The Signal Music Weblog

The Signal: EP052 - An oxygen-rich environment.

(I don't even know what that means.)

The basics: File is available for a limited time. It leads to music you might like. Or you might not. Track list is in the file's id3 tags. Notes are below the MORE break.

So there's that.

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They may be able to rend us limb from limb, and (occasionally) successfully walk up steps, but we don't have to fear robots taking jobs from hungry musicians yet.

You all, I assume, saw the in-house advertisement for Microsoft's Songsmith software, right? It was getting laughed at by most of the major blogs I visit over the last few weeks. It's software that, when you sing your vocals to it, comes up with background beats and chords and all the rest of that band stuff you need to make songs.

The hitch: it makes bad songs. And presumably so does anyone who tries to use it.

But here's where the comedy alchemy spins gold from it: Over at Videogum, there's a set of videos where the original vocals from Oasis, The Cars and The Police are fed into the software to see what results. It's something to behold. (Best bit: A commenter says "These aren't too bad," and is rebutted by another commenter thusly: "Do you have ears?")

I gotta admit, I get real sick of hearing the same mediocre musical artists working the BART circuit. Except, maybe, for that punk dude who does Johnny Cash covers. He's awesome.

But NYC's got miles underground and you get all sorts of strange happenings and musical magic. Like, for example, something I found stumbling around on YouTube: The Stumblebums.

A punk brass band trio composed of snare drum, tuba, and trumpet, with the trumpet player also wailing out some gravely Tom-Waits-kinda vocals to bounce off the hard subway walls. That's pretty awesome.

If you live in New York, are your bosses usually cool if you say the reason you're in late to work is you were commuting and you had to stop and listen to band?