Music

If you’re in the mood for something… different, David Lynch has offered up a free stream of his new album The Big Dream on Pitchfork. Weirdness guaranteed.

Sennheiser’s Colorful Cans Value Style as Much as Sound

Sennheiser is usually known for high-end audio quality and rather clunky design. That changed, a little, with its Momentum headphones—but now the act is smartened up even further with these colorful cans. These over-the-ear headphones are smaller, neater version of the first Momentums—in fact, they pack the same audio innards. But just of much as…

Original Doctor Who theme song slowed into 20 minutes of alien music

YouTube user telegenicx slows songs down and stretches them out into long and languid sonic experiences. Ron Grainer’s original 1963 Doctor Who theme song is particularly well suited to this time stretching, transforming into 20 minutes of otherworldly mood music. [via Dangerous Minds]

Wake Up This Morning With an Earful of Coffee

Mornin’! Welcome to Saturday! Before you put that piping hot cup of coffee to your lips, why not try some piping hot coffee for your ears? It’s not as bad as it sounds. Who doesn’t like a little aural pleasure? Using what is quite possibly the most technically sophisticated coffee setup known to man, sound…

A musical memorial to dead Game of Thrones characters we used to know

Remember Game of Thrones Season One, when all the major characters were still alive? The ladies of Not Literally are back with another pop culture-parodying video, this time using Gotye to pay tribute to “A Character I Used to Know.” Spoilers for Season One. Now that we’ve gotten through the Red Wedding, we need a…

Here’s a Patriotic Playlist for Your July 4th BBQ

You’ve already checked marching band music off your list if you went to a local parade this morning. Now that you’ve got that covered, here’s a Fourth of July-themed Spotify playlist so you can rock out, America-style today. What’s a party without good tunes? We put some of the usual July 4 offenders on there—some…

Man plays Game of Thrones theme on flaming bagpipes while unicycling

Granted, the man plays it terribly, but given that 1) he’s serenading Daenerys, 2) he’s riding a unicycle, and 3) there is fire shooting out of his goddamned bagpipes, I’m willing to give him an “A” for effort alone. [Via Fashionably Geek]

An Army of Beatboxing Cameras Is One Expensively Awesome Drum Kit

As far as entry costs go, a drum kit can be a little expensive compared to a beater guitar or bass. This Nikon shutter percussion symphony takes it to a whole new multi-thousand-dollar level. Photographer Benjamin Von Wong got the idea from for this Nikon symphony watching a video that compares shutter sounds from different…

The exclusive debut of Adam Warrock’s new BSG music video “Galactica”

Nerdcore rapper Adam Warrock has sung about everything from Firefly to Marvel’s West Coast Avengers comics, and now we can add the new Battlestar Galactica series to his oeuvre. He’s just released an 8-song EP inspired by the original miniseries, and io9 is proud to debut the first track and music video, “Galactica.” You can…

In Egadz’s new video, the future of music is living inside the machine

Here’s the world premiere of the music video for “Ghost” by Egadz. It’s a great take on 8-bit video games where the artist is “playing” in both senses. It’s also a lovely fantasy about a holographic world where the artist seems to be battling a computer. What’s really interesting is that this video is from…

130 years of global temperature data, converted to music

By using global temperature data collected since 1880 and charting it to music, University of Minnesota undergrad Daniel Crawford has composed a unique cello piece he calls “A Song of Our Warming Planet.” “Climate scientists have a standard tool box to communicate their data,” Crawford explains in the video above. “What we’re trying to do…

Get pumped to battle kaiju with the entire Pacific Rim soundtrack

Ramin Djawadi composed the theme song for Game of Thrones, and now we get to hear his mighty war music for Pacific Rim. The entire soundtrack is online, giving us a preview of the mood music for those kaiju vs. giant robot battles. Djawadi was nominated for a Grammy for his Iron Man score, and…

Pixies – Bagboy

Just two weeks after their long-time (albeit intermittently involved) bassist Kim Deal left the band, the Pixies are back! And for the first time in nearly a decade, they’re debuting a new song: Bagboy. “The lyrics, coincidentally, were composed at a Starbucks Coffee in Harvard Square in Cambridge, about a hundred feet from where, 25…

Why you can’t get that damn ringtone out of your head

Certain kinds of music are more memorable than others. But why? Stanford music professor Jonathan Berger uses a common ringtone to explain why we can’t get certain tunes out of our minds. Berger has a fantastic, music-laced essay on Nautilus about how music can confound our expectations, and worm its way into our minds. The…

WSJ: Apple’s Radio Terms Are (Slightly) More Generous Than Pandora’s

Apple’s new Radio service is now official and Pandora is coming under fire for being tight-fisted. Interesting, then, to hear of figures dug out by the Wall Street Journal which suggest that Apple is being every-so-slightly more generous with its deal. https://gizmodo.com/itunes-radio-apples-pandora-service-is-finally-here-512264218 According to the Journal, Apple will pay 0.13 cents and 15 percent of…

Pandora Actually Pays $1,300 for a Million Plays Not 16 Bucks

Math! It can solve a lot of problems. It can be made deliberately fuzzy. It can help us break down complicated things. Like artist music royalties from streaming music stations. When David Lowery revealed that Pandora paid him only $16 for 1 million plays, there was an outrage. But some deeper math reveals that Pandora…

An Artist Got 16 Bucks for a Song That Pandora Streamed a Million Times (Updated)

A million of anything is pretty much always an insanely impossible number. Winning a million dollars, having a million Twitter followers, selling a million products—anything done a million times is something to be proud of. But maybe not getting your song streamed on Pandora a million times. All you get sometimes is 16 measly dollars.…

The 1960s Batman theme song, as sung by actual bats

What if real bats sang the old Batman theme song? Well, their “Nana Nanas” would fall outside the range of human hearing. But Ulrich Seidel and his Bat-organ give us something close. Seidel reduced actual bat noises to human-audible frequencies, and then assigned the different bat notes to different keys on his keyboard (which he…

Watching This Video Will Make You Happy with 1990 Nostalgia

When you look back in time, it’s easy to forget what exactly happened when. Things sort of just blend together. Luckily we have YouTube videos to do our remembering for us now. Remember Videos just created a video about 1990 that shows off all that happened in pop culture back then, think Windows 3.0 Back…

This Tiny Wooden Speaker Turns Your Glasses Into Equalizers

Chances are you’ve used an equalizer before, and chances are there was a lot of blindly turning dials and hoping something good happened. The Timbre Speaker embraces exactly that kind of blind experimentation by using nothing but two glasses for its sound control. Designed by industrial design student Casey Lin, the speaker appears to be…