Every so often you will see a video about someone trying to break a wine glass by singing very loudly. Old movies and cartoons are ripe with this seeming cliche, but some physicists still banter about the question of whether or not a human voice can actually do it. Well, a high school physics teacher in had one of his school's more talented male students try the trick, and after a lot of practice he actually learned how to do it.
I am not the greatest keyboard player in the world, but seeing the YouTube demo of the Roland VP-770 keyboard makes me wish I was. The guy doing the demo is Ed Diaz, a regular presenter at the Roland booth at the conventions I have attended. He's a lot of fun to watch no matter what equipment he is working on, but seeing him play with the vocalization features of this new device is really cool. Check it out on YouTube and find out more about the VP-770 on Roland's web site.
On May 19th Sibelius released the latest version of the Sibelius music notation program. This version boasts a lot of new features, many of which are very significant improvements over the previous version. But what exactly are the new features of Sibelius 6 and is it worth the investment?
Several months ago I posted an article titled How To Teach Music Lessons Via The Internet. Following the publication of it I had had several people contact me asking if I knew of any directories where potential students could find teachers that are willing to teach instrumental or voice lessons over the Internet using videoconferencing. While there are several places out there that people can find a music teacher there were none that I could find that specialized in this new, virtual type of instruction. I finally got around to putting together an online music lesson directory, but decided to go beyond just providing a place for virtual lesson instructors.
The New York Metropolitan Opera has been doing some incredibly cool things lately by putting archived productions of hundreds of operas, audio files, and even high definition video online for subscribers to view at any time. They have even gone so far as to stream live operas directly into theaters all over the United States. Now they have announced that for one weekend only (May 1-3, 2009) they will be opening up the web site for everyone to view or listen to the archives for free.