Not filk, but filkers (or coders) might be interested...
New Sounds (
newsounds.org) is a genre-defying series that started as
late-night programming on New York Public Radio, exploring less-common
music -- anything from the oldest musics to the latest avant-garde, solo
to orchestral to synth to vocal... Basically, it it's something good
that will be new to most people, John and company will consider it. They
haven't done filk or other fannish musics yet, though some if the
cross-cultural collisions and invented instruments verge on the
steampunk-inspired bands I've heard. There's a themed episode every day,
sometimes repeats but lots of new material; John and company are still
discovering new performers and new recordings, and they're tied into the
New York new-music scene, recording performances at Bang On A Can as
well as hosting their own series of public performances and in-studio
sessions.
They have a podcast feed, but it wasn't always up to date, and it didn't
give access to the 40 years (4000 episodes!) of archived shows on their
website... So I've written a smart-speaker skill to explore their
offerings. It's still very much in development, and so far is Alexa-only
though I'm hoping to enable Google support soon. It can also access
their live stream, which has much the same mix of musics but mostly
without John's descriptions of what we're listening to and why it's
worth paying attention to (though it does include episodes of the show too).
If this sounds interesting, you're invited to alpha-test the Alexa
skill. Just tell me you're interested and give me the E-mail address
associated with your Alexa account. Note that this doesn't absolutely
require you have Alexa hardware; it can be run from a tablet or phone
that has the Alexa app installed.
And if you're interested in how it works, the JavaScript code has been
checked into Github as kubycsolutions/new-sounds-on-demand. Note that I
started this not knowing Alexa programming, not knowing the libraries
I'm using, and in fact barely knowing JavaScript, so I'm sure the code
isn't idiomatic for any of them, and it's "whittled" code so the
organization is less than optimal.
Feedback on either functionality or implementation is welcome, of
course. There's a fairly long wishlist of things I still want to do with
it, including. But it's a more complete example than I'd found
elsewhere, and I at least think it's a fun toy and good listening.
The producers are aware of it, so I'm hoping it may someday graduate to
being official. For now it's strictly skunkworks.
Anyway, thought some of you might be interested in either the code or
the music.
"We now return you to your regularly scheduled conversation."