The Specials “A Message to You, Rudy” video featured on 120 Minutes, 1991
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someone made a supercut of ever single spell in every single Harry Potter movie. it’s over 17 minutes long.
Did you hear about Macaulay Culkin and his pals singing pizza-themed Velvet Underground covers? Well here’s their first video.
PLEASE WATCH THIS
So here’s a story.
Back in the mid-90′s I was an awkward closeted bisexual teen living in NC who had like 5 friends and only one of them I could talk about stuff like music with. So he and I talked a lot about music, and he made me mixtapes with New Music I Had Never Heard Before on them and so I fell in love with David Bowie and Elvis Costello and a bit in love with that friend as well. But that’s high school for you.
My eldest sibling, my half-brother, is a solid 14 years older than me, and is a sarcastic, brilliant asshole. So of course teenage me idolized him, because he was going to law school (and thus conforming to family expectations) while also saying “fuck it” and going to live in Kenya for a while, and biking across America and stuff. One day we’re talking on the phone (which we didn’t do often, but which I always enjoyed. It must have been one of our birthdays?) and he’s like “So what are you in to these days?” and I’m like *okay, fuck it, imma tell him* — “Well, I recently got obsessed with Elvis Costello and I love ‘King of America’ because it’s so different from his other stuff but I’m pretty sure ‘Allison’ is the most beautiful love song I’ve ever heard.” And he goes, after a long pause “….Oh. What else are you listening to?” and I start listing off bands I love, because he honestly seemed interested, and they’re everything from Tori Amos to Ani DiFranco to Tom Waits to Bobby Darin to Nirvana to god knows what else lil grunge me was obsessed with at the time, Radiohead probably. And my brother, he goes “Hey. Hey. Tell me your address. I’m going to send you something.”
So a week later I get home from school and there’s a package on our doorstep, and it’s for me, and I open it up and it’s an old, beat up record player and one album: “The Specials.” And the note in the package just says this: “Your mom [his ex-step-mother] can show you how a record player works — she taught me. Listen to this. Call me Saturday and tell me what you think. If you like it, I’ll send you more music. Stay weird. Love you.”
I still have that note. The record, however, I listened to so many times that I ruined it, because I was young.
Anyways. I love this song.
“Orlando Jones has actually done it all—you’ll remember him as a 7 Up spokesperson, his role on MADtv, Sound FX, The Sinbad Show, A Different World, Roc, The Bernie Mac Show… the list literally goes on. Today, he ventures into the music world
His song, "Thug Music Vol. 1—Play At A Maximum Volume” is not some struggle rap song from an actor turned musician. Jones, who has adopted the pseudonym GSR, is trying to use music to create a dialogue inspired by recent events including the Michael Dunn/Jordan Davis trial, Trayvon Martin’s death, and more.“
Electron microscope video of a needle on a vinyl record.
H O W
like you can tell me all you want how the sound is stored in the grooves but fucking H O W
HOW DOES THAT GET INTO THE NEEDLE
HOW ARE THE VIBRATIONS TURNED INTO MUSIC THAT YOU CAN HEAR???
H O W
The vibrations aren’t “turned into” music, they are music. When vibrations occur inside your inner ear, your brain processes this as sound.
The grooves in a record are an analogy for these vibrations, a method of remembering them so that they can be recreated later on.
Put your hand on a speaker while loud music is playing and you’ll feel the vibrations. Those are exactly the same vibrations happening inside your ear when you hear the music.
But how do you capture that?
Take a surface that vibrates strongly when a sound is played, like the skin of a drumhead for example. Connect that surface to a little tool - when sound causes the surface to vibrate, the tool digs a little bit into some wax, leaving behind a pattern that matches - in proportion - the vibrations of the surface caused by the sound. This is your analogy (hence: analog music).
Now, when there’s no sound playing, you run that little tool back over the pattern. This causes the skin to vibrate again, this time in response to the tool running over the pattern instead of because of an external sound. The vibrations should match, proportionally, the original vibrations of the music.. and thus these new vibrations, if you were to amplify them, would be a recreation or “recording” of the original music.
That’s oversimplified of course and things have changed a lot since the days of wax, but that is very basically how the process of recording music worked at first, and the general idea of how sound gets from a groove in a record into your brain.
(reblogging for Disparition commentary)
Thank you Science side of tumblr
I hugely appreciate people taking to the time explain stuff like this, as it helps put an end to the “wow, science is magic!” trope that’s become far too common.
My top music genres, according to Spotify’s year end thing.
My top artist was (to no one’s surprise) Frank Turner.
What the hell is “chamber pop,” though.
Here’s “Call Me Maybe” without the music.
Trump posted a video to his Facebook today, but he used the wrong music. I fixed it for him. Thank you.
This is the only kind of Trump video I ever want to watch.
