cooltunes

Recently, a priest has come forward to complain about the use of pop music at funerals. Further, he states that there’s little religion at these services. I won’t go into the latter, but there’s a lot of online space devoted to the former.

He came down pretty hard on Tina Turner, whose Simply the Best he found particularly galling. I think most will agree that funerals are very personal, and there’s quite a mix of ages and backgrounds sitting there dressed in their good clothes in a most uncomfortable setting. At the average funeral, there is the deceased right in front for the duration. To buffer this, an appropriate selection of music is comforting and cathartic at the same time.

For my mom’s service, several pieces were picked for their sorrowful qualities. The menfolk in my family bottle up most of their emotions, and one, especially, needed to let go of some of this. At the end of the ceremony, you guessed it. The only dry eyes belonged to the guys.

I was a mess. But then I cried all through putting together the playlist, which included some of the songs in the above links. But if a person had specified that certain songs be played, however enthusiastic and supposedly out of place, then I sure think those wishes should be honored.

When the kids were old enough to trust in a bookstore without worrying about them racing up and down the aisles, we would sometimes visit the old Tower bookstore in Mountain View. For a time, the fellow in charge of the background music was our hero. ‘What’s that playing? What is that?’ We wondered to ourselves and to each other, and finally one night I went up to him and asked.

And that is how we were introduced to darkwave/neoclassical music ( Arcana, back in the day). In turn, our lone CD was loaned out to at least one other young man, who found it led to a whole new world of Gothic sounds.

Then there was the time we wandered into a store in North Beach selling various exotic artifacts. The music was primal, mysterious and wildly percussive. Mesmerizing. I was the official asker, and I did. And that is how I learned about X-Tribe. Best played in a dark, musty store full of masks, bones, skins and primitive but very sharp weapons. Excellent elsewhere too.

Back up a few years, the kids were small, and a piano recital was held in a parent’s home. Now as a rule, recitals were not something I looked forward to, being a fidgety person. But the second we walked into the house, I got into that zone of unknown but ravishing music in the background. What is that? Who wrote that? It was classical, and not the usual suspects, but so infused with holiday feeling that I was desperate to find out what it was. We didn’t know the parents well. As the evening wound up, there was the usual mayhem and excited confusion whenever a group of children congregate at Christmas time. And before I knew it, the opportunity was gone.

I never saw the parents again. I have never found that music.

See previous post. The more I think about it, the worse I feel. Because today I got an email from the person who can’t stand to have things in her ear. She thanked me for being understanding about how the iPod was a ‘bad fit’ as a gift for her.

I had been so taken aback by her remarks the other day that I didn’t think to tell her how she could just plug her iPod into her stereo system or her car, thereby getting around using earphones. And it wasn’t that I was understanding, it was more that I was. . . silent.

But I’m not sure I could ever tell anyone their present was inappropriate. Perhaps she saw endless iTunes gift cards in her future. (I did explain she could put the music on CDs.) But can you imagine? Endless iTunes gift cards?

Last Christmas I gave iPods to two people I felt would never buy one for themselves. One recipient has no computer and no access to one, so I added 200 songs from my music library with the stipulation that I would remove any or all that were not wanted.

The other recipient does have access to iTunes. Both are incredibly difficult to buy gifts for, and selfishly, I had in mind very easy future gifts of iTunes gift cards, at least for the computer user . Hah.

Both were initially pleased with having a nifty Apple gadget. However, the first giftee soon made it clear that he did not want any more songs added (his nano has a 2,000 song capability), nor did he want any of his music collection on the iPod. I got what amounted to a lecture on why he felt this way, and how the gift was basically useless. He said he didn’t want to hear songs over and over again.

The other person bought one iTunes song, and that was that. She also gave me a lecture on why it was an inappropriate gift, although she did give consideration to my feelings. So I got to see someone hold an iPod in their hand, and go on and on about how they can’t stand to have something in their ear. Or how they could never do yard work with something like this because they want to know if someone is coming up behind them. And I think maybe I should just ask for it back and hold a giveaway for Cooltunes.

I’m going to assume that she did not appreciate the iTunes gift card I just gave her for her birthday. Pre-lecture.

A solid education in music theory? Knowledge of several instruments? An ability to summon an entire orchestra in the memory?

Nah. Sometimes, the songwriter is ignorant of complex chords, and can only count to four.

Only three of their choices appear on Rolling Stone’s best 50 list.

After learning recently that a relative has not been exposed to music much past the 60s, I decided to get him a nano 8g. He does not have internet access, and chooses not to sample music through headphones in a record store due to his fastidious nature.

Over the next few days, I will load up the nano with a wide variety of music, the likes of which he has never heard. He’ll probably hate a lot of it, but then there will be happy discoveries.

And because he doesn’t have a computer, I will also have to buy a wall charger.

This promises to be lots more fun than filling up a basket with various foods as I did last year.

A family member has remarked that attending a concert that consists solely of the performer onstage with his laptop lacks a certain visual excitement.

In the world of classical music, technological advances are moving the usual group-of-musicians-with-conductor scenario into a more futuristic realm. Nowadays, a concert-goer might see the conductor decked out in a specially wired jacket that allows a Wii-minded directing of an orchestra.

This orchestra would include a section that is not visible to the audience, but gleaned from a database of digital sounds that gives an unprecedented depth and range to the listening experience.

When experts listen to samples of computer-generated music embedded in a Beethoven symphony performance, they find it difficult to tell the difference from the real thing.

Maybe. But the rumor is that users would expect to pay a high price when they buy iPods and iPhones in order to get the free pass to the iTunes library.

