HOW BING CROSBY AND THE NAZIS HELPED TO CREATE SILICON VALLEY
How Bing and his influence in the recording industry helped to enable modern technology.
Bonus commentary on how the new “crooning” was a bad influence on the young. Nothing ever changes.
This is a little different.
If you go their youtube page you’ll see they’ve done several Beatles songs.
Slowed this much it sounds a bit like a whale-song chorus. Not for foot-tapping, but maybe for background/relaxation. I’ve played with slowed songs before but I’ve only gone to 3/4 or 2/3 speed; Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good” gives me the mental image of a singer in a black dress, single spotlight in a smoky bar when it’s slowed down. Elvis’s “Burning Love” is definitely more bluesy. There are a few Heart and Blondie songs I like as well (some with the slowed voice pitch, some preserving the original; the Amazing Slow Downer app I use allows one to adjust that. However, it’s limited to 20% of the original speed, or a slowdown of 5x. Still, interesting sounds.)
Seventy-six Go-Pros led the big parade…
Go-Pro attached to a trombone slide
Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments including the keyboard, drums and maracas, a cymbal, and the debut of an adapted guitar built from a couch frame.
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These flying quadrotors are completely autonomous, meaning humans are not controlling them; rather they are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.
FACT: Dolly Parton is two amazing singers. If you slow her songs down (as if you were playing an old 45 at 33rpm) she sounds completely different and really terrific
Two examples at the link: 9 to 5 and Jolene
Inspired by this, I’ve spent a few hours playing around with some slowdown software, and there are some songs that are interesting when you play them at 3/4 or 2/3 speed, and others when you speed them up.
Whistle While You Work? Not in Space
Former astronaut Dan Barry has seven hours of spacewalking time to his credit. He tried whistling during his spacewalk on STS-96 in May 1999.
“It wasn’t something I hadn’t planned — I thought of it on the fly. It turned out that it didn’t work.,” he said.
Barry called down to Mission Control and said, “Houston, EV2. The science types might like to know that it is not possible to whistle during an EVA.”
Cool effect. Since this is not slow-motion, you might think it has to be basic aliasing: seeing a beat between the oscillations of the string and the frame-rate of a camera, often seen with wheels that look to be spinning slowly — or backward — on film. It’s not unlike the effect of a strobe light* that’s near the frequency of oscillation that make the motion seem slow or nonexistent, which sometimes happens with fluorescent (or rectified LED) lighting.
But it probably isn’t, or at least not in a simple way. When you strum a guitar the oscillations have a much longer wavelength. The fundamental mode is a standing wave where the string makes a half -wave (e.g. a 1m string has a wavelength of 2m), and there two nodes, one at either end. The next mode would have a node in the center and be a full wavelength. If the speed of sound is around 400 m/s, that gives a frequency of 200 Hz, or 400 Hz for the 2nd order mode. That’s about what we are hearing. The wavelengths shown in the video are much shorter, by more than an order of magnitude, and perhaps two. 20,000 Hz is way off. Plus the waveforms — you could get them by adding Fourier components, but that’s not going on here. This is a shutter effect, so it’s related to aliasing, but the sampling is happening as the exposure is scanned, i.e. each exposure is taking some time, and the exposure on the left side of the image does not represent the same time as the exposure on the right. This is called a rolling shutter and can have some pretty neat effects.
*Just bought a strobe. So I’ll be playing around with it.
Pick your isotopes from the Chart of the Nuclides. The program plays the energy level decay cascade as a series of notes that sound (to me) like a xylophone/marimba. You can change volume, pitch and tempo of each, as well as the waveform played — square and triangle waves sound more “techno” (I picked the isobaric combo of Ce, Xe and Cs, all -135). There’s also a visual of nuclei emitting the gammas. Interesting.
OK, a cymbal. Ooh, Bessel functions!
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