http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_R7fgo0FLc
robotized organs of speech
人間と同様の音声生成器官を持つ発話ロボット #DigInfo
DigInfo TV - http://jp.diginfo.tv/ 2011/7/13 香川大学 発話ロボット
Pato Fu tocando "Cities in dust" - (Siouxsie & The Banshees) no Estúdio Showlivre ao vivo/2007
Streinj deyz haev faund as
Streinj deyz haev traekd as daun
Dhey'r gouing tu distroy
Aar kaezhual joyz
Wii shael gou on pleying
Or faind a nuu taun
Yae!
Streinj aiz fil streinj ruumz
Voisis wil signal dhear taiard end
Dha houstes is grining
Hur gests sliip fram sining
Hiar mii tok av sin
Aend yuu nou dhis iz it
Yae!
Streinj deyz haev faund as
Aend thruu dhear streinj awars
Wii linger aloun
Baadiiz kanfyuuzd
Memariiz misyuuzd
Aez wii ran fram dha dey
Tu a streinj nait av stoun
Manythings.org/shuffle/ has a good explanation of how to fix the iPod Shuffle. It links directly to the sourceforge page of rebuild_db. It also explains why any reasonable person --such as a language student-- might find it useful to rebuild the database. I wish I had known about this sooner.
There are several audio players and managers in Linux which function as alternatives to iTunes. I started off using the default application (for Ubuntu) Rhythmbox but later switched to Banshee as Rhythmbox had a few unacceptable problems: not transferring tracks to an iPod on occasion, not downloading podcasts on occasion, and not playing music on occasion. I have also tried Amarok, Exaile, Songbird, and a few other minor ones but all of these failed to support iPods, podcasts, or my computer's audio. I need iPod support because I have a few iPods around and probably will for a long time, although the mass-storage USB is a much better way than the closed iTunes-managed corporate podware which crAAPL grants its devotees.
I recently misplaced the (2005?) 1st-generation Shuffle that never seemed to die, so I went to a second or third generation clippy Shuffle Emerald(?) that someone else didn't need. My needs are simple: just to be able to play 3-6 hours of podcasts and some music every day during my commutes. Banshee doesn't recognize it, so I've switched back to Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox seems to be working better than before, so far, although some podcasts seem to go offline much of the time.
One thing I noticed when I was giving Exaile a spin again was the excellent selection of internet radio stations. Because they are pre-installed in Exaile, you tend to use them. I decided to add some radio stations to the poor selection that pre-exists in Rhythmbox. Here are the URLs I added, in rough order from higher bitrates to lower. I can't stand commercials, so I selected mostly public and college radio.
KEXP
http://kexp-mp3-2.cac.washington.edu:8000/listen.pls
128kbps
KCRW
http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwlive.pls
128kbps
http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwmusic.pls
128kbps
http://media.kcrw.com/live/kcrwnews.pls
64kbps
WGBH Boston
http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=1274610
64kbps
KUNI
http://134.161.228.190:8000/listen.pls
64kbps
IPR
http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=1279144
64kbps
WBUR.org - Boston's NPR news source
http://audio.wbur.org/stream/live_mp3.m3u
47kbps
KPFK
http://sc1.mainstreamnetwork.com:9042/listen.pls
32kbps
WNYC
http://beta.wnyc.org/stream/wnyc-fm939/mp3.pls
32kbps
http://beta.wnyc.org/stream/wnyc-am820/mp3.pls
32kbps
WKCR Columbia University NY
http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=1211987
http://kanga.college.columbia.edu:8000/listen.pls
24kbps
In addition to those, I am still looking into these:
Soma FM - 19 unique channels
http://somafm.com/
That's beginning to be too much choice.
One of the best places to search is Shoutcast.
Shoutcast - "39,740 free internet radio stations"
http://www.shoutcast.com/
If you don't find what you are looking for there, try radio-locator, which lets you search by city, zip-code, country, format (genre), or call letters.
radio-locator
http://www.radio-locator.com/
Update: Rhythmbox still sucks. "...could not parse the feed contents..." Banshee chocked on the iPod mb229 a few more times but finally rebuilt the database without crashing and now is good. Banshee wins.
