LitReactor: the supplemental material

litreactor.com 8 Mini Grammar Studies in Modern Music Music is a great way to remember specific details. When you take a closer look at the lyrics in certian songs, you can easily remember tricky grammar devices and spend less time looking things up.

litreactor.com Setting the Mood: 24 Songs to Accompany Specific Scenes While Writing Songs to inspire kickass car chases, shootouts, and sexy sex scenes, amongst other things.

David Bowie’s notebooks

austinkleon:

Hyperallergic on the highlights of the David Bowie Is… traveling exhibit:
the real treasure is the stash of original pages of his modest spiral notebooks. In them, he composed lyrics and how they might be put to music, performed, and turned into video, all simultaneously. His handwritten script changes not just over the years but from page to page. The writings are often surrounded by surreal drawings: night scenes of empty cities, colored in multiple impressionistic shades with markers. The drawings are beautiful — cinematic descriptions, like a director’s notes for a film.
Here are some storyboards he drew:
I love these cut-up lyrics for “Blackout” off Heroes:
Here’s Bowie explaining the cut-up technique:
Speaking of cut-ups, here’s a weird interview recorded in 1974 when Bowie met Burroughs for the first time.
Many of these images can be found in the David Bowie Is… catalog:
h/t @ayjay
Filed under: notebooks, David Bowie

litreactor.com 10 Albums Based on Books and Literature Musicians with library cards, and the records they make...

But as I’ve read more and more contemporary YA, I find myself unconvinced by the constant, consistent refrain of the same ’80s/early ’90s music of the indie rock persuasion. I’ll admit that as a kid, I too grew up with cassette tapes and records by artists that were introduced to me by my parents instead of the radio. Some of those songs have remained my favourites, and led me to other singers and bands over the years. That didn’t mean I was immune to pop music on the radio, or any of the other countless genres out there. Music shifts and changes so often, and mine isn’t the first generation to both be influenced by acts from the past and be interested in looking for as-yet-undiscovered talent.

Knowing that has made me ask: Where are the teens who are unapologetic about the music they love, and the books that don’t use specific bands as the barometer for whether or not we should appreciate a specific character? Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing bad about liking The Smiths, or bands similar to them. But like many other literary motifs, they don’t and can’t be representative of all teens’ musical tastes. So when a teen character rattles off The Smiths as one of their favourite bands, and it doesn’t actually add to their characterization in any way, I get frustrated.

from Why I’m Tired Of The Same Old Music In YA
(via bookriot)

bookpatrol:

Listen Up!
New Computer Program Turns Literature Into Music
The latest from the algorithm universe comes to us via TransPose, a new computer program which translates literature into music.
Created by Hannah Davis and Saif Mohammad TransPose assigns ratings to words based on their emotional value and aims to “programmatically translate the basic emotions of a novel into a musical piece that holds the same basic emotional feeling.”
The current version of TransProse is just the beginning of our investigation, and we don’t claim to be making beautiful music yet. This iteration is a starting point to see if we could programmatically translate the basic emotions of a novel into a musical piece that holds the same basic emotional feeling.
A few things to listen for:
the octave represents the difference between joy and sadness densities throughout the novel
shorter notes correspond with more emotionally dense areas of the novel
more emotion creates more dissonant notes (parts of the music that are relatively simple/consonant mean there are fewer emotions there)

Posts tagged music

David Bowie’s notebooks