101 Interesting Things, part fifty-nine: YouTube Cover Bands

We thought the internet would enable people to educate themselves, put an end to disinformation by making fact-checking easily available to all, bring the world closer together through open communication, and radically open up artistic collaboration.

Uhh... instead, we enabled people to look at cats (and porn), gave superpowers to disinformers, balkanized the world with micro-communities that enable all kinds of awfulness from pedos to Nazis, and... wait.  We actually radically opened up artistic collaboration.  One outta four... is an F minus minus.  But at least it's not an F minus minus minus!

Today, I want to talk about some of my favorite cover bands that I only found out about because of YouTube.  There are cover bands older than YouTube, of course, such as Me First and the Gimme Gimmes.  But YouTube makes it possible to check out their sound and then... do whatever?  I guess you could participate in the crowdfunding, but even if you don't, there's still the ad revenue they get.

Ew, that means I like something a corporation did.  Le sigh.  I can't be all-commie all the time, I guess.

Four and Four: Some Mood-Setting Bits

Not by me, I must say.  But still, inspirational, and/or related.  The first half is an excerpt (OK, four excerpts, but conjoined as one) from an old and epic poem.  The second half is Canadian swing.  Dig it.  :)

In Memoriam A.H.H.
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
(Queen Victoria said that this was her sole comfort, aside from the Bible.
I'm not so sure that's a solid recommendation.
But hey, what do I know?  I just think it's rad.)

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace
Believing where we cannot prove;

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death, and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him:  thou art just

Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou:
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

101 Interesting Things, part forty-six: Overtones

Enough of blood.  I mean, I'll probably wrap it up at some point, since the immune system is just so cool.  But enough of blood for now, I want to talk about other things.

So those Pentatonix guys I linked last time, that guy at (your) lower-right?  His name is Avi Kaplan, and he can do something called "overtone singing," and I can almost guarantee that you know what it sounds like even if you don't know what it's called.  Here he is:

See?  You know that sound, right?

OMFG, the news is SUNG now?!

Yes. Yes, it is. I give you auto-tuned news:

Seriously, this is the only way it could be made more of a spectacle, and less of a ridiculous circus. Ooh, and this one is good, too, because it involves autotuned talking heads talking about exceptionalism and smoking lettuce:

It's not a weekend. I need sleep. G'night!

Wait. OK, you also need to learn about the Federal Commission of T-Pain (bonus dragon charts included at no extra cost!), and the three greatest keywords EVAR for press coverage: pirates, drugs, gay marriage. News just don't get any better than this. I mean, unless it's good news, that is.

101 Interesting Things, part forty-two: Musical Roads

So you know how when you're driving along the highway doing a hundred and ten miles an hour at two in the morning on maybe ninety minutes of sleep after drinking all weekend, and you nod off for a second and you're probably going to run off the road, but then you hear this obnoxious BZZRRRT sound as you cross into the shoulder? You can relate to that, right? No?

Well, OK, you'll just have to trust me that that's how it works. They're called "rumble strips," and some guy figured out that closer grooves in the pavement produce higher pitches and farther grooves produce lower pitches. Pick your speed, and you can make music:

It's called a musical road, and they've got 'em in Denmark, Japan, South Korea, and the USA. Here's another:

So yeah. There's not a whole lot to this, except that roads can be used as musical instruments. Which is awesome, don't get me wrong - I'm just saying, once you've explained the principle, there's not really a whole lot more you can say about it. I could get into the human angle, but I'm more fond of robots. So here's a robot playing a violin, which I think is also way cool:

101 Interesting Things, part thirty-seven: Music

Music is probably one of the "realest" things there is, if "being real" can be considered a continuum and not just a binary thing. If you're having trouble imagining a spectrum of realism, think about how real chairs are: well, OK, on the one hand there are actually chairs in the world, but on the other hand there are just atoms arranged chair-wise. But those atoms are composed of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and those things are a little bit "more real" than the chair-like arrangements into which we place them. If you can dig that. Or it could be that, since words are imaginary, I'm just playing a pretty word game. Your choice, I guess.

The best definition for music that I ever heard was, "organized sound in time." Now, the sound of music (phenomenologically speaking) is just vibrations in the air wobbling your eardrum and then turning those wobbles from air vibrations into liquid vibrations, followed by tiny hairs in your inner ear picking up those vibrations and telling your brain that you're hearing sound. But what's behind that is a bunch of rhythms, and what makes music interesting is the arrangements of (and relationships between) those rhythms. I don't just mean time signature and beat, I mean the rhythm with which the air must vibrate to carry, say, a C#.

Now here's where the "realness" of music comes in: the relationships between those vibrations are a matter of mathematical proportion. While it's fairly arbitrary what names we give to our notes and what scales we use, these rhythms have a direct relationship to the bits of reality from which they are constructed. What precisely that means is up to the reader, but the fact remains that sound (or more generally, rhythm) is a direct expression of the properties of reality that produce it. There is a key difference, however, between rhythm as we perceive it and rhythm as it actually is, and here I want to illustrate the point by reference to some of the differences between Indian and Western music.

Both Indian and Western music are based on the physics of sound, but whereas Western music only recognizes twelve notes in an octave, Indian music recognizes twenty-two notes in an octave. Interestingly, both styles typically choose only seven notes in that octave range to play in a piece, and this determines the key of the piece. While the variations of Western music typically involve play with harmonic progression, Indian music tends to focus its complexity on melody and rhythm: in an Indian performance, the audience can keep a steady rhythm while the performers play around, and then they meet back up and the audience is impressed with how they each went and played with the rhythm and then managed to meet back in the middle. In a Western performance, the audience just kind of sits and listens while everyone stays in the same rhythm and plays different parts in harmony. And whereas Western music tends to have a "mood," Indian music has a time of day: Westerners have happy music, sad music, suspenseful music; Indians have morning music, afternoon music, night music. And that's just skimming the surface! (A more thorough read can be found here.)

The point is, a Westerner might call Indian music dissonant and arrhythmic, while an Indian might call Western music repetitive and dull. Each would describe their own music as rich and soulful and all kinds of other positive adjectives, while the other thing is "just weird." Which you like seems to be based only on where you grew up, the local style to which you have grown accustomed, like language or an accent: Indians have three distinct sounds which Westerners seem to translate all as the "D" sound, and Westerners seem to do this thing with migrating Rs (which is why a Bostonian will "wash the cah," while a Texan will "warsh the car").

But underneath that style is the same physics, the same vibrations, the same travelling disturbances through reality. Much like language is all about communicating ideas, music is all about communicating rhythms; but while ideas are only in our heads, rhythms are actually "out there in the world." I think that makes music and rhythmic expression a little bit more real, more interesting, more visceral, than the things that we do with language alone.