Tootfinder

The Return of the Cassette Tape: How Analog Music is Making a Comeback https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2025/09/the-return-of-the-cassette-tape-how-analog-music-is-making-a-comeback

The Return of the Cassette Tape? How Analog Music Is Making a Comeback | The Saturday Evening Post
It’s not just vinyl that’s become popular again. The humble cassette tape is having a renaissance of its own.

Taylor Swift set a new record for first-week album sales, reaching 4M by releasing 38 variations of Life of a Showgirl, an increasingly popular strategy (Elias Leight/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/…

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?

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.
🎶

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.

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!!!

Spotify reinstates integration with third-party DJ software for Premium subscribers in 51 markets, including the US, after pulling support in 2020 (Lawrence Bonk/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/spotify-now-di…

Spotify now directly integrates with DJ software
Spotify just announced integration with popular DJ software platforms. This will allow users to create DJ sets by dipping into their playlists.

Half black kitten, half otter 🦦

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.)

Unveiling the Listener Structure Underlying K-pop's Global Success: A Large-Scale Listening Data Analysis
Ryota Nakamura, Keita Nishimoto, Ichiro Sakata, Kimitaka Asatani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06606

Unveiling the Listener Structure Underlying K-pop's Global Success: A Large-Scale Listening Data Analysis
From the mid-2000s to the 2010s, K-pop moved beyond its status as a regionally popular genre in Asia and established itself as a global music genre with enthusiastic fans around the world. However, little is known about how the vast number of music listeners across the globe have listened to and perceived K-pop. This study addresses this question by analyzing a large-scale listening dataset from Last.fm. An analysis of the distribution of play counts reveals that K-pop experienced a significant…

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:

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…

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

Crude Tunes: The Histories and Cultures of Petroleum in Popular Music
https://ift.tt/NpOfLhj
updated: Tuesday, October 7, 2025 - 12:35pmfull name / name of organization: John Miller and Josie…
via Input 4 RELCFP