Incredible guitarist
This guitarist is pretty good – then he starts dancing!
Sesame Street pinball number count song
Charles Cornell sat down with the deceptively simple song about counting to 12. You almost certain know this song if you were a kid between 1977 and 2002.
Called the Pinball Number Count on Sesame Street, Cornell peals back the surprising layers of complexity. Odd time signatures (7/4 or pairs of 4/4 + 3/4), funky chord compositions, and famous musicians that had no business being on a kids show. It’s definitely fun watching a musician pull apart this little masterpiece.
It was written in 1976 by Walt Kraemer, arranged by Ed Bogas, and vocals were performed by the Pointer Sisters. Yes, the actual Pointer Sisters. It first appeared on Sesame Street in Season 8 which aired in1977. It appeared continually until 2002. Andy Narell plays the steel drums for numbers 2, 4, 9, and 12. Mel Martin plays the soprano sax bits for numbers 5, 6, 7, and 10.
Or, you can play the Number Count pinball game from the Sesame Street website.
AI reconstructing songs from brain scans
The 15-second audio clip sounds like a muffled version of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall played underwater. Except Pink Floyd didn’t perform any of the music in the clip. Instead, the track was captured by a team of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, who looked at the brain activity of more than two dozen people who listened to the song.
That data was then decoded by a machine learning model and reconstructed into audio — marking the first time researchers have been able to re-create a song from neural signals.
Articles:
Ray Stevens
I grew up as a kid listening to a lot of Ray Steven’s comedy songs. This is one of the most complex but completely accurate. What fun.
Waking up to Pure Imagination
This is probably the best arrangement of the song “Pure Imagination” sung by Gene Wilder in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Here it is performed in 2017 as the morning wake-up call for the Jersey Surf professional marching band. The sublime harmonics of the euphoniums, balance of the horns, and acoustics is absolutely magical. If I was woken up to this, I would think I was waking up in heaven.
Jersey Surf is a world class drum and marching corps. There is the huge DCI (Drum Corps International) competition every year in Indianapolis and my guess is this is the band spending the night hosted in the local gym at George Washington Technical High School in Indy where this was shot.
Update Early 2023:
Man, this thing has taken off. There were videos taken from both sides as it turns out. Left side and Right side (original). This person combines the two so you get them in stereo!
Update Nov 2023:
Here’s another version that was taken in 2023. The trumpet chokes a bit, but the rest is perfect.
most popular song each month since January 1980
Wow – I remember all of these. The nostalgia is thick…
The Lord is My Light
The Lord is My Light by Christopher Walker. This is a very good version without all the over-production – just some great voices.
Halcali – HALCALISM Candy Hearts
This is some feel-good fun Japanese pop music for your day!
Anuc
We have a new contender for the worst Christmas song rendition. Anuc has been screaming up the meme charts with his take on a variety of songs. In case you’re curious, yes, he is singing in English.
Riffusion
Riffusion (Riff-fusion) is a music AI that you type in prompts and it generates music for you. It’s not going to win any awards anytime soon but it does seem to handle smooth and electronic tunes pretty well. Honestly, if I heard some of this in an elevator, I doubt I would notice.
One more step towards our automatically generated content future.