It makes me feel important.
Check out Rob Seward’s latest work, a book entitled Death Death Death. It’s an algorithmically generated book wherein association trees are used to link sequences of words the root word, death. The associations get pretty weird and interesting after a while, as you can see in the video. It’s been nominated for the FILE Prix Lux. You should vote for it (it’s on the second page).
I actually worked a bit alongside Rob last summer on one of his other awesome projects, Four Letter Words.
Possibly the most common complaint that one hears about classical music is that it’s boring. To many people, classical music is something that they hear occasionally in the dentist’s office or in the soundtrack to a dusty period film with a lot of corsets and talking. Flipping through radio stations, they hastily pass by the classical frequencies and move on to supposedly more exciting fare. Certain enthusiasts of classical music are likely to lament this behaviour with withering proclamations of society’s decline, but they are perhaps overreacting. The sneering youth have a point, classical music can be boring. If you’re listening to it wrong. Which is to say quietly.
Listening to Beethoven at half-volume on a pair of laptop speakers (as I am now, but I already like Beethoven, so my hypocrisy is acceptable, right?) betrays the intended presentation of the music, and undermines the experience of hearing it. The man liked his music loud, after all. It seems like a bit of an obvious point, but turning up the volume really does make such a difference. It’s easy to dismiss classical music as background filler and senior citizen fodder when you can barely hear it, but when it’s shaking your fillings out you might just see it in a new light.
Of course, generally speaking, all music sounds better louder. I think we can all agree that Led Zeppelin is a lot more fun to listen to when it’s coming out of wall of Marshalls instead of your roommate’s iPod speakers. But classical music seems to be especially prone to crippling via attenuation. For some reason, the experience relies more heavily on the presence and immediacy of the music, or at least that would seem to be the case for many people.
To those that say classical is boring, I say turn it up. Grab a pair of headphones, clamp them to your skull, and max out the volume on your stereo. Never mind the hearing damage. A cello concerto is usually a safe bet for some quality bone-rattling. I’d recommend Philip Glass’ Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, especially the third movement. It’s totally melodramatic and terrifying.
The youtube clip with the good quality sound seems to have embedding disabled. Check that one out here. The video below doesn’t have great sound, but there’s an interesting little interview piece at the beginning.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged beethoven, brahms, cello, classical music, philip glass Leave a comment
For those of you that play guitar or are into the manic shredding stylings of Steve Vai, you might be familiar with this guitar:
The hole in the body there is a handle. A while ago I got my hands on an old beat-up classical guitar and messed around with it a bit, namely adding a handle of my own. Think of it as an acoustic take on the JEM up there. Sort of a traveling hobo thing.
There’s the handle.
…and there are some slightly silly things I drew on the front with permanent marker.
It’s a cute idea, but not without its disadvantages. Some might point out that it’s more likely to get damaged, but I’d be more concerned with the idiot-with-a-guitar-in-public effect. One must strike a fine balance when carting this instrument around. Quads of any sort must be avoided, aviator sunglasses shunned. Anything by Oasis is strictly off-limits (as if it ever wouldn’t be).
Still, maybe I’ll venture outside with it at some point.
It’s a surprisingly nice-sounding guitar, considering I think I paid less than fifty dollars for it and broke the neck shortly thereafter. The sound is deep and sonorous, if a bit dull. The action of the strings is incredibly high, making it somewhat difficult to play, but it adds to its crappy charm.
Duh. GIMME.
I think often about how to make school less of a pain. It became clear pretty quickly when I arrived at university that it wasn’t going to be quite the enlightened community of learners that I had imagined in high school. The general approach to undergraduate engineering education (I can’t speak for the humanities, but I get the impression that there are similarities) seems to be the old “throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks” method. The buckshot technique. The first two years are basically an extended vetting process, breaking the spirits of the students to prepare them for a life that will supposedly also consist of meeting deadlines and being rigorously evaluated over and over.
Certain personalities thrive in this environment. Certainly anyone who is willing to dedicate all their efforts to meeting exactly the institution’s criteria will do well. Those who can follow instructions to the letter and execute strictly defined tasks are in the right place. However, should we really be rewarding that behaviour so enthusiastically? Is obedience the only metric that matters when we evaluate a student’s competency? As far as I can tell, the deck is stacked majorly in the favour of people who are excellent at doing what they’re told.
Perhaps there’s a different way to evaluate students quantitatively. One thought that I had is to give complex marks instead of just real-valued ones. If you don’t know, there is another world out there of numbers that come from taking the square root of a negative. We call these complex numbers. Often we encounter phenomena – like periodic motion – that can be described with a quantity that has both a real and complex part. So what if we apply some very simple complex analysis to the grading of students? It might be interesting to see a report card with a graph of a student’s complex grade instead of the standard letter or number. The real axis measures practical competencies, i.e. the ability to solve specific mathematic problems, performance on quizzes, and meeting deadlines. The imaginary axis measures the conceptual and creative competencies, i.e. the originality of work and ideas, open-mindedness, independence, and adaptability. Students would have to pay attention to their slope or angle rather than their GPA. A well-rounded individual might have a theta of approximately pi/4, or a slope of 1.
