The Friday Fillip

It’s a trio of trills today.

• First up is a fillip of finches. Alek Komarnitsky has set up a web cam pointed at a nest of baby finches. The image is refreshed every few seconds, which makes BirdCam even more fun than his other enterprise, which is titled “Watching Grass Grow – The Most Boring Website in the World” Of course, you may prefer the silence of the lawn to the imagined tweets of baby finches. You can also let Alek’s site play you some bluegrass music while you contemplate the chicks or chickweed.
• Now for some real sound. Sort of. And instead of mute finches it’s imagined Beatles. Ukulele Beatles Fun offers you over 60 songs by the Fab Four played on a simulated ukulele that is synced with the lyrics and a tablature showing the proper uke fingering. Now this is not as strange as it may seem: George Harrison was a ukulele fan, keeping lots of the tiny twangers on hand for impromptu plucking parties. This is actually a superbly done site and might be a good model for how to build an instructional app. It’s also a gas to hear Maxwell’s Silver Hammer picked out twang by twang.
• Number three is a quiz. Everyone loves a quiz, right? This comes courtesy of Language Log, where they’re interested in, among other things, the noises we make when we talk. And who has been talking more, lately, than the candidates for U.S. president? Mark Liberman presents us with Political Melodies, three small MP3 files, each of which he’s created to offer us the “music” of one candidate’s voice, and our job is to guess whether the clip is Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or Barack Obama. The candidates’ words are gone, replaced by “five harmonically-related sinusoids with 1/F amplitudes,” whatever they are; but the tones and rhythms remain.