Rotating ribs

Back in the 1950s, stilyagi (hipsters) in the Soviet Union went to great lengths to bootleg jazz and rock 'n' roll music. It was before the advent of the tape recorder and vinyl was scarce, so they salvaged radiographs from hospital waste bins to press records. They would use manicure scissors to cut the x-ray into crude circles of 23-25 cm in diameter and use a cigarette to burn a hole in the middle of each. Russian musicologist Artemy Troitsky explains that a special machine – for instance a modified phonograph – was needed to cut grooves in the disks. The quality of the so-called bone music was awful, but the black-market price was low. Says author Anya von Bremzen, “You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”

Posted with Blogsy

Blogworthy birdsong

Just days after my post Metamusic, in which I expressed fear that "scientific" music-making would become a bit boring, a reader has pointed out the best example yet. When Brazilian multimedia artist Jarbas Agnelli saw a photograph of blackbirds on electrical wires in a São Paulo newspaper, he saw in his mind's eye the image above. Curious to hear what melody the birds were creating by their perches, he transposed their exact locations as musical notes. The incredibly beautiful result (LISTEN HERE) suggests that God or nature has a much larger repertoire than techno. As Agnelli writes at the end of the video, "I just erased the birds for effect at the end, but didn't change their positions at all. What would be the point?"

Posted with Blogsy

Metamusic

I fear that pretty soon strangely scientific ways of making music will no longer be blogworthy! I posted about University of Minnesota student Daniel Crawford creating a disturbing solo composition for cello based on the increasing temperature readings of the planet over the past 130 years. I have also posted about German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck developing a way to translate tree rings into music. Now Canadian computer scientist Saif Mohammad and New York University student Hannah Davis have devised a way to transpose the emotions of the written word into song (LISTEN HERE). And scientist and musician Kieran Heather has turned a NASA image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field into sound (LISTEN HERE). Heather concludes, "The end result is strangely musical, yet clearly contains the same organic and seemingly unpredictable complexities that can be found everywhere in nature. It seems 'God' is a fan of Techno…"

Posted with Blogsy

Xylostones

Residing in storage in the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris since French troops brought them back from the Sahara in the early 1900s are a set of ancient oblong stones long believed to have been to grind grain. The stones – some of them up to 3.2' (1 m) in length – have been dated to between 2500 and 8000 B.C., but their true use was only discovered only 20 years ago. Paleomusicologist Erik Gonthier, a former jeweller and stone-cutter, tapped one with a mallet in the storeroom of the museum in 1994. From it came a decidedly musical sound and 5 years later the stones were officially recognized as lithophones, which were played (EXAMPLE HERE) by resting them on brackets made of leather or plant fibers. Gonthier (IMAGE ABOVE) explains that each stone has 2 sound planes that can be found by tapping at 90° angles around its circumference. The public will be treated to a concert entitled "Paleomusique," performed 3 times this weekend, after which the stones will be packed away again forever to avoid damaging our cultural heritage. Gonthier states that our ancestors' musicality is often overshadowed by their rock-painting and tool-making skills. He believes there may have been a strong link between music and visual art in prehistoric caves: "These were the first theatre or cinema halls," he speculates. And the lithophones were designed to be portable. Not so, Stonehenge!

Posted with Blogsy

Dendrochronophonograph

German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck has developed a way to make music out of tree rings. A cross-section of a tree trunk is turned on a custom-built record player. The "needle" is a PlayStation Eye Camera and a stepper motor attached to the control arm, which relays the data to a computer. The rings are then translated into music using a program called Ableton Live. "Interpretation it may be, but it still varies according to the piece of wood that's placed on the turntable," notes Gizmodo. One result is an eerie audio recording entitled "Years" (LISTEN HERE).

 

Posted with Blogsy

Bosch's butt

At the turn the 16th c., Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch painted a cautionary triptych (IMAGE ABOVE), the title of which was lost to time. Now referred to as "The Garden of Earthly Delights," the work hangs in the Prado in Madrid and depicts the Garden of Eden on the left, the delights of earth in the center, and the horrors of eternal damnation on the right. Earlier this month, a student at Oklahoma Christian University was perusing a reproduction of the painting with a friend. Amelia – who also blogs and describes herself as a hard-of-hearing music and information systems double major – writes, "Luke and I…discovered, much to our amusement, music written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting which is intended to represent Hell. I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era." Surprised at all the attention her discovery has received, she is working with the college music department on a more precise transcription, but until then we have the "600-year-old butt song from hell," a.k.a. the "torture victim's backside hymnal" (LISTEN HERE).

