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Tag Archives: Music

A MUSIC BREAK FOR YOU

January 10, 2021 Humor

SENSATIONAL ALEX HARVEY BANK: “BOOIDS”

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

Rickey Smiley To Host The 2020 ‘Black Music Honors’ On Bounce TV

November 11, 2020 Humor

Chicago-based television production company Central City Productions will present the 2020 Black Music Honors in national broadcast syndication November 21 – December 13, 2020. Television and radio personality Rickey Smiley returns as host of the star-studded two-hour special which will honor artists and musicians who have influenced and made significant contributions to American music.

The honorees for this year’s Black Music Honors include Grammy® Award-nominated R&B legends Rhona Bennett, Terry Ellis, and Cindy Herron of En Vogue, recognized as one of the top 5 highest selling American female music groups in history, who will receive the Urban Music Icon Award for their three decades in the industry. Grammy® Award-winner, actress and Broadway star Deborah Cox will receive the Entertainer Icon Award. Multiple Stellar Awards and Grammy® Award-winner and producer Fred Hammond will receive the Gospel Music Icon Award. The National Museum of African American Music will be honored with the Legacy Award.

Founder and Executive Producer Don Jackson stated, “I am extremely excited about our 5th Annual 2020 Black Music Honors television special and our legendary awardees. Even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important for us to stay committed to producing The Black Music Honors as a means of celebrating music icons who are often overlooked in receiving their much-deserved recognition.”

Performers of the evening include Musiq Soulchild, Raheem DeVaughn, Tweet, MAJOR., June’s Diary, Brian Courtney Wilson, D Smoke, Evvie McKinney, Marvin Sapp, RL, and Sheléa.

The show is set to air on Saturday, November 21 at 12PM (EST) on Bounce TV. State Farm returns as the show’s title sponsor. Other sponsors include AT&T, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson and Bounty.

Saturday’s Episode of ‘SNL’ Hosted by Dave Chappelle Was the Most Watched Since Eddie Murphy Hosted

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Music and Politics

July 26, 2020 Humor

This comic made me laugh:

Ironically, there is another connection from this comic to politics. The song (Don’t stand so close to me) is definitely apropos to the ongoing sex scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, both of whom have connections to Donald Trump. Maxwell recruited girls (especially underage ones) for Epstein to sexually abuse, but that didn’t stop Trump from wishing her well (and during a discussion of the coronavirus pandemic, no less).

Just for fun, here are two new ads from the Lincoln Project about Trump’s relationship with Maxwell:

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Political Irony

Researchers’ AI system infers music from silent videos of musicians

July 24, 2020 Big Data

In a study accepted to the upcoming 2020 European Conference on Computer Vision, MIT and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers describe an AI system — Foley Music — that can generate “plausible” music from silent videos of musicians playing instruments. They say it works on a variety of music performances and outperforms “several” existing systems in generating music that’s pleasant to listen to.

It’s the researchers’ belief an AI model that can infer music from body movements could serve as the foundation for a range of applications, from adding sound effects to videos automatically to creating immersive experiences in virtual reality. Studies from cognitive psychology suggest humans possess this skill — even young children report that what they hear is influenced by the signals they receive from seeing a person speak, for example.

Foley Music extracts 2D key points of people’s bodies (25 total points) and fingers (21 points) from video frames as intermediate visual representations, which it uses to model body and hand movements. For the music, the system employs MIDI representations that encode the timing and loudness of each note. Given the key points and the MIDI events (which tend to number around 500), a “graph-transformer” module learns mapping functions to associate movements with music, capturing the long-term relationships to produce accordion, bass, bassoon, cello, guitar, piano, tuba, ukulele, and violin clips.

The MIDI events aren’t rendered into music by the system, but the researchers note they can be imported into a standard synthesizer. The team leaves training a neural synthesizer to do this automatically to future work.

In experiments, the researchers trained Foley Music on three data sets containing 1,000 music performance videos belonging to 11 categories: URMP, a high-quality multi-instrument video corpus recorded in a studio that provides a MIDI file for each recorded video; AtinPiano, a YouTube channel including piano video recordings with the camera looking down on the keyboard and hands; and MUSIC, an untrimmed video data set downloaded by querying keywords from YouTube.

