While it's always been difficult to pinpoint the reasons behind the musical urge (or addiction), there does appear to be a segment of society that thrives on the benefits of organized sound. I guess that musicians and composers are contributing members of a distinctive clan - or share a common mutation of genes that promotes the impulse within our environment.
Taking the long view, I've been impressed with the scientific discoveries that have been made in our life-time: Gernomics, Information Technology, Robotics, AI, Physics, Astronomy, Medicine, Brain-imaging with fMRI, Biotech, Mathematics, etc, etc, etc.
It's a completely different world today than what existed in our childhood. And yet, if you peal away all the superficial aspects of musical expression and look at the fundamentals, Music is basically an age-old art-form more akin to religion or some esoteric philosophy.
If you have to ask "why" or "how" music is so pervasive and influential, you are either asking the wrong question or oblivious to the inherently vaporous patterns of the basic impulse. It's clearly more intuitive than scientific.
But, sometimes when in a state of dubious rationality, I do question the blind faith that is required to accept the fundamental premise of the musical experience. Taken as a whole, the status quo often seems so relative and arbitrary.
Is it possible that our artistic lives are based on a falsehood, that music is nothing more than a residual organ of an obsolete cultural norm? Or, as practicing musicians, are we way ahead of our time and in fact early practitioners of a brand new, yet-to-emerge, science?
At present, I remain on the fence: a Musical Agnostic.
A little about me
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Going Rogue
Waves are everywhere.
Most of the time they are very predictable. The mathematics of probability theory show that the size of waves fall within a very clearly defined window of measurable and predictable amplitude.
But is size everything?
Earlier this week a 26-foot rogue wave came out of nowhere to hit a cruise ship in the French Mediterranean. Two passengers were killed and six people injured.
The study and science of "rogue" or "freak" waves is rather new. It's really in the past decade that researchers have had the tools to study the phenomenon in depth. Many didn't even believe that the phenomenon existed, since there was no clear scientific evidence on record.
The entire world-wide shipping industry has evolved on the assumption that waves will never attain a height beyond 50-feet. Ships are designed to withstand that "worst case" scenario, but anything taller is likely to inflict damage or disaster. But in the last two decades over 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length have been damaged or were sunk by this random and freakish act of nature.
Then on New Year's day in 1995, the Draupner platform in the North Sea was pounded by one of the mysterious rogue waves. It was massive, and oddly enough, it was the first time a rogue wave had ever been recorded.
A rogue wave is not the same as Tsunami. They come out of nowhere, and can occur anywhere in the sea. They also defy our assumptions about how waves are created.
The new paradigm regarding rogue waves utilizes a different mathematical model, one that is associated with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics does not neatly conform our old rules of classical physics. Rogue waves are not possible in Newton's world
In a nutshell, rogue waves are thought to be nonlinear.
If you are the sort of person that needs an equation to explain the ocean surf, then you will be comforted to know that the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) does the job.
For those of us who are math-challenged, all you really need to know is that rogue waves start off as a "normal" wave, but then suck up energy from its' adjacent neighbors. The waves just before and after the emerging rogue wave are demoted to mere ripples. Their energy is transferred to the rogue wave, and it becomes a solid wall of moving water.
The upper limit is not known, but past encounters have shown that rogue waves can attain a height of well over 100 feet. Think about that the next time you book a vacation cruise.
As someone who in inclined to think defensively, I began to wonder if the nonlinear Schrödinger equation might apply to other areas of the physical universe. For example, is there such thing as a rogue sound wave? Is it possible that a non suspecting audience at Symphony Hall attending a concert by the Boston Symphony might be subjected suddenly to a "death wave" of sound emerging randomly from a performance of Beethoven's 5th symphony?
I've heard a lot of rogue pieces of music in my life, but so far the random killer piece of music has resulted from acts that are purely human in origin. But it does beg the question since this nonlinear phenomenon is proven to be fact (albeit relatively rare): Is there even a remote possibility that a freakish synergy created by some strange combination of audio frequencies could behave in this deadly fashion?
To be honest, I wouldn't rule it out.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave
Most of the time they are very predictable. The mathematics of probability theory show that the size of waves fall within a very clearly defined window of measurable and predictable amplitude.
But is size everything?
Earlier this week a 26-foot rogue wave came out of nowhere to hit a cruise ship in the French Mediterranean. Two passengers were killed and six people injured.
