Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of websites CAN all be wrong One day a couple of years ago I happened to hear an old song called “The Endless Enigma,” by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, that I remembered from when I was a teenager. Listening to it again reminded me that there was a line in the lyrics that I’d never been able to understand: I’m tired of ________, with tongues in their cheeks… This …
That's right, but the tricky part comes when you realise that some of it *can* be trusted.
Those selfies you posted ten years ago which now appear as the "I feel lucky" hit when you apply for your first job, for example, are completely authentic. We need to find a way to teach the younglings *both* of these truths.
... a Google search, for the two versions (whole strings) results in a 2 to 1 probability to get the wrong information ... meaning, there is a 33% chance to stumble on to some real facts here ... oh, and the top one, on the result list of the wrong version, states: "What is the meaning of the expression "liver for freaks" in this verse of "The Endless Enigma" from the album "Trilogy" by Emerson, Lake ... which spells even more hope ... let the cleanup begin ... ha ha ha ... well spotted ...
... well, well, well ... I wonder if someone considers that neither of the verses are actually correct ... listen to the song [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQxc2-ERPug] ... it clearly says (in this and the version I have):
I'm tired of living with freaks
With their tongues in their cheeks
... now, how about that ... fool me twice, shame on me ...
Cheers
I fully agree with Mr. Mandl. I'd like to add another example of this... one that actually happened to me.
I am the author of a rather detailed research of the history of Chilean holidays. There's a particular one, September 11, that used to commemorate the 1973 coup. When I was starting out this work, I didn't know when exactly it began being observed, so I wrote down "No earlier than 1974." as a placeholder. At some point, I mistakenly reduced that to "1974", so for a while my research listed that year as the holiday's beginning. A few months later I corrected this when I found the decree-law that established it (published in 1981, so that's the actual beginning year)... but by that time several other sites had copied the wrong data, and it propagated from there. Three years later, it's still easy to find sites that list the wrong year (1974) instead of the correct one (1981).
At least I have the source to back it up and I've managed to convince two different people about this, so they've corrected their sites as well.
Thank you AC. There's always somebody here who knows:)
I've got off my intellectual backside and had a look in Wikipedia (an easy place to start) and found this, which has examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(music)
As might be expected, this contains other technical words related to the description of music............ I might be gone for some time.
Trying to think how to explain it in terms a non-musician would understand.
Beat - you should generally be able to bang the table or your foot or something at a regular speed, and the changes in notes will generally fall into that beat. In a lot of music, the drummer will do pretty much that, in classical music, the conductor will wave a stick to keep time.
You may notice when listening to the beat, that one beat in every four for example is stronger than the other beats. That stronger beat represents the beginning of the bar.
In Britain we generally use words based on italian words to describe note lengths. These are as follows, with each one half the length of the previous one in the list
Breve, Semi Breve, Minum, Crotchet, Quaver, Semi Quaver
The Americans use english translations of the german words. These are as follows, with each one the same as the equivalent position in the previous list
Double note, whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note
and if you hang around that bar long enough, you will get a laugh when someone simply mentions the XKCD number
As you will if you hang around here long enough.
Really, I can't help but wonder why people post the entire URL for XKCD references (particularly when they can't be bothered actually putting it in an HTML A element, so it's an actual link, grumble grumble[1]). Just cite the damn thing like you would an RFC:
"An HTTP user agent shouldn't cache the result of any non-idempotent request. See RFC 2616."
"Oh yeah? See XKCD 927."
[1] I used to have (my own improved version of) the Greasemonkey SuperLinkifier script enabled, so I didn't even notice this sort of thing; but I disabled it after I got tired of the noticeable slowdown rendering pages with megabytes of text. (Typically those were log files and such - obviously constructing an HTML page with megabytes of text is not usually desirable.)
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One of the reasons I decided to learn English on my own (I had French in school) was to understand the songs I liked. My name is a giveaway, but in general, languages born and spoken around the Mediterranean sea (or the same latitude in general) have mostly comprehensible lyrics; you know, balance between vowels and consonants, since the closer to a pole, the more closed your mouth tends to be (more consonants), while the closer to the equator, you want to expel more heat (more vowels).