The researchers had the trained Foley Music system generate MIDI clips for 450 videos. Then, they conducted a listening study that tasked volunteers from Amazon Mechanical Turk with rating 50 of those clips across four categories:

Correctness: How relevant the generated song was to the video content.
Noise: Which song had the least noise.
Synchronization: Which song best temporally aligned with the video content.
Overall: Which song they preferred to listen to.

The evaluators found Foley Music’s generated music harder to distinguish from real recordings than other baseline systems, the researchers report. Moreover, the MIDI event representations appeared to help improve sound quality, semantic alignment, and temporal synchronization.

“The results demonstrated that the correlations between visual and music signals can be well established through body keypoints and MIDI representations. We additionally show our framework can be easily extended to generate music with different styles through the MIDI representations,” the coauthors wrote. “We envision that our work will open up future research on studying the connections between video and music using intermediate body keypoints and MIDI event representations.”

Foley Music comes a year after researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) detailed a system — Pixel Player — that used AI to distinguish between and isolate sounds of instruments. The fully trained PixelPlayer, given a video as the input, splits the accompanying audio and identifies the source of sound and then calculates the volume of each pixel in the image and “spatially localizes” it — i.e., identifies regions in the clip that generate similar sound waves.

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A MUSIC BREAK FOR YOU

July 10, 2020 Humor

LED ZEPPELIN: “SINCE I’VE BEEN LOVING YOU”

WHAT AN EPIC CLASSIC!!

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

A MUSIC BREAK FOR YOU

April 1, 2020 Humor

ANTOINE BARIL: “ONE MAN PLAYS GENESIS”

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A MUSIC BREAK FOR YOU

January 17, 2020 Humor

SPARKS: “TIPS FOR TEENS”

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

The 2019 American Music Awards Nominations Announced

October 25, 2019 Humor

As the kick-off to this year’s highly anticipated “2019 American Music Awards,” chart-topping artist and AMA nominee Ella Mai today announced the “2019 American Music Awards” nominees in four categories LIVE on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” followed by additional nominees announced via the AMAs social media accounts. Rounding out the morning, Mai also announced nominees via Billboard Magazine’s social media platforms. The “2019 American Music Awards” will broadcast live from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday, Nov. 24, at 8:00 p.m. EST on ABC.

Two-time AMA winner Post Malone is the most nominated artist this year with seven total nominations, including Artist of the Year, Collaboration of the Year and Favorite Male Artist – Pop/Rock. Three-time AMA winner Ariana Grande and first-time AMA nominee Billie Eilish each received six nods, including Favorite Music Video, Favorite Social Artist, Favorite Female Artist – Pop/Rock and Favorite Album – Pop/Rock. Lil Nas X and Taylor Swift are tied with five nominations each, followed by Billy Ray Cyrus, Khalid and Ella Mai with four each.

Nominees for the coveted Artist of the Year category are Drake, Ariana Grande, Halsey, Post Malone and Taylor Swift. Swift is the current record holder in this category with four wins. Swift could also go on to surpass Michael Jackson’s record for most AMA wins of all time, 24, should she win in two of the five categories which she is nominated. Swift and Alabama are currently tied with 23 all-time AMA wins.

The American Music Awards, the world’s largest fan-voted awards show, is where music enthusiasts watch their favorite artists and pop culture icons come together to honor idols, newcomers and record-breakers in the contemporary music scene. From Pop and Rock to Country, Hip Hop and beyond, this year’s show will celebrate some of the best moments in music with appearances by today’s brightest stars and live performances from the biggest names in the industry.

American Music Awards nominees are based on key fan interactions as reflected on Billboard.com, including streaming, album and digital song sales, radio airplay, social activity, and touring. These measurements are tracked by Billboard and its data partners, including Nielsen Music and Next Big Sound, and reflect the time period of Sept. 28, 2018, through Sept. 26, 2019. The American Music Awards winners are voted entirely by fans.