Here's another way to rebuild the (Shuffle) database.
Recently Linux visitors to my site seem to outnumber Mac visitors, sometimes by 2 to 1. Ten percent of visitors are from Japan (at the moment), so those LXers are not just me re-loading my own page. I really do think there could be a stampede to Linux in the form of Google's Chrome OS. I'd like to see Chrome pass Mac OS and get alot of attention in the process, bursting Steve's bubble. I expect that it has a fairly good chance of doing that and becoming a phenomenon similar to what they've done with Android. This might make a major dent in the Microsoft monopoly or Win-Mac duopoly.
I recently upgraded two machines to Ubuntu 10.04.1. I hadn't made the change earlier because Lucid came out in late April, several weeks into the first semester of the new school year in Japan. And since I immediately went on vacation in August, I didn't have a chance to install until late August. The exception is the Asus Eee 4G, my most expendable computer and therefore a test bed, which has had Xubuntu 10.04 on the SSD and Ubuntu 10.04 on the SD card and which performed excellently as a vacation computer, within the limitations of the 7" screen and a slow processor. That's a configuration I can recommend; I usually boot the SD Ubuntu rather than the Xubuntu option.
The two others were the Asus 1000HE and the Apple Mac Mini. I upgraded the 1000HE through the Update Manager (Preferences>Update Manager>Distribution Upgrade). That seemed to go well, but afterwards the computer had devolved into the Netbook Edition that it had begun as long ago when I first made it dual-boot. I despise the Netbook Edition since it uses space less efficiently than regular Ubuntu. However, it was a deformed and disfigured Netbook Edition, with a stub menu and nothing there. I was able to add an item to the menu and restart it. I found that the solution is to select a GNOME session at startup, not Netbook Edition, and then use Synaptic to remove all Netbook Edition packages so it can only boot as GNOME or something equally reasonable at startup. If Lucid is stable on this machine I may be able to stick with that for a few years. Some Skype test calls were a little dodgy at first; I'll have to check some real calls to see if audio is really OK.
I was a little worried about the Mac Mini since the install seems rather fragile, and after rEFIt hands the boot off to GRUB2, it all took about 5-7 minutes to re-boot. Of course, you could go months between reboots. I usually log out and log back in if something appears glitchy. Sometimes it froze during bootup and I worried that it was lost. I used an Ubuntu Studio DVD for this upgrade. It went very well, although it didn't seem to transform from Edubuntu to Ubuntu Studio as I had thought it would. Perhaps only packages relevant to Edubuntu were upgraded from the DVD as one source, the rest from the internet. Performance has improved: the Mac Mini goes to sleep and the on/off/sleep light pulses gently as it does as a Mac, Bluetooth is working perfectly now where it didn't before (or maybe I was just doing it wrong before?), and that troublesome bootup is now about 2-3 minutes, slightly long but better than some Windows machines I use in universities and perhaps just about par for the Linux-on-a-Mac course.
The UNE is a waste because you can simply set your top (and bottom) panels to auto-hide by configuring them with a right-click. This saves more space than the UNE. In addition, the UNE launcher is a huge waste of space and time. Using GNOME Main Menu, you can have a single icon in the auto-hide menubar and with a single click, drag, and release open any application. Using F11 toggles the tab I am viewing in and out of full screen view. The "Run" applet in the menu bar lets you launch an app with a few letters of its name. By comparison, the launcher of UNE requires a click (on the ever-present menubar) to bring it forward, another click to navigate to the right section, a few more clicks or scrollwheel to scroll down the list of apps (which are not the size of text but have huge space-wasting icons and the name of the app in a box!) and finally a click on the icon to launch the app which will then appear in the tiny space left available to you in UNE. Just use regular Ubuntu is my advice (or Debian or Mint or Mandriva or openSuSE...). I am not a fan of "Docks" either.
Update: Not only does sleep work, bluetooth work, and bootup go faster, "Restart" works properly now, too. In 9.10, I had shutdown but restart went to darkness requiring physically powering off. There have been a few new Linux kernel updates and thus a few restarts recently. It takes about 1 minute 15 seconds from selecting "Restart" until the EFI/rEFIt/BootCamp stuff goes away and GRUB comes into the scene, then one minute to my Login screen and about 30 seconds (?) more after that. I guess it's OK. Anyway, there is much better support for the 2009 Mac Mini in Lucid than in Karmic.