Anyway, I remember a summer vacation when I was 12-13, and we were at a camping site and next to us were two British ladies in their 50s. We became friendly, and at some time, I found the courage to ask for their help: “listen, this is a Dire Straits song that I can't understand the lyrics at some point, would be so kind to help?” They agreed. They listened. They couldn't tell what were the lyrics. One of the ladies explained to me: “You know, we don't always understand what the singers say.”
*That* was a revelation to me; I wasn't (that :) stupid!
Later on, I discovered that many LP records had sleeves with the lyrics in (bye bye cassette tapes!) Of course, even then there were other difficulties (“sings a streetsuss serenade”? “helluva start”? or the damned handwriting on “the Wall”...) explaining what it is you were reading.
Music. The world needs more music. Cheers and a happy new year to everyone.
I worked in Germany with a (German) guy who learned to sing every Bob Dylan song word-perfect years before he learned English. He had no idea what he was singing, but that wasn't the point. Could lead to some strange interpretations, though... ("Aalen in der Wachs stau er", anyone?)
Oh,...and it's "Sings the street a serenade"
Happy New Year!
Try googling for "site:markknopfler.com streetsuss". A moment ago I found: "sings a streetsuss serenade".
At some point in 1982-1984 I had access to the vinyl record which came with the lyrics. I clearly remember being intrigued by the word at that time, though I can't guarantee it was spelt like that; it might have been "streetsus". I've had a few beers since then.
The Oxford English Dictionary online, "Draft additions 1993", has "suss" with the definition "Know-how, savoir faire; understanding, ‘nous’" and citations from 1979, 1987 and 1990. The citations are from "Sounds" and "Hi-Fi News".
I did wonder at first whether it was "suss, n.", "A slattern, slut", with citations from ?1565 and 1865, but I guess not.
> “You know, we don't always understand what the singers say.”
On that note, it's possible that Frankie Goes to Hollywood"'s greatest achievement was to liberate the lyrics of Born to Run from Bruce Springsteen's mumblings.
"Beyond the Palace the hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard / Girls comb their hair in rear view mirrors and the boys try to look so hard" - who'da known?
Rumour has it that when Phil Collins played the drums for the Genesis track "Apocalypse in 9/8" (part of Supper's Ready) he didn't know how to drum in 9/8 and just did it by feel. Later he learned how to play it properly and many feel it wasn't as good.
In junior high school, I played clarinet in the concert band, and so had the benefit of several years of music education and was able to read music and discern things like time signatures. Still, odd-metered time signatures were difficult even as I tried to remind myself that 5/4 was the same as 4/4, except that you're counting to five; I often ended up learning those pieces by "feel" as actually trying to count five to the bar while playing was clumsy and threw me off.
There's a popular old Grateful Dead tune, "Estimated Prophet", which is played in 7/4, and when subconsciously tapping my feet or bobbing my head in time with it, I'm always doing it by "feel" instead of actually counting seven to the bar. I once tried to consciously count off the bars in that tune and just couldn't do it.
Late '50s modern jazzman Dave Brubeck was famous for writing in odd meters; his big breakout hit from 1959, "Take Five", is written in 5/4, hence the title. At least half the tunes on his first three albums are written in odd meters; the track lists on the album jackets include, along with the track length, the time signatures. What was really great about that stuff was the fact that when you listen to those performances, they have a really relaxed, natural feel to them; they don't sound as if the band is really working hard to play in odd time signatures.
(Where's the IT Angle? Well, there's mathematics involved...)
Anything beyond 3/4 and 4/4 can be construed as a compound time signature. And even 4/4 can be construed as two measures of 2/4. So for 7/4, instead of counting, let's say, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7, one might count 1-2 + 1-2-3 + 1-2, or 1-2-3-4 + 1-2-3, or whatever combination happens to fit the accents and stresses of the music.
