Posts Tagged ‘music’
“That’s why we have the Museum… to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old”*…
Maya Claire has created a virtual museum– and nearly infinite museum– generated from Wikipedia…
You can find exhibits on millions of topics, from the Architecture of Liverpool to Zoroastrianism. Search for the topic you want to learn about, or just wander from topic to topic as your curiosity dictates!
If you have an OpenXR-compatible headset, you can also visit the MoAT in VR! (Currently, the Oculus Quest is not supported)
The breadth of the museum is made possible by downloading text and images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Every exhibit in the museum corresponds to a Wikipedia article. The walls of the exhibit are covered in images and text from the article, and hallways lead out to other exhibits based on the article’s links.
The museum is greatly inspired by educational videos that I watched as a kid, and the liminal spaces produced by early CGI. I want to recapture the promise that the internet can be a place of endless learning and exploration. I hope you enjoy your time exploring the Museum of All Things!…
Download instructions (and more) at “MoAT: The Museum of All Things,” by @may.as (with help from @wikipedia.org).
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As we browse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s concert film Pictures at an Exhibition had its US premiere in Los Angeles. Their rock adaptation of the piano suite by Modest Mussorgsky was filmed live in 1970 at the Lyceum Theatre in London.
“Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn”*…
From Open Culture, an appreciation of an animator who, though never a commercial success in his own time, became an inspriation…
At a time when much of animation was consumed with little anthropomorphized animals sporting white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a completely different direction. His work is all about dancing geometric shapes and abstract forms spinning around a flat featureless background. Think of a Mondrian or Malevich painting that moves, often in time to the music. Fischinger’s movies have a mesmerizing elegance to them. Check out his 1938 short An Optical Poem above. Circles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody.
This is, of course, well before the days of digital. While it might be relatively simple to manipulate a shape in a computer, Fischinger’s technique was decidedly more low tech. Using bits of paper and fishing line, he individually photographed each frame, somehow doing it all in sync with Liszt’s composition. Think of the hours of mind-numbing work that must have entailed.
Born in 1900 near Frankfurt, Fischinger trained as a musician and an architect before discovering film. In the 1930s, he moved to Berlin and started producing more and more abstract animations that ran before feature films. They proved to be popular too, at least until the National Socialists came to power. The Nazis were some of the most fanatical art critics of the 20th Century, and they hated anything non-representational. The likes of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky among others were written off as “degenerate.” (By stark contrast, the CIA reportedly loved Abstract Expressionism, but that’s a different story.) Fischinger fled Germany in 1936 for the sun and glamour of Hollywood.
The problem was that Hollywood was really not ready for Fischinger. Producers saw the obvious talent in his work, and they feared that it was too ahead of its time for broad audiences. “[Fischinger] was going in a completely different direction than any other animator at the time,” said famed graphic designer Chip Kidd in an interview with NPR. “He was really exploring abstract patterns, but with a purpose to them — pioneering what technically is the music video.”
Fischinger’s most widely seen American work was the section in Walt Disney’s Fantasia set to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor [see it here]. Disney turned his geometric forms into mountain peaks and violin bows. Fischinger was apoplectic. “The film is not really my work,” Fischinger later reflected. “Rather, it is the most inartistic product of a factory. …One thing I definitely found out: that no true work of art can be made with that procedure used in the Disney studio.” Fischinger didn’t work with Disney again and instead retreated into the art world.
There he found admirers who were receptive to his vision. John Cage, for one, considered the German animator’s experiments to be a major influence on his own work. Cage recalled his first meeting with Fischinger in an interview with Daniel Charles in 1968.
One day I was introduced to Oscar Fischinger who made abstract films quite precisely articulated on pieces of traditional music. When I was introduced to him, he began to talk with me about the spirit, which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to liberate that spirit is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to percussion…
Bonus: an excerpt from Fischinger’s cigarette ad from 1934:
An animator ahead of his time: “Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney,” from @openculture.bsky.social.
You can find excerpts of other Fischinger films on Vimeo.
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As we appreciate art, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 (16 days after its single-theater premiere) that Walt Disney’s Pinocchio was released. Although it received critical acclaim and became the first animated feature to win a competitive Academy Award– winning two (for Best Music, Original Score and for Best Music, Original Song for “When You Wish Upon a Star”)– it was initially a commercial failure (mainly due to World War II closing off the European and Asian markets). It eventually made a profit after its 1945 rerelease, and is now considered one of the greatest animated films ever made.
Pinocchio was also a major step forward in animation technique, especially in effects animation, an effort led by Joshua Meador.. (In contrast to the character animators who concentrate on the acting of the characters, effects animators create everything that moves other than the characters—vehicles, machinery, and natural effects such as rain, lightning, snow, smoke, shadows and water.)
