Wilco at The Greek

"You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun"

That is one of my favorite lines from Jeff Tweedy, the creative foundation for the band Wilco. We went across the Bay last night to see them at the beautiful Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus. The weather was perfect and although we got there a little later than we wanted, we didn't miss any of Wilco's set and got pretty good seats.

They played a lot of tunes from their newest album, Sky Blue Sky, which has seen a lot of play on my iPod in the last month or so. It's a great record. Some of the songs are simple, even light, acoustic guitar melodies while some are more raucous rock songs. A few have a very Lennon/Beatles quality to them, especially "Hate it Here".

I am a huge fan of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)...I think that'll always be their best, it is their Sgt. Peppers in my eyes. But this newest album might be my second favorite. The show last night was fantastic....a good mix of new and old. Jeff Tweedy is a great performer and the rest of the band members are all excellent musicians. I'm no Wilco historian but I think Tweedy and the bassist John Stirratt are the only members left from the original line-up back in the mid '90s. Guitarist Nels Cline is a maniac!

It was a beautiful night and a great time. If Wilco comes to your town I highly recommend you shell out the cash to see them.


photo of Wilco from here
photo of Jeff Tweedy from here

So What

It's been too long since I had a post about music. If you like jazz, you'll love this rendition of trumpeter Miles Davis' "So What" featuring John Coltrane on saxophone from 1958.

I especially like how these cats hang around in the background just chillin' during Coltrane's solo. Good stuff.

some funky jazz

I haven't had a music post in a while....here is a video of Medeski, Martin, & Wood playing "The Lover" in 2005. They are a jazz trio from NYC and one of my all-time favorites. Billy Martin is the man on the drums...and makes some interesting art too.



Check 'em out if they come to your town.

Internet radio in danger

If you live in the U.S. and enjoy public radio on the web, please visit this site to learn more about what could happen to public radio and what you can do to try and help it.
If you are inclined to let your representative know, they made it extraordinarily easy to accomplish that.




Also check out savenetradio.org for additional perspective...like a lot of you, I listen to streaming internet radio because let's face it...corporate radio is lame.

I found out about all of this on my favorite internet station, SomaFM, based here in San Francisco. They have 11 stations...my favorite is Groove Salad...nice, ambient music that is especially good as background music while working (or trying to work).

Wilco on Letterman

Here's a video from 2004 of Wilco playing one of my favorites, 'Hummingbird', on David Letterman. Enjoy.

Underground musicians

Literally...in this case.

This is a video of flute player Greg Pattillo and cello player Eric Stephenson at Union Square subway in NYC (via Hidden Track and on YouTube, where you can find other videos of Pattillo).

It's a couple minutes long....give it a listen.

Data Sonification

Although it would likely be a waste of time, I have always been tempted to somehow turn geologic data I have collected into sound. It is commonplace to convert data into visual representations by which qualitative patterns are evaluated by simply looking at it (e.g., maps). Less common is converting data into sound and listening for patterns. The idea of turning data into sound for analysis is certainly not new (e.g., the Geiger counter was invented in the first decade of the 20th century), but the application of sonification to varied data types across scientific disciplines has seen more activity in the last couple of decades.

It is important to make the distinction between music and sound. A separate, but related, discussion would deal with the potential for creating new kinds of avant-garde music within this realm (check out here [1] and here [2]), but that's not what I'm talking about. Data sonification is simply the auditory equivalent of data visualization. Yes, some visual data is certainly striking in its beauty, but aesthetic value and scientific value are mutually exclusive. In recent years, data sonification has been applied especially in biomedical disciplines (e.g., here and here), but what about the geosciences?

What data types in geoscience would be amenable to being listened to? One answer to why we haven't seen the value of data sonification demonstrated in this regard is because it has none. This approach can most easily be applied with time series data (and potentially 'thickness series' data as I discuss below) but what about spatial information? My intuition is that turning spatial data into something that one can listen to would create something extremely difficult to interpret.

The two figures below show a waveform (top) and associated sonogram (bottom) for an eruption event at Mt. Etna (click on the image to go to the webpage for those figures, here for the home page [3], or here for a BBC report about the project in general [4]).

I listened to some of the data from the above project and I have to say I was underwhelmed. It should be noted, however, that I am currently sitting in a room where clicking, whooshing, and otherwise white-noiseing of a magical machine that knows when a zircon was born is overpowering all other sound. Additionally, this particular dataset is a gradual and subtle crecsendo...all-in-all, not a very exciting pattern. That being said, one of the objectives of what they are doing is to figure out a workflow.