The study and science of "rogue" or "freak" waves is rather new. It's really in the past decade that researchers have had the tools to study the phenomenon in depth. Many didn't even believe that the phenomenon existed, since there was no clear scientific evidence on record.
The entire world-wide shipping industry has evolved on the assumption that waves will never attain a height beyond 50-feet. Ships are designed to withstand that "worst case" scenario, but anything taller is likely to inflict damage or disaster. But in the last two decades over 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length have been damaged or were sunk by this random and freakish act of nature.
Then on New Year's day in 1995, the Draupner platform in the North Sea was pounded by one of the mysterious rogue waves. It was massive, and oddly enough, it was the first time a rogue wave had ever been recorded.
A rogue wave is not the same as Tsunami. They come out of nowhere, and can occur anywhere in the sea. They also defy our assumptions about how waves are created.The new paradigm regarding rogue waves utilizes a different mathematical model, one that is associated with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics does not neatly conform our old rules of classical physics. Rogue waves are not possible in Newton's world
In a nutshell, rogue waves are thought to be nonlinear.
If you are the sort of person that needs an equation to explain the ocean surf, then you will be comforted to know that the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) does the job.
For those of us who are math-challenged, all you really need to know is that rogue waves start off as a "normal" wave, but then suck up energy from its' adjacent neighbors. The waves just before and after the emerging rogue wave are demoted to mere ripples. Their energy is transferred to the rogue wave, and it becomes a solid wall of moving water.
The upper limit is not known, but past encounters have shown that rogue waves can attain a height of well over 100 feet. Think about that the next time you book a vacation cruise.
As someone who in inclined to think defensively, I began to wonder if the nonlinear Schrödinger equation might apply to other areas of the physical universe. For example, is there such thing as a rogue sound wave? Is it possible that a non suspecting audience at Symphony Hall attending a concert by the Boston Symphony might be subjected suddenly to a "death wave" of sound emerging randomly from a performance of Beethoven's 5th symphony?
I've heard a lot of rogue pieces of music in my life, but so far the random killer piece of music has resulted from acts that are purely human in origin. But it does beg the question since this nonlinear phenomenon is proven to be fact (albeit relatively rare): Is there even a remote possibility that a freakish synergy created by some strange combination of audio frequencies could behave in this deadly fashion?
To be honest, I wouldn't rule it out.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave
------------------------
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Hypermusic Prologue comes to Boston
Perhaps you read about it here on Deconstructing-Jim back in 2008...
http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2008/12/hypermusic-prologue.html
Now you can see the opera Hypermusic Prologue live at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge on Saturday, Feb. 27th, 2010 at 7:30 pm.
Here is an excerpt from Longy's Press Release:
Barcelona composer Hector Parra of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, will perform a version of the popular Hypermusic Prologue, a unique project for intercommunication between science, music and art. The opera libretto was written by theoretical physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard and a member of Longy's Board of Visitors. The work has been described as "one of the great achievements of European contemporary music in this century."
------------
Monday, December 14, 2009
Some thoughts on hearing
Neural Science may someday develop to the point where they will explain why we listen to music. But for now, the subject of how we listen to music is complex enough.
Although there is a theory that plants like to groove to Rock music, our fellow mammals don't seem to care for it. A neural scientist at NY University said, "...if you give monkeys a choice between music and silence, they choose silence pretty strongly."
Yet every human culture studied exhibits music in some form. It seems to have always been that way. An artifact of a 43,ooo to 82,ooo-year Neanderthal bone flute was excavated recently from the cave of our distant ancestor in Germany. It's tuned for "Do-Re-Mi."
Here are a few curious facts...
Humans come with eyelids which allow us to voluntarily shut out what we see. Why didn't we evolve with ear flaps? It would be nice to turn off an annoying sound - or a bad piece of music. (Those of us with hearing-aids thankfully have volume controls).
Of all our senses, hearing seems to be the most supercharged. We hear in the equivalent of a 60" LCD flat-panel HDTV with 1080p resolution in 3D. Compared to vision, hearing can differentiate between discrete temporal events much more accurately than the human eye. A percussionist playing on a snare drum can easily tap out a repetitive pattern of twenty beats per second. We will hear each tap on the drum as an individual event in time. But when twenty successive images are presented to the eye, we see it as a movie. The brain connects the images, unifies them, and interprets the string of visual events quite differently.
