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Favourite things. Music and Movies. Nature. Items that interest me on any topic.
‘Hope For The Future’, a new song from Paul McCartney written for
the computer game Destiny has popped put with little
fanfare.
McCartney announced on Twitter two years ago that he was working
on the project. The
song is no small budget production. The track was recorded at Abbey Road Studios
in London with a 120-piece orchestra conducted by Giles Martin, son of Sir
George Martin, the Beatles producer.
McCartney composed 50 minutes of music for the computer game but
despite the high profile artist and big budget production the song has
remarkably small views of YouTube. ‘Destiny’ the game was released on September 9.
‘Hope For The
Future’ by Paul McCartney was released as a single through iTunes on September
26.
This
has been a good week for Beatles fans, as George Harrison’s first six studio albums have been re-released and Conan, in turn,has celebrated
“George Harrison Week.” All week the show has been showcasing Harrison covers
from various stars including (on Monday night)
Beck, and last night the guest was Paul Simon.
Harkening back to his performance alongside Harrison in a
1976 Saturday Night Live episode, the singer performed a lovely cover
of Harrison’s “Here Comes the
Sun (above). By Aisha Harris With thanks to Slate. But there's more.....
The Sydney Opera House will play host to a new Beatles production,
All You Need Is Love, in January.
‘All
You Need Is Love’ will feature the 50 piece Strawberry Fields Orchestra with
Musical Director Paul Gray , Conducted by Nicholas Buc , with Vocal Direction by
Lindsay Field and Orchestra leader Adrian Keating.
Jack
Jones, Ciaran Gribbin, Darren Percival and Jackson Thomas have lined up for
vocals.
‘All
You Need Is Love’ is the latest production in a line of Beatles musicals from
Phil Bathols and Tim Woods. The pair developed and produced Let It Be, The White
Album Concert and Beatles Back2Back.
All
You Need is Love is on January 2, 3 and 4 at the Sydney Opera
House.
By Paul Cashmere
With thanks to Noise 11 Still more... The Beatles Release Free 4 EP
The Beatles are offering a free EP ‘4’ via iTunes for fans. The 4 song digital EP highlights each of the four Beatles solo. The tracks featured are: John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band – Love (from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970) Paul McCartney – Call Me Back Again (from Venus and Mars, 1975) George Harrison – Let It Down (from All Things Must Pass, 1970) - above Ringo Starr – ‘Walk With You’ (from Y Not, 2010) Download your free Beatles ‘4’ EP here. By Paul Cashmere With thanks to Noise 11
Conan
O’Brien paid tribute to the late George Harrison this week with
performances from Paul Simon and Beck earlier in the week. The week long
tribute was to coincide with the release of the new George Harrison box
set ‘The Apple Years’ featuring George’s first six Apple albums.
Norah will also perform this Sunday at George Fest at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. The line-up includes: George Fest 2014 Lineup: Brian Wilson Norah Jones Brandon Flowers & Mark Stoermer (The Killers) Wayne Coyne & Steven Drozd (The Flaming Lips) Ben Harper Ann Wilson (Heart) Britt Daniel (Spoon) “Weird Al” Yankovic Nick Valensi (The Strokes) Dhani Harrison Ian Astbury Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Butch Walker Cold War Kids Karen Elson Brian Bell (Weezer) Big Black Delta Chase Cohl Jamestown Revival Matt Sorum Ryan Miller (Guster) The Black Ryder Ginnger Shankar
Serious Beatles fans may be able to describe the band's complex musical
evolution during its eight-year run, but now there is a mathematical
way to map the group's progression from "Love Me Do" all the way to "Let
It Be."
A group of researchers developed an algorithm that sorts out
similarities among songs based on sound frequencies and patterns. The
scientists then used the algorithm to analyze songs from each of the 13
Beatles albums released in the United Kingdom. After determining how
closely related each song was, the algorithm successfully ranked the
albums chronologically.
"People who are not Beatles fans normally
can't tell that 'Help!' was recorded before 'Rubber Soul,' but the
algorithm can," study author Lior Shamir, a professor at the Lawrence
Technological University in Southfield, Michigan, said in a statement.
"This experiment demonstrates that artificial intelligence can identify
the changes and progression in musical styles by 'listening' to popular
music albums in a completely new way." [Images: The World's Most Beautiful Equations]
The algorithm, which is described in the August issue of the
journal Pattern Recognition Letters, converts each song into a visual
map called a spectrogram. This diagram displays the changes in
sound-wave frequency, shape and texture throughout the song. The
algorithm then sorts and compares how closely the spectra of sound waves
line up in each song. Lastly, a statistical analysis ranks how closely
related two songs are to each other.
The algorithm determined that songs on the Beatles' first album,
"Please, Please Me,"were most like the songs on the group's next
recorded album, "With the Beatles." The early tunes were least similar
to the songs on the band's last album, "Abbey Road."(Even though "Let It
Be"was the last album the band released, the songs on the album were
actually recorded before those on "Abbey Road," meaning the algorithm
correctly identified the chronological order of the songs, despite the
release dates.)
Shamir and his graduate student Joe George didn't stop at the Beatles:
They also used the algorithm to analyze other well-known groups, such as
U2, Tears for Fears and Queen.
The algorithm spotted the similarities
between two consecutive Tears for Fears albums, even though they were
released 15 years apart: The band recorded "Seeds of Love"in 1989 right
before breaking up, and "Everybody Loves a Happy Ending" was the first
album released after the band reunited in 2004. The algorithm also
correctly sorted Queen's discography and could distinguish between the
albums recorded before and after "Hot Space" — the record that
represented the most radical shift in the group's music.
Shamir and George hope the algorithm can be used to organize music databases and help users easily navigate and search through songs,
artists and albums. For music streaming services like Spotify and
Pandora that play music based on songs that users have "liked," the
algorithm could be adapted to go one step further and identify music
that matches a person's individual music preferences.
"A system can learn the musical preferences of a user by 'listening' to the music he
or she listens to, and then constantly search[es] for more music he or
she will probably also like, but might not be aware of," Shamir told
Live Science in an email. "The information revolution allows every
musician to make their creative work accessible to the public, but the
main problem is discovering it in the vast flow of data."
