Following up from my post on the amazing polyphonic voice of German vocalist Anna-Maria Hefele, here is a further equally-wild but incomparable female vocal performance. 

Seemingly sweet, 19 year old French female - Manon - begins this clip of her performance of The Vampire From Nazareth by Septic Flesh with a brief spoken intro. She almost comes across as shy. But strap yourself in. 

Unlike former frontwoman of Arch Enemy, Angela Gossow, Manon's speaking voice does not elude to what follows. 

Put your horns up and enjoy. 

Don't judge a g̶i̶r̶l growl by its cover.
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Paul Doolan provides keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Tell me about YOUR song!

Many years ago I was introduced to overtone singing in the form of Tibetan throat singing - a specialised chanting style often performed by monks. I have since seen similar examples of this style of vocal technique from many parts of the world, used for storytelling, ritual and entertainment. 

The polyphonic overtone singing of German vocalist Anna-Maria Hefele is something truly unique. Her precise melodic control of the pitch of both the fundamental and overtones is amazing to watch and listen to, and something very different to the chanting style of overtone singing.

See her introductory video below, which gets particularly fascinating around the 3 minute mark as Anna-Maria demonstrates moving the fundamental and overtone pitch in different directions and at greater speed. 

Exploring Anna-Maria Hefele's work further, I was enchanted by the performance of the piece Rosary Sonata 1 with Supersonus (the European Resonance Ensemble). It's a great reminder of how different and inspiring music can be, especially when it varies from the "norm" of what you hear every day.

It's amazing when you find something new in something so familiar. Like finally understanding the real lyric in a song you've listened to for years, or noticing something in the background of a movie you've seen a thousand times. 

Enter the world of hidden treasures in music. Now in my time I've stumbled across a few of these. A band I was in years ago even recorded a "hidden track" many minutes after the end of the last song, which was actually an out take of an alternative acoustic version of one of the songs on the album. Nothing hard to find - just let the CD play rather than hitting stop at the end, and there it is. 

But there have been some absolutely remarkable secrets hidden in music over the years, 10 of which have been collated in this article. 

Some of the coolest examples:

• The track "Erased, Over, Out" from the Nine Inch Nails album Further Down the Spiral, if fast-forwarded on a regular CD player, will play the words "ERASE ME" over and over
• Monty Python's Matching Tie & Handkerchief album had one side containing two completely different sets of tracks, and you never knew which one you'd get until you played it. This was done on vinyl by recording double grooves, which is when the album's grooves are pressed in a way that makes it so you get a completely different set of tracks depending on where the needle lands
  
• Led Zeppelin's album In Through the Out Door appears to have relatively dull album artwork. However if you wash the inner sleeve with water, the album's black and white drawings become permanently colored. Many people have owned the album for decades without knowing this could be done, as it was never promoted as a feature of the album
  
• Even a band I have listened to unbroken for more than 20 years, Dream Theater, hid instrumental intros on half the songs on their album Octavarium in the pregap (a part of a CD track accessible by pressing and holding the rewind button at the beginning of the first track, until it can't go back any further). 
• And lastly, perhaps most creepily, Aphex Twin's fan-dubbed "Equation" track features a metallic, buzzing noise around five minutes and 30 seconds into the song. When you run that section through a spectrograph (a program that converts sound waves into visible images...as you do...), this image comes out:
  

What secrets within albums do you know about?
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Paul Doolan provides keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Tell me about YOUR song!

There's a whole world of what could be considered internet time-wasting, but here's something I found fascinating. Audio visual experiments that enable you to manipulate sound onscreen in your browser. 

While there are all kinds of flavours of these things around to play with, a couple which I've found particularly fun are Keylight 01 and Keylight 03 from Swedish JavaScript coder and CSS tweaker, Hakim El Hattab. 

In Keylight 01 you play a synthy piano sound using the keys on your computer keyboard. Try pressing YRIZD for example (and hopefully with some memory of Close Encounters of the Third Kind...). 

