A Call for Ears

Another request for participants from those crazy Dutch music cognition researchers:

Can we borrow your ears?

We would like to invite you to partake in a listening experiment on timing and tempo in music using fragments from the Rock, Jazz and Classical repertoire.

All you need is a computer with a broadband internet connection, the ability to playback audio, and -of course- an interest in music. To access the experiment, please follow the link:

Five Amazon Gift Certificates will be raffled among all who respond before 15 April 2006.

Thanks in advance for your time and ears!

Music Cognition Group, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Nasty reviews

Kieran Healy has written about an interesting competition to find the best mean review. He offers his own candidate, Philip Larkin.

For sheer mean-spirited, grossly unfair (not to say misguided) but nevertheless well-written and funny attacks on worthy targets, you can’t beat Philip Larkin’s criticism of modernist Jazz, especially his stuff on John Coltrane and Miles Davis. He thought Coltrane was “possessed continually by an almost Scandinavian unloveliness.” For example, here he is reviewing A Love Supreme:

It is of course absurd to suggest he can’t play his instrument: the rapidity of his fingering alone dispels that notion. It would be juster to question whether he knows what to do with it now that he can play it. His solos seem to me to bear the same relation to proper jazz solos as those drawings of running dogs, showing their legs in all positions so that they appear to have about fifty of them, have to real drawings. Once, they are amusing and even instructive. But the whole point of drawing is choosing the right line, not drawing fifty alternatives. Again, Coltrane’s choice and treatment of themes is hypnotic, repetitive, monotonous: he will rock backwards and forwards between two chords for five minutes, or pull a tune to pieces like someone subtracting petals from a flower. Apart from the periodic lashing of himself into a frenzy, it is hard to attach any particular emotional importance to his work.

And on Miles Davis:

He had several manners: the dead muzzled slow stuff, the sour yelping fast stuff, and the sonorous theatrical arranged stuff, and I disliked them all.

In comments, I started to formulate a reason to celebrate these mean reviews. Terry Teachout created an index to explore one's artistic tastes. I think that reading a mean review also helps to explore the personal aesthetic world. Disagreement with the review can be visceral or intellectual, which helps to pinpoint where the aesthetic view resides. Intellectually, I agree with the points of Kieran's review of Cryptonomicon, yet I enjoyed the book. This tells me that my pleasure was not based on admiration of craftmanship, but on a more emotional level. An agreement with the mean review can cause the reader to be uncomfortable, producing thoughts such as "well, that's a little strong, isn't it." Thus the reader finds out the intensity of his/her likes and dislikes.

These reactions are only possible if the initiating review is worded strongly. It helps if the review is bad, in the sense of creating a false clarity. Nuance waters down the effect, even if it is more honest. Thus, bring on the mean reviews, I say. As long as they aren't about me.

World Music Extreme

As part of the International Conference on Auditory Display, the Institute of Contemporary Arts London is hosting a concert called "Global Music - The World by Ear." Like a previous concert I wrote about, composers are asked to use an existing set of data on "190 countries with geographical data (capital location, area), population numbers, and is extended by several basic social indicators such as GDP, access to sanitation and drinking water, and life expectancy"
to generate sonifications. I think it is excellent that they call these works "sonifications" rather than compositions, even though there is clearly artistic creativity involved. The focus is on how to create an aural impression of the data, much in the same way a graph creates a visual impression. Musical considerations are secondary, so sonification = graph as composition = painting.

The deadline for submissions has been extended to the end of the month, so get cracking! Details follow.

The 'Global Music - The World by Ear' Concert will take place on June 21st, 2006, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, as part of the International Conference on Auditory Display in London from 20-23 June 2006. It is open to the general public and will be promoted and listed by the ICA.

The concert program will be sonifications based on global data. A basic dataset serving as a starting point for these sonifications is provided and you are invited to participate by submitting a piece of music driven by this data and your chosen additions to it.

Motivation
Werner Pirchner, Ein halbes Doppelalbum, 1973: "The military costs every person still alive roughly as much as half a kilogram of bread per day."

Global data are ubiquitous - one finds them in every newspaper, and they cover a range of themes, from global warming to increasing poverty, from individual purchasing power to the ageing of the world's population. Obviously these data are of a social nature: They describe specific aspects (e.g. ecological or economic) of the environment in which societies exist, which taken together determine culture, i.e. the way people live.

Rising awareness of these global interdependencies has led both to fear and concerns (e.g. captured in the notion of the risk society, see Beck 1986, Giddens 1990, 1999), as well as hopes for eventual positive consequences of globalisation. Along with developments like the scientisation of politics (see Drori et al 2003), this growing understanding of global issues has re-defined the context of the political discourse in modern societies: As modern societies claim to steer their own course based on self-observation by means of data, an information feedback loop is realised.

Alternative choices of data that are important to consider, which data should be set in relation to each other, and a consideration of how to perceptualise these data choices meaningfully can enrich this discourse.

