Have time for a 3 minute break? Check this out.

It’s a video from an event back in June called “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus.” It was a panel of men (John Schaefer – the host, Daniel Levitin – scientist and Bobby McFerrin – musical artist) discussing the relationship between the human brain and music to better understand the relationship between the two.

The man in the video is named Bobby McFerrin. Most know him from his #1 single “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Here he making his case for the pentatonic scale.

If you like this I suggest checking out the World of Science Festival Vimeo Channel, it has a lot of additional material.

Additional Resources

World of Science Festival Website
World of Science Festival Vimeo Channel

UPDATE — I don’t know why those videos aren’t playing, but you can watch them here 

I’m not sure how many of your are Phoenix fans, but I just came across these videos of them playing live. They are amazing.

via Pitchfork.

Holy shit, this song is great:

So I was going to post some sweet blues I discovered while riding my bike yesterday, but someone requested some funk, and one name came to mind. That’s right… Ryan Shaw. He’s real talented, and could have easily became a hip hop / new-school R&B singer, but instead, he writes and sings what he likes the best, which happens to be Funk and Motown.

For those that went on the Mayercraft, you’ll agree that Ryan was by far the most entertaining artist on the boat (yes, more than Jay May). The two songs below show both sides of his music. The first is pure dance funk. The second resembles old school doo-op, kinda like Gene Chandler, The Chevrons, Frank Zappa, etc.
When you hear doo-op, you expect bad quality recordings. When you hear someone like Ryan do it, it’s real rare and refreshing to listen to. Kinda like drinking a nice tall glass of Joe’s homemade orange juice.

I got a juicer by the way…

I was going to post some videos of his performances on the boat, especially the one with his bass player going all nuts, but it’s shitty with embarrassing dancing and drunkenness. I’ll think it over. In the meantime, enjoy.

Ryan Shaw – Do the 45

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Ryan Shaw – I’ll be Satisfied

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It’s hard to get noticed when you have a purely instrumental band, but that’s one of the many beauties of funk (and blues). This funk band uses a lot of percussion and Afrobeats to infect people with their talent. Budos records in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and perform quite often in the city apparently. After listening to the entire album, I’d say they have a heavy Spanish influence, which usually doesn’t mix well with funk, but what do I know. I’m just an Italian boy from the suburbs talking about the blues. Enjoy your evenings.

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This is a really great series. Breakfast @ Sulimay’s is a group of 3 elderly folks who review indie rock in a diner in Philly. It’s pretty awesome. In this review they talk about Dan Deacon and The Doves.

Enjoy.

The whole compilation is actually pretty fantastic.

AKA: I”m fucking stoked as hell for the Animal Collective show on May 16th in Toronto.

All,

Earlier, over Mexican food, Eric & Phil were discussing the phenomenon known as “The Musical Phase”–that is, a period of time where a certain album or artist dominates our musical preferences.  While this wasn’t a new discovery, and in fact has been the topic of many a conversation at 440 Bergen Street, they decided that it deserved a little attention and love.

Since Juice The Blog was nearly always on their minds (if not somewhere just nearby), they rather immediately happened upon the idea to create a shared calendar in collaboration with the JTB community, where temporally appropriate albums and artists could be scheduled at their menological peak for all to enjoy.  May we present to you our Calendar….

A Year in Music: A Calendar.

Please feel free to add but not delete your musical preferences, for as we all know, overlap is a good thing. You can schedule your bands or albums for however short or long seems natural. Be sure to share any other information in the details section deemed necessary for maximum appreciation. Also, make sure your events are set to repeat yearly.

If you are interested in contributing, leave a comment on this post requesting an invite and you will be contacted by e-mail.

With Love and Affection,

Phil & Eric, 440 Bergen St.

This kid plays 32 songs in 8 minutes almost flawlessly. Check, check, check, check it out.

Battlefield 1942 rocks my world. Kyle and I used to play this game back in high school. There was no good VOIP at the time, so we used to hold the non-portable land line phones to our heads while we played. I remember how my neck used to feel after.

Nice use of lit bulbs to the beat, even better use of video game reference

Happy Up Here from Röyksopp on Vimeo.

Hey guys. Just an update to when a will have videos online of Army Ants and Warship Armada: We are getting a new image set up on a single computer in the lab soon that will have Fraps on it (Fraps doesn’t offer a site license which has been our hold up this whole time …) so I will eventually have videos of both games up soon. Also, we will be showing Army Ants at GDC for the whole week of GDC (the week before Mayercraft) in case anyone is there.

Until then, I have decided to post the music I wrote for each game. BLin, Adam, Choof and Beej may recognize most of them, as they were around during most of the writing of the songs (BLin and Adam during Warship Armada)

So here they are. They are tagged up for iTunes, but I will warn you that they aren’t balanced very well with the audio levels, so some songs may come out quiet and others may come out loud… I hope that is okay. Feel free to use them for whatever you want, commercial or not. If anyone actually tries to use these songs for commercial use, well … good luck. They aren’t that great. Feel free.

WARSHIP ARMADA

Warship Armada was a naval battle game that takes place during the 1600′s, so the songs are all very instrumental. The game was developed in the Spring of 2008.

• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – MAIN THEME: This song came out pretty cool. I was really happy with the movement that the song had. Had some variety to it. Also was happy with the way the instruments blended together. It is the music that plays during the menu sequences and when the game boots up.
• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – BATTLE THEME: This song is more ambient and loops with less of a melody. It was supposed to be tense and “battle like.” It is the music that plays while playing the game.
• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – ENDING CREDITS (MAGGIE SONG): This song is a little goofy. It’s also called the Maggie Song because it was written in about 10 minutes while on the phone with Maggie. I wrote it as a joke, but when we came down to the last minute, we realized that we wanted a song to play when the end game statistics were being shown. It’s not even really an ending credits song at all. Short and weird. Also had input from Choof and BLin and maybe Adam and Beej for the tuba farts at the end.

ARMY ANTS

Army Ants was a game that was a little less “serious” than Warship Armada. It was exaggerated and modern, highly fictional and action oriented. When writing the music, I was aiming for “epic”, to basically not only excite the player but also to poke fun at the whole thing. The game centered around turn based real time battle in a dynamic environment.

• [DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – ITS GAME TIME: I have never worked with e-guitar sounds before, simply because they are much more work on the digital end than other instruments. This guitar patch was created by actually filtering a basic noise through several channels and hooking up separate damping tracks and the like. So technically I was happy with the way it came out. I also liked the sound in general and thought it was pretty over-the-top “epic.” This song plays during the menu sequences and during the game itself.
• [DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – END THEME: The end theme to army ants was completely out of place, but I still love it. One of my favorite songs is John Murphy’s “Sunshine” track from the movie Sunshine (also in the beginning of the X-Men trailer) because it is so ridiculously epic. After toying with ideas, I decided to literally rearrange that song. This version is shorter, sped up and incorperates more percussion and other instruments. I wanted it to be epic. It plays during the credits of the game after a match is won.

So that’s it! I hope you all enjoy it. I would love to post more music. Eric and I wrote a song back in the UC days called Cumulorockin or something like that that I would love to throw up here.

UPDATE (by eric): Here’s some Cumulolyrical action. Everybody rock out please.

I thought I would write a quick review of a website I have been using recently: Pandora Radio

Pandora radio has become my single source of music lately. I am typically working on-the-go and work on various computers throughout the day, so maintaining a single iTunes library has become difficult.

Pandora Radio Features: Pandora radio is a flash-based music streaming website with a massive library of full length songs from almost every genre. Unlike most radio stations, when you go to listen to a “station”, the song always starts from the beginning and you have the ability to skip songs. It is more of a library of music than a streaming radio station.

How do you use Pandora: When you start up Pandora, it will ask you to enter a song or artist that you want to listen to. Pandora will then create a station of similar music to that song. For example, when I just typed in “Gravity”, it told me that it was searching for music similar to “Gravity” by John Mayer, and first song it gave me was “In Repair” by John Mayer from Continuum, then “Early in the Morning” by Eric Clapton, and finally “I Forgot to be Your Lover” by Robert Clay. You cannot specify a song to listen to directly, but if you are not looking for any particular song and just want a playlist in the background of a certain genre, this is the solution for you. You are able to filter out songs you don’t like from the list and that “station” will avoid songs that are similar to that in the future. You can use the service without signing up (which is free) or you can sign up and all stations that you create will remain saved. I personally have four stations right now: Boards of Canada Station, Portishead Station, Asobi Seksu station, and Gravity Station.

How it Works: It creates a station just for you based off the music that you like. How this works is based on the music genome project that pandora has created. The music genome project has tagged hundreds of attributes to each song, and using these attributes can find music similar to whatever music you are looking for. It is an excellent means of finding music similar to that of your target song, and it has yet to give me a song that I have felt is far off from the music I am looking for.

Interacting with the Website: The website is all flash based, but does an excellent job of maintaining traditional usability. Tab orders are all appropriately implemented and nothing feels too “flashy.” In my opinion, it is a flash based website that accomplishes everything a flash based website should aim to.

Potential Drawback: There is one potential drawback that I haven’t yet been able to fully test in the website. Once I left my computer for a while and when I came back, Pandora stopped my music and was asking me if I was “still listening” because it didn’t want to stream music to a computer that was no longer listening to it. Now, on one level it was a good move on their part to save bandwidth, but on the other hand, if you are hosting a party or are looking to stream music in the background, I can see this being a problem. I believe it was only reacting to the fact that my computer went idle. I have never had to “click back” on the pandora player while working on another document or looking at another website; it has only come up when I have left the computer entirely.

Extra Goodies: Pandora also operates on Windows Mobile devices, select Sprint phones, and AT&T phones (congratulations iPhone …) so you can stream pandora in your car if you have unlimited wireless internet. Quite a bonus if you ask me!

Conclusion: Pandora is an excellent service. It is the first online radio service that I have used that has really stuck with me. I cannot reccomend it enough.

Other Reviews of Pandora:

[04/11/2006] CNET Pandora Review

[01/14/2009] CNET Pandora 2.0 for Iphone Review

[10/15/2007] Laptop Mag Pandora Review

References

[Pandora.com] Pandora Mobile Information

[Pandora.com] Pandora Genome Information