【推荐1】Austin City Limits (ACL) Music Festival is a music event that is held every year. It takes place at Zilker Park in Austin, Texas, and is hosted over two weekends in late September and early October, each lasting three days. It is an event that has grown in popularity since it began and now has as many as 450,000 people taking part in it.

The festival was founded in 2002 and is produced by C3 Presents, which is an Austin-based company. At first, it was inspired by a weekly music series broadcast, filmed live by KLRU, the local Austin television station, which is also called Austin City Limits. The first event was only two days long and 67 bands performed on five stages and the audience was around 25,000.

By 2003, around 100 bands were taking part in ACL Music Festival and in 2004, the event grew to over eight stages and extended (延续) to three days. The top attendance at the event was 75,000 people. The festival even won the Pollstar’s Festival of the Year Award in 2005. That year became known as the “Dust Bowl” year as the festival crowd kicked up so much dust that it was difficult for festival goers to breathe. The organizers settled this problem by using watering devices on the site.

With the exception of heavy rain in 2009, the festival continued over the next few years without any major dramas. In 2013, the organizers decided to extend the event over two weekends. Another important fact about that year was that the event was canceled on the third day of the second weekend due to heavy rain causing floods. Besides, the festival was called off due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020.

In recent years, there have been many excellent actors performing at the festival. Other than that, there are many other attractions at ACL Music Festival. These include Austin Eats and ACL Art Market. Furthermore, there is an ACL Cares section at the festival that allows festival goers to give something back to the community.

【推荐2】Chinese Dragon Head-raising Festival is a traditional Chinese festival held on the second day of the second month of the Chinese calendar. It marks the start of spring and farming. Ancient people believed that after this day, rainfall increases because the rain-bringing Dragon King has woken up from his winter sleep. In ancient times, farming highly depended on the weather. Proper rainfall and plenty of sunlight were necessary for a good harvest at the end of the year. The Chinese dragon, besides a symbol of good luck and great power, is also the god managing weather and water. So Dragon Head-raising Day is about honoring the Chinese dragon and praying for good weather in spring.

The festival celebrates ancient agrarian(农耕的) Chinese culture, and while some of traditional ways to celebrate it are no longer practiced, others persist.

The most famous tradition is getting a haircut. A saying warns that cutting your hair in the first month will cause your uncle to die. Although today few pay attention to it, it was once a tradition for people to line up outside barber shops this day after they avoided haircuts for the preceding(前面的)month.

Today Chinese Dragon Head-raising Day is celebrated in many different ways, most of which are still similar to those practiced in the ancient times, including eating spring pancakes and noodles. People eat tofu balls in East China’s Fujian Province during the festival while fried beans are the traditional festival food for people in parts of Shandong Province. Food eaten on this day also gets a lucky name. For example, noodles are “dragon’s beard” and dumplings are “dragon’s ears”.

【推荐3】London: The Edinburgh Festival, the biggest arts festival of its kind in the world, got under way in the Scotland capital on Sunday with a concert that included Hector Berlioz’s “To Deum”, under the direction of Christoph von Dohnanyi.

The festival, which runs until August 31 this year, includes as its high points Peter Stein’s staging of Wagner’s “Parsifal”, with Claudio Abbado directing the Gustav Mahler youth orchestra (管弦乐队). The concert programme includes American pianist Richard Goode, bass baritone Thomas Quash off and violinist Christian Tetzlaff. New to the programmers this year will be 25 late evening classical music concerts.

Earlier this month, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the largest show-case in the world for performance art, officially got under way with theatre, dance, poetry and music presentations(演出).

Many of the fringe artists, who can enter the fringe festival upon payment of a small fee, were inspired this year by the events of September 11.

Thousands of people flock to Edinburgh from around the world during the festival, which is over 50 years old. It aims to promote(促进) and encourage arts and to reflect international culture. It comprises(consists of) various dance, music, opera, and theatre presentations taking place across the city during the three-week run.

【推荐1】Roger Federer never let them see him sweat. He played tennis with a style that rarely showed the effort behind the masterful attacking. He did not cry on losses or celebrate wins wildly.

His seemingly effortless style helped him to win, and win a lot: 20 Grand Slam championships-a half-dozen more than any man before him, and 103 tournament titles, plus a Davis Cup award and Olympic medals for Switzerland, and stayed week after week at No. 1 in the rankings.

“Every time people write me off, or try to write me off, I’m able to comeback,” Federer once said. On Thursday, about a month past his 41st birthday, he announced that there would be no more comebacks this time.

“Some depart, others come and the world keeps going,” one of Federer’s competitors, Rafael Nadal, said. “It’s a natural cycle.”

Yes, the world will keep going. But tennis will not be the same. Once a table-throwing kid—off the court, where he would overturn aches stable when losing to his father—who grew up admiring basketball stars such as Michael Jordan and soccer players more than tennis players, Federer became a symbol of his sport: grace, humility, beloved by everyone.

“There will be people who will win more medals. There will always be a new No. 1. But no one has had such a big impact and will continue to have such a big impact,” Rafael Nadal admitted. “We’ll miss him.”

When it came to success, Federer cared about competition more than anything else. He was proud of facing—and defeating—stars from an earlier generation (Sampras and And re Agassi), from his own generation (Andy Roddick, Lleyton Hewitt and Mar at Safin), and from the next generation (Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka).

“I was lucky enough to play so many great matches that I will never forget,” Federer wrote in his goodbye post addressed to his competitors. “We battled with passion. We pushed each other, and together we took tennis to new levels.”

【推荐3】Though she has not released any new songs, Stefanie Sun has been dominating trending lists on the social media recently. The reason for this is a little strange, as there are AI versions of Sun’s songs topping the charts.

The popular tunes, which see Sun’s voice digitally inserted (嵌入) in place of the original singer for songs like Jay Chou’s Hair Like Snow, which have over 1 million views online, have resulted in some fantastic experiences for music fans.

Some fans have welcomed the AI-generated songs, saying they offer an option for people with different tastes in music. Sun hosted several online concerts. More than 240 million people watched her performances in a one-hour online concert in 2022. Though Sun last week appeared at a music festival, fans are far from satisfied as she only sang a couple of songs. Therefore, the recent AI-generated music featuring her voice has provided some comfort for fans that miss her performances.

But others have also raised concerns about copyright (版权) problems. In recent years, there have been many cases of artists being charged for sampling other artists’ work without permission. With the rise of AI-generated music, the issue is becoming more complicated. Another issue raised is its potential impact on lesser-known artists. In the highly competitive music industry, many talented artists struggle to get their music heard. The rise of AI-generated music featuring popular artists could further make it even harder for them to gain a place in the industry.

Despite these concerns, there’s no denying the popularity of the AI-generated music featuring Sun’s voice. Fans have praised the technology for its ability to create a diverse range of music, and for its ability to bring Sun’s voice back. The AI-generated music has also made it possible to honor singers who had passed away.

AI technology has already been used to create hit songs, and it’s likely that we’ll see even more AI-generated music in the future, which will continue to shape the future of the music industry.