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Dearest gentle reader, 'Bridgerton' has created a song for the first dance at your wedding

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Dearest gentle reader, 'Bridgerton' has created a song for the first dance at your wedding

Each new season of “Bridgerton” brings a bounty of reveals: Steamy romances. Elaborate balls. Whistledown dispatches. And string quartet covers of pop hits to accompany it all.

“We’re always looking for covers that are pretty recognizable and also enhance the story we’re telling,” said music supervisor Justin Kamps. “Sometimes we like the more straightforward cover with the steady tempo that’s perfect for the ball sequences, and then other times we like the ones with a bit more creativity in the arrangement so it’s a bit more emotional.”

Picking and placing orchestral covers for the Netflix series is an intricate process, beginning with what Season 3 showrunner Jess Brownell estimates to be “a playlist of maybe 100 or 200 orchestral versions of pop songs” that — with input from directors, producers and Netflix — is trimmed down to a dozen or so standouts.

According to the Economist, it’s led to a surge of classical musicians recording pop covers, string quartet bookings at weddings, and live events that merge classical music and pop. After the release of the third season’s first batch of episodes last month, Spotify searches for “Bridgerton” content increased 1,700%, while the creation of “Bridgerton”-related playlists on Spotify spiked nearly 400% in the U.S.

“Bridgerton” includes orchestral covers of pop music, but the show finally debuted its first original song.

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(Liam Daniel / Netflix)

“It’s been so exciting to watch the ‘Bridgerton’ sound become solidified and become so popular,” said the series’ composer Kris Bowers. “In the beginning, it was really an experiment, but now that we’re a few years into it, there’s this huge ocean of classical covers of pop songs that exists, either because of how many people were inspired by ‘Bridgerton’ or people who make one in hopes of getting into the show.”

After renditions of hits like BTS’ “Dynamite,” Ariana Grande’s “pov” and Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me,” Season 3 ends with an orchestral cover of “All I Want,” the franchise’s first original song. The cover evokes the series’ now-signature sound (this one performed by a string quintet instead of a quartet, noted Bowers) and echoes the pop sensibilities of songs regularly covered for “Bridgerton” — which is coincidental, because the songwriters for “All I Want” didn’t even know they were writing for the hit show.

“The prompt was to write a love song for a Netflix project that could be a first dance at a wedding,” said Rogét Chahayed, who wrote “All I Want” with friends and fellow songwriters Wesley Singerman, Taylor Dexter and Nicole Cohen in the span of a day. “It can be a lot of pressure to write to a prompt, but in the middle of the session, we all looked at each other and agreed that it sounded like a song you’d want to hear at a memorable event you share with your family and friends.”

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According to Bowers, an original “Bridgerton” song has been in the works for years; he was part of an attempt to create one for last year’s spinoff series “Queen Charlotte,” but it didn’t come to fruition. For “Bridgerton” fans, “All I Want” is worth the wait: the full track features the intricate vocals of Tori Kelly; its lyrics are a litany of similes for perfect fits and long-lasting love.

“A lot of people [writing music today] try to be aware of TikTok and trends and things like that,” added Chahayed. “But we really wanted this song to almost outlive social media and feel timeless, sound beautiful and say something really heartfelt.”

So with all the work put into “All I Want,” why does the orchestral cover play during the final episode’s end credits, a section regularly cut short for the viewer by Netflix’s previews, instead of during a key “Bridgerton” scene? It’s because of timing. According to Kamps, the initiative was “mostly spearheaded by the Netflix music team and the Netflix marketing team” for the “Bridgerton” wedding event earlier this year (Kelly debuted the track for the first dance between two newly wedded superfans).

“Everyone loved the song so much that they wanted to try to find a way to incorporate it into the actual show as well,” he explained. “Kris then did an amazing job with the cover and we were looking for somewhere [in the show] that made sense, but we had already found all these other spots for music that we love. So now it’s a lovely way to cap off the season.”

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Thankfully, fans who want to hear “All I Want” in full — both the Kelly version and the orchestral cover — can listen to it on the season’s soundtrack, now streaming on all digital platforms.

Movie Reviews

‘Madhuvidhu’ movie review: A light-hearted film that squanders a promising conflict

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‘Madhuvidhu’ movie review: A light-hearted film that squanders a promising conflict

At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.

When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.

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Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, sets opening date and first exhibition

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Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, sets opening date and first exhibition

After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.

Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.

The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”

“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”

The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.

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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.

(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)

Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”

“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”

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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.

Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.

“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”

“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”

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Michael Jackson documentary set to release after massive re-write

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Michael Jackson documentary set to release after massive re-write
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‘Michael’ — a new movie about the King of Pop – is drumming up big buzz. The film was produced in-part by the co-executors of the late singer’s estate, and has some critics questioning whether it is too focused on sanitizing the singer’s troubled image.

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