Really, though, this might just be a token gesture, a way of seeming more fair without having to actually change very much. Complex grades on their own don’t do the trick, you need to have educators who understand their students qualitatively as well as quantitatively and are willing to spend some time with them. Building good relationships between teachers and students is made especially difficult, though, when you have hundreds of students in every class.
Anyway, just a thought. In a perfect world we would all get gumdrops and hugs instead of grades and our teachers would all be unicorns, but maybe this is something worth thinking about. I know, it’s a bit silly, but there you go.
Last summer, I had the pleasure of spending some time at the Madagascar Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Madagascar is an art combine that specializes in building scary, awesome things (think fire, lots of fire). It’s a great place run by lovely people.
The goal at Madagascar, succinctly, is to produce dangerous art. Conventional mediums are certainly capable of evoking strong emotion, but for some the experience lacks a certain visceral thrill. Dangerous art is genuinely frightening and, more often than not, participatory. Staring at a Matisse for a few minutes isn’t quite the same as straddling a jet engine and wondering if it will hold together long enough for you to ride it. Not that I have a problem with Matisse. Matisse and I are cool.
Recently they put together a human powered carousel that looks like a barrel of laughs.
There’s a concerted effort at Madagascar to do everything, or as much as possible, manually. For example, the carousel above isn’t just a bunch of bicycles welded together. The entire mechanism, including the wheels, is custom-made by Madagascar members. This certainly isn’t the most efficient way of getting things done, and the engineer in me resists the idea a bit. However, it’s all a matter of tradeoffs. Going the long way round means taking some more time and getting a few more scrapes along the way, but often leaves you with a heap of knowledge and experience you didn’t previously possess, not to mention pride. It’s not always necessary, of course, but if you can exercise basic discretion and common sense, then you can probably figure when to take the scenic route. Engineers at large firms are used to churning out a product on an airtight schedule and budget, but what are the chances that that product is a pyrotechnical version of Simon?
It’s a murky problem – how to create an open, welcoming, interesting environment in which people like doing work and in which work actually gets done. It’s generally beneficial to keep things egalitarian, but at some point there has to be a driving force, someone making decisions and pressing ahead. A “do-ocracy” is ideal, as long as people are doing, and other people aren’t consistently objecting to what’s being done. People will rarely agree on what specifically to do about something, but when that thing is simply done by someone, there aren’t usually many complaints. So go forth and do! The results are usually good, except when they aren’t.
Check out the official Madagascar Instutute site HERE. They’re great.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged carousel, dangerous art, fire, madagascar institute, organization Leave a comment
This used to be a toy electric guitar. I grabbed it from a second hand store ages ago, tore it up, and sort of blindly connected things together until it made some odd noises. Those were the days when circuit bending was just at the peak of its internet popularity, and as a bored suburbanite teenage nerd, I daydreamed of making my own bleeps and bloops.
The case is wonky and weirdly cut, and some of the switches are floating up out of their mountings, but it sounds plenty strange. I really didn’t know how or where to obtain sensible building materials and tools, and so I ended up using whatever happened to be around. The sides of the box, if I remember correctly, are from an orange crate, and the top is, well, some old vinyl records. As it turns out, records are actually kind of great for mounting electronics to.
My favourite feature of the device has got to be the short voice recordings that it plays every once in a while. Occasionally, while the toy is turned on, a cheerful woman’s voice will say things like “Hi! Let’s play!” and “Follow the magical, musical lights!”. It’s terrifying and pretty great.
I’ll post a video soon – in the meantime check out these sample recordings:
#1. The box on its own:
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#2. Adding some effects/looping to the creepy voice lady:
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#3. More effects on top of raw noisebox sounds:
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Cool Books: Radiotron Designer’s Handbook
Look at this lovely old book that I bought! It’s an old tube radio manual, and it’s full of great stuff. The illustrations are perfectly old-fashioned and painstakingly hand-drawn. I like it. It bears a lot of similarity to the Radio Handbook that I also own. In fact, I bought both of them from Eliot’s Bookshop here in Toronto. There always seems to be a bounty of interesting old engineering books on their shelves (well, one of their shelves).
It’s a shame that vacuum tubes barely get mentioned in the modern electrical engineering curriculum. An understanding of their operation provides insight into how transistors work, not to mention an intuitive grasp of amplification and certain electromagnetic principles. Also, they’re just cool. They look fascinating and weird. They draw people in. It seems to me that they’re an obvious tool for getting students excited about electronics and electromagnetism.
Anyways, check it out:
Great, right?