So how high are we talking about? How will other companies compete?

The inner workings of songs from Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead, John Lennon, Queen and Amy Winehouse, among others.

Using chord variations to manipulate listeners’ emotions is also discussed at length in This is Your Brain on Music: the Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel J. Levitin, which I got for Christmas. Thanks, Chris!

The list includes Tim Burton, Robin Williams, Buzz Aldrin, Robert Downey, Jr., Francis Ford Coppola, Ted Turner and many musicians. Nina Simone is not listed here, but there is mention in her wikipedia entry that her diagnosis was kept a secret.

A scholarly discussion (with tongue firmly in cheek) published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The site has a bit of a problem displaying text via Firefox on a Mac, your experience might be better.

Bands such as Arcade Fire and RyanDan are letting fans control the movement on their videos, and embedding links to further info and shopping.

The neurologist who wrote Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat examines how music played a role in some of his patients’ disorders (including his experience with his own leg). A review from Slate.

Up at the jr. high field, the high school band is performing during lunch. On a very windy day, all that drifts over is drums.

This must be from last year’s show. I still get a little misted up watching this stuff. Six years as a band parent will do that.

Do I miss it? Um, no.

In this corner of Cupertino is Apple and iTunes (80% market share), and over here in another corner of Cupertino is gBox. Google is involved, but only via their ads, they say.

Outside of Silicon Valley, Amazon enters the fray, with Wal-Mart and Best Buy stepping up efforts to topple iTunes’ dominance.

Will the price of a song go down?

So what are the elements of music that sends shivers up and down your spine? Shrieking violins are common, as are menacing horns. Spectral voices, especially those chanting Latin, can be found in many pieces. Sounds that mimic alarms. Percussive panting that conjures up rabid beasts hot on your trail.

The unnamed anime piece mentioned in the previous post has all these (minus the Latin), punctuated with the pure and innocent wind chimes.

From Rolling Stone, a report on the how and why, with grim statistics.

Working with a software engineer and a mathematician, Townshend’s brainchild creates music from your personal data.

I’ve been re-reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho on my train ride to work, and to liven things up (not that the book needs anything additional to entertain me) I decided to keep tabs on the music Bateman listens to and is exposed to in the book. So far, aside from the obvious artists Bateman spends full chapters expressing his opinions of (Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News, Whitney Huston), he also listens to the Talking Heads, Stephen Bishop, and Christopher Cross, and is also exposed at various times to several other 80’s artists: The Crystals, The Ronettes, The Shirelles, INXS, and Belinda Carlisle, to name a few. Some of them I have never heard of, but I guess that’s not surprising.

A couple of other music-related experiences I’ve had related to the book - first, I happened listening to The Axis of Perdition during one of the more gruesome parts while reading the book for the first time. The song contained a sample from the horror movie Event Horizon, and I felt that the sample along with the violent nature of the music was a pretty good complement for the book. More recently, I was reading it while listening to random Melt-Banana songs, which was an awesome experience.. the frenetic, bizarre music and Yasuko’s chipmunk-on-speed vocals went well with the book’s dark humor and Bateman’s occaisional hallucinations. It is kind of hard to concentrate for very long when listening to them though.

According to a new study out of Canada, kids who take music lessons do better on memory tests than their nonmusical peers. The research was performed on children ages four to six, duration of the lessons was one year.

In a new report, researchers find that iPod users seldom buy from iTunes. Where does all that music come from then?

According to the study, most of it hails from the owner’s CD collection or from file-sharing. File-sharing?

More on this later.

The Independent takes a look at Mercora, last.fm, MyStrands, Pandora and others.

While messing around on last.fm, I learned of a horrifying European character called Crazy Frog. People in the US don’t seem to be too familiar with Crazy Frog, but apparently there is a song by Crazy Frog which people generally agree is one of the most irritating songs ever made by man. A search for ‘crazy frog’ on YouTube will get you a taste of what this sounds like.

From last.fm:

The success of this album along with the “Axel F” single has irritated and baffled many critics and musicians. This is mostly due to the Frog’s constant chart domination despite the hatred of so many, and the frustration of legitimate musicians selling well below him.

Anyway, through Crazy Frog I discovered many of the more negative tags on last.fm, such as “the worst thing ever to happen to music” (Crazy Frog is by far the top artist), “kill me now,” and “rapes my ears”. I made sure to tag my musical nemesis Kelly Clarkson with all these tags.

Cows seem to appreciate music. And why shouldn’t they?

The article includes a link to kulning, a method of herd calling that contains elements of fear, that is, screaming.

Listen to algorithmic music based on a word of your choosing. I picked ‘precipitation’ because we had some, unexpectedly, this afternoon.

So who uses algorithmic composition? Brian Eno, for one.

Surrounded by metal fans in a small Scottish town, a 15-year old Alan Warner discovers music that he can relate to in Can.

In a child born with Williams, there are about 20 genes missing in the brain. IQ will always be low, and the simplest act can be profoundly difficult.

However, many have extremely outgoing personalities, a very cheerful attitude, and a stunning ability with music.

We all respond to music in our own way, even if we can’t sing a note in tune. Few, if any, cultures exist that don’t have some form of sound that can be interpreted as a kind of music.

People handicapped by medical disabilities that severely hamper their senses relate that they can still appreciate music.

Some studies show that infants might be born with perfect pitch, but lose this ability as they mature.

Why is music so important to mankind? Theories abound, including one from Darwin, who thought music had a role in the mating process. Other scientists think music could have been a non-threatening way to bond with fellow humans for survival purposes.

Much more here.