musical instruments

A commentary video by YouTuber PaymoneyWubby reacting to children's content on the Musical.ly app, which became TikTok. It highlights the child-safety concerns of young kids dancing on a public social platform.

The original Broadway cast performs 'The Internet Is For Porn' from the musical Avenue Q, with press-reel footage synced to the live performance.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

Linus Akesson demonstrates the Commodordion, a fully functional 8-bit accordion built around Commodore 64 hardware with bellows made of floppy disks. He performs Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag and tells the story of the build.

Rob Scallon explores a five-story pipe organ, the largest in the Midwest, with organist John Sherer. The half-hour tour covers most of the instrument and how it works.

A short music video by the Japanese group Electronicos Fantasticos, led by Ei Wada, playing festival-style music on repurposed old electronics. Instruments include CRT TVs, a barcode reader, an electric fan harp and TV taiko drums.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

Wintergatan's video of the Marble Machine, a hand-built music instrument that plays a song using about 2000 marbles on a mechanical clockwork-style mechanism.

A 2008 comedic rap musical pitting Wall Street bankers against consultants, produced by Leveraged Sell-Out.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song Who's Next, about the spread of nuclear weapons, with a spoken introduction. It is a short musical comedy piece from the Cold War era.

Adam Neely tests the claims for tuning to A=432 Hz by trying the unusual tuning systems that its proponents' numerology requires. He compares how they sound against standard tuning and temperaments.

Part one of Look Mum No Computer's series on buying a whole church pipe organ, covering how it was removed from its home. The series goes on to restoring it and rewiring it for MIDI.

A short demonstration comparing just intonation with equal temperament, played so you can hear how the tuning compromise changes intervals and chords. It includes a Bach prelude played in both tunings.

Peter Pringle sings the opening of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian, accompanied by a reconstructed ancient instrument. The description gives background on Sumer, cuneiform and how little is known about the language's pronunciation.

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs an early version of the Hamilton idea, then called "The Hamilton Mixtape", at the White House poetry and spoken word evening in May 2009. He is accompanied by Alex Lacamoire and the audience laughs along at the premise of a hip-hop song about Alexander Hamilton.

A scene from My Fair Lady in which Professor Higgins meets Colonel Pickering and Doolittle, singing about how the English fail to speak their own language properly. It has English subtitles.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about poisoning pigeons in the park, in a rare 1967 Norwegian broadcast recording.

Dr. Bruce Bugbee walks through the calculations for crop yield potential when light is the limiting factor, from photosynthetic quantum yield through respiration efficiency and harvest index, using the Energy Cascade Model.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay asking why Marvel films lack memorable musical themes. It blames temp tracks and directors scoring to filler music.

Veritasium visits NIST to explain Standard Reference Materials, the carefully characterized items such as peanut butter used to calibrate instruments and keep measurements consistent. It covers why they exist and why they are expensive.

Andrew Sorensen's OSCON 2014 keynote in which he live-codes generative music on stage using his Impromptu environment while narrating his computational and musical choices. It imagines concert programmers as a performing art.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

Comedian and cellist Rob Paravonian rants about having to play Pachelbel's Canon in D, and shows how many pop songs reuse its chord progression. It was recorded live at Penn State.

A complete remastered soundtrack for the Transport Tycoon 2014 mobile game, re-recorded with real instruments rather than the original MIDI. The music was composed by John Broomhall for the classic Transport Tycoon.

Reggie Watts performs at TED 2012, blending vocal looping, beatboxing, poetry and comedy across musical genres in a larger-than-life improvised set.

OK Go's music video for Needing/Getting, shot in the desert with a Chevy Sonic fitted with pneumatic arms that play over a thousand instruments across two miles.

A score-following video of Iannis Xenakis's 1950s orchestral piece Metastasis, showing his graphic, mathematically derived notation as the music plays. It is a landmark of post-war modernist composition.

Drummer Larnell Lewis hears Metallica's Enter Sandman for the first time on Drumeo and learns to play it by ear, using his musical vocabulary.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with an introduction. It is a two-minute musical clip.

Bill Wurtz's fast, comedic and musical run through the whole history of Japan in nine minutes.

A short TED-Ed animated lesson by Anita Collins on what happens in the brain when people play a musical instrument. It argues that playing engages many brain areas at once, like a full-body workout, with long-term benefits.

Tom Scott visits Yale's archives to look at a 367-year-old bond from a Dutch water authority that is still paying interest. Finance professor Geert Rouwenhorst explains how it works.

Donald Knuth explains at Stanford's CCRMA the constraint-based methods he is using to compose a major work for pipe organ.

A song by Pig With The Face Of A Boy that narrates the history of the Soviet Union from a worker's view, set to the Tetris melody.

A Danish university math revue music video that parodies Barbra Streisand to explain the Banach-Tarski paradox, with oranges multiplying on stage.

A short recording of a 1565 organ in Mantua tuned in quarter-comma meantone, showing split sharps in use. The extra keys provide separate D-sharp and A-flat for more tonalities.

An animated, musical visualization of Conway's Game of Life showing patterns made in the Golly program.

The Galaxy Song from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, a comic musical tour of the size and motion of the galaxy and our place in it.

The official 4K upload of Michael Jackson's 14-minute short film Thriller, directed by John Landis. It is widely regarded as a landmark music video.