This season’s most terrifying Christmas song was written by a Canadian robot

A team at the University of Toronto computer science lab have developed a neural network capable of writing melodies and lyrics on the prompting of an image. Their “neural karaoke” program was trained on 100 hours of holiday music (poor thing) and 50 hours of lyrics, then fed a collection of captioned images to make connections between visual data and associated concepts. chartattack.com.

Neil Young to expand digital audio service Pono into streaming

Never say Neil Young isn’t persistent. His Pono audiophile download service may not have captured the public imagination – launching, as it did, just as streaming became a huge force in music consumption – but that hasn’t stopped the veteran Canadian rocker from deciding to take another push at saving our ears from over-compressed music files. TheGuardian.com.

All of this while Edison Research posts their Q-3 2016 study on the share of all audio listening and despite growth in many streaming services, AM/FM dominates with a 50% share of audio time spent. Streaming services are growing at the expense of pre-owned music, not AM/FM radio.

And Finally

How can we let the passing of Alan Thicke, Farther of one Canadas’ most well known musical exports, Robin Sparkles. go without at least a mention.