Being a sedimentary geologist, I measure and describe a lot of vertical sections of stratigraphic successions that are exposed in outcrop or part of wellbore data (e.g., core, logs) for the subsurface. At right is an example of a measured section from outcrop. How might we go about sonifying this? From my perspective, I would want attributes such as lithology, grain size, bed thickness, prominent sedimentary structures, presence/absence of trace fossils, and so on captured in the data. The question is: would doing this add any value to the process of recognizing and then interpreting observed (heard) patterns?

Perhaps the value might be when multiple sections are combined? I don't know. This is one of those topics that is perfect for a blog because I'd like to hear what people think. Do you think your particular type of data could be converted to sound and be of any use?





Further reading (and some listening) on the web:
(1) Article from Feb 2007 SF Chronicle about Stanford music professor turning data into sound
(2) Heart Chamber Orchestra
(3) Mt. Etna Volcano Sonification: Listening to Seismograms
(4) BBC News report about Mt. Etna project
(5) A Spatialized Meterological Data Sonification Project (PDF)

From the perspective of a guy from Buffalo at a Tragically Hip concert in San Francisco

This story is from the perspective of a guy from Buffalo at a Tragically Hip concert in San Francisco.

Really...the only way to see these guys is in a small (and famous) music club in San Francisco and not in a giant arena in Calgary. Don't get me wrong...I love 'em...but they are better suited to the smaller room. This is, by far, the most concentrated collection of Canadians in San Francisco tonight -- maybe the most all year?

In the bathroom between the opening band and The Hip, a voice calls out "Who's from Vancouver, eh?" -- this is answered by "Go Canucks!" from the opposite corner and, slightly overlapping in timing, "Go Leafs, Go" from right next to me in a clear combative tone. A couple more Crown and Coke's and I would have added in my own $0.02 and screamed something clever like "Buffalo rules...wooo". The 'wooo' is pretty standard really...seems trite, but how can you leave it out. C'mon.

The Canadian national anthem was 'sung' outside the club afterwards by competing packs of drunks waiting for their friends. It was beautiful...I wanted to pull the sweater over this guy's head next to me and start beating the crap out of him...but in a fun and friendly way. The kind of fun fight where the involved parties make sure to take care of their eyeglasses beforehand and do so with a giant and somewhat maniacal smile on their face. Although I never did find my friends -- the guys who flew down from Calgary just for this show -- and they now have my coat from the coat check, dammit.

Even though they didn't play 'Naughtical Disaster'...the Sabres have clinched a playoff berth. All is well.


once in a while...I stray from geo topics...no worries, it's just a random post

Awesome jazz and groove podcast

For those podcast subscribers out there, I found a great monthly music show that highlights groovy jazz
(including all the sub-sub-sub-genres of acid jazz, afro-beat, bop, cool jazz, cosmic jazz, dub, downtempo, electro-jazz, fusion, future jazz, groove jazz, jazzatronic, jazz dance, jazz-funk, jazz-rock, kozmigroov, modal, phusion, progressive, modern, nu-jazz, soul-jazz, spiritual, and world).

It's called BendingCorners and is nice because the creators are DJs who spin sets that are about an hour or a little more of continuous music (i.e., one, long audio file)...typically within a 'theme' for that month. You can either subscribe to the podcast or just download the files directly. Although they only come once a month, if you like it, you can download from the archive. If you get really into it (I wish I had the time), they have the playlists for each set and you can explore the original stuff.

If jazz and groove is not your thing, you should at the very least download the tribute to James Brown (the Dec 2006 set called 'Mr. Dynamite').

Drumming and piano by a guy who plays neither

This guy spliced together audio and video of himself at a drumset and piano to create a music piece...and a pretty cool video. It starts out a little slow...give it a chance. Click on photo above to go to the video at YouTube (thnx for link BK).

Looking for new music?

If you like to listen to music on your computer but don't feel like being bothered by making playlists and are unimpressed by internet radio stations, you should check out Pandora. It is an internet radio station that integrates your likes and dislikes. You create different stations based on an artist or song and it searches the Music Genome Project database for similar-sounding music. Then you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. The more you do this, the more it refines that particular station. I've had it going for a few months, have about 10 different stations, and it does a decent job of picking music for that station.

The best part is that it will choose a lot of unknown artists. It searches for similar music based solely on the music...not the number of records sold, popularity, appearances on TV, corporate sponsorship, etc. I've found some bands i've never heard of but really like now. If a song/artist comes up that you really like you can simply click 'save to favorites' and then later on, when you have time, find out more.

Check it out.