How Jazz Warmed Cold-War Hearts – an NPR Picture Show

NPR’s The Picture Show blog is currently featuring a story about how jazz was used in the Cold War.  Not only is this a fascinating aspect of cultural history, but the story also gives some background on the State Department’s program of “ambassadorial jazz tours,” which led, eventually, to a program that sponsored former BG students, The Student Loan, on a tour of Pacific Islands & South East Asia earlier this year.

Oklahoma chooses official rock song

Oklahoma recently joined Ohio in the ranks of states with official rock songs (ours is “Hang on Sloopy”) by selecting “Do You Realize??” by OK natives, the Flaming Lips.  Hear the story at NPR.

Requiem for a box

Yesterday, NPR ran a story on the rise and fall of the boom box and the cultural implications of it.  Check out their site for great pictures and a link to the audio.

Finding Music Recommendations

If you’re a bit confused about how and why you get recommendations for particular tunes on any given social networking site, check out this post by the folks over at ReadWriteWeb for an overview of four common approaches that these services use.

Thanks to MP3s and the Internet, we now have millions of songs readily available to us with the click of a button, but, paradoxically, this has often made it even harder to discover new music to listen to. Every online music store and every social network that focuses on online music, however, now features some kind of music recommendation system, and some services like Pandora or Slacker Radio are indeed nothing else but highly sophisticated music discovery engines.

New in Naxos: Nettwerk

Naxos Music Library has announced today the addition of the label Nettwerk to their online holdings:
On November 13, Canada’s #1 Independent Record Label, Nettwerk Music Group, Joins Naxos Music Library
469 titles from Nettwerk’s catalog, featuring artists such as Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, and Sixpence None the Richer will be available on Naxos Music Library.
BGSU students, faculty, and staff may access these recordings and many others online via Naxos Music Library.

Spinning Halloween haunts for our patrons…

Want to know what music people are talking about?

Check out The Hype Machine for feeds about bands that people are blogging about. You can browse by the most blogged bands, the most recent posts, or search for your favorite band and see what the blogosphere has to say about them. You can also listen to a snippet (or in some cases, all) of the tracks mentioned in blog posts and find links to purchase them online.

Green Opera: An Inconvenient Truth

La Scala has announced that composer Giorgio Battistelli will be setting Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, as an opera. Read more in The Guardian.

Earliest known recording of the human voice surfaces

A recent discovery of a phonautogram in France’s patent office reveals what seems to be the earliest recording of a human voice.  Created by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville in 1859, the “recording” — a collection of sound waves transcribed on paper — is of a woman singing “Au Clair de la Lune.”

The full story of the discovery was featured in a front-page story in the New York Times today, and the recording itself may be heard at:  http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/.

And in further instrument news…

Today’s issue of The Independent includes an article on a new instrument developed by Yamaha and media artist Toshio Iwai that is part sequencer, part performance art.

Tenori-On

A tablet with lights on both the front and back, the Tenori-On was developed in Japan and already has a host of fans, including the Tenorions, a group that works exclusively on the Tenori-On. The article includes a range of perspectives on the instrument’s learning curve. According to Peter Peck, Yamaha’s Tenori-On spokesman:

I don’t need to know anything about music, I’m just pressing lights and buttons. Anyone can walk up to it and make something happen, and be inspired. With a guitar you don’t get that instant reward. But after that initial bit of inspiration, there’s also a huge curve of musical development to learn on the Tenori-On if you really want to get the most out of it.

Visit Yamaha’s Tenori-On site for more details about the instrument, including demos. So far, the Tenori-On is only available in the UK.

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