World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

At the World Science Festival in June here in New York, specialists – including musical specialist Bobby McFerrin – gathered to ask what in music we humans hear universally, versus what is culturally specific.

Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.

You can watch a series of five video highlights, but the one above is perhaps the most striking. (I believe it’s already more than made the rounds around the Interwebs, but, well, we can say we were all busy creating digital music.)

Notes and Neurons videos

It’s funny just how low the average person’s opinion of their musical ability can be. Ask an average “non-musician,” and they’ll often claim to be deaf to rhythm and pitch. Push the issue, though, and typically you’ll discover quite the opposite. Listen as the crowd laughs at discovering they all share some basic intuition about how pitch works. These are, after all, science and neurology types, not musicians.

Ah, you say, but this is just a crowd in New York. And most of us interact only with people in our own cultural circles. For me, that means people surrounded by pop music, Western harmony and counterpoint, chord changes derived from Protestant hymns — the lot.

What’s wonderful is that certain basic rhythmic and pitch elements – belying rich complexities of psychoacoustic phenomena underneath – do indeed seem to be universal. To me, that profound universality says something about what we share as human beings. At the same time, it makes me even more interested in all of the local details. When playing Balinese gamelan, some Western-trained musicians literally turned up their noses because they said the results sounded “out of tune.” Like a pungent flavoring in a foreign food, they discovered something unfamiliar. (I wonder if they would have the same reaction to sambal.) Of course, the underlying pitch systems are related to pentatonic (and heptatonic) pitch collections. And the same thing that disturbed one person has excited other musicians – not simply because it’s exotic, but because it can speak to something deeper in our hearing that we don’t get from other music.

Anyway, thanks to (noou) for this story, via IRCAM’s Eric Boyer; it really made my day. And it should certainly spark (ahem) some interest in neurology and the brain. Or, as I’m going to start saying whenever coming across something like this,

“Larry, what the hell just happened here?”

…and a bunch of bananas (footage from the Theremin Center, Moscow).

Via the Pd list, though, it seems that the next NK workshop will go somewhere else altogether: music with microorganisms. Really – you’ll need a USB microscope. It’s electronic music in a Petri dish.

I could try to explain, but I’ll leave it to the description by organizers Marc R. Dusseiller & Kaspar Koenig:

Overview–Experimental make-workshop with multilayered outcome for people interested in sound, DIY-biology, microscopy and interaction of living microorganisms. Knowledge in physical computing, video and sound processing, electronics and puredata is welcome, but not compulsory.

Description–In this workshop the experiments will take place in close-up view of microorganisms (e.g. water bears aka tardigrades, amoebae and collected organisms from urban environments), which appears to be a world by itself. Maybe due to the scaling and the amplification of a microscope, but maybe also due to all parameters of imagination that the microcosmos provokes. Growth and behaviour of these microscopic animals remind us of our own micro-macro-development. With the image and the movement of the organisms, the participants are encouraged to collect inspiration and bridge video and sound to what they experience with these small ?"animalcules?", as termed by their first observer Leeuwenhoek in 1677.

The participants will learn how to work with the usb-microscopes and hack webcams to be used as microscopes, observe the behaviour and motion of the waterbears and other microorganisms, find sounds from the lab equipment, hack into electronic devices to integrate into bioelectronic culture devices and build habitats for the animals. Also they will discover sounds from the different instrumentation and utilities of the laboratory. Recycle and compose arrangements for Lab-visual and
Lab-sound scapes and benefit from a cross fertilization between the whole (scientific) equipment (you can bring your own too!) and an artistic metaphorical language. The outcome can be a video with a microscopic soundtrack, a living object with singing waterbears, a performance with laboratory sounds, or an openLab Hackteria installation.

Material needed–The participant should bring their own laptop/computer, a webcam with an adjustable lens and some general lab stuff they have access to. Material available various labware, glassware, petri-dishes, usb-microscopes, microorganisms, soldering stations, electronic parts,
arduinos etc..

H a c k t e r i a & l a b h a c k i n g with Marc R. Dusseiller & Kaspar koenig

Saturday 30 May – Wednesday 3 June 2009, 12.00-18.00 daily

Location: NK / ElsenStr. 52 (2.Hof) Berlin, Germany

Telephone: +49 (0)176 20626386

Course Participation fee: 100 euros

Registration is required for this workshop and can only be done via

email to: enka_nkATgmxDOTde

Please register early to ensure a place. Places are limited to 16.

I know most of you can’t make it to Berlin, but perhaps this will spawn (breed?) other ideas.

Found via the Pd mailing list.

Exclusive Free Mix: Amon Tobin, Back from Space

Exclusive Free Mix: Deru

And here are the direct links to listen / download:

Download the Amon Tobin Yuri’s Night mix [contains NSFW audio samples]

Download Deru’s Free Mix

Updated! If you were having problems with the links, it’s because I made a mistake generating URLs with Amazon S3, and some browsers (IE and Safari but evidently not Firefox) get picky. It should be fixed now.

For more on Amon Tobin, our friends at Current TV have this interview on the Foley Room album — not exactly news, but inspiring stuff, nonetheless. Anyone who’s a found sound sound design fan (as I know many of you are in your own work) should get a kick out of it:

Let us know what you think of the music in comments. (Truly — thoughtful criticism is welcome as well as praise.)

Hello from Ground Control: this week, I’ll be coming to you live from CDM’s micro-blog for Yuri’s Night Bay Area, ground zero for the global space rave celebrating human exploration of the cosmos. CDM’s challenge: to bring all the goodness up close and personal to you, from California to wherever you are on Planet Earth.

