Of greater concern in my opinion are the bears playing the music.

Cute? Yes.
Troubling despite being cute? Absolutely.

I would definitely make a point of exposing him to other artists.

I stumbled across this on RedFlagDeals this morning, originally posted because of the free lullaby offered on the site. What I found more interesting is the Soothing Sound Mixer (click Tools for a better sleep, top right) that lets you create your own background noise from a set of available sounds like rain falling, heartbeats, traffic among many other options. You can even mix various sounds together, control the volume, schedule a time for it to turn off, save and share your creations.

For those curious about the lullabies, they are Lullaby and Goodnight, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Hush Little Baby, Rock-A-Bye Baby and All The Pretty Horses and can be found here.

I’m sure many of you have come across albums from the Putumayo series at one time or another, those world music compilation CDs with the colorful covers and fun artwork. While I see them all the time I have to admit that I haven’t listened to many of them. The one exception would be the Caribbean Party album which was quite good, and whose selection of tracks was far less generic than I’d expected for this type of compilation album.

Anyway, it seems the Putumayo series has really taken to the web of late. My initial online contact was through a link to their new blog, but quickly turned to the Putumayo Kids website. The number of available children’s albums is actually quite extensive and could serve as an interesting gift option next time you need to pick up something small on your way to visit friends.
Example albums at Amazon here.

Here are some related Putumayo links:
Official Putumayo Site
Putumayo Kids
Blog

via Boing Boing

“Fan” video created to Devil’s Lullaby – didn’t leave nobody but the baby.

Creepy.

Chances are your kids aren’t familiar with Soca, and given the subject matter of much of the music that may not be an entirely bad thing. That said, there is always an exception and this classic video featuring Machel Montano as a young boy singing “Too Young To Soca” will have your child dancing all day long.

I spent some time at a concert this weekend (Dave Matthews)… an outdoor concert in a natural setting, but one that had some serious volume to it nonetheless. There were no homes or businesses for miles, so no need to temper the experience with reduced noise.

There were kids at this concert. Understand that this was not an event geared toward children, however many adults brought their kids along anyway to ‘experience’ it for themselves. From what I saw ages ranged into the teens, all the way down to babies no more than a few months old.

This is something I saw at Caribana earlier this summer as well, though at Caribana the children were at least as young and the volumes near the big trucks twice as loud.

Surely this can’t be good for a child’s ears… and must be generally overwhelming to them as well. I wonder if studies have been done on the longterm impacts to a kid’s hearing resulting from attendance at concerts from an early age. It just seems wrong to me.

This series was just brought to my attention today by a friend at work. The Rockabye Baby series consists of albums with keyboard and bell versions of music we’re all familiar with. The thing is, this is not the familiarity that you’d expect.

Sample artists include (among others):
Bob Marley (my personal favourite)
Radiohead
Nirvana
Tool (eek)
Led Zeppelin

Holy crap, listen to “Sober” on the Tool CD… terrifying. I thought the original was creepy, but the ‘kids’ version would have me curled up in a ball in the corner.

While identifying some of the tracks is a bit difficult, there are some genuinely entertaining items here… in particular the Bob Marley versions seem like options I’d play for my child.

Give them a listen – Amazon allows you to preview the tracks for each of the albums above. I’m going to load up on the Marley disc for future unforeseen gifting needs.

I’m definitely not a fan of music boxes… I find them terribly creepy. Blame my parents, horror movies, whoever, but the fact is I can’t be in the room with one.

Strange then that I don’t find this wooden music orb off-putting at all. Made of high quality oak, this “music orb” available from the Moma Store this little ball plays an 18 note chime from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

The only downside? My immediate desire upon seeing this thing was to pick it up and throw it as far as possible. Prepare to replace some windows.

Want.