by cataloging songs based purely on musical attributes (over three dozen criteria) and providing the listener with a program of music similar to one's liking of a band or even a particular…
jdupuis | October 7, 2009Here Comes Science by the alt-rock band The Might be Giants is a delightful CD/DVD set of kids music and video about...Science! The set comes with both a CD with all the music and a DVD with all the videos wrapped into a show with animated, light-hearted commentary and introduction by the two Giants, John Linnell and John Flansburgh.
Here's a list of the tunes, so you can get an idea of the breadth of topics covered. TMBG has a channel on YouTube where you can find many of the videos.
Science Is Real
Meet the Elements
I Am a Paleontologist w/Danny Weinkauf
The Bloodmobile
Electric Car w/…
oracknows | September 29, 2009I realize that every blogger and his or her grandmother has been posting this lately, but I only just got around to watching it last night. It's surprisingly pleasant and tuneful:
Really cool.
aardvarchaeology | September 29, 2009
11-y-o Junior bought his first own album last Saturday: Mika's The Boy Who Knew Too Much. (My own first was Depeche Mode's Some Great Reward, bought at age 12 in '84 or '85). It's an excellent record once you've gotten used to Mika's queeny (and Queenish) style of singing: catchy studio pop. And Junior has this awesome "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" mishearing of one of the songs. When he told me about it and played me "By the Time" I couldn't hear it any other way either.
"By the time I'm dreaming
and you've crept out on me sleeping
I'm busy in the place for underwear"
What Mika actually…
oracknows | September 25, 2009There once was a time not so long ago--oh, say, four our five years--when the anti-vaccine fringe was looked upon as what it was: a fringe group, a bunch of quacks and quack advocates, all in essence one big conspiracy theory movement, in which vaccines are the One True Cause of Autism. At the time, there were two basic flavors of this movement, the American and the British variety. The British variety began back in the 1990s, fueled by Andrew Wakefield's pseudoscience, lack of ethics, bad science, and even potentially data falsification for his original 1998 Lancet study that claimed to have…
terrasig | September 20, 2009I'm not drinking these days but scribbler50 at Behind the Stick is still my favorite bartender.
This week, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody.
Yea verily, go forth this morning and read.
grrlscientist | September 18, 2009tags: Jarbas Agnelli, Paulo Pinto, birds on a wire, NPR, Public Radio, music, streaming video
This video is the result of a creative musician, Jarbas Agnelli, who noticed that a flock of birds on wires resembled musical notes. He took a photograph of these birds, by Paulo Pinto, and set them to music. The result of this interesting observation is below the jump;
Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli.
[Original story], many thanks to a reader, Robin, who sent this video link to me.
Of course, I have to ask you; can you identify the species?
jdupuis | September 18, 2009I'm talking about the new-to-me Wolfgang's Vault! Among other things, it includes a Vault Store, where you can buy prints and other swag; the Concert vault with 2859 concerts, the Crawdaddy magazine & archives. The concerts material can be sliced & diced into playlists and radio shows.
The concerts are by, among others: The Allman Brothers, The Band, Black Sabbath, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Linda Ronstadt, Lynyrd Skynyrd, MC5, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Van Morrison and The Who.
As I type this, I'm listening…
aardvarchaeology | September 18, 2009Musical styles can have really weird names. There's sauce music (salsa), meringue music (merengue), juvenile delinquent music (punk), record collection music (disco), LSD warehouse music (acid house), popular music (pop), you name it. But some of the most intensely loved musical styles have names that mean "copulation music".
"Jazz" was once a verb meaning "to fuck". Jazz music was originally played in the better class of New Orleans brothel, where men would listen to music before, well, getting down to some actual jazzing and jizzing.
Likewise with "swing". A verb meaning "to fuck". (Here…
revere | September 17, 2009It's been a hard year or two. First Miriam Makeba. Then Odetta. Now we've lost another one, Mary Travers, the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary. Mary died Wednesday of leukemia in Connecticut. Even before Mary, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow formed one of the iconic sixties folk groups in 1961, Mary sang back up for Pete Seeger. And for half a century, Peter, Paul and Mary we're there when we needed them. Every major demonstration or event. Always. They were there.
