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It’s seventh grade, the day of the final English exam, and Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams have spent all semester singing and playing guitar and piano when they should have been studying, letting that copy of Romeo and Juliet collect dust in the backs of their lockers. “We got this,” they’ve been telling themselves, “we know most of the songs in West Side Story.” Then, when Mrs. Harris demands an essay about what love in the play means, Kahan panics, flips to the end of the book (and only the end of the book), and…

One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick up tiny perturbations in that light caused by seismic activity or even loud sounds, like from a passing ambulance. It’s a newfangled technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS.Because DAS can track…

Are you ready to O.D. on Jesus and Mary Chain? The group’s latest single, “jamcod,” which will appear on their upcoming Glasgow Eyes LP, finds frontman Jim Reid singing, “Tears are what you want, tears are what you got,” before the band’s trademark noise, led by Jim’s brother William’s guitar, kicks in and he builds to the titular chant: “J.A.M.C.O.D.” The group will achieve full overdose potential when Glasgow Eyes comes out on March 8. The band recorded the album, which contains typically iconoclastic-looking…

Sam Altman-run OpenAI on Monday announced it is rolling out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT that can now help the AI chatbot see, hear and speak. These capabilities offer a new, more intuitive type of interface by allowing you to have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you’re talking about, the company said in a statement. “Voice mode and vision for chatGPT! really worth a try,” Altman posted on X. The company said it is rolling out voice and images in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise…

Every April growing up in East Texas, Vincent Neil Emerson and his family traveled to Louisiana for their tribe’s annual powwow. For that one weekend of the year, the future singer-songwriter was immersed in the culture of his mother’s people, the Choctaw-Apache. He was dazzled by the spectacle of the dances, the drums and song, which were performed, at times, in traditional regalia, jewelry, and beadwork. Those memories were seared into his mind. “It’s always been a huge part of my life. It’s how I was…

Ishion Hutchinson, 40, is an original, innovative and fastidious poet whose third collection, School of Instructions, about West Indian volunteer soldiers fighting in the British army in the Middle East during the first world war, has been nominated for the 2023 TS Eliot prize. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Hutchinson comes across as a high-flying autodidact of exceptional energy, responsiveness and warmth. After attending university in Jamaica, he went on to do a master’s at New York University and now teaches poetry on…

And Dolly's takes on "Satisfaction," "Stairway to Heaven," and "Free Bird" rock too On Rockstar, which finally drops today, Dolly Parton challenged herself to get out of her comfort zone, focusing on singing rock & roll for the first time in her career. She wrote a few songs for the album but the vast majority of the tracks are covers, including some surprising picks. Her rendition of Prince and the Revolution’s “Purple Rain” leans deep into the gospel feel of the song, giving Parton space…

TikTokTikTok has become a platform that people go to to share and discover new music. Oftentimes, songs that go viral on TikTok also make it to the charts and become fan favorites. Now, TikTok is making it easier for you to stream those songs on your music streaming apps. Also: YouTube creators will need to identify AI-generated content now, or elseOn Tuesday, TikTok launched an "add to Music App" feature, which allows users in the US and UK to add songs from TikTok to their preferred music app, including Apple…

Noise-canceling headphones have come a long way with their transparency modes, allowing users to hear real-world noise even when listening to something on their headphones. However, they don’t let you control what you hear. Now, researchers have created a set of AI noise-canceling headphones that will let you select what noises you want to hear so you can filter out unnecessary sounds but still keep an ear out for important things. Tech. Entertainment. Science. Your inbox. Sign up for the most interesting tech…

The technology that makes it possible, called semantic hearing, could pave the way for smarter hearing aids and earphones, allowing the wearer to filter out some sounds while boosting others.  The system, which is still in prototype, works by connecting off-the-shelf noise-canceling headphones to a smartphone app. The microphones embedded in these headphones, which are used to cancel out noise, are repurposed to also detect the sounds in the world around the wearer. These sounds are then played back to a neural network,…