Sasha Frere-Jones on the use of laptops in live music
— Gregg Gillis covers his laptop with saran wrap and reconstructs his mix nightly via sciencevsromance.net #Being a List of Songs Related to the Switching-On of the LHC
— and, just to be sure, no and nope via haddock.org #Simon Carless announces FingerGaming, new iPhone gaming blog
— promising site from the same group that runs GameSetWatch, Indiegames, and Gamasutra #Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk's "Feed the Animals"
Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals is one of my favorite albums this year, a hyperactive mish-mash sampling hundreds of songs from the last 45 years of popular music. Gregg Gillis created a beautiful, illegal mess of copyright clearance hell, which you should download immediately. (It’s free, but I kicked in $20 for Gregg’s legal fund and a copy of the CD.)
Last month, Rex Sorgatz asked about collecting metadata on the album for data crunching. After spelunking through Billboard’s chart history, that sounded like my idea of a good time.
So I compiled all the data into spreadsheets, used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to collect some additional information, and pulled out a few charts. As always, I’ve provided CSV downloads for all the data along with the original output from Mechanical Turk, for those interested in experimenting with the platform.
Update (October 30): Here’s the official sample list.