I love machine/music hybrids. It satisfies my mechanical, geeky, physics-PhD side while also socking it to the right-cortex. Physical parts are hot. Cogs, exposed mechanisms, gears… oh my. This guy — a street performer in Bath, the beautiful town next-door to Bristol, the city of my undergrad days — combines both with a semi-automatic guitar accompaniment to his fiddling:
Have you ever heard of the musical road in Lancaster, CA?
Well that roadspeed-dependent rendition of William Tell is sadly no more. It was disturbing the local residents with it’s repetitive and unbearably out-of-tune musical emissions, according to an article in the local paper. According to our youtube comments on the above video from locals sources:
So the city council meeting was this evening, and demolition of the road started this morning at around 7am. I spoke at the meeting about the road, expressing my concern about how quickly they were to get rid of it, and was told that reason they moved so quickly was because of safety concerns regarding all of the u-turns. When I asked how many car accidents had actually occured on the road as a result of u-turns, i was told by Mayor Paris, “Well, none”
Oh well. There goes another neat — but perhaps poorly executed — piece of creativity. At least we can still drop by the one in Japan…
Yesterdays post lacked a postscript. Actually it’s a lot more than that, as it is the link which originally prompted the writing of that whole goddamn thing. It’s a transcription (PDF alert) of the Mario Brothers theme so that all you budding orchestrators and orchestrators-in-development can write versions for the instruments which it hasn’t been played on yet. All two of them.
There are some melodies that most people will instantly recognize. On the one hand there are the classical: da-da-da-dum; the Ode to Joy; O Fortuna; etc. On the other are songs from popular music: Smoke on the Water, Hey Jude, Oops… I Did it Again.
And then there is a third group containing everything else.
For the Gen X/Y crowd this 3rd group is far from an afterthought — it contains some of our most striking examples. There are pieces in this category that have so strongly influenced us that there are over 800 different renditions for piano, and over 1000 for guitar just on youtube. These are pieces which we have listened to continuously for hours at a time, over the course of days, weeks, months, years.
And here is the most ubiquitous of the bunch:
Even a cursory glance through youtube gives you an idea of the influence of this particular piece. There are versions for orchestra (with over 280,000 views):
Early this ante-m., the covers (duvet actually, imported all the way from Debenhams in England which took up most of the space in my luggage but was highly, exceptionally, worth it) came off to the incessant looping of Toxic. The Britney song. This wasn’t an outside, uninvited intrusion due to radio-alarm randomness, but instead an internal performance which I blame on too many ukulele videos before bed:
I remember having a ukulele as a kid, and also remember my musical skills mostly encompassing breaking the strings. It turns out that there is a huge (not so) seedy underworld community of ukulele devotees with mad ukulele skills. For example, I managed to miss the rise to popularity of this performance (which occurred thousands of years ago in internet time):
Hell, there are even multiple ukulele “orchestras” in existence. Here’s the GB one covering Kate Bush — which actually makes me just want to turn it off and listen to the original, but the “Heathcliff!” is kind of funny:
It almost makes me want to pay for and try playing the ukulele.