Closing the feedback loop by informing society about its current state and its development is a task that both scientists and artists have responded to, and this is the key point of this call:

* You can contribute to the discourse by perceptualising aspects of world societal developments,
* search for data that concern interesting questions, and devise strategies for investigating them, and
* demonstrate that sound can communicate information in an accessible way for the general public.

Constraints
As a common reference point, we have compiled a basic dataset which includes 190 countries with geographical data (capital location, area), population numbers, and is extended by several basic social indicators such as GDP, access to sanitation and drinking water, and life expectancy.

Using this reference dataset is mandatory: All submissions must include countries, capital locations, population and area data. This dataset can be extended with extra dimensions, and in fact this is strongly encouraged; the extensions included in the reference dataset (such as GDP) are given as examples only.

Examples of a larger number of interesting extensions can be found in the extended version of the basic dataset (see links in section Data Background and Resources below).

Easily accessible sources for possible extensions to the dataset are also given in the Resources section; if you need advice on these, please feel free to ask us: icad.concert AT dcs.qmul.ac.uk

Submissions should last between 3-10 minutes.

Likely Questions
Missing values for some countries and some dimensions are to be expected, and this is a common problem in social data. Pragmatic handling of some sort will be necessary here.

The countries/regions represented have very different sizes and population numbers; one result we hope for is that very different strategies for representing these frame dimensions will be applied in the submissions.

Our reference data set is a snapshot of the year 2005; participants may choose to introduce time and to explore development issues.

If you are unsure whether your idea for a submission would comply with the rules, please feel free to ask us:

Data Background and Resources
The reference datasets have been compiled from official UN statistics and the CIA World Factbook (links below).

Data files have been updated! (see website for more details)

References:

Beck, Ulrich (1986): Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main. English edition: 1992, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Delhi.

Drori, Gili S., John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez, Evan Schofer (2003): Science in the Modern World Polity: Institutionalization and Globalization. Stanford.

Giddens, Anthony (1990): The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford.

Giddens, Anthony (1999) : Runaway World. A series of lectures on globalisation for the BBC, available [here]

When they pry the clickwheel from my cold dead hands

Cognitive Daily's latest casual research was about the iPod volume limitator recently offered by Apple. They found that most people did not plan to download the safety software, and in fact this trend ran counter to other safe practices, wearing bike helmets as the indicator.

The day after Apple made this announcement about the optional safety feature, there was a discussion of its merits on the Auditory email list. The limitator assumes everyone uses the standard-issue earbuds, as different earbuds or headphones can change the output drastically. Likewise, the methods of recording and encoding the music will affect the actual dB output. Here is a good article on the problem, which started way back with the Walkman.

I know that I don't plan to download the volume limitation software, but I have been more conscious of what volume I set my iPod at. I try not to go past halfway on the bar, with the exception being when I am biking on a windy day past a construction site during a thunder storm as a fire engine drives by.

Wired conductors

From NPR last weekend, Keith Lockhart was wired for physiological measurements as he conducts the Boston Pops last weekend. 5 musicians will also be measured, and 50 members of the audience. Dan Levitin of McGill University is conducting (heh) this study, in hopes to find agreements with emotion theory. Lockhart is conducting the overture from the Marriage of Figaro and Robert Kapilow's settings of Dr. Seuss stories for soprano and boy soprano (Green Eggs and Ham) or soprano and girl soprano (Gertrude McFuzz) with the orchestra. The results should be interesting.

Boston Globe article here.

Elite Eight

The DePauw women won a nail-biter last night. Wheaton came to play, with a good number of orange-clad fans in the bleachers. The final score, 69-60, doesn't really reflect how close the game was. For almost the entire game the two teams were within 4 points of each other. DePauw led for much of the game, but Wheaton did hold the lead at enough points to make me very nervous. The student turnout was great, so much that many students were forced to sit in non-student sections. I played in the pep band (trumpet, not cornetto), both to save money and to show support both for the team and for my students who are involved with the band. We sit right next to the student section, so I was more aware of small shenanigans that go on, including very wacky costumes. The noise was incredible, and the level of play was great.

Unfortunately, both of my alma maters fared worse last night. The Lawrence men's team, though ranked #1, fell to Illinois Wesleyan in a very close game (71-68). I tried to listen to the game as webcast by Lawrence's campus "radio" station, but I have not been able to get their webcasts to work. And the Rochester women lost to Scranton, 68-63. This was probably a good thing, otherwise they could have ended up playing DePauw in the final four.

Tonight we play Hope College. Tremble with fear, you Flying Dutch(men)! There is no Senta at Neal Fieldhouse to redeem you tonight.

The evolution of car music

First there was Woody Guthrie. Then there were the Beatles. Now, we have this: a choir of Foley artists.

(link from Loose Poodle's Peter (the other))