Hayward (as in Tony) sounds a little like "wayward". It makes a guy think...
Carry On My Hayward Son
(adopted from KANSAS)
Carry on my Hayward son(-of-a-bitch)
There'll "BP" when you are done
Stop the gushing leaking oil
Don't you spill no more
Once I sank below the noise and confusion
"Beyond Petroleum" was just an illusion
I was drilling ever deeper
But I drilled too deep
Killed eleven on the rig in the fire
Burned alive to help our stock price go higher
I hear the voices when I'm drilling
I can hear them say
Refrain
Carry on my Hayward son(-of-a-bitch)
There'll "BP" when you are done
Stop the gushing leaking oil
Don't you spill no more
Tried the Top Hat and the Junk Shot and Top Kill
Lied to everyone about how much we spill
"Boot on your neck!" said Salazar
but his balls are in our jar.
On a stormy sea of moving emulsion
Nauseated by oceanic revulsion
I try to hide it with dispersent
But I hear the voices say
Refrain
Carry on my Hayward son(-of-a-bitch)
There'll "BP" when you are done
Stop the gushing leaking oil
Don't you spill no more
No!
Carry on, you will always remember
Carry on, it's the fault of the vendor
Blowout preventer from Transocean
Halliburton's concrete plug
Carry on my Hayward son(-of-a-bitch)
There'll "BP" when you are done
Stop the gushing leaking oil
Don't you spill (don't you spill no more)
The original lyrics are not irrelevant to the situation, either.
(by KANSAS)
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion
I was soaring ever higher
But I flew too high
Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man
Though my mind could think I still was a mad man
I hear the voices when I'm dreaming
I can hear them say
{Refrain
Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man, well
It surely means that I don't know
On a stormy sea of moving emotion
Tossed about I'm like a ship on the ocean
I set a course for winds of fortune
But I hear the voices say
{Refrain
No!
Carry on, you will always remember
Carry on, nothing equals the splendor
The center lights around your vanity
But surely heaven waits for you
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry (don't you cry no more)
series, not only because the kid could be listening to his lectures, but the drunk salariman or group of three housewives are usually the ones shouting to talk louder than the volume of a noisy train, which makes it doubly difficult to hear anything on earbuds. Nobody says a word to them -- it's a noisy train, after all-- but harrassing people for the whisper of noise that might escape from their earbuds in the seconds stopping at the station is encouraged. It's bizarre, but at least someone broke Kevin's leg again last month.
I think the music-lover may be misinterpreting Kevin as an oversensitive victim, when he's just digging out some ear wax in his spare time.
The campaign seems to be running out of ideas, recycling the same nonsense, although they've gone to positive (?) behaviors now. Try people who sneeze all over others without covering their mouths, and the ones who pick their noses and flick it onto other passengers? Maybe it's not good manners to attack the retarded, though.
The new Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" Linux distribution went with the undemocratic decision to move the Menu, Close, Minimize, and Maximize buttons from the right to the left! This may be good for Mac users, but having already broken my 15-year-old Mac habit, I prefer to keep the buttons on the right. I won't be upgrading my OS right away anyway, as everything is working well now, but eventually I will switch to 10.04. When I do so, I will immediately move the buttons back to the right using gconf-editor as explained at UbuStu and How-to Geek, among other places. I do think Ubuntu has damaged their standing with this move. It's put me off a little bit. I think many users will migrate downstream to Mint or upstream to Debian. I have been considering Debian, in particular Skolelinux to replace Edubuntu. I've also been considering a more multimedia-oriented distro such as Ubuntu Studio since it seems that in audio and video is where Linux fails or falls short of the ease of use of Mac, so I would like that functionality to be the best it can be and see if it can compete.
I've not upgraded the distribution, but have changed to Shiki-Dust as the window border and Breathe as the icon theme instead of Gartoon. I changed to a grassy desktop wallpaper, too.
