pocketsnacks

There is a site called “8tracks” that lets you upload mp3’s and the assemble them into an 8 track mix. Kind of like one side of a mix-tape*, which is no doubt a historically brief art form which has been mostly lost and replaced with mix CD’s (not the same at all) and play lists. Personally I don’t do the play list thing much.

So this is just a few tracks, uploaded and arranged, that I thought I would use to test this thing.

*I think one of the great aspect of a mix-tape over a CD (or playlist) is the fact that you get two sides. You get to come up with an opening track for both sides, as well as a closer for both. And if you were into the art the the mix-tape, then you understand how important it can be to seek out and place the right songs there.

I have been using last.fm since about april of 2005. So for almost 4 years it has been tracking what I listen to, making charts based on that, as well as recommending me new bands, finding neighbors with similar musical tastes, and also creating a number of radio stations for me, based on my listening habits, tracks I have “liked”, etc.  I know lot of people use Pandora, which I did try out way back when it was new, but I just didn’t like what it spewed out at me, plus I just really dig having my own personal charts made out of what I listen to.

Anyhow, the point of this blurp was that recently last.fm held a hack day to see what developers could build in a day using last.fm’s api. One of the cool ones to come out of it was something called songcolours which analyzes your charts and spits out a colored pie graph, a phrase and some songs, broken down by color.

Honestly I have no idea what it all represents, but I found it cool. My phrase was “sky lucy diamonds world river sun”. Admittedly I have been listening to various versions of “Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds” recently.

I assume this with change as newer songs get into my charts, but here is mine.

Over the past few years, I used to catch bits of a radio show on NPR that always caught my attention and would suck me in, but I never knew when it was on or exactly what it was. I finally did some investigating a while back and discovered it was WNYC’s Radiolab.

Since then I think I haven listened to every episode from all 5 seasons. It is kind of sciencey, but really more just about curiosity. Every episode they pose a question, sometimes a very seemingly simple and obvious one, and then explore it. Usually revealing that it was not such a simple question after all.
Questions like, why do we sleep? Why do we laugh? What is music?

They attempt to answer these question with interviews and sort of, audio collages and stories. And they employ some really nice audio editing, sounds and music. It is really just great radio, and it feels very new and fresh and smart.

They have every episode available to listen to online, or download at their website, as well as extras that didn’t make it into the show (which is an hour long). You can also grab it at iTunes for free, but they don’t have as many episodes.