This is just a sneaking suspicion of mine, but I get this feeling that mainstream musicians will start mixing in a cappella influences in their musical creations in the coming year or years. By influences, I mean vocal bass and vocal percussion (aka beatboxing). Sure, this is not new stuff and I have heard beatboxing done since the 1980s. However, right now I do not think there is a single mainstream album out there that uses beatboxing nor vocal basses.

Thanks to groups like Pentatonix and Urban Method from The Sing-Off, I believe there will be a resurgence in employing vocal basses and percussion as these techniques allow musicians to put emotion into the low end of their sound, something that may not be easily accomplished with musical instruments. This is especially true in live performances and concerts where a human bass and beatboxer (ahem, vocal percussionist) can freestyle and easily adapt to any changes in the music.

Adding to that is Pentatonix. This group has certainly proved that it is possible for an a cappella group to create an authentic hip-hop/club/techno sound. Not only that, their Sing-Off performances have routinely broken into iTunes's top 100 list, and if this blog article is not wrong (no guarantees) they even had a song in the top 10 list on iTunes. So there is a strong possibility that Pentatonix may become the first a cappella group to go mainstream in this century. If this really happens, then 2012 may be the year that a cappella goes mainstream.

This video features The Sing-Off 2nd Runner-up Urban Method, The Sing-Off Champion Pentatonix and Flo Rida. Not a single musical instrument is used. That's right, other than microphones, there are no drums, no guitars, no electronic synth. It is done purely using human voices.



Just compare it with the original.



I'm really looking forward to a Pentatonix album.

A month ago, I rated the Sing-Off group Pentatonix as a black horse after hearing them sing three songs on the show. It has been a month and the group has skyrocketed to front runner by a mile. The group is so talented, creative and versatile that they have been able to deliver top notch performances despite having every genre of music being thrown at all the groups. Rock and Roll, Country, R&B, Pop, you name it, Pentatonix has nailed them all. Heck, in the recent week some of the groups have taken to blatantly imitating Pentatonix's signature style in a bid to stay in the competition. That is probably the ultimate compliment any competitor can give to Pentatonix.

If you don't follow The Sing-Off, here's what you have been missing out.

The Sing-Off is an acapella contest/tv show that has been airing in the states over the past two christmas. This year, the show has returned bigger than ever and features a much more varied teams. Out of this season's contestants the teams that are most likely to win this season's competition are Delilah, Vocal Point and Urban Method. Pentatonix also deserves a mention as they're a black horse that could easily rock the boat by being totally unique and talented.

Similar to last season's Backbeats, Delilah took some of the best female singers from past seasons of The Sing-Off to form this all female acapella group. Even though this performance comes from the very first episode of the season, many are already hailing Delilah's performance as the best one of the season.

The boys from Vocal Point are not the first acapella group from Brigham Young University to participate in The Sing-Off. Noteworthy from season one was also from BYU and like Noteworthy, Youtube have a collection of their past performances. And from their performance of this Frank Sinatra song, it is clear that these boys are strong at singing oldies.


Urban Method's call themselves a rappapella group who incorporate rap in their performance. Thus far, Urban Method have mostly been featuring two or three of their members with the rest mainly singing backup so it is hard to judge if they have the versatility or talent to win the competition. So far, they are ahead in the competition because they are seasoned musicians who are good at arranging their performance to showcase their strengths.


Finally, we come to Pentatonix. They come off as a young and possibly one of the least experienced groups remaining in the competition, but each of the five members that make up Pentatonix compensates with having insane talent for making club and techno style acapella. It is impressive that they are able to reproduce the music of the genre with no musical instruments or electronic equipment.

I just wanted to note down something Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently said at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.

"Trust me - if you gave people at Google free rein to produce TV you'd end up with a lot of bad sci-fi,"

I lol'ed a bit at the amount of truth in that statement.

I took a snapshot of search trends on all four Singapore Presidential Election candidates using Google Search Trends and Yahoo! Clues Trend Analysis on Saturday, 27 August, 2011 at roughly 8pm, when the polling stations close.

Google Search Trends
Historically, Google search tends to be used by the more technologically savvy web users such as young working professionals.

Google only reported search trends up to 25 August. Dr. Tony Tan leads the pack with the most number of searches, closely followed by Dr. Tan Cheng Bock. Tan Kin Lian's sudden peak on 23 August seems to be an outlier, possibly due to some controversial report on him, and the number of searchers seem to return to their original level roughly two days later. Tan Jee Say's searchers have consistently been lower than the other three presidential candidates thru-out the campaign period.

My analysis is that young, working professional voters were originally inclined towards Dr. Tony Tan but Dr. Tan Cheng Bock's electoral campaign strategy has managed to wrest the momentum away from Dr. Tony Tan. 

Yahoo! Clues Trends Analysis
Users of Yahoo! tend to come from a wider range of the population so it tends to reflect the search trend of the general Singapore population. Yahoo's search report is more detailed and includes gender and age breakdown.

Yahoo! searchers present a totally different perspective with Tan Jee Say getting the largest percentage of searches, followed by Dr. Tan Cheng Bock. Tan Kin Lian comes in third. Dr. Tony Tan came in last with the fewest number of searches, presumably because the Singapore population is familiar with Dr. Tony Tan as he has been a Member of Parliament for many years.

What I find noteworthy are the twin peaks on 11 August and 19 August. All four presidential candidates were awarded certificate of eligibility on 11 August, resulting in a rush by the population to find out more about Tan Jee Say, Dr. Tan Cheng Bock and Tan Kin Lian.

The first speeches by all four presidential candidates was broadcast on the night of 18 August. The very next day, all searches on four candidates peaked with Tan Jee Say yet again getting the most searches, closely followed by Dr. Tan Cheng Bock and Tan Kin Lian. Once again Dr. Tony Ton received the least number of searches.

Recently I read a blog that claims using long phrase-like passwords such as "this is fun" is much more secure than using cryptic but short passwords like "J4fS!2". And on the surface, it seems true. The tried and true method for cracking passwords is the brute-force method of trying every single possible combination of passwords. So it seems to make sense that a long 11 character password such as "this is fun" would naturally require a longer time to crack than a short 6 character password of "J4fS!2".

This is so not true.

The blogger makes an faulty assumption that brute-force crackers treat passwords as if it were a number combination lock. A number combination lock can be unlocked by trying every single possible number combination starting from 1, 2, 3, 4, .... 995, 996, 997, 998, 999 and so on.

In reality, a smart password cracking program would first try the most commonly used passwords first before resorting to every possible sequence of characters. And as a computational linguist, I know there are lots of open and publicly accessible databases/corpora for most commonly used phrases in all languages. These corpora are usually used for language-based applications such as speech recognition, text summarization and question answering, but an evil person can also use the same database to crack commonly used password phrases.