Voting is now open for all AMA categories. Fans can access the official voting ballot for the AMAs directly by visiting goo.gle/AMAsVote or by going to Google.com and using the search terms “AMAs Vote” or “[Nominee Name] AMAs Vote.” Fans can submit up to 30 votes per category, per day, per Google account while voting is open. Voting will close on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, at 11:59:59 p.m. PST.

“2019 AMERICAN MUSIC AWARDS” TOP NOMINATED ARTISTS CHART FACTS:

Post Malone
- Two-time American Music Award winner Post Malone comes into the 2019 AMAs with a field-leading seven nominations—and it’s no wonder, as he’s chalked up what could be considered his biggest year yet in music. 2019 started off with his third No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, “Sunflower (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse)” with Swae Lee, and he followed it up with four more top 10s. Further, his third album, “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” stormed in atop the Billboard 200 chart, giving the artist his second No. 1. Concurrent with the album’s bow at No. 1, all 17 of the set’s songs debuted on the Hot 100 chart.
Ariana Grande
- Ariana Grande, a current six-time American Music Award nominee, wasted no time in the past year. The pop superstar’s “thank u, next” album debuted at No. 1 less than six months after her last album, “Sweetener,” started at No. 1—the shortest gap between new No. 1 albums by a female artist since 1975. Further, when “thank u, next”charged in at No. 1, it broke the record for the largest streaming week ever earned for a pop album, according to Nielsen Music. The three-time AMA winner collected her first two No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with the title track to“thank u, next” and its follow-up hit, “7 Rings.”
Billie Eilish
- It was a big year on the charts for six-time “2019 American Music Award” nominee Billie Eilish. The 17-year-old singer-songwriter debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” and logged a smash No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 with the set’s breakout hit “Bad Guy.” “When We All Fall Asleep” has collected more than 2 billion on-demand audio streams for its songs in the U.S., including a half-billion alone for “Bad Guy.” Also impressive, when “Bad Guy” hit No. 1 on the Alternative Songs airplay chart, it followed her previous No. 1, “Bury a Friend,” which made Eilish only the third woman to score multiple No. 1s in the 30-plus year history of the chart.

Lil Nas X
- Five-time American Music Award nominee Lil Nas X re-wrote the chart history books in 2019, as his ubiquitous single “Old Town Road” broke the long-standing record for the most weeks at No. 1 in the 60-plus-year history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Fueled by the runaway popularity of the song’s remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, the song spent 19 weeks at No. 1 on the tally, surpassing the previous record-holders, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” featuring Justin Bieber, and Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day,” each with 16 weeks at No. 1. But Lil Nas X didn’t stop there—he followed “Old Town” with another top 10 hit, “Panini,” and a debut EP, 7, which opened at No. 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.

Taylor Swift
- 23-time American Music Award winner Taylor Swift had another super-sized year on the charts, thanks to the 2019 five-time nominee’s massive album “Lover” and its singles. The set blasted in at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, securing the superstar her sixth No. 1 on the list. Further, when it launched at No. 1, it did so with the biggest week earned by an album since her own last release, “reputation,” in 2017. The “Lover” era kicked off with its first single, “ME!” featuring Brendon Urie, notching Swift her 23rd top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. She then followed it up with two more top 10s so far, her 24th and 25th total, “You Need to Calm Down” and the album’s title track.

Billy Ray Cyrus
- Two-time American Music Award winner Billy Ray Cyrus returned to the top of the Billboard charts in a major way in 2019, thanks to an unlikely collaboration: his teaming with Lil Nas X on a remix of the enormous hit “Old Town Road.” The tune spent a record 19 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart and brought 2019 four-time AMA nominee Cyrus back to the chart’s top 10 for the first time since 1992 when his debut hit, “Achy Breaky Heart,” reached No. 4.