Slight correction here. Take 5 was actually written by Paul Desmond who played alto sax on the original recording. Also Indian ragas tend to be in very peculiar time signatures (at least to most Western ears) such as 11/4 and 13/4. The first, for instance, can be broken up in three standard ways 4-4-3, 4-3-4 and of course 3-4-4. Mahavishnu Orchestra had a song called Dance of Maya that turns out to be in 10/8 time but is broken down in such a way that it is very hard to count out. It appears to the ear that in the middle the song shifts to a completely different time signature but it actually is just a different breakdown of the same one. This becomes apparent at the end when both parts get played simultaneously, but the to the jaw-dropped amazement of most who hear it. Fun stuff :)
My music teachers told me to count out music in /8 time signatures as "1 and a..."
i.e. 3/8: "1 and a"
6/8: "1 and a 2 and a" (common for Irish "deedly dee" music)
9/8: "1 and a 2 and a 3 and a"
9/8 is then like an uber-waltz
The big question is why 3/4 music and /8 music sounds 'lilt-y'. Further, why does a stress on the 2nd and 4th beats of 4/4 make it reggae/ska/polka and make you want to move funny?
Not just stress: the actual intervals between the beats need not be constant. This is sometimes called swing.
Them sometimes in compound time beats, commonly the second of each group of 3 may be effectively missed, so instead of (say) 6 evenly spaced beats you have four, but the first of each pair double length.
Related to this you'll sometimes find the first and third beats of 4 time lengthened, occasionally even to such an extent that the rhythym is closer to 12 time with the missed beats as above.
Of rock bands Thin Lizzy were major users of compound time sigs, which is one thing that gave them their distinctive feel. Much mainstream rock is rigidly stuck in 4 time, but Lizzy often played in 6, 9 and 12 time.
Its a very complex topic!
The big question is why 3/4 music and /8 music sounds 'lilt-y'. Further, why does a stress on the 2nd and 4th beats of 4/4 make it reggae/ska/polka and make you want to move funny?
I've often wondered that myself, especially about the reggae groove. I'm sure a trained musicologist or music historian could explain it, but otherwise it's a mystery, at least to me; the accent on 1 and 3 makes me want to jump up and thrash my head up and down and play air guitar, but the accent on 2 and 4 makes me want to just sit back on the couch and take a bong hit.
Then, there's Don Powell's heavy kick-drum groove on all those old Slade records. Cum On Feel The Noize and Mama Weer All Crazee Now were awesome tunes, but they would never have been as great without Don doing that solid-four boot dancing groove. Compare it to Quiet Riot's cover of Noize from the mid '80s, where the drummer's just playing a straight-ahead rock'n'roll groove.
How all those lyric sites out there seem to have copied from each other because you do see the same misreading come up time and time again.
A quite unrelated mystery is how I seem to understand lyrics much more easily now than I used to...Might just be better sound reproduction hardware of course, but I suspect there might be more to it than that.
"how I seem to understand lyrics much more easily now than I used to"
I've often wondered why I understand many previously incomprehensible lyrics when I listen to them while driving. It can't be a result of better sound quality, as several of the cars in question have had iffy audio and high ambient noise levels.
My theory is that while driving requires heightened alertness, the auditory and semantic content of the activity is low, so there is spare capacity for parsing lyrics. This looks pretty mad now I see it written down - can anyone think of a better explanation?
You may be right about spare capacity, or it may be that conscious parsing of speech differs from unconscious parsing, so something you can't understand when you try to listen suddenly fires the right neurons when you simply hear it.
I'm told that there's a known effect whereby you can be sitting in a room doing something and suddenly someone in the background mentions your name. At that point, despite not having been listening to the conversation you are aware of the whole sentence *prior to* the bit where your name was mentioned (and presumably also prior to the point at which you became consciously aware of the conversation).
How all those lyric sites out there seem to have copied from each other because you do see the same misreading come up time and time again...
My all-time favorite was Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising". It took me several years before I realized that John Fogerty was not saying "There's a bathroom on the right".
Oddly enough, though, I got Jimi Hendrix's "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" line right off, the very first time I heard "Purple Haze". Go figure.
@Robert E A Harvey, so you've never heard the other version of Lucille.
I once worked in a hotel and when the band got bored they usually started singing their own version of lyrics:-
"You pick your nose before your meals,
Four hundred children and a crap in the fields."
Icon: The reason why most of the audience never noticed.
A lot of people are constantly looking for subtext with their favorite stars. It's really no different from the people who breathlessly tell everyone about Harry and Hermione's eye-flirting in this one scene. With the gay rights movement just gearing up, you'd better believe a lot of people were looking for validation.
