Some will confuse you, others might annoy you, and a few might even make you laugh. If you’re looking for something you’ve never heard before, this music from around the world delivers.

Tuvan Throat Singing

Tuvan throat singing is one of the most famous styles of overtone singing “a style in which one or more pitches sound simultaneously over a fundamental pitch, producing a unique sound.” — Wikipedia

Normal people can sing one note at a time (and we know sometimes they can’t even do that very well), but these throat singers can sing clear, multiple notes at once. The sounds aren’t always pleasing to most — one style makes a ringing sound and another sounds like a very long burp — but if you listen closely you might hear the two different notes. The ringing style distinguishes the two notes more clearly. One is low and quiet while the other is the high pitched ringing tone.

Why don’t you try learning how throat singing works with these video tutorials. And also check out Paul Pena, who started as a Delta Blues musician and taught himself Tuvan throat singing later in his career. It’s pretty cool how he incorporated throat singing into his Delta Blues roots to create a style of Blues-throat singing fusion. It sounds pretty badass in this track.

Hunting Songs of the Mbuti

Link: Listen to the Hunting Song on Grooveshark

You might consider this elephant hunting song from the Mbuti pygmy tribe of Papua New Guinea to be nothing more than random yelling, but if you listen for a while you start to notice the patterns in the chaos. While I’m sure there’s a good deal of improvisation, I think this song in particular has a lot of nice harmonies (couldn’t find it on youtube so I used a grooveshark link) and clearly there is one guy you can hear that is being the diva of the group. Get him on The Voice!

If you don’t believe that this kind of music can have any connection with Western musical genres, go listen to the band tUnE-yArDs’ most popular song (according to Spotify plays), “ Bizness” and tell me if the chorus doesn’t remind you a bit of our Mbuti diva.

Noh Theater

Noh might remind you of Kabuki, which is more widely recognized around the world. Some commentators have called referred to Noh as “Japanese Opera,” but you’ll notice that the music doesn’t really bother with melody. This is a trend in much of the music derived from Eastern traditions — the focus is on the unique quality sound (the “timbre”) rather than the melody.

In Noh, the music is focused on conveying power through auditory roughness rather than a powerful melody or harmonics. The roughness is built into the technique of playing these instruments. The instruments and vocals are bringing out almost all the frequencies that Western music tends to avoid. There’s instability in the pitch, microtones, and sliding between tones. The differences from Western musical sounds is more evident when this music is compared using sonic visualization software.

Noh music visualization

Western choir singing visualization

Source: Coursera, Intro to Digital Music

Modern Pan Flute Music

In case you didn’t believe that master pan flautists existed, now you know about Gheorghe Zamfir. Zamfir is known for playing an expanded version of the traditional Romanian-style pan flute (nai) of 20 pipes to 22, 25, 28 and 30 pipes to increase its range, obtaining as many as nine tones from each pipe by changing the tightness of his lips. Not bad for an extremely ancient instrument.

Saint Hildegard von Bingen’s Medieval Compositions from the 1100’s

St. Hildegard von Bingen (aka. the “Sibyl of the Rhine”) was a German writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath who lived in the 1100’s. She had one of the largest musical repertoires among medieval composers with over 70 original compositions. The haunting, echoing tones are a result of the medieval practice of monophonic composition in which there were no harmonies.

Zikr

Sometimes called “dhikr,” zikr is a general term for Islamic prayer chanting that is often used as a meditation tool and linked with Sufism.

Sufism is a form of Islamic mysticism that doesn’t really focus on being dogmatic (there are scores of “orders” whose practices vary widely). The more important goal to Sufi’s is perfecting their worship and becoming closer to God. That’s where zikr comes in.

Zikr is a chanting/singing repetition of certain words or names of God that invokes a trancelike, peaceful state of mind. In addition to the video above, you should absolutely listen to this zikr chant from a Uyghur (pronounced “Wee-gur”) order of mystics.

John Cage’s Post-Modern Compositions

John Cage was an American composer that led the post-WWII avant-garde music movement. Musical critics have called him one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century with his innovation in electroacoustic music and non-standard instruments. However, some of his contributions were, what many would consider, idiotic.