Ella Mai
- Four-time American Music Award nominee Ella Mai broke through in mid-2018 with her chart-dominating hit “Boo’d Up,” which spent 13 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot R&B Songs chart. The singer-songwriter followed it up with a string of further hits on the list, including “Trip” (No. 1 for 14 weeks) and “Shot Clock” (No. 3). Plus, her self-titled full-length album arrived and spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Top R&B Albums chart, while also hitting No. 5 on the Billboard 200.

Khalid
- Khalid made waves on the charts in 2019 as the American Music Award-winner landed his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart with “Free Spirit,” and his highest-charting single as a lead artist on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Talk” (peaking at No. 3). With “Free Spirit,” the singer-songwriter also logged the first R&B album to top the Billboard 200 in nearly a year, and scored one of the largest streaming weeks ever for an R&B album, according to Nielsen Music. “Talk” also spent 18 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot R&B Songs chart—one of over a dozen top 20-charting hits in 2019 for the current four-time AMA nominee.

The complete list of nominations for the “2019 American Music Awards” is below.

The “2019 American Music Awards” are sponsored by T-Mobile.

The “2019 American Music Awards” is produced by dick clark productions. Barry Adelman and Mark Bracco are Executive Producers. Larry Klein is Producer.

For the latest American Music Awards news, exclusive content and more, be sure to follow the AMAs on social and join the conversation by using the official hashtag for the show, #AMAs.

Facebook: @AMAs

Twitter: @AMAs

Instagram: @AMAs

Snapchat: TheAMAs

YouTube: YouTube.com/TheAMAs

Tickets are now on sale at www.axs.com.

“2019 AMERICAN MUSIC AWARDS” NOMINEES

ARTIST OF THE YEAR

Drake

Ariana Grande

Halsey

Post Malone

Taylor Swift

NEW ARTIST OF THE YEAR

Luke Combs

Billie Eilish

Lil Nas X

Lizzo

Ella Mai

COLLABORATION OF THE YEAR

Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper “Shallow”

Lil Nas X ft. Billy Ray Cyrus “Old Town Road”

Marshmello & Bastille “Happier”

Shawn Mendes & Camila Cabello “Señorita”

Post Malone & Swae Lee “Sunflower (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse)”

TOUR OF THE YEAR

BTS

Ariana Grande

Elton John

P!nk

Ed Sheeran

FAVORITE MUSIC VIDEO

Billie Eilish “bad guy”

Ariana Grande “7 rings”

Halsey “Without Me”

Lil Nas X ft. Billy Ray Cyrus “Old Town Road”

Taylor Swift “You Need to Calm Down”

FAVORITE SOCIAL ARTIST

BTS

Billie Eilish

EXO

Ariana Grande

Shawn Mendes

FAVORITE MALE ARTIST – POP/ROCK

Drake

Khalid

Post Malone

FAVORITE FEMALE ARTIST – POP/ROCK

Billie Eilish

Ariana Grande

Taylor Swift

FAVORITE DUO OR GROUP – POP/ROCK

BTS

Jonas Brothers

Panic! At The Disco

FAVORITE ALBUM – POP/ROCK

Billie Eilish “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”

Ariana Grande “thank u, next”

Taylor Swift “Lover”

FAVORITE SONG – POP/ROCK

Halsey “Without Me”

Jonas Brothers “Sucker”

Lil Nas X ft. Billy Ray Cyrus “Old Town Road”

Panic! At The Disco “High Hopes”

Post Malone & Swae Lee “Sunflower (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse)”

FAVORITE MALE ARTIST – COUNTRY

Kane Brown

Luke Combs

Thomas Rhett

FAVORITE FEMALE ARTIST – COUNTRY

Kelsea Ballerini

Maren Morris

Carrie Underwood

FAVORITE DUO or GROUP – COUNTRY

Dan + Shay

Florida Georgia Line

Old Dominion

FAVORITE ALBUM – COUNTRY

Kane Brown “Experiment”

Dan + Shay “Dan + Shay”

Carrie Underwood “Cry Pretty”

FAVORITE SONG – COUNTRY

Luke Combs “Beautiful Crazy”

Dan + Shay “Speechless”

Blake Shelton “God’s Country”

FAVORITE ARTIST – RAP/HIP-HOP

Cardi B

Drake

Post Malone

FAVORITE ALBUM – RAP/HIP-HOP

Meek Mill “Championships”

Post Malone “Hollywood’s Bleeding”

Travis Scott “Astroworld”

FAVORITE SONG – RAP/HIP-HOP

Lil Nas X ft. Billy Ray Cyrus “Old Town Road”

Post Malone “Wow.”

