Posts Tagged ‘music’
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”*…
A housekeeping note: (R)D will be off tomorrow– Sunday the 12th– returning on Monday…
Wikipedia has over 300 language editions. Each one picks different images to illustrate the same topic.
From Riley Walz, a marvelous way to explore the the images that different concepts conjure in different cultures: “In Every Language.”
(Image above: “Mother” in English, Portuguese, and others on the left; Italian, Esperanto, and others on the right)
* E. M. Forster
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As we visualize, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that Frank Sinatra recorded “Strangers in the Night.” According to Sinatra: The Life (Summers, Swan, 2006), Sinatra despised the song and called it “a piece of sh*t” and, per Frank Sinatra by Jean-Pierre Hombach, “worst f*cking song that I have ever heard.” Nevertheless, it became his first No. 1 hit since 1955’s “Learning the Blues” and remained on the Billboard charts for 15 weeks. His album of the same name became his most successful. The song also won him Grammy Awards for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, Record of the Year, and Best Arrangement.
“It is impossible to win gracefully at chess. No man has yet said “Mate!” in a voice which failed to sound to his opponent bitter, boastful and malicious.”*…
… but perhaps the offense is muted if the call is remote.
Electronic gaming is huge– and growing, As Rolling Stone reports…
The gaming industry, fueled by platforms like Twitch and YouTube, has surged into a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse, projected to exceed $207 billion in 2026. These platforms do more than showcase gameplay—they cultivate vibrant, interactive communities where fans engage in real time, from live chats to virtual watch parties. Games like League of Legends, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike and Fortnite have become a cultural phenomenon, drawing in over 2.6 billion gamers globally, a number that continues to climb each year. Mobile gaming, accounting for over 60% of global gaming revenue, plays a significant role in this growth, making gaming accessible to a broader audience than ever before…
But as Danny Robb explains, using tecnology to play games remotely has a long history…
In 1897, the United States House of Representatives held a series of chess matches to find their most skilled players. The five winners were pitted against counterparts in the British House of Commons. But while the Americans sat down to play in Washington, D.C., their opponents sat in London. The players received moves by telegraph, and sent responses back over wires that crossed the Atlantic.
By this point, “cable chess” had been slowly evolving for decades. Historian Simone Müller-Pohl argues that this form of long-distance chess play offers insight into the cultural and political currents of the industrial era.
By the mid-nineteenth century, she explains, there was a growing sports culture in Europe and the US. Industrial technologies enabled more people to attend games and follow along from a distance. A growing middle class fostered this sporting culture, which came to include chess.
“Weekly,” Müller-Pohl explains, “the liberal and intellectual elites of the time assembled around chess boards in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Moscow, Rome, and London.” Interest in the game spread, and chess clubs emerged. As clubs arranged tournaments and standardized chess rules, Müller-Pohl argues that chess “was gradually turned into a sport.”
Correspondence chess grew along with the game, in part thanks to cheap and efficient postal services. When the telegraph emerged on the scene, the application to chess was almost immediate.
“It was telegraphy’s fathers who pulled the strings behind the first schemes for cable chess,” Müller-Pohl explains. In 1844, inventor Samuel Morse arranged chess matches on a new telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. “All of the 686 moves necessary for the seven games played were transmitted without mistake or interruption,” Müller-Pohl writes.
Not long after, in 1845, inventor Charles Wheatstone attended a demonstration in London. Chess legend Howard Staunton played against his rival George Walker over the South Western Railway line between Portsmouth and London. Müller-Pohl describes how witnesses found the match “rather tedious,” but it received a lot of press. This was partly the point—the matches demonstrated and advertised the capabilities and accuracy of the invention.
The Staunton match had another interesting aspect. Müller-Pohl points out that “the lines were still used for ordinary traffic during the games, allowing a group of chess players from Southampton to have every move telegraphed to them.” A bit like modern e-sports, spectators could observe the virtual match…
The early history of e-gaming– when telegraph cables let chess clubs stage matches across continents, linking players and spectators in a new kind of long-distance competition: “The First E-Sports? Chess by Telegraph,” from @inverting-vision.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* A. A. Milne
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As we note that what’s old is new again, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” was released. It peaked at number two on the Hot R&B Sides chart and number eight on its pre-Billboard Hot 100 chart. Considered “the first rock & roll hit about rock & roll stardom”, it has been covered by many, many other artists and has received many, many honors and accolades, among them being ranked 33rd and 7th, respectively, on Rolling Stone’s 2021 and 2004 lists of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It was also included as one of the 27 songs on the Voyager Golden Record (a collection of music, images, and sounds designed to serve as an introduction and record of global humanity’s achievements, innovations and culture, to alien/otherworldly inhabitants).
Apropos the piece above, it was released by Chess Records.
“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”*…
… and to the extent that we care about our democracy, that’s an issue.
In an article based on his recent Sakurada-Kai Foundation Oxbridge Lecture at Keio University, Tokyo, John Dunn argues that our democracies depend on our picking up the pace of learning. The abstract:
There cannot be a coherent democratic theory because democracy is not a determinate topic. Representative democracy is a relatively modern regime form. It now needs rehabilitation because so many instances have performed poorly for so long. Representative democracy is now also an aging regime. As a type of state, it is subject to the territorial contentiousness and contested legitimacy of any state. It claims its legitimacy from iterative popular choice, but the plausibility of that claim is increasingly strained by the drastic disparities in life chances reproduced through the property systems it protects. The inherent difficulty for citizens to judge how to advance their collective interests is aggravated by the recent transformation of the information economy. In the cumulative damage inflicted by climate change it faces a deadlier peril than any previous regime and one which only a citizenry that can enlighten itself in time can reasonably hope to nerve itself to meet…
There follows a fascinating– and provocative– elaboration of this thesis in which Dunn considers the history of democracy and the alternatives with which it has, since its inception, vied. He concludes in a bracing fashion…
… The varieties of autocracy which will be on offer wherever the rest of the world has the opportunity to take them up will be without exception the reverse of enlightened – instrumentally and compulsively bound to the extremes of obscurantism, Darkness as a full-on fideist commitment, deliberate self-blinding as a navigational strategy. Move fast, break lots, and never pause to inspect the wreckage.