… the water effects are the true standout in Pinocchio, representing an artistic achievement that would still be difficult to replicate today. To a certain extent, it was nothing more complicated than good old fashioned hard work: Effects animator Sandy Strother [see here] worked on nothing but water effects for a full year. But in addition to working hard, the animators were working smart: In the open-water scenes, for example, the water toward the back of the frame is less detailed and more impressionistic, allowing the artists to focus on making the foreground as rich in detail as possible.
But as detailed as that water is, it isn’t attempting photorealism; as with the character design, the focus is on how the water should function within the story and the emotional response it should provoke, not replicating the real world exactly. Compare the down-to-the-droplet detail of Pinocchio’s open-water scenes to those of Fleischer Studios’ first entry in the feature-animation game, Gulliver’s Travels. Released only a few months before Pinocchio, Gulliver’s Travels used rotoscoping, which had been developed at Fleischer. While the film’s water looks realistic and imposing, it has a flat, almost geometric look that undermines its visual punch. Whereas the way the water works as Monstro chases Geppetto and Pinocchio’s raft is terrifying and overwhelming, and not especially realistic. This is the power of animation, to mold and morph reality to function as something familiar, yet fantastical…
– source
Fischinger, who was primarily engaged down the hall on his ill-fated contribution to Fantasia (released late that same year), contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy’s wand.
“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”*…
Former Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig argues that, at least insofar as many (maybe most) Americans are concerned, unemployment is higher, wages are lower, and growth is less robust than government statistics suggest…
Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between “economic reality” as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground. Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.
What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?
On some level, I relate to the underlying frustrations. Having served as comptroller of the currency during the 1990s, I‘ve spent substantial chunks of my career exploring the gaps between public perception and economic reality, particularly in the realm of finance. Many of the officials I’ve befriended and advised over the last quarter-century — members of the Federal Reserve, those running regulatory agencies, many leaders in Congress — have told me they consider it their responsibility to set public opinion aside and deal with the economy as it exists by the hard numbers. For them, government statistics are thought to be as reliable as solid facts.
In recent years, however, as my focus has broadened beyond finance to the economy as a whole, the disconnect between “hard” government numbers and popular perception has spurred me to question that faith. I’ve had the benefit of living in two realms that seem rarely to intersect — one as a Washington insider, the other as an adviser to lenders and investors across the country. Toggling between the two has led me to be increasingly skeptical that the government’s measurements properly capture the realities defining unemployment, wage growth and the strength of the economy as a whole.
These numbers have time and again suggested to many in Washington that unemployment is low, that wages are growing for middle America and that, to a greater or lesser degree, economic growth is lifting all boats year upon year. But when traveling the country, I’ve encountered something very different…
… Within the nation’s capital, this gap in perception has had profound implications. For decades, a small cohort of federal agencies have reported many of the same economic statistics, using fundamentally the same methodology or relying on the same sources, at the same appointed times. Rarely has anyone ever asked whether the figures they release hew to reality. Given my newfound skepticism, I decided several years ago to gather a team of researchers under the rubric of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to delve deeply into some of the most frequently cited headline statistics.
What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground.
Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed — that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. Second, it does not take into account many Americans who have been so discouraged that they are no longer trying to get a job. Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual’s income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as “employed.”
I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate…
[Ludwig similarly analyzes data on wages, inflation, and GDP, finding them similarlly flawed…]
… Take all of these statistical discrepancies together. What we have here is a collection of economic indicators that all point in the same misleading direction. They all shroud the reality faced by middle- and lower-income households. The problem isn’t that some Americans didn’t come out ahead after four years of Bidenomics. Some did. It’s that, for the most part, those living in more modest circumstances have endured at least 20 years of setbacks, and the last four years did not turn things around enough for the lower 60 percent of American income earners.
To be fair, the prevailing indicators aren’t without merit. It is, for example, useful to know how the wages of full-time employees have evolved. The challenge, quite separate from any quibbling with the talented people working to tell the nation’s economic story, is to provide policymakers with a full picture of the reality faced by the bulk of the population. What we need is to find new ways to provide a more realistic picture of the nation’s underlying economic conditions on a monthly basis. The indicators my colleagues and I have constructed could serve as the basis for or inspiration for government-sponsored alternatives. Regardless, something needs to change.
This should not be a partisan issue — policymakers in both parties would benefit from gleaning a more accurate sense of what’s happening at the ground level of the American economy. In reality, both Democrats and Republicans were vulnerable to being snowed in the 2024 cycle — it just happened that the dissatisfaction during this particular cycle undermined the incumbent party.