Incidentally, the Mac Mini I am using as my main computer is a POS. The "Superdrive" doesn't work at all, with any OS, so I have attached the Buffalo branded portable CD drive that I bought to use with my ASUS 1000HE. Also, the hard drive is the only one among various drives, up to 10 years old, that shows bad blocks and may be failing. This, although I bought it last June! I was considering returning it under warranty, but I don't know how long that would take, and at least the Core 2 Duo CPU and 4GB memory works OK; that's all I need. I regret that I won't be able to contribute to showing Apple's truly bad performance, but since I resolve to not buy an AAPL again, maybe that will be enough. It has been a big mistake. It takes Linux 5 minutes to boot on this machine, and it's not dependable. I don't really need the Mac OS to fall back on as an OS, and if I did, I could have used the older 2003 and earlier PowerPCs upstairs in the PC Lounge and Museum, formerly known as the PowerPC Lounge and Museum.
I was recently offered a Fujitsu "FMV Deskpower CE7/857"with Windows Millenium Edition still installed. I accepted it and found it readily let me install Fedora (which I rejected because it seemed like a pain to install the mp3 and dvd codecs), then MEPIS (which was better but still lacked some codecs and was ugly in a bad-kde way), and finally Xubuntu (9.10), which was attractive and worked well once I connected it, downloaded the codecs and input methods, VLC, etc, and made it into a multi-regional DVD player. The machine does have the unusual habit of randomly opening the DVD/CD tray every few hours, but this doesn't seem to disrupt playing a movie or even installing software; I simply push the button and it goes back in and resumes the movie or install. As free junk, it has better value than the Mac Mini, as it can play DVDs and happily runs any Linux you care to put on it.
It's a wonderful life. Then again, it could be better. Mark Linkous = Sparklehorse = shot himself in the heart with his rifle a week ago. He was a talented musician, and I appreciated his work.
This story at Live Science is from June, but I didn't hear about it until recently.
The applications of this science remain to be discovered. Can the results be generalized beyond cigarettes, club-goers, the "discotheque" environment, smokers, and Italians? It seems that "babababa" may have a different meaning in a club environment than outside of that environment. I'd assume it means, "I'm tripping too much to be able to use language; can you help me?" When the researcher then produces a coherent request, the subject may surrender a cigarette in relief.Hearing in discotheques
In the first study, 286 clubbers were observed while they were talking, with loud music in the background. In total, 72 percent of interactions occurred on the right side of the listener. These results are consistent with the right-ear preference found in laboratory studies and questionnaires, and they demonstrate that the side bias is spontaneously displayed outside the laboratory.
In the second study, the researchers approached 160 clubbers and mumbled an inaudible, meaningless utterance (such as "babababa") and waited for the subjects to turn their head and offer either their left of their right ear. They then asked subjects for a cigarette (in Italian the request specifically was "Hai una sigaretta?" which can be translated in English as "Do you have a cigarette?"). Overall, 58 percent offered their right ear for listening and 42 percent their left. No link was found between the number of cigarettes obtained and the ear receiving the request.
In the third study, the researchers intentionally addressed 176 clubbers in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they spoke to the clubbers' right ear compared with their left.
I finally converted the mac mini to Edubuntu Linux by enabling printing, the last remaining barrier to use. Without being able to print, I would be forced to boot back into the Mac OS X every time I wanted to print. Contrary to the information on the Linux Printing database page, the Canon Pixus 990i, (AKA the i990 outside Japan) does have support.
Canon itself provides rpms --which should work on any(?) rpm-based distribution (Red Hat, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Mandriva-- and source, which I suppose can be compiled once I figure that out.
http://cweb.canon.jp/drv-upd/bj/bjlinux240.html
http://download.canon.jp/pub/driver/bj/linux/
http://support-asia.canon-asia.com/contents/ASIA/EN/0100119202.html
There is also older debian and ubuntu support that may/not work
http://mambo.kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~takushi/#canon
I downloaded turbolinux and that got printing up and running although it may only work for 30 days before putting some logo or something on my printouts. I'll find a workaround w/in 30 days, or buy a new printer, or boot back into MacOSX, or install an rpm-based distribution to keep my printer happy. I hope nothing gets so broken that I have to go back to the Apple world.
