“Videotape” ends Radiohead’s 2007 album In Rainbows, and like many of their albums, it tends towards the funereal. (Think of the drunken “Life in a Glasshouse” from Amnesiac or “Motion Picture Soundtrack” from Kid A). And at first, it does sound very simple, four plaintive descending chords and Thom Yorke’s high melody over the top of it.
But in this 10 minute video essay from Vox Pop: Earworm, the song’s structure is peeled back to reveal a secret–that the chord sequence is not on the downbeat, but shifted a half-beat earlier. Hence, it is a heavily syncopated song that removes all clues to its syncopation.
Advanced musicians out there might not be blown away by any of this, but for fans of Radiohead and those just coming to music theory, the video is a good introduction to complex rhythm ideas. The fun comes from the backwards way in which Vox and Warren Lain–who devoted a whole 30 minutes to exploring the song–came across the secret.
It starts with video of Thom Yorke trying to play a live version along to a click track, and then to Phil Selway’s drums. For some reason Yorke can’t do it. And that’s because his brain is wanting to put the chords on the downbeat, the most natural, obvious choice. To play off beat, without further rhythmic information, shows the band “fighting against not just their own musical instincts, but their own brainwaves” as the Vox host explains.
There is much discussion in the YouTube comments over whether these 10 minutes are worth the analysis. It’s not that Radiohead invented anything new here–check out the off-beat opening of something like XTC’s “Wake Up”–but more that the band goes through the whole song (at least in the recorded version) without revealing the real rhythm, like playing in a certain key and never touching the root note.
To sum up: Radiohead push themselves in the studio and take those experiments into the live experience and challenge themselves. Which is way more than the majority of rock bands ever do. And bless ‘em, Yorke and co., for doing so.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
If you ask a few of today’s youngsters what they want to do when they grow up, the word “design” will almost certainly come up more than once. Ask them what design itself means to them, and you’ll get a variety of answers from the vaguely general to the ultra-specialized. The concept of design — and of designing, and of being a designer — clearly holds a strong appeal, but how to define it in a useful way that still applies in as many cases as possible?
One set of answers comes from the 90-minute “Crash Course in Design Thinking” above, a production of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or d.school. The Interaction Design Foundation defines design thinking as “an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions we might have, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.” In a brief history of the subject there, Rikke Dam and Teo Siang write that “business analysts, engineers, scientists and creative individuals have been focused on the methods and processes of innovation for decades.”
Stanford comes into the picture in the early 1990s, with the formation of the Design Thinking-oriented firm IDEO and its ” design process modelled on the work developed at the Stanford Design School.” In other words, someone using design thinking, on the job at IDEO or elsewhere, knows how to approach new, vague, or otherwise tricky problems in various sectors and work step-by-step toward solutions. D.school, with their mission to “build on methods from across the field of design to create learning experiences that help people unlock their creative potential and apply it to the world,” aims to instill the principles of design thinking in its students. And this crash course, through an activity called “The Gift-Giving Project,” offers a glimpse of how they do it.
You can just watch the video and get a sense of the “design cycle” as d.school teaches it, or you can get hands-on by assembling the simple required materials and a group of your fellow design enthusiasts (make sure you add up to an even number). Youngster or otherwise, you may well emerge from the experience, a mere hour and a half later, with not just new problem-solving habits of mind but a newfound zeal for design, however you define it.
You don’t have to be a gearhead to instantly recognize the sound of the Roland TR-808. Introduced in 1980, the legendary drum machine is all over the 80s, 90s, and the retro 2000s, from dance progenitors like Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” to formative Def Jam releases like Run DMC’s debut and the Beastie Boy’s Licensed to Ill (one of the original machines used on such classics recently went on sale). The 808 provides the backbeat for Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” New Order’s “Shellshock,” and LL Cool J’s “Going Back to Cali”… track after era-defining track pulses with the iconic drum machine’s deep, thudding kick drum and comically synthetic congas, claves, maracas, handclaps, and cowbells.
