A different performance interrupted by a ringtone (looks like from six months ago or so). Great response by the performer.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard the story of the guy whose ringtone stopped a performance of the New York Philharmonic

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.

In addition to the public humiliation of the moment, the Internet proceeded to fall our hapless music lover’s head. It sounds like he was actually the victim of poor user interface design from Apple (unusual!). From the same article:

He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.

Ouch! I certainly understand the design tradeoff: would you rather put people at risk of public humiliation when their silent phones makes noise, or would you rather have somebody sleep through an important meeting because they silenced their phone, forgetting about their alarm clock?

I’d vote for silencing everything when you mute the phone, but pop a warning if you mute the phone with alarms pending. Or maybe a warning that lets you choose whether you want to also silence alarms or not?

I dunno, I’d happily leave the details to the generally-awesome UI designers at Apple.

(As long as we are talking about Apple UI, there is a little tweak I want: I want AutoCorrect to make a little noise whenever it offers me a correction. I can’t really touch type on the iPhone or the iPad (can’t imagine I’m alone here), so I never see the little popups in time to either cancel them or to hit SPACE to accept them. Some subtle sound that cues me to look up from my typing would be lovely.)

Update: John Gruber points out that it’s not worth over-complicating things for edge cases, and yeah, he’s probably right.

Update 2: See also Marco Arment and Andy Ihnatko.

RadioLab’s mind-blowing piece on ragtime pianist Bob Milne:

In this short, a neurologist issues a dare to a ragtime piano player and a famous conductor. When the two men face off in an fMRI machine, the challenge is so unimaginably difficult that one man instantly gives up. But the other achieves a musical feat that ought to be impossible.

Absolutely worth the 20 minute listen.

Love this Tom Waits/Cookie Monster mashup. Natural fit! I should have a whole section dedicated to Muppet mashups:

As long as we’re on the subject of Richard Feynman:

There something about a good Sesame Street rap mashup that I just can’t resist. Here’s the gang doing Sure Shot by The Beastie Boys.

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're Going to Miss Almost Everything: "The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers." -- Sounds depressing, but if found it liberating. A favorite.

Ran into this recently, with a buddy of mine recommending an old Fresh Air episode that didn’t show up on the list of available episodes in iTunes. I wanted to get it on my iPod in with the other Fresh Air podcasts, rather than dumping it into the “music” folder (which would have worked, if you aren’t compulsive about where things go).

Download and install an MP3 tag editor that can view/edit extended tags. I use Mp3tag.

Download the old podcast you want, and open it in Mp3tag. Pick “extended tags” and create the following tags:

PODCAST = 1
PODCASTDESC = episode name
PODCASTID = episode URL
PODCASTURL = podcast subscription URL

You can look at the extended tags for an existing podcast to see sample values.

Save the tags, and then drag and drop the podcast into iTunes. It should appear where it belongs.

Otomata is a hypnotic “generative sequencer.” Yeah, I only have a vague idea of what that means too. What you do is put these blocks in motion and music magically emerges. Looking forward to the iOS version.

My daughters have a lot of music they bought in iTunes, but unfortunately Ella lost her iPod, so she replaced it with a cheap Coby MP3 player. I wanted her to be able to get her iTunes music on there as painlessly as possible, and for her to continue to have access to newly purchased iTunes music going forward without having to go through an explicit conversion step. I was looking for a music manager that would reencode the iTunes music as vanilla MP3s on the fly during the sync process. So it leaves the iTunes files alone, but sticks MP3 versions of those files on the MP3 player during sync.

Tried Songbird, but if it supports this it wasn’t apparent. I had this same problem trying to use it for podcasts a few months back. If it does it, it’s not apparent. I want to like that program, but the things it doesn’t support are exactly the things I want.

Tried MediaMonkey, which I like, but it only supports the autoconvert feature I need on the paid version, which I was on the verge of paying for when I discovered…

MusicBee! Free, and supports autoconvert right out of the box:

Synchronise music files, podcasts and playlists from your library, or music files from any folder to many portable devices. These include iPods, iTouch/ iPhone, MTP devices (most portable devices other than iPods), and USB devices. You can also drag and drop files to the device yourself.

Artwork, tags, ratings and playcounts are all synchronised, with the option to add the track playcounts from the device to your Last.fm library.

Files can be encoded to a format supported by the device on the fly. And you have the option to normalise tracks so they play back at the same volume.

It also looks like it has podcast support baked in, although I haven’t played with that yet. Very happy with it.

I love these little coincidences. Previously mentioned Bohemian Rhapsody, virtuoso ukelele edition arrived in my inbox the same night as Smooth Criminal, duet cello edition, also awesome:

Do I really need to say anything more than Bohemian Rhapsody, virtuoso ukelele edition?

(thx david)

Love the Kanye West Monster Muppet Remix, even if it’s a bit disconcerting to see the Muppets in this light!

A remix of will.i.am’s Yes We Can video with John Boehner stepping up to provide the standard Republican contribution:

Builds nicely, and the end is the best part. Found it via this Frank Rich op-ed, The Rage Is Not About Health Care.

Wow, Adobe is on fire. This isn’t quite as jaw-dropping as the content-aware fill thing from yesterday, but it’s in the ballpark: user-guided sound selection (Quicktime movie). It won’t sound too impressive to explain it, so go watch, but basically you can extract just the lyrics (for example) from a song (leaving all the instrumental stuff behind) by singing along.

This video of a fellow doing piano improv for random strangers on Chat Roulette made me happy. (via waxy)

ToneMatrix is just what I need, a musical instrument that sounds cool no matter what you do. I’m going to file this under “casualgames” even though it’s not really a game, because it feels like playing.

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)