His most famous piece is a 1952 composition called 4′33”, which is exactly, not joking here, four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The performers just sit there and do nothing for 4:33 minutes. You could play 4’33” yourself! In fact, you might be playing it right now.

The idea is that audience members should take that time to absorb and internalize the ambient sound of their space. It’s so meta that it makes my head want to explode! But at least it makes good fodder for jokes. “Hey, can we listen to some 4’33” now?”

4’33” aside, you should check out some of John Cage’s pieces where there is actual sound. You might find that some are pretty interesting.

The 1-bit Symphony

Turn your sound way down before you listen to this one. It starts out pretty loud.

Some of you might still love the 8-bit sound from old computers and video games, but let’s see how you handle 1-bit sound.

The creator of the 1-bit Symphony, Tristan Perich, made a symphony that automatically plays when you plug a headphone jack into a single, simple microchip. It’s the music of transistors turning on and off. Well, all digital music is, but this music makes it more noticeable.

Dawn of Midi

It was a long and hard road for sound engineers to finally get digitally generated sounds to sound like real instruments. Now that they have very close approximations, it looks like one band, “Dawn of MIDI,” is trying to do the reverse. They’re trying to make real instruments sound like synthetic ones. Does that make this music awesome? Or have we just run out of new ideas as a culture? You decide!

Chinese Opera

Chinese costumed opera has its roots in the 3rd Century CE. I specifically picked the least soothing tune I could find in the spirit of this article’s weirdness, but you should know that modern Chinese opera can sound very good, with some amazing costumes and voice acting traditions that go back thousands of years.

I think that the American singer, Kate Bush, has an incredible voice that would fit right in with Chinese opera or Indian Bollywood.

Pansori

The little girl in that video is a child prodigy in the revered art of Korean epic storytelling known as Pansori. There’s a lot more going on in this sound than you can easily hear. Here’s a sonic visualization again. Source: Coursera, Intro to Digital Music

You can hear how her voice uses lots of wavering vibratos and you can see in the visualization how the sound hits more frequencies, conveying more auditory roughness and power.

Here’s a song from the movie “Ghost in the Shell” that seems to be influenced by some of those Pansori-style vocals, but uses them in a more melodic way.

Danger Music

Like most avant-garde, Danger Music is all about the response it evokes and it doesn’t care how it gets there. As you’ve probably guessed from the name, it’s meant to manipulate your basic ‘fight or flight’ instincts and make you feel like you’re in danger. But it actually made me laugh because it’s so ridiculous.

Some of the music literally puts the audience or the performer in danger, and as a result, most Danger Music performances are canceled before they can be performed. I thought this song at least had melody progression, even though it was a creepy, two-note background progression.

Impossible Music — Black MIDI

Ok, this is just nuts. This electronic piano-playing program shows us that about 80% of the keys are being hit at a given time in one of these songs. This isn’t just impossible for one person. I don’t think any number of people could find a way to play this. Only through the magic of software is it possible.

Is it a good thing that this is possible? I’m guessing most of you think it’s not. Perhaps you can see why they call this “Black MIDI.” Because if they put this onto sheet music, the entire staff would be filled with notes, making the page a sea of black.

Our brains can’t even process this many notes. It’s mostly filtered out as white noise. The only parts that you do hear are the moving parts. So in the end, I do think it’s kind of an interesting experience, but at this point I’m spent on the weird music. You can read this article if you’re interested in learning more about Black MIDI.

I’ve got to go listen to some 4’33”

Update!

Looks like Cracked had this same great idea a month or so after I did and made this pretty entertaining video: The 5 Most Surreal Music Genres Around the World

I need to go find some Throat Rap now…

Now that I’ve completed three intensive months of full-stack Ruby on Rails training, I decided that the next project on my docket was to set up my own blog – one that I can use for the long hall.

But it wasn’t clearly the next item on my list of project ideas until I stumbled upon this little beauty called “HPSTR”, a theme for Jekyll. Before I found that, I was planning on using the shiny new blog engine “Ghost”, which I do still want to try out on OpenShift.

So here’s how the setup process went for me as I tried to build this new blog.