Welcome to the open source world, why bother writing some code when you can search for some and paste it into your project.
I wonder how many bugs or security holes that causes.
Sometimes you really need to actually write stuff or work something out yourself. Same goes for lyrics :)
I wonder how many bugs or security holes that causes.Very few, actually, and their effects tend to be well-contained.
You see, just knowing that other people are going to point and laugh if you get it wrong, is a pretty good incentive to get your coding right.
If a project containing badly-written code becomes sufficiently popular, some other programmer keen to make a name for themself will rewrite the badly-written section and either submit it upstream, or call their refactored version a fork (depending whether they want their name at the front of the credits, or just an easy life).
On the other hand, if a project containing badly-written code is not widely used, then its effects are going to be limited anyway.
But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a dig. Thomas Edison never did, even when it was beyond obvious that alternating current was the future .....
There are so many music tracks on the net where a misattributed authorship has spread widely. Even where a YouTube poster seems to have been corrected hundreds of times, they don't fix the error e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BydBT6pEqz4 which has repeated misinformation to over 2 million viewers.
You then see people writing (again and again) - oh I've always loved X's music, when there is no resemblance between X's music and the track posted.
Mind you, with the dominance of iTunes where the composer of music no longer matters, the error pages start to win out.
There are many times finding the misattributed song has lead me to the actual artist. At least the internet makes it easily searchable when you have incorrect information and are trying to find what you are looking for. It was a real pain in the ass back in the day trying to sing to someone else to see if they could figure out the song you were talking about.
Oh, and my favorite "There's a bathroom on the right" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Moon_Rising_(song)
Over the years I've purchased many books of tab that had massive (and blatantly obvious) errors in them. I rapidly decided it was easier in the long run to not be so lazy and learn songs by ear. At least that way the mistakes are my own....
You shouldn't really need the score unless its some weirdo jazzy thing with sus9 major 15th chords or something. Even a mediocre muso like me can grab the chords and so on out of most songs with a bit of practice. And back in the day it was the most practical way to do it anyway. Buying dots for more than a few songs would have been a big lump out of the strings budget...
This is not an Internet phenomenon. There have always been sources you can trust, and sources you can't. It's nothing new. That's why in science and medicine for example, the peer review "chain of trust" is fundamental. (Of course, it too breaks down sometimes.)
So the Internet just gives us more and quicker, not better. But I thought everyone knew that..?
For many years the statue "Here am I - send me" by Kathleen Scott was often taken to be of her young son - the later naturalist Peter Scott. The reasoning was that it was a war memorial for the school he was then attending - and he was often a model for his mother.
Only one source on the web cited his 1967 autobiography where he denied being the model. Kathleen Scott's diary extracts in her autobiography show that when she started that work she simply referred to "the model" rather than "Peter".
The word of mouth prior to the internet had obviously propagated a misconception by one, or several, people. The fiction was obviously more appealing to people's sentiment than the facts.
Remembering the "Gladly" mondegreen still makes me smile.
A young girl had taken her somewhat aged teddy bear to church. As sometimes happens to such much loved bears, one of his eyes had fallen out at some stage to be replaced with one not quite the same as the original, giving him a slightly lop-sided appearance.
The vicar asked her what the bear was called. "Gladly." she replied. "What a curious name," said the vicar, "How did he come to be called that?" "He's named after one of my favourite hymns," said the girl, "You know the one. Gladly, the cross-eyed bear."
Kinda like when people actually figure out the words to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_%28song%29
My rather conservative nephew was singing the song with the lyrics all wrong and was rather redfaced when I told him to go look them up. I still get a chuckle out of that.
Yes, the same errors "lifted" and copied everywhere. Even worse is the pop-over ad: "Click here to get <song> as a ringtone." Woo! 1994 lives! (ftw: Google preview -> cache -> text only version.) Small smile for the sites that add the line "Lyrics by <site>" to the centre of the lyrics.
Yes, the Internet is a cesspool, from wikipedia to forwarded emails debunked by snopes.