This means that music can potentially express ideas and relationships that the visual arts can not. Works that push the envelope of aural perception - such as Milton Babbitt's solo snare drum piece of 1987 - "Homily" - explore rhythm to the max. The ear is faster than the eye, and when the message includes stimuli from both senses, the ear usually wins.
But just how does the brain resolve conflicts between the senses? There is at least one example where visual cues override aural input. If you watch a film where someone on the screen mouths the word "bah" while the soundtrack plays the sound of "dah," your brain will perceive the word as "bah." However, when we are confronted with other contradicting pieces of information, such as rapid flashes of light and the sound of quickfire beeps, our brains usually defer to our ears for accuracy.
The complexity of the ear-eye relationship in music is quite pronounced for the orchestral conductor. The conductor has an almost impossible task to stand before a hundred or so musicians who sit at varying degrees of distance from one another and relay a series of variable beats to them on a rather precise time-grid. Orchestral musicians all see the conductor from a different perspective, and hear the flow of the music in differing degrees of delay because of the room acoustics. They have to meld together both visual and aural information in the context of the written music sitting before them on the music stand.
For the conductor, something as simple as communicating a downbeat is fraught with complexity. The exact start-time with which s musical event begins and how it will ultimately sound has many variables. Unlike an oscillator, musical instruments don't have two states: ON or OFF. The complex and important micro-events that occur within the short attack of a single note exists well within the human perception of time.
Individually and collectively the complex acoustical soup of these events are channeled through the front-end processing of the listeners' middle and inner ear. The information is ultimately parsed, processed and interpreted by the amazing audio engineering burned into our brains.
Generally speaking, we find pleasure with what we hear. Talented and trained musicians and conductors have honed their visual-aural communication skills to maximize results and minimize collective error. Exactitude and clarity is the name of the game.
Composers often have to delegate the details of implementation of their works to conductors and musicians, but are well aware of the complexities of aural perception and the limits of human performance. It's long been known that we can hear far faster than we can physically perform.
As a consequence, some composers have ventured into the world of electronic music to exploit the full capacity of the impressive engineering of the human hearing mechanism. Computer-generated music can (and often does) move at a dizzying pace, and often outstrips even the most agile of musicians who perform on acoustic instruments. Perceptually, we can process music at a very rapid rate - taking in events far quicker than anyone can physically produce them. Some composers (such as Babbitt) have skillfully explored this rich territory of sound, and pushed both our hearing and what can be considered valid musical content right up to the limits of human perception.
Although there is a theory that plants like to groove to Rock music, our fellow mammals don't seem to care for it. A neural scientist at NY University said, "...if you give monkeys a choice between music and silence, they choose silence pretty strongly."
Yet every human culture studied exhibits music in some form. It seems to have always been that way. An artifact of a 43,ooo to 82,ooo-year Neanderthal bone flute was excavated recently from the cave of our distant ancestor in Germany. It's tuned for "Do-Re-Mi."
Here are a few curious facts...
Humans come with eyelids which allow us to voluntarily shut out what we see. Why didn't we evolve with ear flaps? It would be nice to turn off an annoying sound - or a bad piece of music. (Those of us with hearing-aids thankfully have volume controls).
Of all our senses, hearing seems to be the most supercharged. We hear in the equivalent of a 60" LCD flat-panel HDTV with 1080p resolution in 3D. Compared to vision, hearing can differentiate between discrete temporal events much more accurately than the human eye. A percussionist playing on a snare drum can easily tap out a repetitive pattern of twenty beats per second. We will hear each tap on the drum as an individual event in time. But when twenty successive images are presented to the eye, we see it as a movie. The brain connects the images, unifies them, and interprets the string of visual events quite differently.
This means that music can potentially express ideas and relationships that the visual arts can not. Works that push the envelope of aural perception - such as Milton Babbitt's solo snare drum piece of 1987 - "Homily" - explore rhythm to the max. The ear is faster than the eye, and when the message includes stimuli from both senses, the ear usually wins.
But just how does the brain resolve conflicts between the senses? There is at least one example where visual cues override aural input. If you watch a film where someone on the screen mouths the word "bah" while the soundtrack plays the sound of "dah," your brain will perceive the word as "bah." However, when we are confronted with other contradicting pieces of information, such as rapid flashes of light and the sound of quickfire beeps, our brains usually defer to our ears for accuracy.