Travis Scott “SICKO MODE”

FAVORITE MALE ARTIST – SOUL/R&B

Chris Brown

Khalid

Bruno Mars

FAVORITE FEMALE ARTIST – SOUL/R&B

Beyoncé

Lizzo

Ella Mai

FAVORITE ALBUM – SOUL/R&B

Chris Brown “Indigo”

Khalid “Free Spirit”

Ella Mai “Ella Mai”

FAVORITE SONG – SOUL/R&B

Khalid “Talk”

Lizzo “Juice”

Ella Mai “Trip”

FAVORITE ARTIST – ALTERNATIVE ROCK

Billie Eilish

Imagine Dragons

Panic! At The Disco

FAVORITE ARTIST – ADULT CONTEMPORARY

Maroon 5

P!nk

Taylor Swift

FAVORITE ARTIST – LATIN

Bad Bunny

J Balvin

Ozuna

FAVORITE ARTIST – CONTEMPORARY INSPIRATIONAL

Lauren Daigle

for KING & COUNTRY

MercyMe

FAVORITE ARTIST – ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC (EDM)

Avicii

Marshmello

The Chainsmokers

FAVORITE SOUNDTRACK

“A Star is Born” by Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper

“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen

“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”

Comedy Central Teams Up With All Things Comedy To Produce Patrice O’Neal Documentary

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AI identifies Thai country music from audio and lyrics

August 26, 2019 Big Data

Luk thung, a popular subgenre of Thai folk music that emerged shortly after World War II, consists of poetic lyrics often sung with a distinctive vibrato and accompanied by traditional instruments like the khene (mouth organ), phin (lute), and saw sam sai (fiddle). Its aesthetic is distinct in the musical world, and it predictably trips up music classification algorithms trained on Western genres. That’s why researchers at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand investigated a system capable of identifying specific types of luk thung songs from lyrics and audio alone.

“Lut thung … is one of the most prominent genres and has a large listener base from farmers and urban
working-class people,” wrote the coauthors. “for the purpose of personalized music recommendation in the Thai music industry, identifying Luk thung songs in hundreds of thousands of songs can reduce the chance of mistakenly recommending them to non-Luk thung listeners.”

The researchers’ system comprised two models — one that classified lyrics and another that classified audio — that fed into a final classifier that aggregated intermediate features learned from both individual models. To train them, the team compiled a data set of 10,547 Thai lyrics and audio from the year 1985 to 2019, along with labels denoting the mood, tempo, musical instruments added by “musical experts.” They next constructed word-based features using the entire lyrics from the beginning to the end of the song, and for each song, they excerpted a 10-second clip from an audio file in its chorus part.

Because luk thung songs span dialects and regional vocabularies, the researchers opted for a bag of words approach to lyrics classification, where a text (such as a sentence or a document) was represented as the bag (multiset) of its words without regard for grammar or word order. As for the audio model, it was designed to learn the timbral and temporal properties of the song spectrograms — visual representations of signal frequency changes — it ingested.

So how’d the model perform? Well, according to the researchers, their three-component method “substantially” improved overall accuracy for luk thung classification. Moreover, they say it was well-suited to tasks like classifying streaming songs and automatically generating comprehensive lists of luk thung songs for future recommendation, and for studying the evolution of luk thung music over time.

“Country songs, which includes luk thung — bear some resemblance to each other in the distributions of words used in lyrics. This problem may be tackled with document-level, instead of word-level, representation … Vocals might serve as the main remaining determinant that makes Lukthung differentiable from other genres. Thus, isolating singing voice from instrumental and designing vocal-specific filters may beneficially improve the classification outcomes.”

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