Recently in Tunes Category

Interesting: a pop star in Hong Kong has embraced Creative Commons, albeit for her photo gallery, not her music.

Perhaps the world of cantopop could do well by embracing CC….

Yeah, too bad about crappy video quality, but then again, that’s not entirely the point.

… then it’s not going to get any better than this.

(via David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman)

The starting fullback for the Harvard Crimson wants to sing opera when his football career is over.

Why not? (so long as he doesn’t injure himself…)

Well, the long-awaited (well, at least by me) new Hooverphonic album has finally been released, with a new video (see below) and a somewhat new sound.

Yes, the band that started off as a trip-hop quartet, then mutated into an orchestral pop trio, then released an acoustic album, then went electronic again… has turned itself into a psychedelic rock band.

At this rate I figure the next album will be country…

Luciano Pavarotti has died. It was, in the end, cancer that did him in, ironically.

• The Guardian has reaction from Italy, where he was not just a celebrity, but the living embodiment of the national art form; the paper also has a short list of some of his greatest performances.
• Reuters has Pavarotti's obituary in Italian.
• The news.google.it page about the great tenor shows what the man meant to the country.
• The New York Times has a slideshow, Bernie Holland provides a thoughtful and thorough obituary, and Anthony Tommasini shares his own memories. The Times also thoughtfully provides a selected discography (though one grumbles that perhaps they could have provided links to purchase--or at least hear samples--of said recordings).
• The blog Opera Chic links to some of his greatest hits on YouTube and is also rounding up international reaction to the great tenor's passing.

I was lucky enough to hear him live once; it is a memory I'll carry with me forever.

Stewart Copeland reviews the Police’s gig in Vancouver:

“Crack!” on the snare and I’m in, so Sting starts singing. Problem is, he heard my crack as two in the bar, but it was actually four – so we are half a bar out of sync with each other. Andy is in Idaho. …

We changed the keys of EVERY LITTLE THING and DON’T STAND SO CLOSE so needless to say Andy and Sting are now on-stage in front of twenty thousand fans playing avant-garde twelve-tone hodgepodges of both tunes. …

It usually takes about four or five shows in a tour before you get to the disaster gig. But we’re The Police so we are a little ahead of schedule.

It took me a whole lot longer than I was expecting, but as of 8:45 p.m. ET, I have finally finished playing every single song in my music library. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, I’ve been listening to every single song in my iTunes library in alphabetical order (more or less) since January 1. It looks like I originally thought that I might get done in mid-March. Heheh.

Let’s run the numbers:

• 7,598 tracks
• 24 days, 19 hours, 57 minutes, 14 seconds of total playing time
• Average track length was 4 minutes, 42 seconds
• 149 days of calendar time
• 51 tracks per day (on average)
• 3 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds listening per day (on average)
• First song played: “?Y Tu Que Has Hecho?”, The Buena Vista Social Club
• Last song played: “Zyphormius”, Marumari

I’m never doing this again.

So I was in Munich last week on Good Friday, and we’re wandering along, and what should we run across but some Mongolian throat singers (particularly check out the throat singing that starts about 10 seconds from the end):

The admittedly crappy video was captured on my digital camera. My question is: does anyone know what instrument they’re playing? It has a very cello-like tonality, but it’s something that I’ve never seen before (and note the western-style f-holes in the sounding box).