Mind the gap: The most joyous of orchestral fails!

When orchestral musicians lose their concentration… In the orchestral repertoire there are probably thousands of sneaky moments that regularly catch players out. For the musician, to play a wrong note loudly right at the point of a silence can be terrifying and humiliating, but then later in hindsight the story is often hilarious. The situation […]

Google launch Chrome Music Lab

12 new audio-visual experiments A new open-source project from Google lets developers manipulate sound and music Today Google launched a cool new website that encourages users to experiment with visual representations of sound and music. Chrome Music Lab was developed to mark the US National Association for Music Education’s Music in Schools month. In a blog post published […]

Christina Aguilera Facebook masterclass hits bum note

A-ha veyma ree hee hee hee ya The pop singer’s recent video tutorial on how to sing high notes met with vocal opposition on Facebook Here’s a tip for pop singers: if you’re going to post advice online about how to sing well, you’d better hope it isn’t discovered by classically-trained singers. A recent video […]

Fun with spectrograms: how to create images with music

‘You look EXACTLY like birds’ Move over, Aphex Twin! We created a piece of music that appears as a recognisable image on its own spectrogram – here’s how If you’ve been following our series of music tech video experiments lately, you’ll know that we’re seriously into Sonic Visualiser: a nifty piece of free, open-source software developed […]

Meet the world’s first cyborg artist

Soooo many questions Trans-species cyborg Neil Harbisson has come up with a novel technological solution to colour blindness Imagine a world where colours translate into song – and where music is perceived on a radiant visual palette. That’s everyday life for Neil Harbisson, a colour blind artist and voluntary synaesthete for whom a surgically implanted […]

Donald Trump shocks reporters by singing opera

Carmen soon to the White House? GOP hopeful Donald Trump reveals his love of opera – and a surprisingly fine baritone voice – on the campaign trail Donald Trump last night signalled his intention to ‘Make Opera Great Again’ in a hitherto unexpected demonstration of support for the arts in America. The US presidential hopeful surprised both reporters […]

YouTube has a purpose for classical music – and it’s this

Insanely interesting, sometimes just insane YouTube compilations of clips from historic performances reflect the incredible evolution and variety of recorded classical music Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring This compilation features 37 chronologically ordered audio clips of the ‘augurs chords’ from Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet. These instantly recognisable chords are played around 200 times in the […]

Listen: The dial-up modem choir

Eee-oo, eee-oo SHHHHHH We love the nostalgic sound of 90s dial-up modems – so we decided to sing it. Because why not 90 nostalgia is big right now in pop. But nostalgia, it is said, comes in many packages. This was the soundtrack to our 1990s: the sweet, sweet sound of a dial-up modem c. 1998. Who doesn’t remember singing along to […]

How to make music using the voices on your Mac

Fun with OS X We hi-jacked our laptop’s voice library to make some pretty respectable Gregorian chant – here’s how Don’t ask how, but we recently discovered that you can use the ‘say’ command on Terminal, Apple’s built-in command-line application, to have some musical fun. All you need is a Mac running OS X, your […]

The best musical Google Doodles

Click, play, record, share Get those headphones out: we’ve curated a selection of Google’s most tuneful interactive Doodles. Shred guitar for Les Paul’s 96th birthday   It’s hard to believe this Google classic will be five years old in June. This early interactive Doodle let users strum an animated electric guitar, record tunes and play them […]