The complexity of the ear-eye relationship in music is quite pronounced for the orchestral conductor. The conductor has an almost impossible task to stand before a hundred or so musicians who sit at varying degrees of distance from one another and relay a series of variable beats to them on a rather precise time-grid. Orchestral musicians all see the conductor from a different perspective, and hear the flow of the music in differing degrees of delay because of the room acoustics. They have to meld together both visual and aural information in the context of the written music sitting before them on the music stand.
For the conductor, something as simple as communicating a downbeat is fraught with complexity. The exact start-time with which s musical event begins and how it will ultimately sound has many variables. Unlike an oscillator, musical instruments don't have two states: ON or OFF. The complex and important micro-events that occur within the short attack of a single note exists well within the human perception of time.
Individually and collectively the complex acoustical soup of these events are channeled through the front-end processing of the listeners' middle and inner ear. The information is ultimately parsed, processed and interpreted by the amazing audio engineering burned into our brains.
Generally speaking, we find pleasure with what we hear. Talented and trained musicians and conductors have honed their visual-aural communication skills to maximize results and minimize collective error. Exactitude and clarity is the name of the game.
Composers often have to delegate the details of implementation of their works to conductors and musicians, but are well aware of the complexities of aural perception and the limits of human performance. It's long been known that we can hear far faster than we can physically perform.
As a consequence, some composers have ventured into the world of electronic music to exploit the full capacity of the impressive engineering of the human hearing mechanism. Computer-generated music can (and often does) move at a dizzying pace, and often outstrips even the most agile of musicians who perform on acoustic instruments. Perceptually, we can process music at a very rapid rate - taking in events far quicker than anyone can physically produce them. Some composers (such as Babbitt) have skillfully explored this rich territory of sound, and pushed both our hearing and what can be considered valid musical content right up to the limits of human perception.
------------------
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Factoid
Here is a story comparing how things were done at the Russian Federal Space Agency verses NASA....
NASA was spending millions of dollars to solve the ball-point pen problem. Pens don't work well in space. They leak, and the need gravity to push the ink down to the tip. It was an aggravating technical problem, and the best NASA engineers couldn't figure out how to solve it. During the cold war they puzzled, "How is it that the Russian's could make it work when NASA could not?"
After the cold war ended and communication between the Soviet Union and the USA improved, there was free scientific dialog between the two space agencies. The American scientists asked their Russian counterparts, "how do you write in space?"
The answer was simple, "with pencils."
The above story is a good one, but it is an urban myth. Currently a "Zero Gravity Pen" is available from the Fisher Space Pen Company. It uses pressurized ink cartridges. The hi-tech pen was developed independently of NASA with 11 million R&D dollars by inventor Paul C. Fisher. Today Fisher sells different models of his hi-tech zero gravity pens to both the Russian and American space agencies. The Russian Space program ordered 100 Fisher Space pens for the Soyuz mission in 1969. You can purchase a consumer version of these pens online for $25 or less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
http://www.spacepen.com/zerogravitypen.aspx
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_zero_gravity_pen.htm
http://space.about.com/od/spaceexplorationhistory/a/spacepen.htm
NASA was spending millions of dollars to solve the ball-point pen problem. Pens don't work well in space. They leak, and the need gravity to push the ink down to the tip. It was an aggravating technical problem, and the best NASA engineers couldn't figure out how to solve it. During the cold war they puzzled, "How is it that the Russian's could make it work when NASA could not?"
After the cold war ended and communication between the Soviet Union and the USA improved, there was free scientific dialog between the two space agencies. The American scientists asked their Russian counterparts, "how do you write in space?"
The answer was simple, "with pencils."
---------------
The above story is a good one, but it is an urban myth. Currently a "Zero Gravity Pen" is available from the Fisher Space Pen Company. It uses pressurized ink cartridges. The hi-tech pen was developed independently of NASA with 11 million R&D dollars by inventor Paul C. Fisher. Today Fisher sells different models of his hi-tech zero gravity pens to both the Russian and American space agencies. The Russian Space program ordered 100 Fisher Space pens for the Soyuz mission in 1969. You can purchase a consumer version of these pens online for $25 or less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
http://www.spacepen.com/zerogravitypen.aspx
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_zero_gravity_pen.htm
http://space.about.com/od/spaceexplorationhistory/a/spacepen.htm
-------------
Monday, November 9, 2009
ISS versus Hubble
Perhaps you've been wondering how Jim weighs in on NASA's expenditures. Everyone should have an opinion about this, even modernist composers such as myself.
