Category: music

Along with Sinatra, they’ve done what are known as “deepfakes” of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Céline Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you’ll get an approximation out the other end. – The Guardian

“That sense of belonging you get while standing before a chorus of hundreds singing at the holidays isn’t just you feeling festive — it’s your body behaving like a body. If talking to a loved one over Zoom doesn’t feel quite the same as sharing a sofa or a coffee in person, it’s partly because — get ready for some science — you’re not feeling the same vibrations. It may be why I’m genuinely impressed but ultimately unmoved by the Zoom choruses that exploded in popularity this summer.” – Washington Post

Series host Celeste Headlee says, “The idea has been to create discussions that are not just listening sessions, not just another forum in which people talk and bare their souls, and well-meaning executives nod their heads and then change nothing. We want discussions centered around finding practical, actionable solutions, and an environment in which people can voice hard truths without others feeling defensive.” – Boston Globe

Students can’t return yet, or families either, but when they can: “A glass facade floods the space with morning sunlight, ready to unveil the students’ beehive of activity at the school, on St. Nicholas Avenue near 141st Street. An upper-level corridor doubles as a wood-paneled balcony, reached by a grand switchback staircase. The space has been equipped with sophisticated acoustics, and advanced theater lighting and sound.” – The New York Times

Many orchestras fumbled the move to digital, which isn’t really a surprise since they weren’t prepared. “We need to draw people in with ideas they can relate to. Why do we need to do this? Theatre, dance, cinema, the visual arts have been doing this successfully for years. Their audiences are more diverse. Orchestras are several steps behind in this respect.” – The Strad

Oops, Beethoven scholars: Nannette Streicher “owned her own company — employing her husband, Andreas Streicher, a pianist and teacher, to handle sales, bookkeeping and business correspondence. But many Beethoven scholars, perhaps finding it inconceivable that an 18th-century woman could build a piano, have turned Andreas into the manufacturer and Nannette into his shadowy helpmate.” – The New York Times

“The past few months have been picking up a little bit. We’ve been trying to meet our restricted quota. So people were starting to come out a little more now. Now that we have to close, that’s another nail in the coffin.” – Chicago Tribune

From a neuroscience perspective, when a study participant experienced pleasurable musical chills, Chabin et al. observed an uptick of theta activity in the prefrontal cortex in conjunction with higher arousal and emotional-response ratings. – Psychology Today

“You have to listen. It’s not just about following me, you have to know how what you’re doing relates to what other people are doing. Have your ears out. … Another [issue] is time: With a group like Alarm Will Sound, it’s in everyone’s DNA that the default is: We’re going to play in a steady pulse. … That’s not necessarily the ground that people walk on in the orchestral world.” – Van

With the clarion call of the Black Lives Matter movement ringing in the background, Modirzadeh described the SFSU music program as fettered by “a deep intergenerational upholding of that archaic ‘separate but equal’ logic that miseducates, leaving our students perpetually revolving around a musical caste system stuck thick in ethnic myopia.” – San Francisco Classical Voice