The Concept of Musical Harmony Explained in Five Levels of Difficulty, Starting with a Child & Ending with Herbie Hancock

 

Wired mag­a­zine has entered the video explain­er game with a nov­el series that takes con­cepts from kinder­garten to grad­u­ate school and beyond in under twen­ty min­utes. Their “5 Lev­els of Dif­fi­cul­ty” videos have it all: hip 21st cen­tu­ry ideas like blockchain, cute kids say­ing smart things, a cel­e­bra­tion of exper­tise and the com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills today’s experts need to present their work to a diverse, inter­na­tion­al pub­lic of all ages and edu­ca­tion lev­els. This is no gimmick—it’s enter­tain­ing and acces­si­ble, while still infor­ma­tive for even the best informed.

Take the video above, in which 23-year-old com­pos­er and musi­cian Jacob Col­lier explains the con­cept of musi­cal har­mo­ny. His stu­dents include a child, a teen, a col­lege stu­dent, a pro­fes­sion­al, and… Her­bie Han­cock. “I’m pos­i­tive,” he says, “that every­one can leave this video with some under­stand­ing, at some lev­el.” At lev­el 1, we under­stand har­mo­ny as an expres­sion of mood or feel­ing, pro­duced by adding “more notes” to a melody. A sim­ple but effec­tive def­i­n­i­tion.

Lev­el 2 intro­duces basic theory—using chords, or tri­ads, to explain how har­mo­ny can pro­duce dif­fer­ent emo­tions, mod­u­lat­ing from major to minor, and cre­at­ing “nar­ra­tives” with­in a song. In Lev­el 3, har­mo­ny becomes a lan­guage, and the vocab­u­lary of the cir­cle of fifths comes in. Collier’s col­lege stu­dent com­pan­ion also plays gui­tar, and the two jam through a few chord voic­ings to give his exam­ple song, “Amaz­ing Grace,” a smooth and jazzy feel. At Lev­el 4, a pro­fes­sion­al pianist learns a few things about over­tones and under­tones, com­po­si­tion­al arrang­ing, and “neg­a­tive har­mo­ny.”

Then, at 8:30, we get to the main attrac­tion, and, as tends to hap­pen in these videos at the final stage, stu­dent and teacher roles reverse. Col­lier essen­tial­ly inter­views Han­cock on har­mo­ny, both perched behind key­boards and speak­ing the lan­guage of music flu­ent­ly. Non-pro­fes­sion­als won’t have had near­ly enough prepa­ra­tion in 8 min­utes to grasp what’s going on. It’s high lev­el stuff, but even if you’re mys­ti­fied by the the­o­ry, stick around for the stories—and learn what Miles Davis meant when he told Han­cock, “don’t play the but­ter notes,” advice on play­ing har­mo­ny that changed every­thing for him.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Explain­ing Hard Ideas: Sci­en­tists Try to Explain Gene Edit­ing & Brain Map­ping to Young Kids & Stu­dents

Her­bie Han­cock Explains the Big Les­son He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mis­take in Music, as in Life, Is an Oppor­tu­ni­ty

West­ern Music Moves in Three and Even Four (!) Dimen­sion­al Spaces: How the Pio­neer­ing Research of Prince­ton The­o­rist Dmitri Tymoczko Helps Us Visu­al­ize Music in Rad­i­cal, New Ways

John Coltrane Draws a Pic­ture Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­ics of Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Studio Ghibli Releases Tantalizing Concept Art for Its New Theme Park, Opening in Japan in 2022

When you watch an ani­mat­ed film, you vis­it a world. That holds true, to an extent, for live-action movies as well, but much more so for those cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ences whose audio­vi­su­al details all come, of neces­si­ty, craft­ed from scratch. Walt Dis­ney under­stood that bet­ter than any­one else in the motion-pic­ture indus­try, and none could argue that he did­n’t cap­i­tal­ize on it. When they found­ed Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, Hayao Miyaza­ki and the late Isao Taka­ha­ta — in the fine 20th-cen­tu­ry Japan­ese tra­di­tion of bor­row­ing West­ern ideas and then refin­ing them near­ly beyond recog­ni­tion — took Dis­ney’s delib­er­ate world-build­ing a step fur­ther, painstak­ing­ly craft­ing a look and feel for their pro­duc­tions that amounts to a sep­a­rate real­i­ty: rich, coher­ent, and, for the mil­lions of die-hard Ghi­b­li fans all around the world, immense­ly appeal­ing.

In a few years, those fans will get the chance to enter Ghi­b­li’s world in a much more con­crete sense. Dis­ney’s insight that his audi­ence would beat a path to an amuse­ment park based on his stu­dio’s movies led to Dis­ney­land, Dis­ney World, and their glob­al suc­ces­sors, two of which, Tokyo Dis­ney­land and Tokyo Dis­ney Sea, now rank among the five most vis­it­ed theme parks in the world.

The area of the Japan­ese cap­i­tal already offers an acclaimed Ghi­b­li expe­ri­ence in the form of the Ghi­b­li Muse­um, but in just a few years the city of Nagakute, a sub­urb of Nagoya, will see the open­ing of Ghi­b­li’s own ver­sion of Dis­ney­land, a theme park filled with attrac­tions based on the stu­dios beloved films.

Sched­uled to open in 2022 on the same plot of land used for the 2005 World’s Fair (where the house from My Neigh­bor Totoro was then built and still stands today), Ghi­b­li’s theme park will greet vis­i­tors with a main gate rem­i­nis­cent, writes Kotaku’s Bri­an Ashcraft, of “19th-cen­tu­ry struc­tures out of Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle as well as a recre­ation of Whis­per of the Heart’s antique shop.”

