http://www.mikemake.com/#72772/Charting-the-Beatles
Via my friend Kevin, an infographic way of looking at the Beatles music.
Sometimes I am cutting edge and discover stuff for all of you to share and enjoy.
And, sometimes, I am the *last* to know.
From what I have gathered, I must be the last person in my social song to discover the geek-filled songs of Jonathan Coulton.
But, then, I don't have very many ranks in Knowledge: Music.
"The Future Soon" is particularly good. I am going to have to spend some time listening to more of his music and buying some.
On NPR this morning, Kevin Devlin talks about the connection between the Beatles "Hard Day's Night" and Fourier Analysis. That jangling chord that starts the song? The analysis can tell you just how the Beatles did it in the days before synthesizers.
This sort of analysis might lead to being able to determine the authorship of songs that are in dispute, like "In My Life". The theory goes that musicians have certain patterns and cadences that Fourier Analysis can tease out.
Impressions of my first visit to a TSO Concert:
TSO seems to be the fruition of the concept "If ELO and Rick Wakeman decided to do Christmas Concept albums together."
Very crowded. ~9000 fans squeezed into the Target Center, which was at full capacity. Logistics were bad about people getting in, the people sitting next to me didn't show until the show started because of the bottlenecks in getting into the arena.
Lasers, lights, and even pyrotechnics. The TSO people certainly know how to put on a show as far as visuals are concerned.
TSO did, as far as I can tell, the entirety of their first album,Christmas Eve and Other Stories and then branched out to a couple of tracks from other albums, and non album stuff.Aside from the narration of the "story", they didn't do many songs with vocals at all.
Doing the Peanuts theme in the Twin Cities was a smart and audience-popular touch. The crowd overall, though, was politely subdued (I assume this is because the demographics didn't track that young). I liked their instrumental version of Roll over Beethoven.
Even though I was at the back of the stadium relative to the performers for most of the performance, on a couple of occasions, a couple of the performers came forward to a small sub-stage which was much closer.
A couple of technical glitches that were Target Center's fault drew humor more than frustration from TSO and the concert goers.
I would see them again in concert, you betcha.