Well… this is interesting. You know how Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury has been dead for about 20 years now, and Bad Company’s Paul Rogers has been filling in lately? Well, it seems that Queen guitarist Brian May has come up to a solution to the Band’s “singer problem” as he calls it—have Lady Gaga front the band.
To honor rock n’ roll legend Freddie Mercury – on what would have been the Queen singer’s 65th birthday – Google celebrates the music icon with a new Google Doodle and birthday tribute video.
Google published the Freddie Mercury doodle worldwide on its homepage Monday, but not in the US, which is celebrating Mercury’s birthday today (9-6) because of a conflict with Labor Day.
The minute-plus video is set to Queen’s 1978 Queen hit song “Don’t Stop Me Now,” which Mercury wrote. Watch the video below!
Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian best known for his over-the-top characters Borat and Bruno, is set to play the rock n’ roll icon that is Freddie Mercury in a film about the band Queen.
Queen guitarist Brian May confirmed the news in a BBC interview on Friday. May and drummer Roger Taylor are overseeing the music for the film, which will focus on the years leading up to Queen’s legendary, 21-minute appearance at the Live Aid concert in 1985.
Oh, man. If you have kids and you haven’t seen this, get ready. Even if you don’t have kids, yet haven’t seen this either, get ready! Prepare yourself for a major dose of AWESOME. You read the title. Yes; The Muppets do Queen‘s “Bohemian Rhapsody!
You may not think of Queen anymore (well at least the kids won’t), and you may not think of Wayne’s World anymore, because these Muppets just got their own YouTube channel and have been blowing up with their rendition of the famous head-banging song! All of them completely throw down but Animal being confused as he sings, “MOMMA…. Momma?” and Beaker showcasing his falsetto have to be the best parts. Watch it below and decide for yourself!
At the 2009 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Taiwan, UC San Diego electrical engineering Ph.D. student Luke Barrington presented a new model for music analysis (pdf) that can capture both the sound of a song and how it changes over time. The system is being used for a new search engine, dubbed Google for Music, and users would search for descriptive words, like “mellow jazz”, instead of song titles, album names or artist names.
The algorithm labels tracks differently; it cuts them into segments such as verse, chorus and bridge. It’s more accurate because it gives labels to smaller sections of a song, rather than attempting to broadly label the entire thing. But the computer must be taught, so Barrington’s team has made a game for Facebook, called Herd It, which asks you to identify instruments, genres, artist names and emotions triggered by a song.
As a rule, music played by machines is perfectly synchronized and in tune, but this ensemble of old hardware sounds like a band in its early stages, just starting to play in unison. The band’s members are: an Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound, a Texas Instruments TI-99 as lead guitar, an 8 Inch Floppy Disk on the bass, a 3.5 inch Harddrive as the gong and an HP ScanJet 3C on vocals.
There are software plugins which have the sole purpose of “humanizing” electronic music by introducing small imperfections in the note sequences. The musical incompetence of the machines in the video, added to the heroic melodies of Queen’s masterpiece make the performance depressingly human, and beautiful.
(Thanks to Robert Ashley)
Singstar Queen to be released in March, GDC Awards go to music video game designers, and the Slayer track on Guitar Hero: Metallica looks pretty complex. All in today’s round up:
Music fans have given NME their votes for the greatest voice in rock. Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant came out on top with Freddie Mercury of Queen and Paul Rodgers of Free and Bad Company following closely behind. It’s a pretty big honor and a very broad one at that.
Do you agree with this outcome? Let us know what you think!
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Amid rampant rumors that Brit-rockers The Darkness will reform in 2009 with their original line up, lead singer/guitarist Justin Hawkins has announced the rise of a new Spinal Tap – inspired group, Hot Leg.
Hot Leg will unleash its brand of new-age classic rock on the world with its debut album, “Red Light Fever,” in January.
With his flawless falsetto, which he refers to as the “Truth Larynx,” Hawkins will lead the new band with help from guitarist Pete Rinaldi, bassist Samuel SJ Stokes and drummer Darby Todd.