Apparently it's also possible to convert rpm to deb using "alien" but that involves command line interface (CLI)toral skills of a higher level. I don't think I would need that anyway since I have the source.
Printing was the final barrier because sound is good, and I decided that no physical shutdown or restarting is not really such a show-stopper; I am old enough to remember computers that had to be shut down in software and then shut down physically. It was about 15 years ago. Back to the future. Also, Mac and Linux usually run for months without needing to reboot, anyway. (I don't know about WinDOS--never ran it long enough to see if it was equally stable.)
This is "Linux Transition v4" because there has been the Little Sucker (Eee pc 4G), Little Puppy (Eee pc 1000HE), the iLamp (M9290J/A), and now the 2009 mac mini. I had to change the mini since I tend to work on it, use it for mail, and use it for podcasts and iPod syncing. In addition to being figuratively locked in classrooms with Windows five hours a week, if I use the Mac as my main home computer, I may not even use Linux everyday. I was probably using MacOSx 50 or 60% of the time, then Linux, then Windows. This will put Linux on top, with the obligatory Windows time at work, and Mac and Windows available at home as a secondary boot option should I ever need them. This fourth install puts me over the hump. Edubuntu, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and the Netbook Remix and Moblin Remix are the ones I am using now. I'm done with Mandriva for a while and I not using OpenSuSE anymore or Fedora (yet). I am interested in looking into Fedora, Debian, and FreeBSD but Ubuntu is serving me best right now, I like the philosophy, and I think it may be more productive to try to use a larger rather than smaller distribution and build a bigger community, all else being equal.
That leaves only the 2003 eMac and some 1999-2000 iMacs in my 3rd floor PPCLounge running MacOS. I rarely get up there these days. The challenge of the eMac will also require me to finally master editing the xorg.conf file and get the eMac display challenge right. In addition to those, there are also 2 other Windows computers run by others in my family. They seem happy as Windows drones.
I'm very happy with the mac-mini-bootcamp-edubuntu-OS. It seems better than the MacOS, but I could be biased. The text editor gedit is certainly better than Text Edit in that gedit is tabbed. Rhythmbox sees my iPod and plays the music without complaining about it being synched to another computer or such nonsense. I don't know well yet, but if it doesn't support the iPod well, I'll try gpodder and some other tools or just get a SanDisk. Basically, freedom is better. MacOSX is like sleeping in your office because it's a really nice office; Linux is more like having your own place made of prefab parts that you built from free materials donated to a co-op. We might compare it to being out in the forest in some cabins since GNU-Linux(&BSD) is a whole ecosystem of competing and co-evolving operating systems and software, while the Windows-Mac duopoly is a shiny glass office building. Don't you dare try knocking holes in the walls or redecorating. Edubuntu with Google Gadgets and a lot of small customizations looks much better than MacOSX right away. Part of it may be because the 22 inches of screen looks better than the ten inches of screen I was looking at in the netbook experience. Possible 2.2 times better. Squared. Somehow it looks great. I had been looking at that brushed aluminum for years and years. It's a nice look, and it would have been good for 4 to 6 months. But give me a break. Try something different for Steve's sake. Mahogany. Concrete. Stone. Something. I can't stand looking at it anymore. Only one choice in everything. The Cult of Mac. It's like Steve Jobs is dad and you have to live in his house and follow all of his rules as he gets older and a little slower at staying up to date all the time. Grow up, MacAddicts! Stop sucking corporate ass'le. I will enjoy not having only the Mac hardware to choose from for my OS of choice. However, I do intend to keep one working Apple CPU and MacOSx around for odd jobs. I miss the RSS news screensaver; I've got schools of fish now and it's very AfterDark Flocks-esque.
I tried to set my Shuffle to download the latest podcast of some select daily favorites and delete the previous day's. I always do it by hand. I knew it was possible because the Nano can do it. But I found it was not possible. The Shuffle is only allowed to download a random mix, or you synch files manually. Crippleware. Steve Jobs apparently decided the Shuffle was for jogging, that it should be nearly impossible NOT to shuffle it (1 mm slider has to stop halfway to NOT shuffle) and that users should be forced to upgrade to the Nano if they wanted to automatically offload and onload their daily (or frequently updated) favorites. The Shuffle is better for me because I want to operate it by touch in my pocket, so APPL just lost another customer. When I hear "Shuffle" I imagine a crippled old man walking slowly without lifting his feet. I sometimes call it the iPot-snuffle or the iPot-sniffle. It's yet another entry in the Top 50 Things I Hate About APPL. I will have to write that list up sometime. Maybe I should go for 100?