Jekyll Windows Setup and Theme Cloning

Pause for a TL;DR section – Here are all the links to articles and docs that I used throughout the process:

• HPSTR Theme Setup
• Installing Jekyll on Windows
• SO Question on Jekyll “Liquid Exception” issue with Pygments
• Fixing the “Liquid Exception” ‘UTF-8 and IBM437’ issue

My first stop was the Theme Setup section of the HPSTR theme demo site. Step one: Install Jekyll. So I jumped over to the Jekyll homepage and I was reminded that Jekyll is not officially supported by Windows.

No worries. The community has me covered. The Jekyll users community has had more than a year to bring some mature tools and tutorials into the mix.

Here were the first steps (some of which I had already done for past projects):

1. Download and Run the RailsInstaller for Windows
2. Download and Install Git for Windows
3. Download and Install Python 2.7 for Windows (get the first download unless you have a 64-bit Windows install, then get the third MSI link)
4. Run

   1	gem install jekyll

   in the command line
5. Run

   1	gem install kramdown

   in the command line (kramdown is the markdown editor that the HPSTR theme uses, but you could use your own with some research and hacking.

If you didn’t even have Git installed already, you might want to start with some more basic tutorials on using Git and the Command Line.

Now back to Michael Rose’s HPSTR Theme Setup Tutorial.

Michael says to fork his theme’s repo (hit the fork button to do that) but I don’t think I needed to do that when all was said and done. Any git pushes will go to the fork instead of the new repo that I wanted to create under my GitHub User Pages URL. So when I was ready to go live, I used these instructions to switch the remote origin from the forked repo to my mpron.github.io repo that I had created.

All I really think you need to do is create a folder where you want to keep your blog files, navigate there in the command line, then grab the clone url on Michael’s theme repo page, and paste it in the

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git clone [paste url here]

Pygments Issues

Now that you’ve got all of the theme’s files on your machine, it’s time to test it out. In the same folder that has the HPSTR theme files, run

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jekyll serve

If you don’t plan on ever sharing code snippets in your blog, you can just go to the

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_config.yml

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pygments: true

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false

I did want highlighting, so in order for this to work, you need to uninstall a the current Pygments library (a ruby gem) if it’s version is greater than 0.5.0.

Here’s what you should run in your command line to fix things:

gem list
[displays a list of all your installed ruby gems 
with their version numbers in parentheses]
gem uninstall pygments.rb --version "=[insert any pygments version number 
that was installed in the ruby gems list above 0.50]"
gem install pygments.rb --version "=0.5.0"

My gem list showed

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pygments.rb (0.5.0, 0.5.4)

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gem uninstall pygments.rb --version "=0.5.4"

Note about using Syntax Highlighting: When you want to highlight a piece of code, make sure you use the proper highlighting syntax, or your site will not run or deploy. An example code snippet in your blog post’s markdown file will look like this:

If you use a word after

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highlight

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highlight console

Now, the last thing you need to do is go to your C:\ drive and open the RailsInstaller folder that should be there now. Then you have to go into the Ruby 1.9 or Ruby 2.0 folder, depending on which version you decided to get, and then finally open the

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setup_environment.bat

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C:\RailsInstaller\Ruby1.9.3\setup_environment.bat

Look for the “SET PATH=” line which will look something like this:

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SET PATH=%RUBY_DIR%\bin;[several other other paths];%PATH%

and then insert

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C:\Python27

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;%PATH%

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SET PATH=%RUBY_DIR%\bin;[several other other paths];C:\Python27;%PATH%

Close and restart your command line window, navigate to the jekyll theme folder again, and run

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jekyll serve

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jekyll serve

UTF-8 Encoding Issues

Here’s the second weird error I got:

Liquid Exception: incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and IBM437 in _layouts/page.html

Even though there was a relatively simple solution for this, it didn’t stop me from finding a bunch of different, more complex and confusing ways to deal with this encoding issue.

Most of the searches I did pointed to methods that used this chcp 65001 command, but the better method was hiding in plain sight in the comments of the Jekyll on Windows tutorial that Jekyllrb.com recommended, which I didn’t initially use because it was pretty dated and unnecessarily complicated.

