Japan’s population is aging at an accelerated pace, so it’s no surprise that the country now has its own old boy band, with members aged between 65 and 87.

G-Pop, a play on the Japanese word ‘Ojii-san’ for ‘old man’, is not your average boy band. J-Pop and K-Pop groups like most other boy bands, are primarily aimed at teenagers and young adults so the usual recipe for success is finding good-looking young men who can also dance and maybe have some sort of musical talent. G-Pop, on the other hand, is targeting Japan’s older population, so they are actually old men in their 60s through 80s. The Kochi Prefecture-based music troupe made its professional debut seven years ago, it’s been busy putting a positive spin on the country’s rapidly aging population ever since.

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A Barcelona man was sentenced to one year in prison after a court found that he had been terrorizing his neighbors for at least 5 years by playing loud electronic music almost non-stop.

A court in Mataró (Barcelona), Spain recently ruled against a man who had reportedly been driving his neighbors crazy by playing electronic music at a loud volume. The nightmare of the man’s neighbors began 2012, when he started playing his unbearably loud music all day and night. Despite repeated requests to turn the volume down, as well as visits from the local police, the man refused to comply and people had no choice but to put up with it. In 2015, 3 neighbors who lived in a house attached to that of the accused filed a complaint against him, after having endured nearly 3 years of electronic music at full volume. They claimed that the constant banging music was causing them both physical and mental issues.

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Chaco Chaco is a popular South Korean Youtuber whose claim to fame is the ability to reproduce popular songs on one or multiple musical calculators.

Calculators are handy when dealing with math, but one particular calculator is actually more popular as a musical instrument. The Egoelife AR-7778 and AR-8001 are designed as instruments and even come with instructions on how to use them as such. But, just like with any other musical instrument, you need talent and practice to produce music worth listening to, otherwise, you’re just using it as a cool toy. That’s what sets Chaco Chaco, a musical calculator artist with over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube alone, apart from pretty much any other musical calculator user.

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Swedish couple Tomas and Hannah Mazetti are trying to raise $15,000,000 so they can buy the rights to Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ holiday song so they can destroy it.

It’s one of the most popular and widely recognized musical compositions in history. Every year, as the winter holidays start rolling in, you can hear it playing on the radio, on TV, and in stores at least a few times a day. No, it’s not Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas,” but Wham’s catchy winter anthem, ‘Last Christmas’. Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the middle of nowhere for the past three and a half decades, you know the song, and you know just how popular it gets around the winter holidays. It’s so ubiquitous that some people just can’t take it anymore and are trying to have it destroyed.

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Audiophiles are known to pour lots of time and resources into their passion, but few go above and beyond to fulfill their dreams. One such individual spent over 25 years building what many consider the world’s best stereo system.

Ever since he was a teenager, Milwaukee native Ken Fritz knew that music and sound were his greatest passions. In high-school, he was already building his own advanced speakers, and, as an adult, he turned his passion into a successful business that helped him fund his greatest dream – to build the world’s ultimate stereo system. It took him over a quarter of a century to do it, but today his creation is regarded as the best sound system in the world by both professionals and fellow audiophiles.

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A member of a popular South Korean K-pop group has been getting a lot of attention because of his unusual hairstyle – long bangs that completely cover the upper half his face, including his eyes.

Junji (준지) is one of the seven members of OnlyOneOf, an all-male K-pop group founded in 2019. He’s easy to identify among his band mates, as he’s the one with the face half covered by long, blonde bangs. He’s been sporting the bizarre hairstyle since January 2020, and has managed to generate quite a lot of buzz in South Korean entertainment business, because of it. Some people have been speculating that Junji is trying to conceal his looks because he wants fans to like him for more than just looks, others that he is simply not as handsome as the other six members, but the important thing is that they’ve been talking about him a lot.

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Blackbird is a unique stone violin carved by Swedish sculptor Lars Widenfalk, based on drawings by Stradivarius, but with modifications that allow it to be played.

Lars Widenfalk came up with the idea of creating a violin out of stone in the late 1980s, while chiseling away at a piece of diabase and being impressed by the pleasant sound it made when hit with hammer and chisel. It wasn’t until 1990 that he finally got his hands on a piece of diabase large enough to be sculpted into a life-size violin, but as soon as he did, he got to work. In the end, he needed a second piece for the back of the violin, but after two years of hard work, Blackbird, the stone violin named after the homonymous bird, was finally completed.

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Luca Yupanqui, was still in her mother’s uterus when she started recording her first music album. Now she is getting ready to release the world’s first ever LP with sounds from inside the womb.

The daughter of Elizabeth Hart, a member of psych-rock band Psychic Ills, and musician Iván Diaz Mathé, young Luca is all set to follow in her parents’ footsteps, with her debut LP expected to launch on April 24, this year. The ten-track album was produced with the help of Biosonic MIDI technology;  electrodes were placed on Hart’s abdomen, and the vibrations of the fetus were translated into sound using synthesizers. Five hours-worth of recording were edited into the upcoming LP, named Sounds of the Unborn.