A few people with misnamed mp3's suddenly spread through the masses so Electric hellfire clubs cover of "sunday bloody sunday" got mislabeled as MDFMk. Even funnier is a whole loiad of songs being reclassed as KMFDM remixes and the owners of said files refusing to believe they were not as "they had every album" (despite the fact these songs appeared on none of the bands albums
I'm a professional music educator, and I see students make errors based on mistaken transcriptions all the time. Not just internet transcriptions, though: sometimes they transcribe something themselves and don't quite get it right. Often the problems are in the piano reductions put out by the publishers. I found my first mistaken time signature years ago in the sheet music for Sky's first album, and there is what seems to me a very questionable transcription of the rhythm of 'Recorda Me' in one of the Real Books.
As far as the internet goes, I seem to remember a while back looking at online tabs for 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree', and I couldn't find a single one where I could agree with the chords given.
I have a dream that one day someone will open source the entire history of recorded music – the origial stems, that is – so that we can go back and listen exactly what the keyboard player was playing in bar 7 that day. Oh, plus the original autograph scores to every movie ever made :)
...As far as the internet goes, I seem to remember a while back looking at online tabs for 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree', and I couldn't find a single one where I could agree with the chords given...
I shudder to think of how many young guitarists out there are trying to learn old Jethro Tull songs from tablatures or fake books, given how Ian Anderson was famous for writing songs with torturous "designer chords". Back in college, when some of my friends who played in local cover bands were trying to learn Tull tunes, the most commonly-heard question seemed to be "How the hell does he play this stuff?"
Ill see your Jethro Tull and raise you a Steely Dan.
At least with a bogus tab you can kinda use it to work out whats wrong and thereby get the correct chord/voicing in the end.
Much more irritating - try finding a tab for chuck e's in love - loads of hits, all for just the intro (the piss easy bit)
...which curiously enough reminds me of the story that when the makers of Mamma Mia asked Björn and Benny what the backing tracks actually *were* the reply was "Er, dunno exactly, we just played lots of stuff and mixed it all up until it sounded right", followed by many weeks of sitting listening to tapes with the original sound engineer to try to reverse engineer what the hell had actually made it onto the album.
So if you really want to know what the keyboard player was playing in bar 7 that day, I think you should get hold of the original tapes and beg the assistance of M. Fourier.
Far from just the internet, I've come across factual errors in paper-based books, sheer weirdness on some e-books owing to bad transcription (not entirely sure the transcriber's first language was English) and really bad errors in TV documentaries. I remember working as an advisor on a history one but was told by the directors assistant that he wasn't going to use a particular, absolutely critical source, because "that wasn't the story he wanted to tell". The end result was therefore complete bollocks and misrepresented the facts, but is now the "popularly" accepted version (if you get your history from TV that is ;-)
There is a school of thought that suggests that some errors are introduced intentionally by the publishers, and are used to identify the original source of copies of printed works.
This is particularly said of music manuscripts, so that if someone copies by hand some sheet music still in copyright into Sibelius or Rosegarden to produce 'clean' copies, supposedly free of copyright, the publishers can still identify and take appropriate action.
I keep reminding members of the choir I sing with what they can't do when it comes to music copyright. All I can say is thank heaven for the library service in the UK, who can loan/rent out multiple copies of music to choirs and orchestras at reasonable rates to reduce the temptation to buy one copy and just photocopy it.
There is a school of thought that suggests that some errors are introduced intentionally by the publishers, and are used to identify the original source of copies of printed works.
I know this to be true because there was an album documenting "secret marks" which were small alterations made in limited-edition collotype prints of old master paintings, at the publishers I worked for. Neither the process nor the procedure had been used by the company for decades, but we still had copies (stock even!) of those beautiful prints and the slight alterations which would give away a copy.
For the legal pedants: the paintings themselves, of course, would be long, long, out of copyright. However, copyright exists in the reproduction itself too. Want to publish this print too? Fine... but go and do your own negotiation with the gallery for physical access and get your own transparency made, and work from that, not our print.
Many ebook transcriptions come from OCR+spellcheck, and are only updated if enough people report problems. I've found that professional versions are no better than your average pirated transcription/scan, and some pirate communities exclusively deal with proofread versions that are actually better than the selling copy.
Of course, real books have plenty of editing failures, too, so it's hardly unexpected....
The mishearing song lyrics has a long and distinguished history. So distinguished, there's even a word for it.
