Category Archives: music

music: Fred Astaire swings his sing

Posted on 2021-08-10 by skierpage

Everybody reveres Fred Astaire’s dancing, but he’s an underrated singer despite his light thin voice. The way he swings and syncopates “Let the rain pit-ter pat-ter but it reallydoesn’tmatter if the skies are gray” in “Isn’t it a Lovely Day” … Continue reading →

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music: 20 great Elvis Costello songs are the tip of the iceberg

Posted on 2021-07-07 by skierpage

American Songwriter has a long click-through article “The Top 50 Elvis Costello Songs of All Time.” It’s a hell of a list (actually only 20, they updated the h1 heading but not the title) by one if the greats. We … Continue reading →

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music: digitization and the Internet changed music, the Web didn’t

Posted on 2021-04-13 by skierpage

Videos-about-music maker Rick Beato made a stimulating video of “TOP 20 Inventions that CHANGED Music.” It’s entertaining and a pretty good list. Digitization! He left out the underlying technique of digitization. Without it, inventions he mentioned like CDs, PC music, … Continue reading →

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Would aliens understand human music?

Posted on 2021-02-21 by skierpage

Listening to YouTube videos in which people get OpenAI Jukebox to continue songs, one is struck by how weird some of its flights of fancy are. Someone wondered what aliens would make of its attempts to make human music: imagine … Continue reading →

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music: Trevor Horn gigantism

Posted on 2021-02-17 by skierpage

Bruce Forest, the creator of this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink remix of Grace Jones’ “Slave to the Rhythm” above, provided entertaining background in a Facebook comment on one of Trevor Horn’s magna opera/Mount Everest: What do you get if you combine 2 years … Continue reading →

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music: the best video about music

Posted on 2020-10-14 by skierpage

There are lots of music exploration and music theory videos on YouTube. “The 7 Levels of Jazz Harmony” by Adam Neely is pure joy. Even if you don’t know your E♭maj7 from a hole in the ground, even if you … Continue reading →

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Google Play Music: 18 million songs and no respect

Posted on 2020-08-23 by skierpage

I signed up for Google Play Music All Access (Google marketing managers are incompetent at naming) the week it was announced, back in the good old days when Google’s motto was “Do no evil” and every month they brought exciting … Continue reading →

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music: wondering at Stevie Wonder

Posted on 2020-08-04 by skierpage

Play Stevie Wonder’s immortal run of albums – Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, Songs in the Key of Life – and you will be repeatedly floored by his artistry and talent. What brings tears of … Continue reading →

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music: Trevor Horn and the Buggles in 1979

Posted on 2020-06-29 by skierpage

I revere producers as much as musicians and songwriters. I was dimly aware of producers, starting with the mysterious “produced by Bones Howe” in big letters on the back of some record… I thought it was the Carpenters but now … Continue reading →

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computers generating art

Posted on 2020-06-19 by skierpage

First came text GPT-2 and other AI (Artificial Intelligence) Transformer models are impressive. After you hand the AI an enormous corpus of text, you give it some text and it continues, generating character after character that make up recognizable, even … Continue reading →

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