Political songs were a mainstay but so were love songs and children's songs. So here's Mary, in later years, singing one of the group'…
oracknows | September 13, 2009We all know that Mike Adams, a.k.a. the "Health Ranger," is anti-vaccine to the core. He's known for NaturalNews.com, a repository of quackery, anti-vaccine craziness, and conspiracy theories that rivals Whale.to but in a much slicker fashion. Now, unfortunately, I learn that he's going multimedia. Worse, Mike Rangers, who is about as white bread and un-hip-hop a guy as I can imagine, thinks he can rap:
The song is called "Don't Inject Me (The Swine Flu Vaccine Song)."
The common lies about the swine flu are all there: The claim that flu vaccines don't work; the paranoid delusion that the "…
grrlscientist | September 2, 2009tags: travel, ecotourism, Antarctica, music, Sarah Maclaughlan, Silence, streaming video
This is for everyone who has asked me, "why do you want to go to Antarctica?" This is the most amazing video I've seen on YouTube about Antarctica .. everything about it -- from the footage to the music -- is first-class. The music is sung by Sarah Maclaughlan and is called "Silence."
jdupuis | August 27, 2009Apparently inspired by the occasional Five Songs I Love posts I've been doing (here, here and here), Ava at Jemsite asked me if I wouldn't mind coming up with one for their blog.
Well, it sounded like a cool idea -- so here's what I came up with.
It was a fun experience so I hope to do more guest posts as time and inspiration allow.
Thanks, Ava!
terrasig | August 24, 2009
Propofol.
For further information and detailed background, please see our previous post on this injectable anesthetic agent known as propofol or Diprivan®.
This L.A. Times article today also has a concise timeline of the events leading to the death of Michael Jackson
goodmath | August 14, 2009
Peter Hamill, "The Unconscious Life": A track from an amazing live
performance. In general, I'm not a big fan of live recordings - you really need
to be there for a live performance. There's a dynamic between the performer
and the audience in live music, and in a recording, you're listening to it from
the outside - so you can feel that there's something missing. This recording has an
intensity, an intimacy, which is extraordinary. And it's a great song, too.
Valley of the Giants, "Whaling Tale": Valley of the Giants has taken its
place as my favorite post-rock band - surpassing…
terrasig | August 2, 2009Just a quick note this morning as I picked up the dead-tree version of The New York Times this morning in the PharmDriveway.
For some reason, I recognized the name of Anthony DeCurtis in the byline of this short essay on the Manson family Tate-LaBianca murders marking the demise of the 1960s counterculture movement. I posted yesterday on the speakers at the upcoming conference, U2: The Feedback and The Hype - DeCurtis is keynote speaker.
No surprise here since DeCurtis - Dr. DeCurtis, I learned below - has been a contributing editor to Rolling Stone mag and books, with many works in the NYT…
goodmath | August 1, 2009 As long-time readers know, I'm an amateur musician, from a very musical family. My sister is a music teacher, and my brother used to be a professional french horn player and composer. I personally play classical clarinet, a very wide range of folk-flutes, and some bluegrass banjo.
As long as I've studied music, my teachers have always talked about how fundamental the pentatonic scale is. For those who don't know, the pentatonic
scale is a basic scale which has five distinct notes per octave, instead of the 7 of the traditional diatonic scale, or the 12 of the chromatic scale. For example,…
terrasig | August 1, 2009
During the summer between high school and college, about this very time in 1981, I was sitting at a beach house in North Carolina listening to my uncle rail against The Beatles. He held that the band never truly took its fame and international press attention to doing anything good for the world except to glorify LSD.
I now get to tell him about U2.
That summer also saw the launch of MTV and in fall I watched four young Dubliners on a barge playing a song called, "Gloria," the opening track of their album October. And in the intervening years the band, and especially its lead singer Bono…