Cool Podcast Downloads
Posted by: Diccus62 on 30 October 2007
npr: all songs considered
Free podcasts of concerts such as My Morning jacket, the National, Yeah, Yeah,Yeah's,Jose Gonzales, Richard Thompson,Modest Mouse, Iggy, Gogol Bordello and lots more. Think they are only around 15 minutes or so but give a good flavour.
Let me know what you think
Regards
Diccus
Free podcasts of concerts such as My Morning jacket, the National, Yeah, Yeah,Yeah's,Jose Gonzales, Richard Thompson,Modest Mouse, Iggy, Gogol Bordello and lots more. Think they are only around 15 minutes or so but give a good flavour.
Let me know what you think
Regards
Diccus
Sorry chaps 
By far the best podcasts I've heard are produced by RadioLab.com. They've done three seasons, four or five shows per season, and are working on a fourth.
They're hour-long shows, combining spoken voices, sound and music collage, very inventive editing, and the content is utterly fascinating ... by turns intellectually stimulating, funny, profound, and very moving. Each show is devoted to a general topic: Music, Morality, Mortality, Time, Space, Zoos, etc. and usually consists of three or so shorter linked pieces.
Just to give an idea ... the Space show discusses the idea that regarding the question of contacting intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the real problem isn't distance, it's time. Given that our own sun will eventually flame out and incinerate earth (still a few million years off, so don't worry
), we can roughly estimate that the total span of human civilization on Earth will end up being about 10 million years. Let's say there's another intelligent civilization out there whose span is also roughly 10 million years. The fact that they may be billions of light years in distance away aside, the real issue is that 10 million years is a mere blip in the total time span of the universe, and the chance that our 10 million years and another civilization's 10 million years would overlap is incredibly remote.The Music show deals with the relationship between spoken speech and sung melody, and with the high incidence of perfect pitch in cultures in which a tonal language is spoken (Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. in which the same word spoken at a different pitch means something entirely different). There's also a piece on how music actually affects our emotions (triggers dopamine production) with a focus on the riot during the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. A little dopamine makes us feel good, but too much can induce a near-psychotic reaction, the theory being that the extreme shock of the new in Stravinsky's music induced an overdose of dopamine, literally driving people mad, even driving them to real bloodshed.
The Zoo show takes a look at the relatively modern development of environmental habitats for animals, which didn't really come into practice until the 1970s. Taking the example of one dominant male gorilla in a Seattle zoo, living in a drab concrete box with one window. He was understandably depressed, listless, and very angry, starting fights with his cell mates and throwing food and feces at every opportunity. When the new outdoor habitat was opened, he was the first to be let into it, and for several long minutes he just sat there letting the wind ruffle his fur, sniffing the fresh air and looking around. Despite the directive from the zookeepers to the construction crew to double-check the habitat for any leftover chunks of concrete or other debris, sure enough the gorilla started digging in the sand and pulled up a large hunk of rock, which he promptly raised above his head intending to hurl it at the zookeepers gathered there to observe him. He froze in this position, letting them see all of his pent up anger and aggression, and they fully expected him to let that rock fly, but then he calmly put it down. From that moment on he was a profoundly changed gorilla ... the anger and aggression were gone, he was now sweet and good natured. Happy.
Anyway, those are just a few of the stories, and they are all equally engrossing. You can stream them or download podcasts at radiolab.com
All best,
Fred