Roland has obviously felt the pop cultural winds blowing its way. Yesterday, on 808 Day, the company announced a new iteration, now called the TR-08, as part of its Boutique line. (A previous revival, the TR‑8, saw Roland combine the 808 with the classic 909, renowned in rave circles.) The video at the top features some of the 808’s original adopters—producer Jimmy Jam, rapper Marley Marl, and DJs Jazzy Jeff and Juan Atkins—marveling over the new product. Just above, in case you’ve somehow forgotten, we have a demonstration of famous TR-808 beats from tracks like “Planet Rock” and Cybotron’s “Clear,” songs that made innovative use of samples and which themselves became choice material for dozens of sample-based productions.
The 808 was the choice of drum machine for tinkerers. Its sound was “crowd-sourced,” writes Chris Norris, “with artists building on one another’s modifications of the device. One of the first major innovations came about in 1984,” with the “fine tuning of the 808’s low frequencies and further widening of its bass kick drum to create the sound of an underground nuke test” heard on producer Strafe’s club hit “Set it Off.” The new TR-08 has a much smaller footprint and expands the machine’s capabilities with contemporary features like an LED screen, controls over gain and tuning, battery or USB power, and audio or MIDI through a USB connection.
Arguably “one of the most impactful pieces of modern music hardware,” writes The Verge, upon its debut the 808 “received mixed reviews and was considered a commercial failure as its analog circuitry didn’t create the ‘traditional’ drum sounds” most producers expected. This meant that 808s could be picked up relatively cheaply by bedroom producers and local DJs. As a result, “the trembling feeling of that sound,” Norris writes, “booming down boulevards in Oakland, the Bronx, and Detroit are part of America’s cultural DNA, the ghost of Reagan-era blight” and the renaissance of creativity born in its midst. To get a sense of the breadth of the 808’s musical contributions, listen to the playlist above, with everyone from Talking Heads to 2 LIVE CREW, Phil Collins, and Whitney Houston putting in an appearance.
Every recording medium works as a metonym for its era: the term “LP” conjures up associations with a broad musical period of classic rock ‘n’ roll, soul, doo-wop, R&B, funk, jazz, disco etc.; we talk of the “CD era,” dominated by dance music and hip-hop; the 45 makes us think of jukeboxes, diners, and sock-hops; and the cassette, well… at least one subgenre of music, what John Peel called “shambling,” jangly, lo-fi pop, came to be known by the name “C86,” the title of an NME compilation, short for “Cassette, 1986.” (Readers of the magazine had to clip coupons and send money by postal mail to receive a copy of the tape.)
Soon, however, fewer and fewer people will remember the age of the 78rpm record, the preferred vehicle for the music of the early 20th century. From classical and opera to blues, bluegrass, swing, ragtime, gospel, Hawaiian, and holiday novelties the 78 epitomizes the sounds of its heyday as much as any of the media mentioned above.
While cassettes recently made a nostalgic comeback, and turntables are found in every big box store, we’re generally not equipped to play back 78s. These are brittle records made from shellac, a resin secreted by beetles. They were often played on appliances that doubled as quality parlor furniture.
Thanks now to the Internet Archive, that stalwart of digital cataloguing and curation, we can play twenty five thousand 78s and immerse ourselves in the early 20th century, whether for research purposes or pure enjoyment. Previous efforts at preservation have “restored or remastered… commercially viable recordings” on LP or CD, writes The Great 78 Project, the archive’s volunteer program to digitize musical history. The current effort seeks to go beyond popularity and collect everything, from the rarest and strangest to the already historic. “I want to know what the early 20th century sounded like,” writes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, “Midwest, different countries, different social classes, different immigrant communities and their loves and fears.”
