Classical Convert

The Lancaster Musical Road is No More

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…

Tags: lancaster, music, musical road

They’re Super, you know.

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):

Beatboxing flute (over 10,000,000 views):

A version for bare hands:

Tesla coil:

As well as versions for RC car and bottles, ocarina, ruler, accordion, balalaika, theremin, pipe organ, 11-string bass, electric guitar, classical guitar, tuba, clarinet, wind trio, a capella, bassoon, trombone, viola, violin, piano, and many many more…

The influence and reach of that little theme is quite remarkable.

Tags: mario brothers, music, nintendo, youtube

Break Out the MSDS Sheets

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.

Almost.

Tags: music, ukulele, youtube

Baader-Meinhofing

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: one of the greatest Minnesotan exports. It’s a not so terse (but oh-so poshly arrogant) phrase which labels the effect of, having recently observed or learned something new, then noticing it everywhere. The classic example is, after buying a new car suddenly seeing swarming flocks of cars of a similar make. Another example is seeing the term “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon” crop up all over the place after reading about it. Everybody (yeah, everybody in the entire world) reckons that it’s due to the recency effect.

Well, this seems to happen frequently with blogging. No sooner does one craftily (and sexily) tap out a stunning new post, than one observes stuff related to that topic dripping and draped all over the internet. Or even TV if you’re into that kind of thing.

You want an example? Well I’ll give you an example! The other day I touched on a thought about music and motion, and how intricately linked they are, from the point of view of choosing a soundtrack. Today, up pops an article which describes research recently done into this connection. Specifically researchers at the University of Texas have shown that a sound played simultaneously with a faint flash of light makes the visual section of the brain respond exactly as if it had seen a far brighter light. It seems this could be an evolutionary adaptation which allows animals to respond quickly to threats which are often both in motion and, say, growling.

While this is a fair-ways away from directly applying to music, it’s interesting to note that there is a physical connection — rather than merely a figurative one — between sound and vision. Of course, this isn’t really news to those with synesthesia. The really cool thing about this experiment is that the senses are connected in a deliberate, symbiotic fashion, and not just able to have their wires accidentally (or deliberately, lysergic dymethylamide fans) crossed

Tags: baader-meinhof, music, vision

The Further Demise of Physical Media

Continuing the saga of the slow demise of CDs is this poll of the online readers of Stereophile magazine, indicating that only 45% use CDs or SACDs as their primary method of listening to music, compared to 50% who use either an MP3 server or iPod.

I was previously unaware of Stereophile magazine, but it’s one of those magazines targeted at people with more money than sense audiophiles, which reviews things such as these $2999 interconnects using language like:

Silences and spaces between notes and sonic “images” weren’t even black: They were just dead-empty. Tunefulness, rhythm, and musical flow were all superb.

Although to be fair, the author does blatantly point out that it is a ridiculous price.

Regardless of how prodigal the publication is with their praise for expensive audio, the point is that their readership is well-biased toward the audio snob — not the casual top-40 downloader — and these guys are now more inclined to play via hard-disk than CD. I think with both of these ends of the audio listening spectrum covered, storable-audio is well on the way to completely wiping out physical formats.

In fact, the only time I use CDs these days is in my car stereo… and those are only for storing MP3s on. I kinda miss the collection browsing, but don’t miss the dust and taken up space. How about you? Do you still have a collection of CD jewel boxes cluttering up the shelves?

Tags: cd, mp3, music, server