Tags / 28 quotes from 16 sources
#music
Algorithmic Composition: Computational Thinking In Music
Algorithmic composition
Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and…
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Musical training tunes emotional hearing
There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with…
Computational Humanities: Workshop At The 10th International Conference On Computational Science
Computational humanities
Computational Humanities is a new, largely unexplored, field which is situated at the interface between the humanities and the (exact) sciences, in particular information science. The humanities differ from the sciences in their concern with expressions of the human mind, such…
David Cameron's New Year Message
Cameron's list of British virtues
Resilient. Realistic. Intelligent. Curious. Enterprising. Inventive. Unswerving. It's the spirit that has made our universities among the best in the world, our scientists Nobel prizewinners, our athletes gold medal winners, our culture, our music and our television famous…
L'imperfetta meraviglia (Andrea De Carlo)
La scarsa cultura del mondo del rock
Poi bisogna dire tutta la verità: non è che il mondo della musica rock sia popolato da persone di straordinaria intelligenza, e ancora meno di straordinaria cultura. La caratteristica più comune è una mancanza di precisione del pensiero dovuta allo stile di vita, al confronto…
Il sentiero che si forma camminando
Quando si è stufato del boogie e i polpastrelli cominciano a fargli male a furia di picchiare sui tasti, si dedica a variazioni lente su un tema in mi bemolle che gli è venuto qualche giorno fa. È una successione abbastanza normale di accordi, senza intuizioni armoniche…
Una bella canzone è un dono
Tra i suoi colleghi alcuni (pochi) sono stati attraversati da una sola grande canzone, altri (pochissimi) sono riusciti a farsi attraversare da diverse, in fasi diverse delle loro vite, come pescatori che prendono un buon numero di pesci mentre gli altri se ne stanno lì seduti…
Vite divergenti, unite solo dalla musica
Vanno avanti per qualche minuto a scambiarsi manifestazioni di stupore e rammarico per il fatto di non essersi visti così a lungo, anche se sanno benissimo che avrebbero potuto vedersi prima in qualsiasi momento, se solo lo avessero voluto; è difficile pensare a qualcuno con…
Le fantasie dei romanzi e delle canzoni
E lui, cosa diavolo vuole? Cosa va cercando? Insegue ancora le fantasie che si è ficcato in testa con i romanzi che divorava da ragazzino per sottrarsi a una vita reale con cui non voleva avere niente a che fare, e che poi hanno dato origine alle sue canzoni, le quali a loro…
Leielui (italian Edition) (de Carlo, Andrea)
La chitarra messa da parte
Al piano di sotto mangia l’ultima pesca e poi prende la vecchia Eko che tiene appoggiata nell’angolo dietro al divano, suona qualche accordo. È una grossa chitarra costruita in Italia negli anni Settanta con legni laminati, pesante e con le corde troppo alte, comprata di…
La scoperta gioiosa dell'irragionevolezza
Le torna in mente l’entusiasmo con cui aveva seguito nei primi anni la nascita dei pezzi di Alberto, l’evolversi delle vaghe intuizioni iniziali in linee melodiche definite che sembrava fossero sempre state nell’aria. Le torna in mente lo stupore per il processo misterioso…
Live Notation: Transforming Matters Of Performance
What a live coding performance is
Live Coding can be understood as making fundamental source code changes to software while it runs, in order to change its behaviour. The classic Live Coding performance consists of one or more programmers on stage, writing and modifying code in order to improvise music and/or…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Mud, Beethoven and surface features
So consciousness differs from other phenomena such as liquidity and solidity that have surface features, in that we are reluctant to carve off the surface feature and redefine the notion in terms of the causes of the surface feature, because the point of the concept is to…
Minimalism Is Boring (and That's Ok) | I Care If You Listen
Minimalism in music
G.K. Chesterton once wrote that there is “no such thing as an uninteresting subject, only an uninterested person,” and minimal music has opened me to the truth in that statement. If I know that beauty can be found in 468 fourths, then perhaps it can be found in other places as…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
Glory, like love if love were sin
We wouldn’t make it. We couldn’t make it. There weren’t many of them—there weren’t many guns firing—but they had so much time to get a sight on us and shoot us down. They were going to kill us all. Then a wild flurry of explosions crunched into the enemy lines. The idiots! They…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Psycholytic versus psychedelic therapy
Dosage was finally established around the mid-1950s. One hundred micrograms was low, 200 was medium, 300 and above, high. And the two major schools of LSD psychotherapy that evolved were defined primarily by the dose range they employed. The first school used relatively low…
Blindfold, earphones and the psychedelic language
I tripped in the bedroom again, and again had a wonderful afternoon, which I spent in almost exactly the same way—the most intense part of the trip with the blindfold and earphones, then the bath, then the walk on the Heath. In fact, from the first my tripping tended to…
Discovering Ockeghem's Requiem
During the trip when I caught my first glimpse of the sacred, I had been listening to a CD of Hildegard of Bingen. The music must have touched me more deeply than I realized, because when I returned the CD to the library I borrowed two further discs of late medieval/ early…
Acid outflanking my defenses against religion
I think it must have been ten days or a fortnight after Anna’s cremation—it was an afternoon, I remember—when abruptly I understood what had been happening. In a flash I saw that all of it was an ongoing form of the opening to religion, to Christianity in particular, that I had…
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)
Pythagorean numbers and the music of the spheres
Pythagorean doctrines were bound by an oath of secrecy, so we know very little prior to the version of them that appears in Plato. These include a belief in the immortality and transmigration of the soul and the view that the ultimate reality of the universe consists in number…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Don't try to get rid of the ego-sensation
Remember, above all, that an experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious “will,” except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Don’t try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take…
Melody lives in the intervals
Many people imagine that in listening to music they hear simply a succession of tones, singly, or in clusters called chords. If that were true, as it is in the exceptional cases of tone-deaf people, they would hear no music, no melody whatsoever—only a succession of noises…
Art in contemporary society
The market for artists and sculptors has thrived as never before in history, but the paintings look as if they had been made with excrement or scraps from billboards, and the sculptures like mangled typewriters or charred lumber from a burned-down outhouse.2 We have untold…
Of what use is the universe?
Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use—which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Being Nobody: losing the self in ecstasy
We also sometimes live life under the third scenario, as Nobodies. ‘Human beings have stalked this planet for 100,000 years, [and] we have from time to time indulged in wine, women and song; or, drugs and sex and rock and roll, the modern equivalent. There are moments in most…
The Extempore Philosophy
Human-in-the-loop programming
This human-in-the-loop programming approach is exemplified by the practice of live coding or laptop performance, a "new direction in electronic music and video: live coders expose and rewire the innards of software while it generates improvised music and/or visuals. All code…
Zappa Quotes
On being weird
There isn’t anything weird about my music. Weird is a skeleton in the closet, wearing a rubber mask with warts all over its nose, and all that kind of shit. That’s not what I do. The thing that makes my music unusual is that people only hear one kind of music all the time over…
Music
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best…