Watch the minisite now, during the event, and in the couple of weeks following at:

http://yuricdm.com

or subscribe to the yuricdm.com RSS feed.

Yuri’s Night needs special nerdster love for a number of key reasons — a huge lineup of music, art, and science, plus a special CDM event and booth:

• Music: The likes of Amon Tobin, Tycho, Christopher Willits, and many others … and our friend Ganucheau, too
• Motion: Interactive installations and visualists everywhere, including our man Joshua with his incredible Wii-powered SuperDraw, built with Processing
• Space and Science and Games: Here’s where I get especially excited — it’s an event on the airfield at Ames Research Center, not typically a place non-NASA employees can go, and we actually get to play there and listen some of the world’s top scientists. And Will Wright (creator of SimCity, Sims, and the upcoming Spore with its generative music) will be there, too, just in case your geek circuits weren’t overloaded yet.
• CDM @ the Hangar: We’re running a special Futuristic Music Design Challenge competition, and we’ll have the CDM booth for much of the evening where various musical / visual makers will be showing off their inventions (with more of our friends elsewhere at the event). So stop by and say hi.

Fortunately, we’re not alone — the good peoples of Current TV will also be covering the event, and if your blog / Flickr stream / Vimeo account gets involved, let us know. We’ll put it all up on yuricdm.com — our first time trying a minisite for a special event, so we welcome your feedback.

Are you going to San Francisco? We’re still looking for someone to video the competition — please email me immediately if interested. My name is "Peter", I’m at "createdigitalmusic.com" — see if you can work out my email address. Alternatively, use the contact form. We’re also looking for informal Flickr photographers, writers, and other coverage, so give us a holler if you’re going.

And remember:

Event schedule

Tickets information

Directions

I have to say, it’s really a pleasure to do this — not only for us, and for the artists and thinkers involved in the event, but for NASA and the space exploration community. Aside from music, space exploration (human and artificial) was always a major passion and inspiration for me growing up. I personally can’t think of a better reason to throw a party, especially as we think about the significance of technology on Earth.

As an addendum to why trying to make computer models musically creative can be so disastrous, maybe the problem is we fail to understand what creativity is.

Scientists funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) have found that, when jazz musicians are engaged in the highly creative and spontaneous activity known as improvisation, a large region of the brain involved in monitoring one’s performance is shut down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thoughts and behaviors is highly activated.

Study: Prefrontal Cortex In Jazz Musicians Winds Down When Improvising [scientificblogging]

That’s just one study, and I won’t pretend to be an expert in neuroscience. But what the scientists are describing is awfully close to the nuanced way jazz musicians will describe improv. It’s not not thinking. But it’s also not self-monitoring. It’s something else.

In other words, the self-judging prefrontal cortex — the part you can easily model as a set of computer software rules — switches off, but another area of the brain hits overdrive. And “self-initiated” is exactly what’s lacking in computing technology.

But this has another implication, now that so many of us use computers in performance. For one, the lack of initiation from our computer companion means computers may be fundamentally unsatisfying as accompanists or “duets,” no matter how many rules or interactive behaviors we stuff into them. Maybe we don’t have to view them that way — maybe we should think of them as an extension of composition or an instrument. After all, a person with a laptop is usually a solo artist.

But the other likely implication is that, as many readers here have noted, we need to set up computers in ways that allow us to shot down part of the prefrontal cortex when playing. That’s a complex thing: you want your software to help you get into the zone. It doesn’t mean not thinking — quite the opposite. It means taking away distractions, partly feeling good enough about a performance to be able to stop the “self-monitoring” behavior, and partly giving yourself enough to do, musically, that another part of your brain actually has to work harder to proceed. Readers noted earlier this week that music notation can be musically distracting — not surprising, given many musicians make the effort to memorize a piece for exactly this reason.

But in addition to shutting down one section of your head, you want to activate another. That could also mean that tools that automatically limit your playing to specific scales, while they seem to make things easier, prevent your brain from reaching the level of activity when you feel the most inspired — like failing to make an exercise cardiovascular.

Thanks to Richard Lainhart for sending along this article (via the Electronic Music Foundation list).

How do you get into the zone playing live — particularly if you do use a computer?

Hearing over the din of noise is something that humans do a lot better than computers. A new mathematical technique promises to provide highly accurate models of sound, even with broadband noise in the picture. Why does this matter, aside from mathematical curiosity? For one, better sonic analysis could mean more realistic models of instruments and more flexible sound editing tools, inspiring a new generation of music software.

From our friend kokorozashi:

‘In a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcelo Magnasco, professor and head of the Mathematical Physics Laboratory at Rockefeller University, has published a paper that may prove to be a sound-analysis breakthrough, featuring a mathematical method or â€Å“algorithmâ€Â? that’s far more nuanced at transforming sound into a visual representation than current methods. â€Å“This outperforms everything in the market as a general method of sound analysis,â€Â? Magnasco says. In fact, he notes, it may be the same type of method the brain actually uses.’

Full article:
New mathematical method provides better way to analyze noise [Physorg.com]

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time new algorithms yielded scientific advances and musical advances alike. Even the famed (or infamous) AutoTune plug-in benefits from data processing techniques used in oil exploration. (Lesson: it takes a lot of science to make Jessica Simpson sing in tune. Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Of course, the converse is true, too: better sound processing can be very useful to a broad range of sciences, because, well, sound is just about everywhere.

[Updated] Tom Duff has managed to hunt down the actual paper so you can get this straight from the source:

Sparse time-frequency representations,
Timothy J. Gardner and Marcelo O. Magnasco [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]

While I wouldn’t normally say this of academic papers, it has really pretty pictures. (Seriously: visual renderings of the analyses not only illustrate the point, but also happen to look gorgeous.)