You can hear several selections here, and thousands more at this archive of 78s uploaded by audio-visual preservation company, George Blood, L.P. Other 78rpm archives from volunteer collectors and the ARChive of Contemporary Music are being digitized and uploaded as well. You’ll note the recordings are often submerged in crackle and hiss, and generally lack bass and treble (most playback systems of the time could not reproduce the lower and higher ends of the audible spectrum). “We have preserved the often very prominent surface noise and imperfections,” the Archive writes, “and included files generated by different sizes and shapes of stylus to facilitate different kinds of analysis.” Different playback systems could produce markedly different sounds, and the recordings were not always strictly 78rpm.
These conditions of the transfer ensure that we roughly hear what the first audiences heard, though the records’ age and our penchant for 7 speaker audio systems introduce some new variables. None of these recordings were even made in stereo. The 78 period, notes Yale Library, lasted between 1898 and the late 1950s, when the 33 1/2 rpm long-playing record fully edged out the older model. For approximately fifty years, these records carried recorded music, sound, and speech into homes around the world. “What is this?” Kahle asks of this formidable digitization project. “A reference collection? A collector’s dream? A discovery radio station? The soundtrack of the early 20th century?” All of the above. To learn more about The Great 78 Project, including the technical details of the transfer and how you can carefully package up and mail in your own 78rpm records, visit their Preservation page.
In 1997, the Cornell Chronicle announced: “The world’s smallest guitar — carved out of crystalline silicon and no larger than a single cell — has been made at Cornell University to demonstrate a new technology that could have a variety of uses in fiber optics, displays, sensors and electronics.”
Invented by Dustin W. Carr, the so-called “nanoguitar” measured 10 micrometers long–roughly the size of your average red blood cell. And it had six strings, each “about 50 nanometers wide, the width of about 100 atoms.”
According to The Guardian, the vintage 1997 nanoguitar was actually never played. That honor went to a 2003 edition of the nanoguitar, whose strings were plucked by miniature lasers operated with an atomic force microscope, creating “a 40 megahertz signal that is 130,000 times higher than the sound of a full-scale guitar.” The human ear couldn’t hear something at that frequency, and that’s a problem not even a good amp–a Vox AC30, Fender Deluxe Reverb, etc.–could fix.
Thus concludes today’s adventure in nanotechnology.
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FYI: If you follow edtech, you know the name Andrew Ng. He’s the Stanford computer science professor, who co-founded MOOC-provider Coursera and later became chief scientist at Baidu. Since leaving Baidu, he’s been working on three artificial intelligence projects, the first of which he unveiled yesterday. On Medium, he wrote:
I have been working on three new AI projects, and am thrilled to announce the first one: deeplearning.ai, a project dedicated to disseminating AI knowledge, is launching a new sequence of Deep Learning courses on Coursera. These courses will help you master Deep Learning, apply it effectively, and build a career in AI.
Speaking to the MIT Technology Review, Ng elaborated: “The thing that really excites me today is building a new AI-powered society… I don’t think any one company could do all the work that needs to be done, so I think the only way to get there is if we teach millions of people to use these AI tools so they can go and invent the things that no large company, or company I could build, could do.”
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
“Human beings are born with a need for food and shelter,” writes Lanchester. “Once these fundamental necessities of life have been acquired, we look around us at what other people are doing, and wanting, and we copy them.” Or as Thiel explained it, “Imitation is at the root of all behavior.” Lanchester reports that “the reason Thiel latched onto Facebook with such alacrity was that he saw in it for the first time a business that was Girardian to its core: built on people’s deep need to copy,” yet few of us, its users, have clearly perceived that essential aspect of Facebook and other social media platforms.
Marshall McLuhan, despite having died decades before their development, would have caught on right away — and he understood why even we savvy denizens of the 21st century haven’t. “For the past 3500 years of the Western world, the effects of media — whether it’s speech, writing, printing, photography, radio or television — have been systematically overlooked by social observers,” said the author of Understanding Mediaand The Medium is the Message. “Even in today’s revolutionary electronic age, scholars evidence few signs of modifying this traditional stance of ostrichlike disregard.”