However, in the particular instance: try listening to it through headphones - it's at about 3:30 into the track¹ and (if you crank it up to 11) comes over loud and clear.
I suspect a worse source of error in the internet / smartphone age is autocorrect.
[1] Return of the Manticore, side 3 track 3.
I suppose there is a reason some compositions emphasize the eighth note rather than the quarter note. I'm just curious why some state their time signature as 6/8 rather than the reduced form 3/4 (which sheet-wise has the same effect--three quarter notes last the same amount of time as six eighth notes all other things being equal).
Apparently it's down to the fundamental note length not being 1/4 note, but half as much again, ie, 3/8ths (a dotted quarter-note in sheet notation). Three/Four time is typical of waltzes and has a ONE two three and ONE two ... beat structure, but I'm not sure how to describe how 6/8 time sounds, or even whether it necessarily has a fixed place to place the emphases.
Anyway, while reading this article, quite a few thoughts came to me. Several posters have brought some of them up already, but not all..
re: the xkcd strip... is the word order even right in that?
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005424.html
re: "kiss this guy" I believe (I read it somewhere on the Internet :) that Hendrix became aware of this mishearing and on some occasions actually sang the modified lyrics. Certainly one time I saw him on a BBC program it sounded more like "kiss this guy" than "kiss the sky" to me. Also, this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Scuse_Me_While_I_Miss_the_Sky
I loved The Smiths, but lots of their lyrics were indecipherable to me... "horn-shoed bicycle on a hillside desolate???" And forget about My Bloody Valentine....
Getting back to time signatures, I hope you mentioned Time Out by the (sadly) recently-deceased Dave Brubeck. While he didn't write the famous Take Five with its 5/4 time signature, all the tracks on the disc have unusual time signatures. It still sounds great today...
"Apparently it's down to the fundamental note length not being 1/4 note, but half as much again, ie, 3/8ths (a dotted quarter-note in sheet notation). Three/Four time is typical of waltzes and has a ONE two three and ONE two ... beat structure, but I'm not sure how to describe how 6/8 time sounds, or even whether it necessarily has a fixed place to place the emphases."
I'd been wondering about it for years, and now I have some insight. Dotted quarters with plenty of other eighths in the sheet--maybe in triples (producing a da-da-da rhythm) and/or following a quarter (for a daaaa-da rhythm). Now I can visualize it and can recall plenty of music that had these types of rhythm. Thanks.
yeah, that might not have been the best example for deciphering a time-signature. 6/8 time is normally played as something weird called a "compound time signature", though it is less frequently played straight (each eighth note gets a beat). There isn't enough information in the time signature to know which way it is intended-- sometimes the music itself will clue you in (e.g. by breaking the eighth notes into groups of three).
House of the Rising Sun is a nice example of how this time signature feels and why it's called "compound"-- you can feel properties of both 3/4 and 2/4 in each bar-- the lyrics are clearly two beats to the bar (there is- a house) while the guitar part is going 1,2,3 1,2,3. . . it's a pretty distinctive sound.
It's all about the beat. 6/8 divides the bar into two groups of three, e.g. a polka instead of a waltz.
The start of "Money" by Pink Floyd has a 7 note beat, which can only be danced to while inebriated...yet the song was included in a compilation album of "Greatest Dance Tracks".
“No matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as the truth.”
― John F. Kennedy (as copied and pasted from some random website)
The start of "Money" by Pink Floyd has a 7 note beat, which can only be danced to while inebriated...yet the song was included in a compilation album of "Greatest Dance Tracks"...
Yeah, I wondered about that, too. Could be because when it goes to Gilmour's big solo in the middle, it breaks down into a regular 4/4, almost a kind of a swing groove; then, when the solo winds down, it goes back to the 7.
Jethro Tull's "Living In The Past" is another long-time fave of mine. To this day I'm amazed that any band back then could get onto Top Of The Pops and have a massive hit with a song played in 5/4.
As others have said, it's mostly a "feel" thing. 6/8 time is also syntactically useful for cases when the music is played in triplets, but the music has a "1 2 3 4" rhythm to it. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata is a good example for the "feel" of 6/8 music, although Beethoven didn't write it as such.
