Posts tagged 'music'

Jan 23, 2011

Rachmaninov sounds like an 80′s high school dance

View this post on my blog if the audio clips below aren’t showing up. Just saw this old (but fun) post on the blog Mental Floss, “6 pop songs that rip off classical music.” Some aren’t so surprising–for example, the several rap songs with samples of dramatic orchestral pieces. If the combination of rap and (More…)

Jul 29, 2010

Music: A Cheap Trick for Nerds? Part 2.

In my previous post I showed you a piece of piano music based on a Shepard Scale–it seems to go up and up forever. Listen to it (it’s at the bottom on this link), and then ask yourself: 1. Was that interesting? 2. Was that aesthetically pleasing or beautiful? 3. Was that music? Most people (More…)

Music is a Cheap Trick for Nerds, Part 1

Modern classical music, a.k.a. “art music,” often gets a bad rap for being impossible to listen to. In fact, this is completely true. Since you’re probably very busy at work, allow me to take you on a stroll through Youtube and Wikipedia to see why. Part 1: The Shepard Scale First you need to understand (More…)

Apr 23, 2010

Larghetto from Dvorak’s Serenade for String

The movement of music that got me into classical, by the composer that got me into classical.

Nov 19, 2009

TED video ad puzzler redux

Previously on this blog I wondered about the origins of a striking electric string quartet piece in an Autodesk ad at the end of a TED video. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I found some people looking for the same thing on another blog. After a brief discussion in the comments, Sharon Jennings (More…)