Sinatra's Ghost Appears at Radio City...
Elvis' at Bank, Hendrix's at Toy Store
Technology has brought the late Frank Sinatra back to the stage, in a weird virtual-reality-meets-Rockettes show in New York. Elvis also made news in October, topping Forbes magazine's list of "Top Earning Dead Celebrities." Meanwhile, guitar icon Jimi Hendrix is returning as a toy action figure, just in time for Christmas.  More...

New Haunt for LA Orchestra
Architect Frank Gehry designed the new Disney Concert Hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The irregular, chaotic pile of metallic shapes houses a warm, wooden performance venue, whose October debut has gotten positive reviews.  More...

Ocean Giant Threatens Canary Islands
An enormous green wave towers 200 feet over Tenerife, just off the coast of Africa. Made of free-standing concrete, it's merely part of the striking new concert hall that opened there in September.  More...



Magical Mystery Tour
Northwestern University's Gary Kendall is no fool on the hill. The music professor's "The Beatles: An Interdisciplinary Mystery Tour" has confounded his department's expectations and become one of the school's most popular courses.  More...

Boston Kids Find Musical Spirit
It's hiding behind a 40-foot tall milk bottle, at the Boston Children's Museum. A $2 million interactive exhibition, "Making America's Music," is grabbing kids there until May 2004.  More...



Recent Escapes from the Vaults
Elvis was found in a basement in New Jersey, in the incarnation of a long-lost song (which hit the charts this month). Meanwhile, the music label run by Jimi Hendrix's family has released its first largely non-Jimi project, a DVD set of never-before released 1962-1966 performances from the American Folk Blues Festival.  More...

Ghost Riders in the Sky
… And on the air. From July through September, Friday-morning early-risers have heard spirits of Americana wafting from their clock radios, thanks to the NPR series "Honky Tonks, Hymns & the Blues." The complete 11-part history -- which examined the diverse people and issues that shaped the creation of America's musical traditions -- is now available on the Web. More...

Cockroaches Invade Kansas City Museum"The Music Gallery: If Music had an Attic…" it would have giant bugs. At least, it would on Halloween. The Grand Arts gallery recently hosted a creepy exhibition entitled "American Cockroach," a multimedia exploration of the least-loved of our insect friends.  More...

Extra-terrestrials Lift British Art Crowd into Orbit
Conceptually, at least, London's Tate Museum is already lost in space: not content with the challenges of getting people to attend earth-bound galleries, they're making plans for an orbiting museum. What started as a whimsical probe, "a provocative work of fiction," has become a full-fledged program, and the Tate's Trustees have declared that "the next Tate site should be in space." More...



Eerie Howls from Dunes, Black Holes
Marco Polo once described the roar of sand dunes as the call of desert spirits who "at times fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments." Thanks to some new research, now we know why. At the same time, astronomers using extra-sensitive ears have discovered an enormous black hole, 250 million light years away, that's humming the lowest note ever heard -- a B-flat, 57 octaves below middle C. More...

Speakers Stop Beating Hearts
Not because they're loud (they are), or because they're beautiful (they're that, too) -- but because they cost as much as a small car. New models from Bang & Olufsen and Ferguson Hill may actually be raising the blood pressure of serious (and seriously-loaded) audiophiles.  More...

Bats Help Blind Man Across Street
Indirectly. A zoologist in the UK was inspired by bats' use of sound to locate objects in the dark. The result: a sonar-enabled walking stick for the visually impaired. More...

A Shot in the Dark
Where did it come from? A high-tech company is preparing to offer US cities a system that uses an array of sensors to listen for the distinct acoustic signature of gunshots, and then triangulate on their location.  More...

Dolphins Talk on Cell Phone
Irish scientists have joined forces with British mobile phone company Vodaphone to pipe live sounds from a dolphin sanctuary to cell phone users (who would rather be swimming with the dolphins than sitting in traffic or boring meetings). But what the dolphins have to say may be "Shaddup!" More...

Sorcerer Waves Arms, Magically Creates Art
Whether one waves one's arms majestically -- or flops them around like a madman -- creates two different images. Literally. The Body Brush system, developed by Hong Kong multimedia researchers, takes physical movement and converts it to shapes and colors, live and in real time.  More...



Hiroshima Rises from the Abyss
Jazz pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi recently said "farewell" to playing concerts with a big band, with a big bang. Akiyoshi's three-decade retrospective concert at Carnegie Hall featured her suite, "Hiroshima Rising from the Ashes," recorded there in August, 2001 and recently released for the first time in the US.  More...

It's Alive
And it's coming into your house, right now… through your radio speakers. It's "Guitar Alive," a show featuring classical guitar performances, now covering 200 US cities and Europe (through a new international companion, EuroRadio Network  More...

Massive Amoeba Envelops California
While other music retailers have been shriveling and dying, Amoeba Music has been growing and growing. "Our store is vibrant; the walls have energy," says founder Mike Boyder. And its shelves carry an astonishing 300,000 items. More...



Opera Singer Carries Alien in Belly
The "fat lady" sang for the New York City Opera's production of "Lucia di Lammermoor" on October 3. But the leading lady, Jennifer Welch-Babidge, wasn't fat, she was singing for two: the soprano was almost 7 months pregnant during her City Opera debut. (The little bundle of alien joy, a boy, is due to debut in December.)  More...

Beatles Exorcise Spector
The Beatles just can't "Let it Be." That 30-year old work was released after their breakup -- and with some major doctoring by producer Phil Spector. This fall, with "Let it Be… Naked," the surviving Beatles have stripped away Spector's "wall of sound" effects and string arrangements to reveal the back-to-basics album they originally intended.  More...

Bat-Biter's Wife Captured by Mold
The notorious Ozzy Osbourne doesn't scare his longtime wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne. But cancer certainly gets her attention. A colon cancer survivor herself, Sharon has just donated an artistically-painted mold of her breasts to a charity auction.  More...



Mad Scientist Creates Franken-Strads
Biochemist Joesph Nagyvary of Texas A&M University used to study the origins of life. But for the past few decades, his basement laboratory has been turning out hand-made violins that many blindfolded experts prefer to the famed Stradivarius instruments. More...

Stalin's Spirit Tickles the Ivories
The Soviet tyrant died on March 5, 1953, but Uncle Joe's ghost shows up in positive ways in parlors around the world. The "Estonia" piano arose from his whims, and now flourishes as an alternative to the German titans Steinway, Bechstein and Bosendorfer.  More...

Bugle Plays "Taps"... without Bugler
Each day, death catches up with about 1,800 men and women who have served in the US military. However, only 500 buglers are on duty each day, with funds for musicians hard to come by. How to honor the dead with the traditional farewell, "Taps," without the indignity of a boom box? Hide it inside the bugle itself.  More...