A 6/8 signature can operate as a for the purposes of marching while also allowing triplet beats for the music (since 2 and 3 both divide cleanly into 6). IIRC the jig "MacNamara's Band" is based on marching music, but you can hear the triplet pattern of the notes within each third or "step" beat of the song.
...........the artist's endeavours to fit the lyrics to the musical focrm the producer wants and/or the artist's own idiosyncratic take as far as pronunciation goes. The Nat King Cole classic "Mona Lisa" contains the following lines:
"Are you warm, are you real, mona lisa?
Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art? "
If you listen to it it sounds for all the world as if he sung "are you warm are you rill mona lisa?" which does sound a touch peculiar. Oh, Happy New Year everyone!
Of course you also get examples of people using the internet to spread misinformation on purpose (for fun) - like the often regurgitated "you eat x spiders a year while you sleep" which was in fact an experiment to see how quickly misinformation will spread around the internet and become fact. It works in the same way - people republish the information until it becomes the definitive answer when you search. A quick Google search however several years after it was revealed that is was in fact a lie - shows that most of the results on the first page point to the fact it was a made up statistic. So in this example, yes - the web has corrected itself.
re: "you eat x spiders a year while you sleep"
Or the one about how the daddy long-legs (crane fly) is the most poisonous creature in the UK/Ireland, and has venom that can kill a man. Only fortunately for us, it can't bite through our skin...
(yes, this is a myth, but a very often repeated one).
No, no, lol. Not crane flies, but Pholcidae. And I thought they were meant to be the most venomous creature in the world. Anyway, Mythbusters disproved that: http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-database/daddy-long-leg-spiders.htm
Nevertheless, they do an excellent job of keeping down the spider population in my abode.
My lyrics source of choice is LyricWiki (lyrics.wikia.com)
Crowd-source your lyrics, get the community to verify and maintain them, and back it all up with Gracenote-sanctioned versions (though sometimes Gracenote gets it wrong too - for example in Moby's "Lift Me Up", they list one line of the chorus us "[Unverified]". So very helpful.).
They even have the correct lyrics for The Endless Enigma ;)
.. involves the writer Philip Roth. He wrote a story (as writers do...) which some reviewers misinterpreted. The Wiki picked these misinterpretations up and published them.
Philip Roth sent them an e-mail pointing out that what the wiki was saying was not true. The wiki refused to change it - because it had cites for the error, but only an email (from the original writer!) for the correct version. Eventually Roth had to write a magazine article pointing out the error - and the wiki took that as an adequate cite.
The story is here: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/alih/201209/2090/
I constantly find incorrect technical information posted online. When you try to explain to the unknowing that it's incorrect, they assure you it MUST be correct because it's posted at 4,286+ websites or threads - so it MUST be true...or NOT!
The same applies to PC hardware testing where the tester doesn't use appropriate test procedures and then gets an incorrect result. People who know no different will argue that the results MUST be correct because they are published on a website. They completely miss the importance of proper testing methodology.
I have bought guitar tab and chord books before that were obviously wrong. They can be a good starting point for a song, but you need to change it to suit your own style and voice and correct the wrong chords / voiceings.
Playing the exact recording version of a song is very boring and not a lot of bands are faithful to their original recordings.
I'm currently playing The Smiths covers with a country feel to them. Makes people laugh and sing along in silly voices.
Beer because the ultimate stage fright relaxant.
The most obvious error demonstrated in the article was the assumption that accurate information could be looked up consistently in a general web search at all. The nature of the web itself as knowledge base is hit and miss with as a rule unauthorized sourcing. It's always more about connecting and making connections, information and people wise. Sometimes the impression can arise one can use it (the web as collection) as some kind of fast encyclopedia and supplier of arcane or trivial fact from a global data store but it just really isn't designed to do that. It was just one of those popular things that grew out of it, wholly imperfect but since people are not really looking for exactness when looking for song lyrics or music notation on a random site, this is perfectly okay. It's not something to worry about in itself. What is something to worry about is that large amount of people who have at some point bestowed certain qualities on the web which are not there and should also never be expected by professional users.
