Google Squared is a new Google Labs application for displaying search data in a more organized fashion than those regular ol’ search results.  For music collectors, this tool has the potential of being very useful for discovering musical genres.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to add more Rock to your collection.  A Google Squared search results for “Rock Music Genres” returns with many suggestions in a very organized view.

Having this detailed view saves you some time in cherry-picking through search results.  In a well-organized view you get to see all Rock sub-genres.  You’ll be able to tell from this view which genres you are missing from your music collection.

From time to time, I may have my music player on shuffle while a group of people listen to it.  Every so often, a song will come up that will make everybody in the room look at me with a quizzical look.  What just happened?  All of a sudden a song considered by many as “not cool” or “cheezy” happened to be next in the shuffle.  My reaction is always the same: hey “good music is good music”.  This is something I have learned to expect when playing my music of every single genre in random fashion for groups of people.

Here is someone else explaining the same situation:

With Death Row record label now on eMusic, west-coast hip-hop classic albums such as Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (4x platinum), 2 Pac’s All Eyez On Me (9x platinum), and Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle (4x platinum) are now available at relatively cheap prices (as low as a quarter per song).

Death Row, specifically The Chronic, is responsible for establishing the west coast in hip-hop and popularizing the distinctive style of g-funk.

A music genre is a category (or genre) of pieces of music that share a certain style or “basic musical language” (van der Merwe 1989, p.3). Music may also be categorised by non-musical criteria such as geographical origin though a single geographical category will often include a wide variety of sub-genres

The article explains the different attributes that make up a music genre.  The post continues to explain the subjectivity in separating music into genres.  Finally, the article also explains the necessity by some organizations, such as record labels, to cluster music into genres.

Read the complete article here.

After finding a suitable home/host/server for musicgenretree.com, I am ready to offer a sneak peek at the very first incarnations of the site.  Send me a note if you would like an invitation.

These first few versions of the application will simply offer the ability to traverse the genre tree.  In a few months, I will add the ability to get information on each genre and possibly add a community around the site.

One of the reasons I am offering an advanced sneak-peek is to get feedback regarding the overall look-and-feel and to get suggestions on the genre tree itself.

It has been years since I have seen innovation in the turntablism world.  Just when I thought that the art of turntablism has reached its limit in innovation, 2008 DMC World Champion DJ Fly from France enters into the scene.  He has taken the turntablism art to a whole new level and has set a whole new bar for the art of turntablism.  He has a style that can best be described as perfect-timing turntablist and scratching skills to create a musical journey using hip-hop and electronic flavors.  The one thing that sets DJ Fly apart from the rest is his attention to precision.  He rarely misses a beat in his very difficult and articulate sets.  I can’t wait to see what DJ Fly is going to do next.

… and finally, here is DJ Fly with legendary DJ QBert:

4/29/2009 Update: one more video here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x24ylt_dj-fly-le-6-minutes-vice-champion-d_creation

I consider myself a news junkie.  If there is some breaking news occurring, I want to know what it is, immediately.  While on my computer, I get breaking news alerts by subscribing to @cnnbrk and @breakingnewson on Twitter.  Even when I am out-and-about, I have breaking news sent to my mobile phone via SMS text messages.  The one place where I have no access to breaking news is while driving.  If I get an SMS text message notification, I will not read it because it is very distracting to keep checking my messages while driving.

The technology I have in mind that will fix this problem is very simple: include in internet-enabled MP3 players the ability to speak breaking news as they happen.  The process will work as follows.  I am driving down the highway listening to my MP3 player.  When breaking news is occurring somewhere in the world, my music player will be notified.  When the unit gets notified, it will gradually lower the volume of the music that is playing and then speak the breaking news to me, preferably a short snippet ala Twitter.  After the breaking news has been spoken, the music volume will return to its original state.  Technology-wise, it seems very simple.  So simple that I think something like this may have already been created.  Anyone?

To extend on this idea a bit further.  Maybe I can send selected twitter notifications to my MP3 unit and not only will I get breaking news, but friends’ updates, as well.  Pretty cool, ha?

About a year ago, I posted my intentions to rip all my vinyl into mp3s using the ionAudio – Vinyl Recording USB Turntable.  Needless to say, I haven’t even started ripping my first vinyl record.  That might change in the near future thanks to a new turntable that makes it even easier and less time consuming to transfer all your vinyl into MP3s: The LP 2 Flash Turntable made by the same company, ion.  With this new generation of turntable, you simply set the record and forget it.  The turntable will automatically rip and will seperate the record in tracks when it senses silence between tracks.  All I need to do is add the MP3 tags afterwards to all the tracks.

After ripping all my vinyl into MP3s, all that will be left to do is to get rid of it.  I might sell all my vinyl records on eBay.  It seems that there is still a market for them.

soundunwound is a new Amazon.com music site that has been curated with information from Amazon’s own music database, imdb, and musicbrainz.  This is a great site to find all the information you need on a certain musical artist.  Soundwound is artist-focused, not enough emphasis is placed on genres.

Genres appear on each artist’s page to describe them.  This site breaks down the genres in three levels (mainly, quite, hints of), as you will see in the following screenshot for Calexico.

clicking on a genre takes you to a description and top artists on that genre.  These are a few criticisms that I have come up with after playing around for a while:

• there is not one page where we can take a look at all the genres together in an organized fashion.  It seems that the only way to get to a genre page is to search for an artist, then click on a genre describing that genre.
• many of the genres seem to have no descriptions.  Really ? how much would it have cost Amazon to pay somebody to simply copy-n-paste from wikipedia ? It seems that the information for the populated genres has been retrieved from wikipedia – so why not complete them all, or most of ‘em ?

For finding artist information this site has potential – maybe even calling it the imdb for music.  However as a site for finding information about genres and discovering music based on genres it lacks some points.