Representative democracy has recently proved itself a poor structure for collective enlightenment, but the case for it depends on its at least not precluding that, its being still open to making the attempt, and responding to what it can contrive to learn. The most optimistic vision of democracy in action has always seen it as an opportunity for collective self-education on the content of shared goods and the means to achieve them. If that is scarcely a realist picture of what it has ever been, at least it is an image of the right shape. It is too late to ask who will educate the educators. At this point we must educate ourselves together and heed the lessons of that education or we must and will die – not just each of us one by one, as we were always fated to do, but soon enough all of us and for ever…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Can Democracy be Rehabilitated?“
Apposite: “How American Democracy Fell So Far Behind,” from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (gift article– and source of the image above)
* Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
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As we devote ourselves to democracy, we might spare a thought for Ludwig van Beethoven; he died on this date in 1827. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include 9 symphonies, 5 concertos for piano, 32 piano sonatas, and 16 string quartets. He also composed other chamber music, choral works (including the celebrated Missa Solemnis), a single opera (Fidelio), and numerous songs.
Relevantly to the piece above…
Beethoven admired the ideals of the French Revolution, so he dedicated his third symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte… until Napoleon declared himself emperor. Beethoven then sprung into a rage, ripped the front page from his manuscript and scrubbed out Napoleon’s name…
Beethoven’s temper and Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’
“Scuse me while I kiss the sky”*…
In 1967, Jimi Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler arranged for Jimi to meet Cream…
There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: “Hendrix blew into a version of [Howlin’ Wolf’s] ‘Killing Floor’,” recalls [Tony] Garland, “and plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that – it stopped you in your tracks.” [Keith] Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song “which he had yet to master himself”; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: “You never told me he was that fucking good.” – source
Hendrix’s extraodinary virtuosity has, altogether justly, gotten a great deal of attention; less well noted, his incredible mastery of the technology of music making, recording, and performance. Rohan Puranik explains…
3 February 1967 is a day that belongs in the annals of music history. It’s the day that Jimi Hendrix entered London’s Olympic Studios to record a song using a new component. The song was “Purple Haze,” and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. The pedal was a key element of a complex chain of analog elements responsible for the final sound, including the acoustics of the studio room itself. When they sent the tapes for remastering in the United States, the sounds on it were so novel that they included an accompanying note explaining that the distortion at the end was not malfunction but intention. A few months later, Hendrix would deliver his legendary electric guitar performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival.
“Purple Haze” firmly established that an electric guitar can be used not just as a stringed instrument with built-in pickups for convenient sound amplification, but also as a full-blown wave synthesizer whose output can be manipulated at will. Modern guitarists can reproduce Hendrix’s chain using separate plug-ins in digital audio workstation software, but the magic often disappears when everything is buffered and quantized. I wanted to find out if a more systematic approach could do a better job and provide insights into how Hendrix created his groundbreaking sound.
My fascination with Hendrix’s Olympic Studios’ performance arose because there is a “Hendrix was an alien” narrative surrounding his musical innovation—that his music appeared more or less out of nowhere. I wanted to replace that narrative with an engineering-driven account that’s inspectable and reproducible—plots, models, and a signal chain from the guitar through the pedals that you can probe stage by stage…
[And probe it Puranik does– fascinatingly, stage by stage…]
… Hendrix didn’t speak in decibels and ohm values, but he collaborated with engineers who did—Mayer and Kramer—and iterated fast as a systems engineer. Reframing Hendrix as an engineer doesn’t diminish the art. It explains how one person, in under four years as a bandleader, could pull the electric guitar toward its full potential by systematically augmenting the instrument’s shortcomings for maximum expression.
“Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer,” from @spectrum.ieee.org.
See also: “The Technology of Jimi Hendrix.”
* Jimi Hendrix, “Purple Haze”
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As we plug in, we might send well-connected birthday greetings to another wizard with wires, Geoff Tootill; he was born on this date in 1922. An electronic engineer and computer scientist, he worked (with Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn) to design a computer memory. To that end they built the first electronic stored-program computer— the Manchester Baby— at the University of Manchester in 1948.
The Baby was not intended to be a practical computing engine, but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first truly random-access memory. Nonethless, Baby worked: Alan Turing moved to Manchester to use it, and the following year, it inspired the Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercially available electronic general-purpose stored-program digital computer.
“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language”*…
Our language is constantly evolving. Colin Gorrie offers a nifty illustration of the development of English…
A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.
He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.
But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.
By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.
But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.
None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the languageis real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.
It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.
Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely. Then meet me on the other side and I’ll tell you what happened to the language (and the blogger)…
Read it and reap: “How far back in time can you understand English?” from @colingorrie.bsky.social.
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As we travel through time, we might note that not every new emergence becomes sedimented into the evolutionary path, as we recall that on this date in 1980 that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded the first– and last– Grammy for Best Disco Recording. By the time that the Academy got around to it, disco was pretty much dead.
“I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor was the big winner that night. The other nominees were: Earth, Wind & Fire for “Boogie Wonderland,” Michael Jackson for “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough,” Donna Summer for “Bad Girls,” and Rod Stewart for “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” (In January 2020, Gaynor won her second Grammy Award in her career for her gospel album Testimony.)
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