Construction on the International Space Station (ISS) began in 1998, and is expected to be completed in 2011 when the remaining Space Shuttles will be forced into retirement. The purpose of the ISS is to serve as a long-term research laboratory in space, but the projected life-expectancy of this project is not very long. By some accounts it will be retired in 2015 by crashing it into the ocean (remember Skylab?).
Researchers on the ISS perform experiments in biology, physics, astronomy, and meteorology that require a microgravity environment. But when you think about it, many of these experiments could probably be done less expensively on the "vomit comet" or other platforms. While there are many benefits derived from building and maintaining such a major installation with international support, the tangible scientific take aways come at a steep cost. Some have estimated that the ISS will cost up to a 100 billion dollars. That's $100,000,000,000.00
In contrast, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been in orbit since April of 1990. It has performed as an amazing tool in the field of astronomy - changing what we know about the universe. Hubble was not inexpensive. It has cost around $10 billion dollars to design, build, launch, and maintain. It's most recent (and final) upgrade cost just over $1 billion.
In the end I think we will learn much more from Hubble than from the ISS. The ISS will end up costing ten times what Hubble has, but with fewer benefits.
A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon we're talking about real money.
Construction on the International Space Station (ISS) began in 1998, and is expected to be completed in 2011 when the remaining Space Shuttles will be forced into retirement. The purpose of the ISS is to serve as a long-term research laboratory in space, but the projected life-expectancy of this project is not very long. By some accounts it will be retired in 2015 by crashing it into the ocean (remember Skylab?).Researchers on the ISS perform experiments in biology, physics, astronomy, and meteorology that require a microgravity environment. But when you think about it, many of these experiments could probably be done less expensively on the "vomit comet" or other platforms. While there are many benefits derived from building and maintaining such a major installation with international support, the tangible scientific take aways come at a steep cost. Some have estimated that the ISS will cost up to a 100 billion dollars. That's $100,000,000,000.00
In contrast, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been in orbit since April of 1990. It has performed as an amazing tool in the field of astronomy - changing what we know about the universe. Hubble was not inexpensive. It has cost around $10 billion dollars to design, build, launch, and maintain. It's most recent (and final) upgrade cost just over $1 billion.In the end I think we will learn much more from Hubble than from the ISS. The ISS will end up costing ten times what Hubble has, but with fewer benefits.
A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon we're talking about real money.
-------------
Friday, November 6, 2009
Cry Melodies
We've long know about the cultural divide between French and German music. It's one of the great aesthetic confrontations of music history, and the conflict continues today.
Now, researchers at the University of Würzburg in Germany have made an interesting discovery - and it involves (of all things) screaming babies.
What they found is that French babies had a tendency to cry "with a rising melody contour." In direct contrast, German babies cried with falling melodic contours in their vocalizations. These differences in pitch inflection mirror the pitch characteristics of the native language, which presumably was learned by the newborn prenatally.
Does this new scientific evidence lend support to our perception of stylistic differences between say Schoenberg and Debussy? I can think of numerous melodic phrases in Schoenberg that end in a descending stepwise motion. Likewise, Debussy's melodic lines often soar in a decisively upward direction.
The differences between Arnold's schrei-melodie, and Claude's mélodie de cri go well beyond an adult preference for Wiener Schnitzel or Quiche Lorraine. It's potentially something that we mastered in the womb.
The bottom line? Your musical preferences may have been set in place months before you were born.
Now, that's something to cry out about.
Link: http://www.newsweek.com/id/221357
Now, researchers at the University of Würzburg in Germany have made an interesting discovery - and it involves (of all things) screaming babies.
What they found is that French babies had a tendency to cry "with a rising melody contour." In direct contrast, German babies cried with falling melodic contours in their vocalizations. These differences in pitch inflection mirror the pitch characteristics of the native language, which presumably was learned by the newborn prenatally.
Does this new scientific evidence lend support to our perception of stylistic differences between say Schoenberg and Debussy? I can think of numerous melodic phrases in Schoenberg that end in a descending stepwise motion. Likewise, Debussy's melodic lines often soar in a decisively upward direction.
The differences between Arnold's schrei-melodie, and Claude's mélodie de cri go well beyond an adult preference for Wiener Schnitzel or Quiche Lorraine. It's potentially something that we mastered in the womb.
The bottom line? Your musical preferences may have been set in place months before you were born.