Speaking of things I hate about APPL, how about the situation where Windows has a (near) 90% market share and is somehow NOT a monopoly? Can you imagine any other business in which a company has a 90% market share and is NOT considered a monopoly? Imagine if one company had 90% of the phone lines. How much competition would there be? What if one company had 90% of the rails, or roads, or gas stations, or cars, internet service providers, or television stations? Is there any chance it would not be considered a monopoly and not be broken up? Looking back at it, what happened is that Apple saved Microsoft. By taking Microsoft's investment and staying afloat as a token make-believe competitor, they saved Microsoft from Microsoft's worst nightmare, being an undeniable monopolist. The two of them carved up the market. Maybe Steve promised not to sell computers for much under $1000. Bill promised to delay or screw up Windows enough to help APPL get over 5% again. In the alternate timeline where Apple did go broke, Windows would have to be clearly recognized as a monopoly and might have been broken into a few competing companies, teams, and versions of Windows by now.
Apple has an SD card in their laptop computers now, much like they finally have a radio function in some iPods, after refusing to consider it for the first 5 years when it would have been cutting-edge. However, you cannot get the SD card in their one laptop for $1000. You need to pay more and get the more expensive model. Guys. Computers at the $200 and $300 level have the SD card slot. They've had it for years. You don't use that as a feature to squeeze more money out of people--unless you really think of your customers as dumb farm animals (no insult to sentient farm animals intended).
Here is a funny spoof of the iconic I'm-a-Mac ad. The producer says he wrote the script before Google bought YouTube, which is why an anthopomorphised MySpace makes an appearance (as opposed to YouTube). The Linux guy should have been based more on Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman. Unix is like Stallman. The Google hacker guy is not really my image of Google (but what do I know). Perhaps what the Mac is experience is a kernel panic. IMHO, the video could be improved by incorporating a Spinning Beachball of Death as the end.
I've been very busy but when I have some time I'm trying to get to where I can use Linux most of the time.
It has been a month now since Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala came out. I was refreshing the download page and wondering where it was as midnight approached. When it did appear, my download was expected to take an hour. As new Ubuntu users crowded onto the servers, the reported time gradually lengthened to over 24 hours, so I started some bittorrent downloads, which followed the opposite pattern: near infinite download time at first, but as more and more peers acquired copies the download time shrank to a handful of hours. I eventually downloaded 8 or 9 versions of Ubuntu:
To get the sound working, add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-baseMany thanks for that!
options snd-hda-intel model=imac24
I was wondering what portable audio players would be good for interoperability with GNU Linux-based OSs, and according to CNET's MP3(!) Player Finder, the SanDisk Sansa Fuze is about right for me. It comes in 4 or 8 GB sizes, but I would take advantage of the fact that it accepts microSD cards and put a 16 or 32 GB microSD card in. Note that it also can record audio. And has FM. Supports WMA, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC. Seven of your top 50 reasons for hating Apple right there.
Actually, it looks a bit on the large size for me. I like tactile controls (such as those of the iPod shuffle) so I can operate it by touch in the pocket of a shirt or jacket. Assuming it will also work with Linux (both reviews omit mention of that OS), the Clip+ might be better.
The big news with the Clip+ is the addition of a MicroSD card slot, which is capable of accepting SDHC cards, currently available at up to 16GB. At press time, a 16GB card was about $40, which means you could conceivably get yourself a 24GB flash player for around $110. That's an absolutely incredible deal.It may be time for a walk through Akihabara.
