The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

SONG: Staring

SONG: “Staring” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Body of Sea Urchin is One Big Eye,” LiveScience , 28 Dec 2009, as used in the post “Spiny eyes. With legs and mouths.”

ABSTRACT: Floating down. How strange it must be to see always all around you, to be able to move slowly, but never speak or wave or pick up anything – only to watch, only ever to watch.

I remember going snorkeling with my mother as she showed us how the Greeks eat raw sea urchins fresh from the sea. I have eaten uni myself at sushi bars – hopefully they didn’t see me coming.

This should sound more like the Residents. My body keeps staring at you.

Entered on 23 February 2010 at 6:43 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Einstein, music and the frontier of beauty.

You’ve got to read this story.

Entered on 17 February 2010 at 20:56 in the Music file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: My Girlfriend’s a Robot (penitential cover)

SONG: “My Girlfriend’s a Robot” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant. Originally done like this.

SOURCE: This is a penitential cover with no specific scientific source. It’s by The Hanson Brothers, who are not these savage hockey players nor this bubblegum pop band, but some kind of combination of the two.

ABSTRACT: This cover involves no hockey, no Ramones and no unnecessary roughness (the only roughness is entirely necessary). It does, however, involve the excesses of love and the passion for the mechanical implied by the original song. I’m not sure how it wound up as a torch song, really – it’s not exactly what I set out to do, really. I just wanted to follow the emotional lead of the lyrics.
Please enjoy it… like you were programmed to.

Entered on 13 February 2010 at 23:01 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: A Tiny Golden Mean

SONG: “A Tiny Golden Mean” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Golden Ratio Discovered in Quantum World: Hidden Symmetry Observed for the First Time in Solid State Matter,” ScienceDaily, 7 Jan 2010, as used in the post “A tiny golden mean”.

ABSTRACT: Since the golden mean is the ratio that supposedly underlies our sense of beauty – the thing that describes the relationships that look or sound “right” to our brains – it was hard to resist this one. I already knew one song (written by this guy) called “Golden Mean,” so it was kind of interesting coming at the thing from a different angle. It seems strange to me that elementary school kids are taught 3.14… but not 1.618…, but I guess that’s human beings all over. Wheels are more important than portraits.

Obviously, this is not the day when this song should have been done (happy Imbolc, by the way). I’m in a new house, on the one hand, but also have a new Christmas condenser microphone, on the other, so all the flaws can shine through with crystal clarity. Yikes! There’s a borrowed banjo in there, and a couple synthy basses, but for the most part it’s the magic microphone sitting there with me playing guitar and singing the decimal places live in the room. I’ve never been mathematically minded, so numbers have a kind of mystique for me, I guess, which is where that chorus came from. The chords for the verses are *sort of* in the golden ratio (I-IV-V, that standard blues progression), but the choruses are a little different. I kind of felt like there should have been more of a mention of frozen magnetic atoms of cobalt niobate, or a diagram of E8, or at least a use of the phrase “quantum critical,” but the words kept going back to the simple fact that there’s a phi inside the atomic world. That’s pretty cool. (Oh, and the bridge about how the golden mean determines where most pop songs’ bridges are located – that was partially inspired by Douglas Hofstadter, who I’ve been rereading lately.)

So, here’s a song about it. Next up, a penitential cover. Mea culpa.

Entered on 2 February 2010 at 6:42 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Grant B on Pocket: Remixing Danny Seim

This is not explicitly a song about science (although it’s getting harder and harder for me to draw that line), but I’ve got a remix coming out as part of the fascinating project that Pocket has been doing – releasing an album of collaborations with all-stars (like Robyn Hitchcock, Steve Kilbey of The Church and Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think) a single at a time, with the singles being packages with remixes by all sorts of other folks.

Including me.

I am not a techno DJ. Anyone who has spent a few minutes listening through the song archive here could tell you that. I do, however, have access to a banjo and slide guitar, I’ve got some editing software, and I’m told I have a knack for loneliness.

So I did something to a track by Pocket with Danny Seim of Menomena and Lackthereof. It’s not like the other remixes. It’s not like Danny Seim. It’s not like what I do here. But it is sort of like all those things put together.

So, go check it out and hear for yourself, either via Pocket or directly from Other Music. I thought it was pretty darn good.

Entered on 1 February 2010 at 19:50 in the Guild Affairs, Music file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Frame the deviance.

Neurologists get Sonic Youth. That’s what I think after reading Jonah Lehrer’s ScienceBlogs entry about the way music works in the brain:

The experiment was more compelling. The scientists measured the brain waves of a twenty subjects while they listened to various hymns. It turned out that unexpected notes – pitches that violated the previous melodic pattern – triggered an interesting sequence of neural events and a spike in brain activity:

Our electrophysiological results showed that low-probability notes, as compared to high-probability notes, elicited a larger (i) negative ERP component at a late time period (400-450 ms), (ii) beta band (14-30 Hz) oscillation over the parietal lobe, and (iii) long-range phase synchronization between multiple brain regions.

There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance.