If you take a look at my comment on the tutorial, I mention that another commenter on the post showed me the solution. Just add the following line to your

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_config.yml

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jekyll serve

encoding: UTF-8

That’s it. I didn’t need to change my markdown gem to

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redcarpet

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chcp

Off and Running with the HPSTR Theme

The first thing you’ll want to do, if you’re not already familiar with Jekyll’s unique but pretty intuitive file structure, is to walk through this helpful Nettuts tutorial so that you understand which files and folders control different aspects of the site.

Once you’ve done that, you can look back at our HPSTR themed blog files and start making some modifications.

Modding Tips

Read through Michael Rose’s HPSTR Theme Setup Tutorial and all of his other posts on the theme demo to find out about some of the simple modifications you can make. Some of his sections, like the one about using Grunt, and any major customizations will require your own independent research.

For me, the main things I wanted to customize were:

• Delete his posts and site data and put in my own (obviously)
• Delete his “About” information and insert my own (obviously)
• Add my own images for the main page and for blog posts
• Add my own background

Michael gives good advice for swapping your information into the

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_config.yml

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url:

Next you’ll want to delete or move the posts that Michael has in there, but I’d recommend you move them to another folder outside your Jekyll project so that you can still reference how he does certain things like videos and code snippets later. In several cases, reading the markdown code of those posts was a lot more helpful than just reading the post on his demo site.

I’d also recommend you keep one of his posts in your Jekyll project so that you can just delete his markdown text and write your own while maintaining all of the fields in the header content that this theme uses (e.g.

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title:

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description:

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image:

Next, go to the

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about.md

Then open up the

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index.html

Images

In order to use an image on a page, you just have to go find one, modify it to your liking, drop it in the

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images

Although Michael suggests different dimensions, I think that the images should be at least 1200px long and the height should be half the width. This looked better to me when I was decreasing the size of the window. If the image is very wide and not very high, then the text will flow out of the borders of the picture at certain window sizes.

Finally, to change the background, just find a subtle square image that’s not too big and won’t look ugly when it’s tiled across your background. The fun part of this exercise is testing different backgrounds and feature images to see which ones you like the most for your blog’s style.

Deploying Your Blog

Once you’ve gotten a few modifiations, you’ll want to try deploying your site to the web early. Don’t try and do a ton of modifications before seeing how the site will deploy to the web. A common credo among developers is “deploy early and often.”

There are many ways you could deploy this blog, but the easiest by far is to use this blog as your GitHub user page. That just means that GitHub will host it for free as your one personal page that corresponds to your GitHub account.

Before you start your first deployment, make sure you create your user page repo on GitHub and add the user page’s URL to the

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url:

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_config.yml

Making Your GitHub User Page Repo and Deploying to it

This part is super simple, but you have to create this repo on the GitHub site before you deploy your Jekyll project to it. This is why you don’t really want to fork (make a copy) of Michael Rose’s repo, because then it will already be linked to deploy your project to that for, not the new GitHub User Page repo that we want it to go to.

Go to your GitHub web account, click the “Repositories” tab, and then click the green “New” button. Then, in the “Repository Name” field, type “[your GitHub username].github.io”. That’s going to be the URL people type to get to your blog. Mine is mpron.github.io, as you can see in your address bar above.

You can ignore the other fields and hit “Create Repository”. If you forked Michael’s repo, like I did, go to your command line, navigate to your Jekyll project, and follow these instructions to replace the old forked repo with the new [your GitHub username].github.io as the remote origin.

If you didn’t fork his repo, then just go to your Jekyll project in the command line and follow the instructions on the GitHub page that appears after you create the repository. Typing those commands will allow you run through this process every time you want to deploy a modification to your site:

git add . 
git add -u
git commit -m "this is a description of what I changed"
git push

You don’t need to do the

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git add -u

You’re basically done now!

If you connected your project folder to the [your username].github.io using the instructions on the GitHub page, then you should see all the project files when you go to

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https://github.com/[your GitHub username]/[your GitHub username].github.io

To see your live blog, simply go to

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[your GitHub username].github.io

Enjoy your new blog, you badass!