The new collection of music by Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, (and David Lynch), Dark Night Of The Soul, is available online from NPR in streaming format. Many other artist collaborated and are featured. The album and accompanying booklet of photographs by David Lynch is tied up in a legal dispute and may never be released. Plans to release the album with the CD case, booklet, and a blank cd-r are proceeding. BBC, NYT
1. "Revenge" (featuring The Flaming Lips) – 4:52
2. "Just War" (featuring Gruff Rhys) – 3:44
3. "Jaykub" (featuring Jason Lytle) – 3:52
4. "Little Girl" (featuring Julian Casablancas) – 4:33
5. "Angel's Harp" (featuring Black Francis) – 2:57
6. "Pain" (featuring Iggy Pop) – 2:49
7. "Star Eyes (I Can't Catch It)" (featuring David Lynch) – 3:10
8. "Everytime I'm with You" (featuring Jason Lytle) – 3:09
9. "Insane Lullaby" (featuring James Mercer) – 3:12
10. "Daddy's Gone" (featuring Mark Linkous and Nina Persson) – 3:09
11. "The Man Who Played God" (featuring Suzanne Vega) – 3:09
12. "Grim Augury" (featuring Vic Chesnutt) – 2:32
13. "Dark Night of the Soul" (featuring David Lynch and Scott Spillane) – 4:38
I learned via the February 4th WNYC Soundcheck podcast about the phenomenon of Microsoft Songsmith. To me, it is the opposite of karaoke. Whereas karaoke is everything but the vocal, and the vocal is the only live part added at the end, Songsmith starts with the vocal (apparently sung synched to a metronome-like set beat) as a start point, and then the software generates what the rest of the song might sound like according to your preferences. As WNYC puts it, "With the release of Microsoft's Songsmith, seasoned songwriters and amateurs alike can generate canned accompaniment to their own voice (or those of others) with the touch of a button." Songsmith compositions seem to have gone viral a few weeks ago, although many of the YouTube videos still only have a few thousand hits. They (at WNYC) put some examples here, and linked to some others at Musicradar. Check out this playlist at YouTube or create one with a search. Microsoft's geeky (anti?-)ad may make you appreciate the production values of real ads. If you have a pc lying around and some audio tracks, you can give it a try for your 6 hour free trial. [download] [screen-shots]
Here are some lesser-known hits of "The Songsmiths":
Tom's Diner (and Glockenspiel Emporium)
Heart of Glass (and Metal!?)
Reggae-o-head's "Reckoner"
PussyCat Dolls (Don't Cha)
Billie Jean (is not my robot?)
Slim Shady (pleeease sit down?)
Just as with real musicians, it's hard for the virtual band to have a hit, but perhaps someday the robo-musicians WILL be better.
Tunes generated by economic data allow the depression to generate its own soundtrack! Any data will do.
I wonder how this cyber-muzak will wash back and influence human musicmaking, like songbirds imitating cellphone ringtones. Will musicians imitate famous bad Songsmith compositions in their live shows? Will machine translations of random wikipedia pages be the most popular lyrics?
We got the beat
Beat it
Heard it thru the grapevine
Just what i need, ed. (the cars)
The Doobie(us) Bros: Long Train Running
Buddy Holly (weezer)
What's goin on?
God only knows (bleach-boyz)
When the financial melt-down bail-out was first proposed, I marveled at how the paper losses of a handful of bankers could be judged more worthy of intervention than the one-million plus families who have lost their homes in the mortgage crisis over the past year.
Much has been written about socialism for the rich, fascism, moral hazard, and other hazards of this, which I won't re-hash here, since the proposed massive bailout seems to have now become law, well-lubricated with pork fat the second time. Does anybody hear a squealing sound?
I had thought of how difficult it would be for George Bush to persuade people to give him 700 billion dollars, and two songs by the Who came to mind. Initially, We Won't Be Fooled Again, and later, Behind Blue Eyes. This song in its original form seems to reflect the great pain of the bankers. After all, doesn't one banker losing a million properties feel a million times the pain of a family who only loses one? I'm not really sure that the banking class is literally entirely blue-eyed, but let's just say they figuratively are. This song dedication goes out to the clueless Henry Paulson, who will represent the banking class. I don't have a radio station or even a YouTube video or slideshow for this, I'm just suggesting a soundtrack as a concept. Some annotations to the lyrics have been provided for the illumination of the metacognitively challenged.