In an age where faith in institutions of all sorts is in free fall, Americans are perpetually told, per a classic quote from former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that while we may be entitled to our own opinions, we aren’t entitled to our own facts. That should be right, at least in the realm of economics. But the reality is that, if the prevailing indicators remain misleading, the facts don’t apply. We have it in our grasp to cut through the mirage that led Democrats astray in 2024. The question now is whether we will correct course…
On the need to revise our economic reference statistics: “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong.” from @LISEP_org in @POLITICOMag. Eminently worth reading in full.
More on (and more-current readings of) the suggested “revised metrics” at the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.
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As we muse on measurement and meaning, we might recall that it was on this date in 1979 that The Cars released “Good Times Roll,” the third single from their eponymously-titled debut album.
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water”*…
From Dynomight (and here), an argument that algorithms, while problematic today, aren’t necessarily evil…
What does “algorithmic ranking” bring to mind for you? Personally, I get visions of political ragebait and supplement hucksters and unnecessary cleavage. I see cratering attention spans and groups of friends on the subway all blankly swiping at glowing rectangles. I see overconfident charlatans and the hollow eyes eyes of someone reviewing 83 photo she just made her boyfriend take of her in front of a sunset. Most of all, I see dreams of creative expression perverted into a desperate scramble to do whatever it takes to please the Algorithm.
Of course, lots of people like algorithmic ranking, too.
I theorize that the skeptics are right and algorithmic ranking is in fact bad. But it’s not algorithmic ranking per se that’s bad—it’s just that the algorithms you’re used to don’t care about your goals. That might be an inevitable consequence of “enshittification”, but the solution isn’t to avoid all algorithms, but just to avoid algorithms you can’t control. This will become increasingly important in the future as algorithmic ranking becomes algorithmic everything…
Dynomight elaborates on the problem, its genesis, and a plausible answer: “Algorithmic ranking is unfairly maligned,” from @dynomighty.bsky.social.
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As we rethink rankings, we might recall that on this date in 1969 a group at the top of most lists took it to the roof: The Beatles performed on the rooftop of their Apple Corps headquarters at 3 Savile Row, in central London’s office and fashion district. Joined by guest keyboardist Billy Preston, the band played a 42-minute set before the Metropolitan Police arrived and ordered them to “reduce the volume.” It was the final public performance of their career. The concert ended with “Get Back,” after which John Lennon quipped, “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.”
The full concert footage is available at the invaluable Internet Archive. Here, a taste of “Get Back”…
“The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices”*…
Inanna Hamati-Ataya on the importance of understanding our place in the world…
In the 1990s, an entire generation was robbed of its historical consciousness by a powerful and seemingly unprecedented tale. This story, crafted as the Cold War came to an end, declared that real or imagined boundaries had stopped working as they once had. Humans were no longer contained within their old geographies or identities. They now inhabited a new world that appeared to be unhinged from the normal evolution of human society.
The concept chosen to capture this transformational moment in human history was ‘globalisation’. It described how new technologies and networks of connectivity had suddenly brought human communities closer together and made them permeable to an uncontrollable flow of people, ideas, goods and cultural practices, which all moved freely across the integrated markets of the world economy. In the wake of this transformation, new jargon emerged, expressing new anxieties: the world had truly become the ‘global village’ that Marshall McLuhan anticipated in the 1960s, but it was a world shaped by multinational corporations and ‘elite globalisers’, who spoke a common, hegemonic ‘global English’, and were spearheading a destructive ‘homogenisation’ (or ‘McDonaldisation’) of human cultures that national borders were too fragile to withstand.
During the past three decades, more people have begun viewing our ‘global’ world as a cursed fate. With its suffocating time-space compression, globalisation seems to have uncoupled us from the logic and flow of history. Our suspicious, bastard identities – patched together from a mishmash of cultures – appear incompatible with our ancestors’ ‘authentic’ traditions and ways of life. We have become strangers to the places they called home, to the ways they dressed, ate or communicated with one another. And, with no template for how to live and no experience to learn from, the deafening siren songs of anti-globalisation movements are now luring us back into the safer identities and boundaries of a lost, golden past.
This tale of globalisation is the most successful scare story of our times. And like all scare stories, it stimulates our fear of an overwhelming unknown.
But it’s all an illusion. There is no new global world.