[via]

Entered on 25 January 2010 at 6:35 in the Music, Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Dear Winter.

SONG: “Dear Winter” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Humans Have Hidden Sensory System”, LiveScience (via Yahoo! News), 8 Dec 2009, as used in the post “Skin sense.”

ABSTRACT: So, this is probably the geekiest thing I’ve ever done on here. Here’s an axiom: The longer one puts off recording vocals, the higher the probability of one being physically unable to do them. In this case, laryngitis. I couldn’t even talk, much less sing. So I got a ringer to turn the song into an Arab Strap-style spoken word piece. The well-spoken man’s name is Obadiah. He sounds nice, doesn’t he? He’s one of the speech synthesis voices at the MARY text-to-speech web demo. Other than the fact that “black” and “ask” don’t have an assonance in British English, I was quite happy with him.

The song itself was a confluence of two things. First, I love the idea of a hidden sense that we all have but aren’t normally aware of. Made me think of sense-deprivation tanks and deep meditation. Second, I wanted to write a winter solstice song – one that wasn’t necessarily astronomical or Christmas-oriented.

So. There’s this phenomenon in hypothermia cases. Shortly before the end, some victims will strip off all their clothes, because in a last ditch effort to maintain its temperature, the body dilates all the capillaries in the skin and flushes warm blood from the body core out to the skin and extremities. Suddenly, everything feels warm again. This always struck me as a kind of trick – it’s hard not to think of winter doing this to people with some kind of intent or personality. This song isn’t telling that story – the narrator here isn’t dying of hypothermia – but he is communicating with winter. Somewhere outside. Under the shadows.

LYRICS:
> Dear winter, I closed my eyes the way you asked
> and I stood there in the black
>
> I could barely find the sense of mind to cover up my ears
> Your frozen tears falling on my coat,
> your stinging whispers wound around my throat
> Before it all went numb – and I felt something else come
>
> CH:
> I could see you with my skin, in the movement of the air
> On the longest………. night…….of the year.
>
>
> Dear winter, I can hear you in a way,
> all the silent things you had to say
> While muffled in my gloves and boots,
> and woolen socks and a second-hand snow suit
> Your breath was almost bitter on my tongue,
> as my words hung beneath the sky…
> as something moved, unheard, on high.
>
> CH:
> I could see you with my skin, in the movement of the air
> On the longest………. night…….of the year.
>
> BR:
> The sky opened like a window
> as the night stretched on so widely
> Dear winter, I can’t feel your touch inside me,
> And I am blind. And I am numb.
> But I felt something wordless come
> I can’t begin to say its name, but felt it just the same.
>
> CH:
> I could see you with my skin, in the movement of the air
> On the longest………. night…….of the year.
>

Entered on 23 December 2009 at 17:31 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Music Evolution: Science wants YOUR ears!

Chasing the links for that Levitin interview yesterday, I found this call for volunteers in a musical experiment:

MacCullum’s computer program creates a randomly generated pair of “Adam and Eve” “songs”–brief loops of sound. They mutate, recombine and reproduce to form a base population of 100 descendants.

Participants act as the force of natural selection by listening to the songs and rating them, from “I love it!” through “It’s OK…” to “I can’t stand it”. For every 20 songs, the 10 worst rated die off, while the 10 best rated go on to reproduce at random, with each “mating” producing two new songs. Each daughter song inherits a mixture of the parents’ computer codes, just as a biological organism inherits a mixture of its parents’ genetic codes.

“The ‘chromosomes’ in DarwinTunes are actually tree structures of code,” the researchers explain. “There is only one tree structure per song, that is, they are ‘haploid’. During recombination a small number of tree nodes are chosen at random in one parent (each node has a 1 in 1000 chance of being chosen). The same number of nodes are then chosen at random in the other parent.”

Then random mutation comes into play. Each node of a daughter’s code has a one in 1500 chance of mutating. “Eighty per cent of the mutations are ‘point mutations’ which alter the value of a single atomic piece of information (e.g. note length, note position, wavelength multiple). The remainder are ‘macro mutations’ which swap, copy, insert, delete or replace part of the tree structure.”

When 20 new songs are born, the 10 parents die off, and the process continues in the new generation.

Interested in lending your ears? Go to http://darwintunes.org/evolve-music!

Entered on 15 December 2009 at 6:49 in the Music, Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

“Our Place in the Cosmos” by Symphonies of Science.

So. They’ve done it again. Carl Sagan (and a host of other cosmologists) now have soul. I mean, they had soul all along, but thanks to the miracle of modern vocoders, you can now sing along.

More at Symphonies of Science.

The Guild salutes you!

Entered on 30 November 2009 at 22:10 in the Music file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

And now, a robot plays Patsy Cline.

If I tried to tell this as a story, you’d think I was making it up.

A sound artist wired together an old floor lamp, some motors and a couple microprocessors to create this:

I don’t know why it’s always songs named “Crazy” that attract this sort of automata attention, but I’m not complaining.

[via]

Entered on 27 November 2009 at 6:18 in the Music file | Care to make an observation? |  Print