The other one I've sunk some time into is Keylight 03, in which you drag a minimum of two balls around a 3D "room". The basics: 

• The further a ball is placed away from you, the lower the pitch. 
• The further apart the balls are placed, the longer the duration between the pitches playing. 
• You can drag them around once placed to play with timing and pitch, and it can really become quite hypnotic. 
• Dragging a ball off the side of the room will remove it. 
• You can copy the URL at the end to share your creation

It's very easy to imagine a huge beat dropping in behind something you've created very simply after only a few seconds of playing around. 

As an example, here's a link to my Keylight 03 quick take on the My Dying Bride track The Cry of Mankind - a random choice I know, but a great riff which came to mind as soon as I started playing with this tool. 

There's no shortage of stuff to play around with on his site, check it out at hakim.se. 

What riffs can you create?

Matt Perin took a photo of himself every day for 3 years in the effort of creating this one video of himself lip sync-ing to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now". 

As you'll see from the video, this would have taken insane amounts of dedication and forethought. It's definitely a project worth sharing. But worth doing? What do you think?

A recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience has suggested that moving in time to music could be linked to better language skills. 

The researchers found that "the same ingredients that are important for reading are strengthened with musical experience. Musicians have highly consistent auditory-neural responses".

The study suggested that the emphasis on rhythm experienced in musical training can exercise the auditory-system, in turn creating stronger sound-to-meaning associations such as those essential for  learning to read.

Additionally children in the study who were poor readers had a great deal of difficulty accurately tapping a rhythm along with a metronome. 

Read more on the research via BBC News. 

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Paul Doolan provides online keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Want to add keyboards to your track? Learn more now. 

I couldn't stop laughing out loud when looking through this recent list of the "30 Worst Rock Tattoos of All Time" courtesy of Loudwire. 

Some of the titles on this list hilarious are hilarious, as is the undeniable regretfulness of the subjects, permanently inking themselves with very very badly chosen, misspelt or poorly executed tributes to the bands they love. The descriptions of these shocking tattoo examples also are just brilliant. e.g. "Deplorable Dave Grohl" with its description "You could have at least asked for the Foo Fighters frontman’s nose not to disappear halfway down his face or to at least give Grohl some teeth instead of a mouth like a hastily-carved Jack-O’-Lantern".

If laughing at the unfortunate bad choices of others sounds like something you're into, check out the full list of the worst rock tattoos of all time.  

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Paul Doolan provides online keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Want to add keyboards to your track? Learn more now. 

When I first saw the Roli Seaboard keyboard I thought it was a glorified Haken Continuum. I thought to myself "I've been seeing Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater play something like this for years". 

The Seaboard is a new musical instrument that uses a soft-touch, custom-built, pressure-sensitive interface that allows players to manipulate the Seaboard Grand's sounds. As seen in the video demo from Roli below, the keyboard make all manner of modulations of the sound directly via the keys. 

This in itself is a lot like the Haken Continuum. However I did like the fact that the Seaboard follows a raised "black notes" layout, as opposed to the completely flat interface of the Continuum. 

I was also intrigued to find that Jordan Rudess, who according to Wikipedia is "a major proponent of the Continuum in contemporary music", is listed as "Head Of Music Experience" for Roli, developers of the Seaboard. 

It seems Rudess' instruments of choice will continue to evolve, as may the format of the traditional keyboard.

OK - well this is a bit trippy. I was familiar with the concept of a Möbius loop, but had never thought of how it could apply in the playback of music or to explain space-time. 

It's a little tricky to follow at first, but as soon as she gets out the music box it gets a little more interesting!

Most people are aware of the difference between minor keys ("sad" songs) and major keys ("happy" songs). 

In my own compositions, the majority of what I write is in a minor key. I just find it more engaging and emotive to work with. 

But what if you were to take a sad, melancholy, or brooding minor-key song and turn it on its head by transposing it into a major key? That's just what Major Scaled have been doing over on their Vimeo channel. 

Check it out, and get ready to be disturbed...!

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Paul Doolan provides online keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Want to add keyboards to your track? Learn more now.