Recently in Music Category

The most unexpected thing: you immediately forget your look at a child, because what you are hearing is the rapturous soprano voice of an adult. Then, at then end, when the host announces her prize, and the tears flow, you realize that she is indeed a 10 year old child.  Jackie Evancho's voice is astounding.

Related articles:

• Meet Jackie Evancho, Your Next Susan Boyle, Sort of (observer.com)
• 10 Year Old Jackie Evancho Possessed By Adult Singing Voice (bestweekever.tv)
• Jackie Evancho Brings Down The House On America's Got Talent [Video] (realestateradiousa.com)
• Jackie Evancho: America's Got Talent Superstar Is Just 10 Years Old (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)

I just stumbled onto this new program, TuneUp, from TuneUpMedia.com. It's an iTunes plugin that has a number of really cool features:

• The program will analyze your iTunes library and report back all of the tracks that have incomplete information and create a "dirty" playlist.  Incomplete information might mean the track is missing any of the data listed in the graphic to the right.


• Drag any of the "dirty" tracks into TuneUp.  TuneUp then analyzes the sound footprint of the track to determine what the track actually is and offers to retrieve all of the missing meta data for the track.  In other words, you could have a track in your iTunes library called "Track 09."  TuneUp would figure out what the track name, artist, album, genre, year, cover art, and actual track number on the album are and populate all of that data, replacing the "Track 09" with the real info!  That's rather remarkable!  But there's more...


• TuneUp will follow what you're listening to, offer videos of the track in a sidebar (just click to play the videos right there in the sidebar), a bio of the artists, tell you about the upcoming concerts for that artist in your area, even let you purchase the tickets, share related items about the artist from ebay, let you tweet what you're listening to.


• Other features too...

Today Apple sold its 10,000,000,000th (that's billionth) song at the iTunes Store—all in less than 7 years. The music industry can gripe all it wants, but Apple has made them a lot of money they would otherwise have lost to file sharing!

Today's Business Insider has this headline: Blockbuster Collapses: Shutting Down 500 Stores In Desperate Bid To Save $200 Million. I'm actually shocked they survived as long as they did. They ended last year almost $1,000,000,000 in debt.

By closing 500 of their weakest stores, they hope to reduce operating expenses by $200 million. They are also exploring other ways to increase liquidity and find new emerging distribution channels.

Let me offer them a touch of advice. Liquidate now and save everyone the misery to come.

I follow @PhilipBloom on Twitter. He does such amazing work. He has been in Dubai for the past several days shooting this video, Sky. This short timelapse beautifully captures the radiance of the city. And the music, Xibalba by Clint Mansell, is perfect for it.

I appreciate Philip's willingness to share how he does this with HD-DSLRs. It's so helpful to those of us who love to dabble. You can read about the process at his blog, here.

Be sure to watch this in full screen mode. It's beautiful.

He also has a uStream account and broadcast live from his iPhone today. I haven't tried that yet, but it's on my list!

I've got to get to this place while I live out here! While many people are going in and out of the park, this video really puts things in perspective: people look like insects (especially the rock climbers near 2:45) scurrying about in the grand scheme of this untamable place. And I love the music Steven Bumgardner chose: Peter Gabriel's "The Feeling Begins" on Passion. Click below to watch.

Yosemite is bigger than Rhode Island at almost 800,000 acres, but it receives about 3.5 million visitors each year, and most of them spend time in Yosemite Valley. This project was shot back in 2005 after purchasing a Sony Z1U. This was my first HD project (ok, fine, HDV) and I spent about a week in Yosemite during the busy month of July. The footage was all shot in real time, and then sped up in post.

I chose busy places during busy days to show the effects of this mass of humanity. I could have just as easily pointed my camera in another direction and shown nothing but plants, animals and wilderness. Yosemite is popular, but it's also still a relatively wild place.

I’ve lived and worked in National Parks for almost 20 years, and as much as I love landscape photography, I also like looking at the human footprint and the human experience in our national parks. Some of this footage helped me get my current job in 2006, as a videoographer for the National Park Service and the photographer/editor/producer of the web video series "Yosemite Nature Notes" nps.gov/yose/naturenotes"

[Source: People in Yosemite: A TimeLapse Study on Vimeo.]

When it gives people the opportunity to create and share (over 1.5 million views of this video) beyond the grip of corporate ownership.

Sufficient superlatives simply do not exist. Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto in c Minor is just glorious! And, well, then there's the 3rd one as well! But his second is among my most favorite musical works of all time.

The impact of sound on people. Interesting and short TED talk by Julian Treasure.