Earlier this month, a North Carolina man was charged with generating songs using an artificial-intelligence system and configuring bots to stream them automatically, thus racking up some $10 mill...
In the last year, screenwriter Todd Alcott’s hobby has blown up into a legit side career. This Etsy seller isn’t peddling kombucha SCOBYs, letter pressing new baby announcements, or repurposi...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/09/david-bowies-songs-reimagined-as-pulp-fiction-book-covers.html
Image via Wikimedia Commons A quick heads up: On October 3rd, Stanford Continuing Studies will kick off an 8‑week online course called Did It Matter? Does It Now? The Music and Culture of the G...
Grab a cup of coffee, put on your thinking cap, and start working through this video from Minute Physics, which explains why guitars, violins and other instruments can be tuned to a tee. But when...
Audio cassette tapes first appeared on the market in the early nineteen-sixties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dominate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of...
Recently an older musician acquaintance told me he never “got into ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and all that,” referring to the “first major space jam” of Pink Floyd’s career and the su...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/09/the-night-frank-zappa-jammed-with-pink-floyd-1969.html
After making one of the grandest entrances in music history on the stages of East Village clubs, the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, and Saturday Night Live, theatrical German new wave space a...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/08/the-enchanting-opera-performances-of-klaus-nomi.html
Jimi Hendrix arrived on the London scene like a ton of bricks in 1966, smashing every British blues guitarist to pieces the instant they saw him play. As vocalist Terry Reid tells it, when Hendri...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/08/hendrix-come-to-london-and-blows-eric-clapton-away.html
You know the sound of the theremin, that weird, warbly whine that signals mystery, danger, and otherworldly portent in many classic sci-fi films. It has the distinction of being not only the ver...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/08/soviet-inventor-leon-theremin-shows-off-the-theremin-1954.html
Survey the British public about the most important institution to arise in their country after World War II, and a lot of respondents are going to say the National Health Service. But keep asking...
In November 1973, Scot Halpin, a 19-year-old kid, scalped tickets to The Who concert in San Francisco, California. Little did he know that he’d wind up playing drums for the band that night ...
At this time of the year, the Swedish island of Gotland puts on Medeltidsveckan, or “Medieval Week,” the country’s largest historical festival. According to its official About page, it offe...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/08/the-worlds-first-medieval-electronic-instrument.html
“We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” The year is 1999 and David Bowie, in shaggy hair and groovy glasses, has seen the future and it is the Internet. In this short ...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/07/david-bowie-predicts-the-good-bad-of-the-internet-1999.html
Howlin’ Wolf may well have been the greatest blues singer of the 20th century. Certainly many people have said so, but there are other measurements than mere opinion, though it’s one I happen...
It’s easy to dismiss The Monkees. Critics and listeners have been doing it since the sixties, although the band has also come in for its share of reappraisals, particularly for their psych-rock...