Music

Pink Floyd’s New Video Gives Spaceflight The Soundtrack It Deserves

For years, there have been rumors that Pink Floyd’s song, “Echoes,” was written to synchronize with 2001: A Space Odyssey. The band denies this, but no matter—because they’ve just released an amazing new video, featuring time-lapse footage from the International Space Station, set to their instrumental “Marooned.” The video was produced as part of the…

When otters play piano they compose horror movie scores

Well isn’t this just adorable? Asian small-clawed otters got their hands on a keyboard at the National Zoo and started pounding away at the keys to make music that actually sounds like a Hitchcock movie soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook

Doctor Who Sings Rocky Horror‘s “Time Warp” As Fate Always Intended

It seems like the most obvious mash-up of all time in retrospect. But it took the Hillywood Show to finally, finally bring us the Tenth Doctor performing Rocky Horror Picture Show’s quintessential song “The Time Warp.” Kismet! I believe Torchwood’s Captain Jack Harkness singing “Rose Tint My World” should be next on the agenda, don’t…

The Hobbit, Game Of Thrones And Dark Knight Make For One Superb Medley

What do The Hobbit, The Dark Knight and Game of Thrones all have in common? Well, you probably all enjoy them. But they also are part of this amazing, beautiful musical mash-up by Jason Yang. Give it a listen and try not to imagine Bilbo and Batman at the Red Wedding. [Via Geeks Are Sexy]

Did You Know NASA Runs a Rock Radio Station?

Third Rock Radio mixes alt/indie rock with embedded NASA stories and interviews with popular science communicators. Read on for a review on the Observation Deck: https://observationdeck.kinja.com/nasas-streaming-rock-station-is-really-fucking-good-1581160664

Scientists Discover Area Of Brain Responsible For Loving Johnny Cash

Brains are funny things. Injure them or mess with them, and people change — they change personalities, they change languages, and sometimes, they change their opinions on the Man in Black, Johnny Cash. We know this because a journal in Frontier in Behavioural Neuroscience discusses a man who received an electrical implant in his brain…

Brian Eno’s New App Turns His Latest Vinyl Into A Dazzling Cityscape

In support of his latest album, Brian Eno has released a free augmented reality app that turns the vinyl edition of his record into a series of stunning holographic-like visualizations. The interactive app is called “HoloDecks,” and it’s only available for iPhone. To make it work, you just hold your phone’s camera up to a…

Listen to the Appliances of the Future

Last week, in collaboration with Disquiet, we turned our ears to the future of the domestic environment, tuning into the speculative sounds of the appliances of the future. The results, here on our last day of the Home of the Future, are worth a listen as you tour the home either virtually or in person.…

Bowie Reveals The Secret Origin Of Ziggy Stardust In This Great Cartoon

The man responsible for the greatest scifi album of all time is Ziggy Stardust. And the man responsible for that man is of course David Bowie, who explains his creation of his iconic 1970s glam rock character in this 1998 interview with Joe Smith, now animated by PBS’s Blank on Blank. The interview covers —…

Back to the Future dialog remixed into a love song

Pogo takes sounds from movies and transforms them into new songs. This time he remixed Back to the Future into a song dedicated to all the lovers out there—I love it when they say things like that on the radio. Pogo had a few big hits in the internet already—these are some of them: Well,…

Watch a Dead Michael Jackson Perform as a Hologram

Last night’s Billboard Music Awards brought Michael Jackson back from the dead in the form of a hologram—and you can watch the footage right here. Spoiler: there is moonwalking. Michael Jackson isn’t, of course, the first recording artists to make an appearance in holographic form—Tupac beat him to it—but he is arguably the biggest. It…

​America, Why Is Your National Anthem So Goddamn Hard To Sing?

As virtually every American citizen knows all too well, belting out the National Anthem can be a rather precarious proposition. Here’s what the experts have to say about “The Star Spangled Banner” and why it’s such a challenging piece, even for professionals. Over at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Blog, program producer M.K.…

Warner, Universal and Sony have all bought stakes in Shazam, according to the WSJ. Reckon it’ll identify songs on those labels preferentially?

Guys playing guitar and/or having orgasms in slow motion

Think watching women trying to sing while having an orgasm is fun? Well, get a load of these dudes giving serious guitar-face while fondling their instruments. Rawr. The rousing tune—Godiva—comes courtesy of London rocker Eugene McGuiness, with delightful direction by the folks at ThirtyTwo. The video is a damn good time but if watching others…

Today Is Your Last Chance to Watch NASA’s Space Oddity Recorded in Space

A year ago, Col. Chris Hadfield posted a stirring home-brew video of him performing David Bowie’s Space Oddity—while afloat in the International Space Station. For copyright reasons, today’s your last chance to watch the video. 22 million views later. Sheesh. Col. Hadfield just posted the following to his Tumblr: Bowie’s last day – we had…

Watch Jimmy Fallon, Neil Young, and Jack White Press a Record On Stage

You’ve probably seen Jimmy Fallon do his ultra-famous Neil Young impression before, but there’s nothing better, really, than seeing Mr. Young himself on the Fallon stage, playing a track inside Jack White’s old-school novelty recording booth. Jack White, eccentric, owns and operates the only working Voice-O-Graph in the world. The 1947 machine is basically a…

Researchers Train Computers to Manipulate Human Emotions with Art

A musician and a computer scientist have created a software system, called “TransProse,” that transforms written works into piano concertos. It’s all done by training the software to understand how words and sounds create emotional responses in humans. Here’s what A Clockwork Orange sounds like. In a recently published paper, the two researchers—Hannah Davis and…

EuroScience, the Science in the EuroVision Song Contest

Since 1956, European nations have been participating in EuroVision, a live, televised competition for the best musical performance. Yesterday’s competition in Copenhagen was a surprisingly science-heavy lineup of music, for a sufficiently arm-waving definition of science. If you’re willing to indulge in some exuberant hand-waving along to the music, read on for the most science-reliant…

What Will the Appliances of the Future Sound Like?

It’s the year 2044—what does your kitchen sound like? What about your power supply? How about the laundry room, or even your new, high-tech burglar alarm? Disquiet, Gizmodo’s subdomain of all things sonic and ambient, is challenging its readers to come up with a speculative soundtrack for the home of the future—or, more specifically, for…

Why It’s So Hard To LIsten To A Song All The Way Through, In Graphs

You’re almost exactly as likely to skip a song while streaming music as you are to listen to the whole thing. This series of graphs explains what it is that makes it so hard to listen to a song through the end. Paul Lamere (who previously used music streaming data to generate maps of the…