Meet the Swedish band Wintergatan, "Milky Way", with their debut song Sommarfågel.
This is from 2013, but I only just found out about the band today because of their amazing "Marble Machine" video which you really need to check out here. They do such interesting things with both their music and their visuals, so hop over to youtube to get better acquainted!
Victoria Hart is a self-described "recreational mathemusician", and does very neat things with - you guessed it! - math and music. Above is her video "Twelve Tones", a fascinating exploration of such songs as "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" accompanied by neat little bits of information and some very cute drawings. It's funny, it's engaging, it's really very interesting, so check it out!
She has many other videos on her YouTube channel, and funny blog posts about the making of these on her website, so feel free to explore further. (Mom, you would probably enjoy watching her "Doodle Music" video with the little two!)
Did you know that Mozart composed a canon literally titled "Lick Me in the Ass"? I didn't know until just now. It's quite a fun canon, too, sung by six voices in a three-part round. It's uncertain what the original lyrics were, but it seems they might have just been repetitions of the line, "Leck mich im Arsch g'schwindi," of which the last word means 'quickly' and is 'geschwind' in its correct spelling.
The most common bowdlerized (censored, reworked) version translates to:
Let us be glad!
Grumbling is in vain!
Growling, droning is in vain,
is the true bane of life,
Droning is in vain,
Growling, droning is in vain, in vain!
Thus let us be cheerful and merry, be glad!
As put on the official website, "Vocaloid is a technology for singing voice synthesis developed by
Yamaha, and the name of this software application. The software allows
users to input melody and lyrics in order to synthesize singing. In
other words, with this technology, singing can be produced without a
singer.".
Luka, Gumi and Miku, three of the most popular Vocaloids.
This software started out small, but had a huge boom in popularity when Hatsune Miku was introduced, a female singer with two very long blue pigtails. Her voice is sampled from Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita, and her name can be read as meaning "first sound future" (hatsu 初, ne 音, miku ミク (a nanori reading of mirai 未来)).
By now there are many, many songs online created by using one of the various digital singers, with some very prominent songwriters, producers and illustrators in the community. The video below, with music and lyrics by Nem, vocals by Vocaloid singers Gumi and Kagamine Len, and art by Tama, is really fun. It has English subtitles, so check it out! The song style is not for everyone (it really does sound synthetic), but the animation is so sweet. It's called "Ah, It's a Wonderful Cat Life":
Now, there are a bunch of artists who cover these songs, and they go by the name of Utaite. However, I'm not very familiar with those artists yet, having only heard a few covers, and the only one I really know is 96neko (96猫), pronounced kuroneko. She has a rather deep voice, which is pleasant (and a bit odd) after listening to high-pitched synthetic singing. It's easy to find compilations on youtube - here's a 1 hour compilation of some of her covers (with videos):
There's also some very good fanart out there, so I've been having a lot of fun exploring in the past few days! I have some more "serious" tabs open, too, so you may next hear about Gilgamesh, sakko (a Japanese geisha hairstyle or German men's jacket, depending on the language you speak), or even flight tickets. Finally booked my flight to the States today, after much poking around. I suppose music's a more interesting topic to post about, but maybe I'll point out the top websites I use. For now, I leave you with vocaloids!
Yesterday at choir practice I just couldn't get this song out of my head. Fac ut ardeat cormeum, part of the Stabat Mater by Pergolesi, is a beautiful piece I learned years ago and never forgot.
You can view the sheet music here - I sang the second voice, and it continues to lie beautifully in my range.
Today I spent a considerable number of hours working on some fanart of Pentatonix, my favorite a cappella group. They do wonderful covers of popular songs, and both I and Mom love them! If you don't know them yet, a good place to start would be these two videos:
Now, the fanart is still a work in progress (WIP), but here's how it's coming along! I've done most of the line work, so the next step will be to even out the skin color that I just slapped down. It's too late to continue working on it now, and I'm away for the weekend (seeing as it's Easter and all!), so I'm not sure when I'll continue working on this! Haven't decided yet whether I'm taking along my laptop or not.
Scott looks kinda creepy as a floating head. Sorry, Scott! I'm working off a promotional photo of theirs, but might rearrange them a little bit further on. I'm not planning on painting the rest of their bodies, so this set-up isn't optimal!
Just realized that I never did finish that turtle rider I started painting some time ago. Hmmm...
This song by Styx is one I only recently came across, and today I took the time to look up the lyrics. I find them rather clever, and the song is definitely one I'll be returning to frequently!
I find particularly enjoyable the plays on words (believe the unbelievable) and the chorus, which only makes sense if you hear it: "Hip hop hip hop-cracy hip hop". Sung, it sounds like "hip hop hypocrisy hip hop".
They want you to believe
The unbelievable
They say you should accept
The unacceptable
Forget your common sense
It isn't sensible
Good times for fools and dreamers
Watch 'em all deny
The undeniable
See how they refute
The unrefutable
They're ready to defend
The indefensible
High times for lawyer schemers
They say we must forgive
The forgivable
They want us to respect
The unrespectable
The pious and the hip
So hypocritical
High crimes and misdemeanors
(x3) Hip hop hip hop-cracy hip hop
See how they explain
The inexplicable
Watch 'em debate
The undebatable
Apparently a lie
Is never liable
Prime time for talk show screamers
They say we constitute
The Constitutional
With justice here for all
So justifiable
I'm tryin' not to laugh
But man it's laughable
High crimes and misdemeanors
(x5) Hip hop hip hop-cracy hip hop
And so
Today we find
They've changed their minds
They've switched their points of view
Oh what tangled webs they weave
When their beliefs ain't really
What they believe
They're trying to divide
The indivisible
Because they think we're fools
So foolable
I'm tryin' not to laugh
But man it's laughable
Boom times for Wall Street dreamers
They want you to believe
The unbelievable
They say we should accept
The unacceptable
The pious and the hip
So hypocritical
(x3) High crimes and misdemeanors
When I was younger, I fondly remember listening to a tape called "Women of the World - Celtic". The tape had a lovely compilation of very fine Celtic songs, some sung in English and others in Irish (Gaeilge).
Some kind soul uploaded the songs onto youtube, and I was delighted to find them there! Here's the playlist for Celtic I, and the one for Celtic II. The songs are all wonderful, though of course some are more fond to me than others. (I happen to love Sovay, It Ain't Funny, Home Again In Eireann, Against The Wind, Treasure Island, Dulaman, and Song For Ireland. If you're curious who any of the songs are by, just ask and I'll tell you the artist names if I know them!)
Recently I went hunting for some of these songs/artists on Spotify (a platform for listening to music, for those who don't know) and was frustrated to have to search long and hard before finally finding the version of Dulaman I had grown up with. You see, some of these songs are traditional ones, with either varying text or tune, and particularly of Dulaman there are quite a few different versions! All beautiful, to be sure, but not the one I was looking for.
Other nice versions are by Celtic Woman (a group with beautiful female voices) and Anuna (whose rendition reminds slightly of a Gregorian chant, as they are an all male group), but the version I was looking for was the one by Altan - and thankfully, I did find it in the end.
Basically, Dulaman is about a young man come to court a young woman, but rather than refer to the humans as such, they are called seawead - Irish seaweed (dúlamán gaelach), to be precise. You can read the lyrics here, and listen to the song here; it really is a beautiful song, and I find myself singing it to myself at the oddest of times.
If you have a Spotify account, feel free to check out my playlist of Celtic songs here!
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