Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
-
Somewhere between Mozart and Bach
From Scientific American’s Observations blog, a report on a shared emotional code between music and speech:
Almost everyone thinks “Greensleeves” is a sad song—but why? Apart from the melancholy lyrics, it’s because the melody prominently features a musical construct called the minor third, which musicians have used to express sadness since at least the 17th century. The minor third’s emotional sway is closely related to the popular idea that, at least for Western music, songs written in a major key (like “Happy Birthday”) are generally upbeat, while those in a minor key (think of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”) tend towards the doleful.
The tangible relationship between music and emotion is no surprise to anyone, but a study in the June issue of Emotion suggests the minor third isn’t a facet of musical communication alone—it’s how we convey sadness in speech, too. When it comes to sorrow, music and human speech might speak the same language.
Or to quote Nigel Tufnel: “It’s part of a trilogy, a musical trilogy I’m working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don’t know why.”
-
Sensing Nature
From David Cyranoski’s review of the Sensing Nature exhibition at the Tokyo Mori Art Museum:
The merging of nature and human activity harks back to earlier Japanese tradition, according to art historian Toshio Watanabe of the University of the Arts in London, who is lecturing at the gallery. The famed woodblock landscapes of Japan usually depict human endeavour coexisting with nature — unlike Western art, in which nature is an awesome, sublime force that often excludes or overpowers humans. Even in Hokusai’s famous 1832 painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Watanabe explains, the people don’t look panicked and no boats are overturned: “The picture is as much about the energy of the boatmen as the waves.”
Above video from the show: Snow, an interactive installation of feathers created by Yoshioka Tokujin.
-
Korg M01
Nobuyoshi Sano (composer on the arcade series Ridge Racer and Tekken) and Yasunori Mitsuda (who worked on Secret of Mana and composed the music for Chrono Trigger, along with a number of other Square games) have started a new studio called Detune to continue their work on bringing synthesizer emulators to the Nintendo DS. Here Sano demos their upcoming KORG M01 release, which replicates the late 1980’s sounds of the KORG M1.
(Via GameSetWatch)
-
Yukikaze
-
Thingamagoop Pianola
https://vimeo.com/4342116
A Bleep Labs Thingamagoop played like a player piano (in a very basic sense). Would be cool to see a longer strip with an actual melody!
(Via Make)
-
Moulage
WAX MODEL from 1917: Smallpox lesions on face of 15 year old boy
Sorry for the icky photo, folks, just wanted to share a striking bit of anatomical illustration! This image led me down the rabbit hole of looking into the art of moulage, casting realistic wax models with “wounds” and other dermatological problems for use in medical training. Obviously a much better way of introducing a classroom full of doctors to diseases than wheeling in an actual smallpox patient. There’s a photo book on the subject called Diseases in Wax: The History of Medical Moulage that I might have to track down. At $180 on Amazon, though, I sure hope that the library here has it…
(Via the Otis Historical Archives of the National Museum of Health & Medicine on Flickr)
-
Radiolab: Strangers in the Mirror
Another excellent short episode of Radiolab, featuring a conversation with two people I wouldn’t expect to hear on stage together:
Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can’t recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of … that’s right, faces.
Oliver and Chuck–both born with the condition known as Face Blindness–have spent their lives decoding who is saying hello to them. You can sit down with either man, talk to him for an hour, and if he sees you again just fifteen minutes later, he will have no idea who you are. (Unless you have a very squeaky voice or happen to be wearing the same odd purple hat.)
If you’re interested in the science of face perception, I stumbled across this relevant paper this week: Cortical Specialization for Face Perception in Humans (pdf) co-authored by Tel Aviv University’s Galit Yovel.
-
Non Square Pixels
The man who created the first scanned digital photograph in 1957, Russel Kirsch, pioneer of the pixel, apologizes in the May/July issue of Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Now 81 years old, he offers up a replacement (sorta) for the square pixel he first devised: tessellated 6×6 pixel masks that offer much smoother images with lower overall resolution. The resulting file sizes are slightly larger but the improved visual quality is pretty stunning, as seen in the closeup above. His research was inspired by the ancient 6th Century tile mosaics in Ravenna, Italy.
There are a lot of comments out there complaining that square pixels are more efficient, image and wavelet compression is old news, etc., and that’s true, but if you actually read the article you’ll find that the point isn’t so much the shape, the efficiency, or even the capture/display technology needed, but rather that this could be a good method for reducing the resolution of images somewhat while still retaining visual clarity, important in medical applications and in situations where low-resolution images are still tossed around.
Bonus: the man in the demo photo above is his son, the subject of the first-ever digital photograph!
(Via ScienceNews)
-
Dark pulse quantum dot diode laser
A paper in Optics Express describing a quantum dot-powered “dark pulse” laser. I was totally hoping that this was a device that could emit some kind of anti-light to darken the room, but what they’re really talking about is a laser that can go from light to dark very fast. The on/off pulses are down in the 90-picosecond range, useful for even more precise timekeeping or for new innovations in networking / telecom.
(Via The Register)
-
Matisse Photos
Art and Science Collide in Revealing Matisse Exhibit from Northwestern News on Vimeo.
Computational image processing researchers at Northwestern University teamed up with art historians from the Art Institute of Chicago to investigate the colors originally laid down by Matisse while he was working on Bathers by a River:
Researchers at Northwestern University used information about Matisse’s prior works, as well as color information from test samples of the work itself, to help colorize a 1913 black-and-white photo of the work in progress. Matisse began work on Bathers in 1909 and unveiled the painting in 1917.
In this way, they learned what the work looked like midway through its completion. “Matisse tamped down earlier layers of pinks, greens, and blues into a somber palette of mottled grays punctuated with some pinks and greens,” says Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern. That insight helps support research that Matisse began the work as an upbeat pastoral piece but changed it to reflect the graver national mood brought on by World War I.
The Art Institute has up a nice mini-site about Bathers and the accompanying research, including some great overlays on top of the old photos to show the various states the painting went through during the years of its creation.
(Via ACM TechNews)
