I haven’t blogged in quite some time now, so I thought it would be nice to share at least something while my new hard disk is being formatted. One of my favorite songs recently has been 비와 당신 (The Rain and You). It was originally in the movie 라디오 스타 (Radio Star), which is a really good movie, by the way — everybody should see it — and one of my favorite Korean bands, Rumble Fish, released a cover of it on their album Memory for You last year.

It’s a nice song, so besides being able to sing it, I thought it’d be fun to play it on a keyboard/piano. The chords are pretty straightforward. Here they are:

C G F E | F G C (G/C)

They’re all major chords, and they’re each one measure long, except the final G can sometimes be just C major for another measure (like at the end of the song). The | is just to divide the eight measures into groups of four so that it’s easier to read. Those chords are repeated the whole song. The melody is pretty easy as well, especially once you have those chords down. If you play the Rumble Fish intro, the melody begins as ABCD|E with E being played at the same time as the chords begin playing. The actual melody (the singing part) begins on E.

That’s the Rumble Fish version. The original is in G major, with the sung melody beginning on B, and with the following chords:

G D C B | C D G (D/G)

Anyway, for those who find this useful, enjoy playing the song!

Here’s something really cool.

Many of us are familiar with tag clouds, in which larger text indicates higher frequency of that string in some list. A “Web 2.0 thing,” this is often used on del.icio.us and has become popular on blogs using tags. Someone created a service called Wordle, that can generate fancy, customizable text clouds of this sort based on any input. Also, another “Web 2.0” thing that many of you are familiar with is Last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler, back in the day), a service that collects the music you play on your computer and/or iPod to create statistics, using ID3 tags or the equivalent for non-MP3 formats.

Now, someone got the bright idea to take your last.fm profile and turn it into a Wordle image. Follow the instructions, and you’ll be set to create something like this.

Above was a Wordle thing I made with the last six months’ worth of artist frequency from my last.fm account. Below is one with my overall top artists, since June 2003… kinda. You may also click on these two images for bigger versions.

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but I’ve also been really busy—finals start tomorrow. In any case…

Music at Rice (the Shepherd School) is fairly well known, but a lot of non-musi’s are going to think, “What does that have to do with me?” Well, if you appreciate music, or if you like to play piano or something, it means a lot. Besides using the practice rooms with lots of Steinways, there are recitals and performances every week. And to keep informed, Rice students are generally on a a lot of mailing lists, including one specifically for a list of Shepherd events every week. These performances are generally free, and the ones that are not are generally pretty cheap.

So, I encourage everybody to take advantage of these awesome opportunities to hear and appreciate some of the best musical talent in the country. And if you’re considering Rice, this is definitely worth putting in your decision equation.

Back to studying for finals (or something like that).