So the guys who did that Carl Sagan autotune have decided to turn it into an ongoing project, and given their second effort – a mix of Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Feynman and Bill Nye – I’m not sure that extending this into a series necessarily works.
The first song was brilliant for two reasons. First, the tune itself was quite good. But secondly, Carl Sagan’s spoken words worked extraordinarily well for the purpose of Autotuning – his Kermit the Frog voice and deliberate pace of speech turns into Autotuned music much more eloquently than a lot of people’s. And on top of that, Sagan was just a poetic goddamned person, in ways that practically nobody else in the “scientific celebrity” community is. Listening to the attempt to Autotune Bill Nye’s trademark excited exhortations – or a fairly dry statement by Tyson, for that matter – just underlines how much harder it is to Autotune their words into really good music.
So in future: more Sagan, and everybody else is a cameo player, please. Either that, or start Autotuning Beakman’s World.
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I’m hopeful, but I do see your point. But that’s how science and music advance, experimentation!
I know. You can tell on the second song that Sagan’s voice works so well, but that the others are a bit too… excitable for the effect to work.
Maybe Tyson, when he exclaims “That makes me want to grab people in the street / And say, have you heard this??” But Nye’s bits are all off-beat.
And Feynman should stick to drums.
Maybe we could autotune Beaker.
Beakman kicked the ass of Nye in every possible way. The shows, at least. Nye gets points for being a real person who is also pretty groovy.
I’d kinda like to see Bill Nye do a solo tune here.
Yeah, Glorious Dawn was better. Hawking is in that one, but somehow autotuning him works. Not quite as well as Sagan, but pretty good.
I love Nye, but putting him to this just sounds awkward. I’m kind of meh on the other two. Maybe this kind of thing just works better with fewer people, too.
This one’s not as good, but it’s not bad either, and it, too, reminds me of why I loved science as a kid – there’s this incredible wonder to it, this ridiculous joy in knowing we’re all star stuff and interconnected and able to do great things. Sagan’s parts more than the others.
On a semirelated note, in a recent class we had to bring in poems, and it turned out that we got extra credit for memorizing them, and I’d memorized Glorious Dawn, which was basically one of only two hopeful sense-of-wonder poems. The class got distracted from angst and so hung up on “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”. It was funny.
I think this may turn into an excellent series, but I agree that “Glorius Dawn” is superior to this current installation.
Nye was ok, but the chorus in this one was so understated that it weakened the entirety of the song.
Nye was pretty good in this one simply because he was so different-sounding from the other three, especially Sagan. Feynman and Tyson were kind of “meh.”
Not as good as Glorious Dawn, but still worth watching.
I know I’m a little late to the commenting party here, but I think some of you guys are missing some of the point. There’s no “guys” that produce this stuff, it’s just one dude with a keyboard, a guitar, some editing software and every scientist video clip on the internet, whose taste tends toward the chill electronica.
I thought putting Nye in there was genius – when he said “billions and billions of stars” I laughed aloud, because it’s a direct reference to Sagan’s catchphrase (even though he never actually said it in Cosmos).
I applaud the creator for trying to inject a little energy into his second effort – Sagan himself is so whoa-dude-spaced-out when he talks that you need someone enthusiastic to fit the drumline, which is a gimmie given Feynman’s bongos obsession. Both Tyson and Nye fit the bill here. Feynman himself, well, you can’t really get around his Queens accent, but he says so much great sciencey-philosophical stuff that you really can’t leave him out either.
Okay, fine, I’m a huge fangirl and consider the whole project to be genius; I might be a little biased. But: genius. Can’t wait for the next one.