Those words come from an in-depth 1969 interview with Playboy magazine that broke the celebrity literature professor McLuhan’s ideas to an even wider audience than they’d had before. In it he diagnosed a “peculiar form of self-hypnosis” he called “Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.”
As McLuhan saw it, “most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage — that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.”
Just last month, no less omnipresent an internet titan than Google celebrated McLuhan’s 106th birthday, and a social observer called PR Professor saw in it a certain irony: though “it seems like technology that extends man’s ability to experience and interpret the world is positive and desirable,” McLuhan pointed out “that the inherent tendency to focus on the messages within the media make us blind to the limits and structures imposed by the mediums themselves.” This blindness has consequences indeed, since, according to McLuhan, each time a society develops a new media technology, “all other functions of that society tend to be transmuted to accommodate that new form” as that technology “saturates every institution of that society.”
This went for speech, writing, print, and the telegraph as well as it goes for “social media platforms like Twitter, which reduce expressive possibilities to 140 characters of text or expressing one’s self through the ‘re-tweeting’ of posts by others.” McLuhan believed that at one time only the interpretive work of the artist, “who has had the power — and courage — of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world,” could allow the rest of us to recognize the thoroughgoing effects of technology on society, but that “the new environment of electric information” had made possible “a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists.” At least more of us, if we step back, can now understand our affliction by mimetic desire, Narcissus narcosis, or any number of other troubling conditions. What to do about them remains an open question.
We’ve devoted space here before to legendary BBC DJ John Peel’s musical legacy, from his formidable record collection to his many hours of “Peel Sessions,” the recordings he made in BBC studios of artists like David Bowie, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Specials, Siouxsie and the Banshees and so, so many more–usually when they were on the cusp of superstardom or enduring cult status. It was Peel’s particular talent for discovering and promoting such artists that set him apart from his peers. Rather than riding the cultural wave of the moment, he listened at the margins, cultivating and curating what he heard. Whether punk, glam, new wave, hardcore, ska, techno, or industrial, it seems John Peel got there first, and the rest of the industry followed after him.
Peel did not approach his role in a critical vein—sitting in judgment of the music around him. He approached it as an enthusiastic and obsessive fan, which explains much of his appeal to the listeners who loved his broadcasts. He honored those listeners each year by compiling a list of their favorites in what he called “The John Peel Festive 50.” This end-of-the-year event “became a Christmas institution, writes the BBC, “more loved than fairy lights and Christmas crackers.”
Listeners of Peel’s show voted for their three favorite tracks in November. The following month, the highest-ranked “Festive 50” were all played on the air. He described the process as a truly democratic, crowdsourced endeavor, as we would say today.
It’s really just me marking every single vote down in a ledger. There is obviously the temptation to slip something in that I like, especially if it’s just outside the 50, and something crap has gone above it. But I have a very workman-like brain so it just wouldn’t be on to fix it.
Peel “wasn’t always happy with what the listeners voted for,” often feeling “there were too many ‘white boys with guitars’ making an appearance.” The predictability of several of the lists irked him, and seemed to work against the spirit of his mission to tirelessly promote adventurous, experimental music. Peel may have been popular, but in matters of taste, he was no populist. For the most part, however, he remained faithful to the fans’ picks, and noted that he never would have been able to choose the top three songs of the year himself: “I couldn’t get any fewer than a list of 250.”
The tradition, with a few hiccups, continued from its inception in 1976 till Peel’s death in 2004, and the massive Spotify playlist above aggregates the hundreds of those picks—932 songs, to be exact, over 70 hours of music. From Dylan, Clapton, and the Stones to Neko Case—and along the way, no shortage of tracks from the punk and post-punk artists most closely associated with Peel’s show. While the listener’s picks do fall heavily into the “white boys with guitars” category, there’s plenty more besides, including early tracks from Eric B. & Rakim, P.J. Harvey, Stereolab, 10,000 Maniacs, Cocteau Twins, and many more. You can explore the tracks in Peel’s “Festive 50” lists here. They’re sorted by decade: 1970s — 1980s — 1990s — 2000s.
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