Posted with Blogsy

Presto agitato

The image above is the title page of the original edition of the 1802 score for the "Moonlight Sonata" by Ludwig van Beethoven. His Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia," Op. 27, No. 2, as it is formally known, is one of his most popular compositions for piano. The third and final movement of the piece is meant to be played "very quickly and with excitement," but the tempo is often slowed in concert so that orchestras can keep up. The challenge of playing it at the originally intended speed was taken up by Ukrainian-born classical pianist Valentina Lisitsa. She is known for independently launching her career via social media, without initially signing to a tour promoter or record company. So far, the video of her amazing performance in Germany in 2008 has garnered 6,367,098 hits on YouTube. Add yours HERE.


Thanks Chase!

Posted with Blogsy

Synchronous sounds of climate change

I have blogged about global climate change many times, often about ways to gauge the deleterious effects our pollution has had on life on Earth. Now 2 people have independently come up with a way to communicate the trend of our warming climate. They express the average temperature of each year with a musical note, allowing us to hear the graphs:

• University of Minnesota student Daniel Crawford (IMAGE ABOVE) plays temperature readings over the past 130 years as a solo composition for cello entitled “Song of Our Warming Planet" (VIDEO HERE). Editor and communications director Todd Reubold describes, "The result is a haunting sequence that traces the warming of our planet year by year since the late 19th century. During a run of cold years between the late 1800s and early 20th century, the cello is pushed towards the lower limit of its range. The piece moves into the mid-register to track the modest warming that occurred during the 1940s. As the sequence approaches the present, the cello reaches higher and higher notes, reflecting the string of warm years in the 1990s and 2000s."
• Energy technologist S. Julio Friedmann and computer programmer Michael Loomis of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory produced a composition for digital violin called "Fiddling a Warming Tune" that charts more than 600 years of climate variations (VIDEO HERE, SCROLL DOWN). Friedmann explains, "I had a number of reasons for doing this. Chief was that I found that many people simply didn’t understand — internally, viscerally — the relative timing, magnitude, and rates of the climate changes. A scientist can look at the graphs and get it, but most people won’t intuitively understand. Among other things, this leads to confusion about what’s a natural cycle versus an unusual, indeed unique, detour away from natural signals. Sound was a new way to communicate this – orthogonal, and compelling."

 

Posted with Blogsy

X-rayed aria

After the debut of the opera Médée by Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842) in Paris in 1797, reviewers commented that it was too long. The Italian composer scratched out the aria called "Du trouble affreux qui me dévore" ["The terrible disorder that consumes me"] and the opera has been performed without it ever since. Scientists at Stanford University's National Accelerator Laboratory - who recovered Archimedes' lost writings a few years ago - have now successfully applied their x-rays to Cherubini's musical score. By sorting out the iron in his ink, the zinc on the pre-printed paper, and the charcoal he used to scrub out the section, they have restored the opera so that it can now be performed in its entirety for the first time in more than 200 years. Physicist Uwe Bergmann describes, "It was amazing to be able to see the complete aria. For me, uncovering the composition of a genius' work that had been lost for centuries is as thrilling as trying to uncover one of the big secrets of nature." Listen to part of the opera here and the missing aria here.

Posted with Blogsy

Bagpipe bugs

“I will have to buy a new kilt,” said 78-year-old British bagpiper John Shone (not pictured) who lost 14 lbs. suffering from an infection that nearly took his life. At a loss as to what was causing the illness, the hospital pathology lab finally asked what his hobbies were and tested his instrument. They cultured deadly Rhodotorula and Fusarium fungi that had gotten into his lungs. Bagpipes can be notoriously temperamental and Shone had an important piobaireachd performance coming up, so he hadn't cleaned his instrument in 18 months. Bacteria, mold and fungus can grow in saliva that gets inside instruments including bagpipes, trombones, clarinets, flutes, and saxophones. Using his experience as an example, Shone is reminding other pipers of the potential danger of not cleaning their instruments regularly.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy