Tired of the same music? Dive into SoundPond January 28th, 2010

Over the last few years I’ve listened to progressively less music, and the reason was mainly because:

  • Most new music really irritates me. I know there is some good stuff coming through the noise, but I hate subjecting myself to all the horrible crud to find a diamond in the ruff, all while getting spammed with advertisements the entire time.
  • I don’t want to wear myself out on the music I do like. A lot of bands have been put on hiatus to pursue other interests.
  • Also a lot of bands that used to be good got drastically worse, probably just because they had contracts saying they had to keep making music – or they just want more money.

It’s gotten so bad that I’ve basically outsourced my musical taste to trusted friends of mine. With services like Last.fm and Pandora it’s easy to just clone someone else’s musical taste. Today I saw a simple Facebook status update from Daniel O’Connor about becoming a fan of SoundPond.

These are folks from Australia that use UStream to offer a nice rotation of DJs making original mixes. They have a very simple (and limited) chat room, and they communicate with their listeners, which can be quite engaging. The folks I spoke with had a great attitude and everyone seemed to be having a great time, and it was 2:30 AM in their timezone!

I don’t know much about the service under the hood, or who is really behind it all, but I think it’s some of the folks from LibertySound, which consists of Ka$h, Penny Drops, and Kim Savage. This is another world for me, so if I’m drastically wrong please help me out.

Give them some love on facebook by becoming a fan (button on their homepage too), tweeting @SoundPond, and most importantly – enjoy the music.

Symphony of Science November 7th, 2009

CalculatorWhile browsing YouTube I found a video that took the great popular scientist Carl Sagan (RIP) and transformed his thoughts into song. The video was made by John Boswell of Symphony of Science. I found it ironic that I liked the use of the auto-tune feature, while I hate with a passion T-Pain, who’s Wikipedia article lists his “Instrument” as Auto-Tune. The idea of hearing something that Sagan, Hawking, or another brilliant mind said, instead of half-constructed ramblings of a musical artist is appealing. (For the record T-Pain and other artists may be making stupid music, but they’re making serious bank while doing it, so my hat’s off to them in that regard)

Out of random chance I happened to remember the name of the video and showed it to a good amount of people throughout the day. We all had a fun time with it, but nobody knew anything about Symphony of Science, or the idea of there being more videos to come in the future. Later John released We’re All Connected, returning with Sagan and folk, including Bill Nye. After seeing this video, I don’t think John is going to have a problem finding amazingly elegant and on-topic sound bytes to mix and match together. So far most of us like Glorious Dawn more than We’re All Connected, but the fact that I have to pause and think about it means both are obviously awesome.