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Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) is considered the world’s slowest musical composition and the subject of the longest-lasting musical performance in recorded human history.

Written by the late American composer John Cage, As Slow as Possible has been playing at the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany since September 5, 2001. ‘Played’ is perhaps to strong a word to describe the sound coming out of the organ built specifically for this musical piece, as the performance began with a pause that lasted until February 2003, and has since continued with single notes played continuously for several months, sometimes years. For example, the latest note change occurred on September 5, 2020, and the next one is scheduled for February 5, 2022. I think it’s safe to say that none of us will hear the end of this epic performance, as it is meant to end in the year 2640…

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A Japanese former busker turned Zen Buddhist monk has been getting a lot of attention because of his unique music which combines beatboxing, sampling and a wide range of chants.

Before being ordained as a monk in 2015, 37-year-old Yogetsu Akasaka traveled the world as a full-time busker, making a living on his beatboxing skills. A friend had introduced him to the oral art of sound and instrument imitation in his early 20’s, and he was so impressed that he decided to give it a go himself. It turned out that he was pretty good at it, so good in fact that he was able to make a living as a busker in several countries, including the United States and Australia. After following his father’s example and becoming a monk, he realized he missed his music, so he came up with a way to blend his calling and his beatboxing talent in a unique way.

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Colombian singer Maluma is one of the world’s most popular reggaeton stars, but while millions of people love listening to his hits, one jailed Mexican official claims he has been driven crazy by Maluma’s music after police “tortured” him by playing loud reggaeton non-stop for 10 days straight.

Gilberto Aguirre Garza, the former director of the Attorney General’s Office in the Mexican state of Veracruz, was jailed in April for his alleged involvement in the concealment and alteration of evidence relating to the mass burial of 13 human bodies. On January 19, 2016, the remains of 19 victims of enforced disappearance allegedly perpetrated by public servants of the Public Security Secretariat of the State were discovered in a place called La Barranca de La Aurora. However, prosecutors claimed that Garza instructed personnel under his command to report the finding of only 6 bodies, a charge that he has always denied. The jailed official’s lawyer recently told reporters that, in an effort to force his client to admit to the crime and denounce other public servants, the current Verracruz Governor and the state’s Attorney General have been subjecting Garza to music torture.

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A cheese maker from the Emmental region of Switzerland has been experimenting with various musical genres to see if they can make his cheese taste better.

Since September, cheese maker Beat Wampfler has been blasting musical masterpieces by legends such as Led Zeppelin and A Tribe Called Quest to his wheels of Emmental cheese, hoping to prove that music can influence the development, characteristics and, most importantly, the flavor of the cheese. He is convinced that humidity, temperature and nutrients are not the only things that can have an impact on the taste of cheese, and that sounds, ultrasounds and music can make an impact on flavor as well.

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A New York man has been dubbed the “Pied Piper of Raccons” after a video of him drawing almost two dozen furry critters from the woods with a Native American flute tune went viral online.

The popular video shows Eddy Lawrence playing his flute on the side of the road in Brasher State Forest, St Lawrence County, as dozens of raccoons emerge from the woods and form an audience around him. The otherwise shy creatures appeared mesmerized by the song, and according to the person who shot the video, around 20 of them had gathered around Lawrence by the time he finished playing. As the song ended, the spell it put on the raccoons seemed to break as well, as they scurried back into the forest.

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Eva N., from the Slovakian town of Štúrovo, was recently arrested after defying the Supreme Court’s decision to stop playing a four-minute aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ on loop every day from early in the morning until late at night.

It’s safe to say that Eva N.’s neighbors on Kossuth Street, in Štúrovo, know Verid’s La Traviata by heart. After all they’ve been forced to listen to it for 16 years, ever since the woman started playing it from loudspeakers on her balconies almost non-stop during the day. They’ve been trying to get her to stop for years, appealing to both local police and the justice system, but Eva just defied everyone and kept turning on Placido Domingo’s interpretation of La Traviata every morning at around 6 am, and only turned it off at around 10 at night. Luckily, after over a decade and a half of audio torture, Slovakia’s Supreme Court recently upheld the decision of a lower court that required Eva N. to stop playing her music at loud volume. She ignored the ruling as she did the previous ones, only this time, she got arrested.

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British beekeeper and musician Bioni (pronounced BEE-own-ee) Samp has found an incredible way to combine his two greatest passions. He records the frequencies of his bees and uses them to create original electronic musical compositions.

Bioni – a pseudonym, as his real name is a closely guarded secret – produces abstract music that is rhythmic and dancey, but the 50-something Londoner has a higher goal than making people get jiggy with it on the dance floor. He uses his unusual music to raise awareness about colony collapse disorder (CDC), a plague that has wiped out millions of honeybee hives globally since 2006. Billions of bees are killed by CDC every year, and that’s not counting the ones that dies as result of climate change and pesticide poisoning. he feels that by using bees as a musical instrument he can get through to people easier than by preaching to them about the plight of bees and the dangers their extinction poses to humanity.

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