This open letter from OK Go, in explaining why their new video can’t be embedded, pretty well covers the state of the music industry (incidentally, the video is great). (via waxy)

Upular: “composed using chords, bass notes and vocal samples from the Disney Pixar film Up.” Totally new and original sounding, yet still capturing the feel of the movie somehow. I love the shift at 1:28.

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs his Alexander Hamilton rap (as if sung by Aaron Burr) at the White House Poetry Jam:

Listen-to-whatever-you-want-whenever-you-want music streaming site Grooveshark has redesigned, and it’s even awesomer. And they settled the EMI lawsuit so it might even be allowed to stay up. Can’t wait for the iPhone app, if it happens, and Apple approves it.

Shazam is this ridiculously cool service where you hold your phone up, record maybe 10 seconds of whatever song is playing, and the service identifies the song for you with uncanny accuracy, even in rooms with lots of background noise. Slate has a piece on how it fingerprints songs to work its magic:

OK, but how does Shazam make these fingerprints? As Avery Wang, Shazam’s chief scientist and one of its co-founders, explained to Scientific American in 2003, the company’s approach was long considered computationally impractical—there was thought to be too much information in a song to compile a simple signature. But as he wrestled with the problem, Wang had a brilliant idea: What if he ignored nearly everything in a song and focused instead on just a few relatively “intense” moments? Thus Shazam creates a spectrogram for each song in its database—a graph that plots three dimensions of music: frequency vs. amplitude vs. time. The algorithm then picks out just those points that represent the peaks of the graph—notes that contain “higher energy content” than all the other notes around it, as Wang explained in an academic paper he published to describe how Shazam works (PDF). In practice, this seems to work out to about three data points per second per song.

I love DJ Steve Porter’s Press Hop. “Not a game not a game not a game…”

I’m sure I’m catching this on the tail end of the wave, but Bobby McFerrin’s audience-based demonstration of the pentatonic scale is fantastic.

I know I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but ThruYOU is incredible. Nothing but YouTube videos mixed together to create new (and fantastic) songs. I like to leave it open in another tab while I work because the music is so good.

The Anthem Project: citizens of one country sing the national anthem of another country. France does great with ours. (via ted)

Beautiful, relaxing fun: Auditorium (via ze)

I pulled my 2008 mix together in time for the holidays. The “case” is a quick and dirty paper bag job cobbled together with Inkscape (Sketch Rockwell is the “2008” font):

The music is pretty much culled from a year of listening to EQX, plus the Where the Hell is Matt? track, all bought from Amazon (the first year I didn’t rip my mix from CDs). Despite the very thin alternative veneer, I fear I have betrayed my underlying 80s sensibilities:

1. I Want Candy by Bow Wow Wow
2. That’s Not My Name by The Ting Tings
3. Generator by The Holloways
4. Boots of Chinese Plastic by The Pretenders
5. The Golden Path by The Chemical Brothers w/ The Flaming Lips
6. Pepper by Butthole Surfers
7. Into Action by Tim Armstrong
8. Early To Bed by Morphine
9. Handlebars by Flobots
10. Weapon Of Choice by Fatboy Slim
11. Two Shoes by The Cat Empire
12. Coin-Operated Boy by The Dresden Dolls
13. Mercy by Duffy
14. Paper Planes by M.I.A.
15. Hurt by Johnny Cash
16. Praan by Garry Schyman

Anita Lillie has a demo video up of her masters thesis, MusicBox, a very impressive project for mapping and visualizing music collections by a combination of their metadata and acoustic fingerprints (also on YouTube, in HD). Further proof that all the cool kids are using Processing these days. Slick, I love the idea of drawing a line through the music map and getting a playlist that smoothly transitions through musical styles and genres. Doesn’t sound like it will be available for download anytime soon, though. (via hackszine)

Beaker performs Ode to Joy as only he can (via kottke). That led me to Danny Boy, sung by a true Muppet dream team: The Swedish Chef, Animal, and Beaker.

Robert Lang's TED Talk. Excellent. Also on TED, Bruno Bowden folds while Rufus Cappadocia plays (actually, Rufus upstages the folding, I'll have to hunt down his CD).

I want one of these drum tables. Scroll down that page for the video.

Nice shadow puppet interpretation of Louis Armstrong's It's a Wonderful World.

Lifehacker posted a Songbird screencast (media player based on the Firefox codebase), eliciting a bunch of "not ready for prime time" comments, but boy, it looks like it's going to be awfully tasty when it's through baking.

One of the most interesting things I've read in weeks: if Joshua Bell played a DC metro during morning rush hour, would anyone notice?

Outside Magazine answers the question, "Will listening to music improve my training?" (scroll down to the second question)