I could not help smiling for this whole clip. It’s just great. Wow.
Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.
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The theme started out in 1976 as electronic music, was set for brass orchestra in 1983, and was later reinterpreted and recorded for NPR by jazz musician Wycliffe Gordon in 1995. Meanwhile, lots of musicians have written and performed variations, some of which get played on air. The most “well-known” version (according to NPR) was performed and arranged by the Washington Saxophone Quartet.
Quire Cleveland recording a trixie. (That’s me on the left of the chorus.)
In the theme’s history, brass settings are the norm. However, my Dad recently got invited to compose some trixies in an early music style. He came up with some fun stuff and recorded it with Quire Cleveland, and some fellow faculty at CWRU. You can hear them all at the Quire Cleveland website — or just listen to All Things Considered!
Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.
Tonight I had the amazing experience of singing a concert with Blue Heron, one of the premier early music choirs in the country.
I had an unusual week, attending lectures on topological field theory and writing about neutrinos by day, getting into the 1430’s groove in rehearsals by night. And the music wasn’t easy. Many of the pieces were thick with cross-relations, rhythmically complicated, and generally funky. I’ve had a few nightmares where I stop concentrating, and either I sing an incorrect B-flat, or the seesaw mechanism stops working. Continue reading »
On a 5 minute break (read procrastination vacation) from preparing for my oral exam next week, I came across the interesting YouTube Symphony: “The world’s first collaborative orchestra.”
YouTube explains:
We have invited musicians from around the world to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. The video entries will be combined into the first ever collaborative virtual performance, and the world will select the best to perform at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in April 2009.
Musicians “auditioned” by posting on YouTube a video of themselves playing one of a few designated audition pieces. From there, YouTube picked a few dozen finalists and has invited us viewers to vote on the ones we like (or give thumbs down to the ones we don’t). Continue reading »
Microsoft Songsmith is a piece of software that attempts to automatically generate background instrumentals to go along with a vocal line. Via techcrunch:
the song-making software is inspiring a whole new genre on YouTube where people alter famous music videos and concert footage by stripping out the original instruments and replace them with tinny keyboards or folk banjos, and keep the vocals. The results are a twisted breed of classic hits that are fascinating in the same way that terrible automobile accidents are.