All posts tagged Music

Black History Month & Women Making History

by admin on 3 Feb ’12 in Enlighten Me, History, community, giving back, music, not-for-profit with No comments

In 1976 Gerald Ford officially declared February,  ‘Black History Month’ in order to pay recognition to the too-often neglected accomplishments of African-Americans. Each year we celebrate this month with a different theme and 2012’s theme pays tribute to the ways in which women have shaped the United States and its history. So we’d like to take a minute to honor a few women who have done some wonderful things to help do just that.

Rachel Robinson

Wife of the late Jackie Robinson, Mrs. Robinson founded the Jackie Robinson Foundation in 1973, which is an amazing not-for-profit organization promoting the advancement of higher education among underserved populations. The foundation provides millions of dollars in scholarship aid; boasts a nearly 100% graduation rate and has helped over 1,400 students and in 2009, Mrs. Robinson received the UCLA Medal for her lifetime achievements. The UCLA Medal honors individuals who’ve made extraordinary and distinguished contributions to their professions; higher education; our society and to the people of UCLA.

Etta James

Etta began as a gospel prodigy—singing in church and on the radio at the age of 5—and went on to become one of the most renowned American singers. Born Jamesetta Hawkins, Etta garnered a plethora of awards throughout her career (including six Grammys) and went on to be inducted into Rock & Roll; Blues; and Grammy Halls of Fame. Unfortunately Etta passed away last month after a battle with leukemia but her legacy will never be forgotten.

Michelle Obama

As the first African-American First Lady, Michele has assumed a vital position as a role model for women and an advocate for poverty awareness, nutrition and healthy eating. She created the Let’s Move campaign— a comprehensive initiative dedicated to solving the problem of obesity within a generation, so that children born today will grow up healthier and able to pursue their dreams.

As Americans, we should be proud of where we are today but should also recognize that it we are only where we are today because of those before us. These women, along with many African-Americans have shaped—and continue to shape our lives and our futures for the better.

Free Friday: Turntable.FM

by admin on 29 Jul ’11 in Cool Stuff, Design, Digital, Free Stuff, Networking, Squeaky, Technology, community, facebook, music, social media, web development with No comments

If you don’t already know about Turntable.fm you are missing out on a creative and fun way to share and discover new music with friends. Turntable.fm combines music with social media while incorporating a game-like twist. Just log in with your Facebook account and then find a room with a genre that tickles your fancy.

From there, you can rate what’s playing as either ‘Lame’ or ‘Awesome’ via a convenient meter. A lame rating will contribute to a song getting skipped (if enough people vote that way) and an awesome rating will allow the DJ who played the song to acquire points. The more points you acquire, the more avatars you will unlock.  If there is an opening on the stage you can step in and play some tunes or—if you don’t feel like it—you can just hang out and let others do the spinning.

Although the music selection is slightly limited, there is still a good amount of music to choose from. Plus, you can  upload your own mp3s to play them. This  allows you to share that new album with your friends or even let them listen to your latest indie project to see what they think.

Overall, this innovative web application creates a pleasant experience by allowing users to share music and interact with friends. Currently, they have a significant amount of features but as a relatively young product, it has the potential to grow and we will likely see additional features in the future. We love it and hope Billy Chasen and the Turntable.fm team continue to improve an already awesome product.

Free Friday: New Museum Block Party 2011

by admin on 22 Jul ’11 in Cool Stuff, Enlighten Me, Events, Free Stuff, History, NYC, art, community, company culture, multicultural, music with No comments

Art, music and gorgeous weather. Put ‘em together and what do you have? The New Museum Block Party, a friendly clash of music, culture and interactive artwork that is perfect for all ages.

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Free Friday: FIGMENT NYC

by admin on 10 Jun ’11 in Cool Stuff, Culture, Events, Free Stuff, Mobile, NYC, Squeaky, YouTube, art, community, iPhone, music with No comments

If you’ve ever been to the Squeaky loft, you’d know by our abundance of artwork that we are big advocates of art and culture. We believe that culture fuels innovation and we love that our city is filled with exciting art-filled events such as FIGMENT.

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Free Friday: Aviary

by admin on 15 Apr ’11 in Cool Stuff, Culture, Digital, Free Stuff, Technology, social media with No comments


Love music? So do we. A couple of our employees even DJ in their spare time and if you’ve seen our Christmas party blog post you know that some of us are musically gifted as well.

That aside, we have come across some really cool and innovative audio editing and music creation software. The best part—besides the fact that it’s free—is that it’s web software so there is no downloading required, saving you valuable disk space.

Created by Aviary, Myna Audio editor allows you to come up with fresh tracks using their huge library of sounds and loops. The second music editor, Roc Music Creator, allows anyone to compose music by incorporating a multitude of sound effects from a bunch of various instruments and you can even create sounds and loops and use them in Myna.

Start by browsing the instrument folders until you come across some cool sounds you’d like to use. Then it’s as simple as dragging and dropping. In Roc, you can drop a whole folder and utilize all the sounds in it or just choose the individual ones you like and add them to the individual tracks.

Once you’ve completed your free registration you can save your projects and download them in .wav or .mp3 format.  And of course, like everything else you can share the crap out of it on your favorite social network and show all your friends the dope tracks you created. You can also upload to SoundCloud and share it that way as well.

Listen to the mix we made below and check out Aviary’s whole suite of software including Phoenix for image editing and Raven for vector editing plus a ton of others.
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