Over the last few years I've seen a new myth appear and it's all over the sodding internet: the claim that "Hogmanay" (Scottish for New Year's Eve) comes from the Gaelic "Oge maidne"... which doesn't exist. There is something similar -- "òg-mhadainn", but this means the very start of a morning (predawn, I believe). And yet it has spread so profusely that you'll even see someone posting pictures of his New Year's parties under the heading "Oge Maidne".
It's being copy-and-pasted around so much that it's killing genuine truth....
Oh yes........ For some reason I don't even understand myself, "I am not a dance music fan" I love the song "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" By Eiffel 65. Its even the ringtone on my phone.
But there is not ONE site on the internet that has not twisted the "Da Ba Dee" part into misheard lyrics. Not a single one. And if I argue the point someone will say, "You are wrong! I checked the official site!" this OFFICIAL site always tends to be Lyrics Freak or something of its ilk, where the Lyrics are contributed from the readers. Worse are the people who purposely contribute bad lyrics because the think its funny.
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This post has been deleted by its author
I'm Shaving off my muff for you (Houston)
Excuse me while I kiss this guy (Hendrix)
We built this city on the wrong damn road (Jefferson Starship ? Airplane ? Spruce Goose ?)
Here we are now, in containers (Nirvana, or was it Chinese immigrants ?)
And one of my favourite :
My anus is the center hole (J. Geils Band)
I'm sure there's a website somewhere.
I heard (!) Dave Edmunds got to play with Carl Perkins and was told his intro to Blue Suede Shoes was wrong, you're playing it like the record, I fluffed it in the studio it should go like this...
I have published sheet music that is less like the recordings than some on line tabs - although plenty of on line tabs that are v. wrong!
Dave
The hard copy in libraries is better vetted and verified, unlike the cheaply replicated slop that emerges from a web search. Data Integrity is carefully guarded in most life/death institutions (aka medical, military, financial). We're not talking about if it remains uncorrupted on some cloud platform or if the media (hard drives/dvd/flash/etc) will retain it correctly, but if the facts themselves are correct.
Music is another animal entirely, a mish-mosh of human rhythm, vocalizations, but perhaps the one most ignored is 'presence', or the direct affect by a performer on immediate persons physically present. I used the word AFFECT rather than EFFECT for purpose. (rather than effect :))
Money (and ownership of today's so called 'music") corrupts the process, removes the performer from the listener by insertion of duplicating process. And that is the only thing the big corporate RIAA and Sony types are in, duplication and shipping that around. They cannot be performers, artists or anything similar, so they steal the very heart of the artist's value from their work, and no one is the wiser.
STOP buying music, go only to concerts, LIVE concerts, where the artist can do what they do best, touch and see the people who care enough to show up.
Eliminate the greedy corporate overhead from the real art of music and communication.
Any artist of worth is not in it for greed, but for the love of the art. If their art is worth showing up for, they will never be hungry.
Out of the millions of performers, decide who are the real artists and who are the false profit takers, the cheap duplicators and clueless parrots.
"STOP buying music, go only to concerts, LIVE concerts, where the artist can do what they do best..."
Hmm, I'm a musician, but I produce electronic music and don't perform live. I and others who do this surely appreciate your dismissing us as non-artists and cheap duplicators of heartless fakery.
Also, there are plenty of musicians whose most prominent talent is indeed touching the people who show up, but I'm not sure how many aim to do so in the way you envision.
I'm supposed to recognise 3/4 from 6/8 for music exams! I try and figure when the chords should change, if most of them change every 3 beats its 3/4, 6 then 6/8, 12 12/8 etc - but you can have split bars etc so you're looking for a lowest common factor & feel.
Often a 3/4 is a waltz, 6/8 a jig and 12/8 is a slow blues (think Gary Moore.)
AFAIK compound time is based around tuples - eg triplets
6/8 = 2/4 with all triplets (ie 3 notes over 2 beats)
12/8 = 4/4 ditto
That's what I read on the web somewhere ;-)
For 12/8 count it as 123,223,323,423; 123,223,323,423 etc
From just a melody line I can end up counting 1 2 3 4 and confusing 12/8 with 4/4 :-(
...was, along with mis-hearing lyrics, trying to decipher lyrics from British bands who used British slang in their lyrics. I never had much trouble understanding Ian Anderson's pronunciation, but every now and then I'd be like... "dog-end? fag packet...? What tha'...?"
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