Now, that's something to cry out about.
Link: http://www.newsweek.com/id/221357
-----------------
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Factoid
PBS's NOVA aired a program about botany that discussed the classification of plants. It has recently been determined that groups of plants are related to each other according to their genetic makeup. It's all about DNA.
As it turns out, "strawberries and marijuana are closely related."
= 
"Strawberry Fields Forever" -John Lennon, 1967
Link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/flower/about.html
As it turns out, "strawberries and marijuana are closely related."
= 
"Strawberry Fields Forever" -John Lennon, 1967
Link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/flower/about.html
---------------------
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
IESO 2009 in Taiwan
He was selected as one of four student participants to represent the United States at the 2009 International Earth Science Olympiad (IESO) in Taiwan.
The conference began on September 14th and will conclude on September 22nd. High school contestants from 15 participating countries will work in teams to solve the world's environmental problems, do field science work, and experience the culture of Taiwan. Other countries participating this year include Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Nepal, Nigeria, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Joseph (in photo with microphone above) was selected earlier this summer by scoring amongst the top four in an exam administered at the UVM/GIV Engineering Institute held at the UVM College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences (CEMS) in Burlington Vermont. The purpose of the UMV/GIV Institute is to help students gain an understanding of how research can work to solve societal problems through creative engineering. Students focus on how technology impacts humans, do hands-on engineering projects, participate in tours and engage in presentations by professors, computer scientists and mathematicians. The award ceremony from the UMV/GIV Institute is shown in the YouTube video below...
The IESO 2009 conference in Taipei Taiwan will focus on sustainability issues such as climate change. Now in its third year, the international event has seen a sharp increase in the number of participating countries from six to 15, with the United Kingdom and Italy joining the competition for the first time. It marks the first time Taiwan has hosted the annual event aimed at enhancing young students' interest in and understanding of the natural environment, climatic changes and the relationship between humans and nature.
IESO contestants will travel to the 921 Earthquake Museum in central Taiwan's Nantou County for inspection. They will conduct field surveys in the 921 earthquake memorial park and then present their briefings to a jury of experts to vie for the "best teamwork" and "best field survey" awards. All the contestants will be taken to Taiwan's northern coastline known for its complicated geological formations.
The IESO American Team is chaperoned by Tom and Beth Tailer, co-directors of the UVM/GIV Engineering Institute. They have been providing online mentoring for Joseph and his American teammates all summer. Joseph had crammed for much of his summer vacation in preparation for the highly-competitive event, which includes team sequestering and lengthy written exams. Upon the US team’s arrival in Taipei, Beth Tailor emailed the parents indicating, “The students did a wonderful job at the opening ceremony, and their presentation and skit were well received.” She added, “The food is plentiful, and we already have many stories to tell.”
The first IESO competition was held in South Korea in 2007, followed by a second event in the Philippines the following year. This marks the first time Taiwan has hosted the annual IESO event, which is aimed at enhancing young students' interest in and understanding of the natural environment, climatic changes and the relationship between humans and nature.
The 2009 IESO will conclude on September 21st with an award presentation ceremony where it is anticipated that gifts will be given to the foreign contestants by the host country to help them better understand Taiwan's culture and lifestyle.
Here is the American team during a visit to the National Palace Museum...
Link: http://www.ieso2009.tw/home/home.htm
-----------------
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Factoid
Kodachrome film is about to be discontinued. But who invented it?
Kodachrome color film was invented by two musicians: Leopold Godowsky, Jr. (1900-1983) and Leopold Damrosch Mannes (1899-1964). The Patent Number that made them rich is 1,997,493.
Leopold Godowsky, Jr. was an accomplished professional violinist who played first violinist with the both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras. His father, Leopold Godowsky, was one of the great pianists and composers of the early 20th century. Leopold Godowsky Jr. married Frances Gershwin. Frances, the kid sister of George and Ira, was a singer and fine musician in her own right.
Leopold Damrosch Mannes was a pianist-composer (yep, that's not a typo, he was a composer!). He studied music at Juilliard and at Harvard under a Pulitzer Music Scholarship. In 1926 was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to study music composition in Italy.
Mannes' father was concertmaster of the New York Symphony (which later morphed into the NY Philharmonic). It was conducted by Walter Damrosch. Leopold married the Maestro's pianist sister, Clara Damrosch (1870-1948), and together they concertized throughout the world as a violin and piano duo.