Our present appears that way only because we have forgotten our common past. Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia. Remembering this older shared history is a path to a different tale, which begins much, much earlier – long before the arrival of international supply chains, ocean-going sailing ships, and continent-spanning silk roads. The tale of globalisation is written across human history. So why do we keep getting the story so wrong?…
[She unpacks the answer to her questions, then turns to it implications…]
… In our own contemporary era, anti-globalisation movements have recently shifted from the far Left to the far Right of national and global politics. Justified resentment against the locally experienced injustices of the global economy and the growing disruptive effect of global climate change are now couched in resentment for the social and cultural dimensions of globalisation. Identitarianism, a political ideology that stresses the preservation of narrowly conceived ‘Western’ ethnicities and cultures, has accordingly become the easiest and most efficient strategy to mobilise local grievances, and direct them at whatever is perceived as a threat to the wellbeing of those suffering within. The ugly age of nationalism is back.
Is nationalist identitarianism the ethos we will now deploy to confront the common existential threats that await us in the coming century? Why wouldn’t it be? Does anyone doubt that national borders will be turned, once again, into sacred physical boundaries and fiercely defended against those fleeing the environmental, economic or military devastation of their homes? Do we doubt that eloquent voices animated by the most (ig)noble intentions will rise to justify patriotic bullets being aimed at ‘alien migrants’ and climate refugees? And that leaders will say these displaced people cannot be accommodated because of their numbers and cultures, and the threat they pose to our secure lives – to our ‘identity’?
Such scenarios are far too likely given the rise of xenophobic worldviews, such as the conspiratorial idea of a ‘Great Replacement’, in which elites – imagined to be Jews and other minorities – have begun executing a plan to replace so-called indigenous white Europeans with other populations of apparently greater and threatening reproductive vitality. These racialist worldviews dangerously converge with a public misunderstanding of ‘race’ as reflected in the recent craze for DNA ‘ancestry tests’. DNA has little to do with ‘identity’, as social and political ideologies have constructed it, and much to do with physical and social geography. Our genes are a result of human adaptive mobility, and the journeys, rich encounters and kin-making that our freedom of movement made possible over tens of thousands of years. Our genome does not tell our whole story, but the story it does tell shows how past globalisations made us what we are today.
As we search for ways of communing with one another beyond the stubborn ideology of difference, we should also prepare for vicious future distortions and manipulations of our current scientific and historical understanding of identity. Some humans today carry a few genes that their Pleistocene ancestors inherited from intercourse with our Eurasian Neanderthalian and Denisovan cousins, whom some communities of Homo sapiens encountered on their journeys of cosmopolitan expansion. How might such a genetic difference among us be interpreted and used in the future by those intent on pursuing identitarianism to its silliest or most murderous conclusions? Might they declare that some humans are not ‘pure’ enough to enjoy the full freedom, security and dignity we recognise as the natural rights of humankind? Or might they, on the contrary, elevate the Neanderthalian or Denisovan gene as a marker of Eurasian ‘distinction’ to recreate narratives of racial superiority, similar to those that once plagued archaeological thinking about the allegedly more ‘advanced’ nature of those human fossils laying the farthest away from the species’ original African homes?
Palaeontologists who insist on ascribing the label ‘humans’ to the entire Homo genus while reserving that of ‘modern humans’ to the surviving representatives of the lineage (ie, us) probably understand better than most the dangers of ideological manipulations of scientific taxonomies. But in the open marketplace where ideas freely flow in the name of freedom of thought and expression, how can we protect ourselves and one another from such dangers, if we still perceive plurality as a threat to survival, and cannot see the richness of our shared human culture?
The wars we wage against one another are all civil wars. Until we recognise them as such, they will remain tragedies we accept as natural – or horrors we cheer on in the name of grand notions sold to us by loud voices who know our fears too well (and know too little of the richness of our world and our history). We have always been global, and this is our shared identity. It is our unique way of being and remaining in the world as one family. Whatever we cherish in our humanity and culture has been crafted by our global journeys and encounters. Through them, we will continue to write the story of how we become us…
All of our religions, stories, languages, and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history: “There are no pure cultures,” from @berytia.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
Still, as Venkatesh Rao reminds us, the “vacuous over-large abstractions like “globalization” make us underestimate the horizontal historicity of the world.”
* Jimmy Carter
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As we go with the flow, we might recall that it was on this date in 1690 (or so musicologists believe) that Johann Christoph Denner, inspired by a reeded recorder-like instrument called the chalumeau, designed and created a longer and keyed (so more widely-ranged) instrument that was quickly copied and modified by other makers– and became what we know as the clarinet. By 1791, Mozart was composing for the instrument; by Beethoven’s time, the clarinet was a staple member in the orchestra.
To the point of the essay above, it’s worth noting that the chalumeau– and thus the clarinet– were direct descendants of ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian reeded pipes… that may themselves have been modeled on similar instruments from Central and East Asia.
The clarinet, as depicted in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 1776 (source)
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