Tootfinder

Of the many popular music stars of the 80s, I feel the one most likely to be found—and happiest—playing a country song in a small room with 20 people and just a guitar is Mark Knopfler.
(Why yes, some early years' Dire Straits showed up on my recommended playlist this morning.)

Do Music Source Separation Models Preserve Spatial Information in Binaural Audio?
Richa Namballa, Agnieszka Roginska, Magdalena Fuentes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00155

Do Music Source Separation Models Preserve Spatial Information in Binaural Audio?
Binaural audio remains underexplored within the music information retrieval community. Motivated by the rising popularity of virtual and augmented reality experiences as well as potential applications to accessibility, we investigate how well existing music source separation (MSS) models perform on binaural audio. Although these models process two-channel inputs, it is unclear how effectively they retain spatial information. In this work, we evaluate how several popular MSS models preserve spat…

Just learned that my little visual cosine gradient generator tool (from 2015) is featured in this popular video tutorial (1.1M views) about artistic shader programming:
https://youtu.be/f4s1h2YETNY?t=971
The tool is still here:

Euphonica is a Rust-Powered MPD Client Heavy on Bling
MPD (Music Player Daemon) is a server-client audio player long popular with Linux users. The headless daemon runs as a background service, typically on a remote audio server. Music is then accessed via a GUI client frontend, which connects to the MPD server to stream content.
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Euphonica is a Rust-Powered MPD Client Heavy on Bling
Euphonica is a new Rust-based MPD frontend for Linux desktops, with 'bling' as a key feature. I showcase its design, features, and current development status.

#TomLehrer, mathematician and singer-songwriter known for colorful satire, dies at 97
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/tom-lehr

Universal Music Representations? Evaluating Foundation Models on World Music Corpora
Charilaos Papaioannou, Emmanouil Benetos, Alexandros Potamianos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17055

Universal Music Representations? Evaluating Foundation Models on World Music Corpora
Foundation models have revolutionized music information retrieval, but questions remain about their ability to generalize across diverse musical traditions. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art audio foundation models across six musical corpora spanning Western popular, Greek, Turkish, and Indian classical traditions. We employ three complementary methodologies to investigate these models' cross-cultural capabilities: probing to assess inherent representations…

Some recent popular books “explaining” music are actually awful. They commit the naturalistic fallacy with flair - as if the sweep of nature had quietly handed us a tidy little musical rulebook. I come away not with understanding but with a feeling of aesthetic conscription. Or constipation.

SLEEPING-DISCO 9M: A large-scale pre-training dataset for generative music modeling
Tawsif Ahmed, Andrej Radonjic, Gollam Rabby
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14293

SLEEPING-DISCO 9M: A large-scale pre-training dataset for generative music modeling
We present Sleeping-DISCO 9M, a large-scale pre-training dataset for music and song. To the best of our knowledge, there are no open-source high-quality dataset representing popular and well-known songs for generative music modeling tasks such as text-music, music-captioning, singing-voice synthesis, melody reconstruction and cross-model retrieval. Past contributions focused on isolated and constrained factors whose core perspective was to create synthetic or re-recorded music corpus (e.g. GTSi…

We just got back from a staged reading of “Mary’s Wedding” by Stephen Massicotte.
Wow!!! It was intense. Just two actors, no props, no sets beyond four music stands.
It is a Canadian play, apparently far more popular in Canada than in the US. (Which makes sense because it is about WW-I, an event into which Canada was more involved than the US.)
Santa Cruz Shakespeare has a reading or similar pay-what-you-will event every Tuesday in August. Well worth it!!!

A bit of distraction.
When I was a boy, in the 1950s, you heard people whistling everywhere. Delivery boys, building workers, shopkeepers.
Then, from some time in the 60s you've hardly heard it.
Why?
Hypotheses:
* Noisier streets (cars).
* Decline of singable popular music.
* Increased self-consciousness.
What do you think?

Methods for pitch analysis in contemporary popular music: multiple pitches from harmonic tones in Vitalic's music
Emmanuel Deruty, David Meredith, Maarten Grachten, Pascal Arbez-Nicolas, Andreas Hasselholt J{\o}rgensen, Oliver S{\o}nderm{\o}lle Hansen, Magnus Stensli, Christian N{\o}rk{\ae}r Petersen
https://arxiv.org/abs/25…

Methods for pitch analysis in contemporary popular music: multiple pitches from harmonic tones in Vitalic's music
Aims. This study suggests that the use of multiple perceived pitches arising from a single harmonic complex tone is an active and intentional feature of contemporary popular music. The phenomenon is illustrated through examples drawn from the work of electronic artist Vitalic and others. Methods. Two listening tests were conducted: (1) evaluation of the number of simultaneous pitches perceived from single harmonic tones, and (2) manual pitch transcription of sequences of harmonic tones. Relat…

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https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/09/entertainment/sly-stone-death

Sly Stone, pioneering funk musician, dead at 82
Sly Stone, the influential but enigmatic funk-rock star whose soulful, socially conscious recordings altered the course of popular music before he abruptly retreated from the spotlight and became the J.D. Salinger of rock, has died, his family announced Monday.

Evolving music theory for emerging musical languages
Emmanuel Deruty
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14504 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.1450…

Evolving music theory for emerging musical languages
This chapter reconsiders the concept of pitch in contemporary popular music (CPM), particularly in electronic contexts where traditional assumptions may fail. Drawing on phenomenological and inductive methods, it argues that pitch is not an ontologically objective property but a perceptual construct shaped by listeners and conditions. Analyses of quasi-harmonic tones reveal that a single tone can convey multiple pitches, giving rise to tonal fission. The perception of pitch may also be multista…

Melodic and Metrical Elements of Expressiveness in Hindustani Vocal Music
Yash Bhake, Ankit Anand, Preeti Rao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04430 https://arxi…

Melodic and Metrical Elements of Expressiveness in Hindustani Vocal Music
This paper presents an attempt to study the aesthetics of North Indian Khayal music with reference to the flexibility exercised by artists in performing popular compositions. We study expressive timing and pitch variations of the given lyrical content within and across performances and propose computational representations that can discriminate between different performances of the same song in terms of expression. We present the necessary audio processing and annotation procedures, and discuss…