After Leopold Mannes retired from Kodak, he served as president of the Mannes College of Music, which had been founded by his parents in 1916. He continued to perform as a pianist and composed several musical works (which like Kodachrome film, are now lost to history). Mannes served as a judge for music competitions, including the inaugural Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
The Godowsky and Mannes Archives are currently held in the collection of Thurman F. Naylor, in Chestnut Hill, MA.
Now, that was a Kodak moment.
It begs another question, why is Leopold no longer a popular children's name?
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky,_Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Mannes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Gershwin
Kodachrome color film was invented by two musicians: Leopold Godowsky, Jr. (1900-1983) and Leopold Damrosch Mannes (1899-1964). The Patent Number that made them rich is 1,997,493.
Leopold Godowsky, Jr. was an accomplished professional violinist who played first violinist with the both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras. His father, Leopold Godowsky, was one of the great pianists and composers of the early 20th century. Leopold Godowsky Jr. married Frances Gershwin. Frances, the kid sister of George and Ira, was a singer and fine musician in her own right.
Leopold Damrosch Mannes was a pianist-composer (yep, that's not a typo, he was a composer!). He studied music at Juilliard and at Harvard under a Pulitzer Music Scholarship. In 1926 was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to study music composition in Italy.
Mannes' father was concertmaster of the New York Symphony (which later morphed into the NY Philharmonic). It was conducted by Walter Damrosch. Leopold married the Maestro's pianist sister, Clara Damrosch (1870-1948), and together they concertized throughout the world as a violin and piano duo.
After Leopold Mannes retired from Kodak, he served as president of the Mannes College of Music, which had been founded by his parents in 1916. He continued to perform as a pianist and composed several musical works (which like Kodachrome film, are now lost to history). Mannes served as a judge for music competitions, including the inaugural Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
The Godowsky and Mannes Archives are currently held in the collection of Thurman F. Naylor, in Chestnut Hill, MA.
Now, that was a Kodak moment.
It begs another question, why is Leopold no longer a popular children's name?
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky,_Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Mannes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Gershwin
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Saturday, May 2, 2009
Snowball
Music is going to the birds - literally.
Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo from Indiana is among 14 documented species of parrots to have rhythm. It's scientifically proven. In two studies recently published in Current Biology, scientists have concluded that these dancing birds are clearly able to synchronize their head bobs and leg movements to throbbing music.
What do they like to listen to you ask? Boulez? Babbitt? Stockhausen? Berio?
Snowball seems to have a preference for the Backstreet Boys, Queen, and Steve Nicks. He (or she?) has even performed on Dave Letterman. More than two and a half million people have viewed the following YouTube video alone...
That makes sense. I have often wondered why music is so pervasive in human culture. It is obviously part of our hard-wired human neurology, yet at the same time the skill appears to be completely useless in terms of an evolutionary trait of natural selection. Why have composers and musicians not died out? They don't contribute anything essential toward survival.
Perhaps if Snowball took a college-level course in music appreciation, and was exposed to the high-culture art of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, his/her taste in music might broaden and mature. On the other hand, perhaps the Backstreet Boys is the best humanity can offer, and anything else pales in comparison.
Whatever the case, Snowball seems to have a good agent, and I know musicans who would give anything for that amount of fame or celebrity.
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Monday, February 23, 2009
Lulin - the green comet
Today at 10:43 PM EST comet Lulin (鹿林) will streak by the earth. It will be within 38 million miles (0.41 AU) – 160 times farther than the moon. It is expected to be visible to the naked eye. Discovered only a year ago by a Chinese teenager, the comet gains its green color from poisonous cyanogen and diatomic carbon gases in its atmosphere.
http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/02/green-comet-lulin.html
While planets in our system circle the sun counter-clockwise, Lulin circles clockwise. This makes the comet appear that the tail is in front (or backwards) as it approaches the earth.
Lulin came from the outskirts of our solar system from 18 trillion miles away. After it passes by earth, it will leave our solar system never to return again.
The comet was discovered one summer afternoon in July 2007, when Quanzhi Ye, a 19 year-old student of meteorology at China's Sun Yat-sen University, looked at a photo that had been taken just nights before by Taiwanese astronomer Chi Sheng Lin at the Lulin Observatory of Taiwan.In celebration of this one-of-a-kind celestial event, I have named the middle movement of my Chamber Symphony Lulin.
Link:http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/02/green-comet-lulin.html
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