It also includes “the Big Ghi­b­li Ware­house, which is filled with all sorts of Ghi­b­li themed play areas as well as exhi­bi­tion areas and small cin­e­mas,” a Princess Mononoke vil­lage, a com­bined area for Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle and Kik­i’s Deliv­ery Ser­vice called Witch Val­ley, and the Totoro-themed Don­doko For­est. Will Stu­dio Ghi­b­li’s theme park rise into the ranks of the world’s most vis­it­ed? Nobody who has yet vis­it­ed their world, in any of its man­i­fes­ta­tions thus far, would put it past them.

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li has released some basic con­cept for the new theme park. You can get a few glimpses of what they have in mind on this page.

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

What Made Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Ani­ma­tor Isao Taka­ha­ta (RIP) a Mas­ter: Two Video Essays

Watch Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Char­ac­ters Enter the Real World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Computer Scientists Figure Out What’s the Longest Distance You Could Sail at Sea Without Hitting Land

Back in 2012, a red­di­tor by the name of “Kepleron­ly­knows” won­dered what’s the longest dis­tance you could trav­el by sea with­out hit­ting land. And then s/he haz­ard­ed an edu­cat­ed guess: “you can sail almost 20,000 miles in a straight line from Pak­istan to the Kam­chat­ka Penin­su­la, Rus­sia.”

Six years lat­er, two com­put­er scientists–Rohan Chabuk­swar (Unit­ed Tech­nolo­gies Research Cen­ter in Ire­land) and Kushal Mukher­jee (IBM Research in India)–have devel­oped an algo­rithm that offers a more defin­i­tive answer. Accord­ing to their com­pu­ta­tions, “Kepleron­ly­knows was entire­ly cor­rect,” notes the MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review.

The longest path over water “begins in Son­mi­ani, Balochis­tan, Pak­istan, pass­es between Africa and Mada­gas­car and then between Antarc­ti­ca and Tier­ra del Fuego in South Amer­i­ca, and ends in the Kara­gin­sky Dis­trict, Kam­chat­ka Krai, in Rus­sia. It is 32,089.7 kilo­me­ters long.” Or 19,939 miles.

While they were at it, Chabuk­swar and Mukher­jee also deter­mined the longest land jour­ney you could take with­out hit­ting the sea. That path, again notes the MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review, “runs from near Jin­jiang, Fujian, in Chi­na, weaves through Mon­go­lia Kaza­khstan and Rus­sia, and final­ly reach­es Europe to fin­ish near Sagres in Por­tu­gal. In total the route pass­es through 15 coun­tries over 11,241.1 kilo­me­ters.” Or 6,984 miles. You can read Chabuk­swar and Mukher­jee’s research report here.

via the MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Col­or­ful Map Visu­al­izes the Lex­i­cal Dis­tances Between Europe’s Lan­guages: 54 Lan­guages Spo­ken by 670 Mil­lion Peo­ple

Col­or­ful Maps from 1914 and 2016 Show How Planes & Trains Have Made the World Small­er and Trav­el Times Quick­er

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visu­al­ized in Two Min­utes: 10 Mil­lion Lives, 20,000 Voy­ages, Over 315 Years

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

Dramatic Footage of San Francisco Right Before & After the Massively Devastating Earthquake of 1906

Dis­as­ters both nat­ur­al and man-made—or in the case of cli­mate change, some mea­sure of both—can reduce built envi­ron­ments to ash and rub­ble with lit­tle warn­ing. In cas­es like the Lis­bon earth­quake, the Great Fire of Lon­don, or the bomb­ing of Dres­den, cities have been com­plete­ly rebuilt. In oth­ers, like the utter­ly destroyed Pom­peii, they lay in ruins for­ev­er, or like Cher­nobyl, become irra­di­at­ed ghost towns. Such events stand as sin­gu­lar moments in his­to­ry, like rup­tures in time, shak­ing faith in reli­gion, sci­ence, and gov­ern­ment.

In the case of the Great 1906 San Fran­cis­co Earth­quake, which destroyed 80% of the city with its esti­mat­ed mag­ni­tude of 7.9, the dis­as­ter also serves as a dire his­tor­i­cal warn­ing for what might hap­pen again if seis­mol­o­gists’ cur­rent grim prog­nos­ti­ca­tions prove cor­rect. In the film above, “A Trip Down Mar­ket Street” by the Miles broth­ers, we see the bustling city just four days before the quake. Film his­to­ri­an David Kiehn has dat­ed this footage to April 14th, 1906. The very con­vinc­ing sound design has been added by Mike Upchurch.

The film shows Mar­ket Street in full swing, Mod­el T’s jostling with horse­drawn car­riages over street­car tracks, while pedes­tri­ans weave in and out of the traf­fic. The four Miles broth­ers, Har­ry, Her­bert, Ear­le, and Joe, left for New York short­ly after shoot­ing in San Fran­cis­co and just missed the quake. They had sent the neg­a­tives ahead, bare­ly sav­ing this valu­able footage. They returned to find their stu­dios, and their city, destroyed by the quake and the near­ly four days of fires that fol­lowed it. They did what any film­mak­er would—started film­ing.

Their footage of the dev­as­ta­tion was long thought lost until it was re-dis­cov­ered at a flea mar­ket. Kiehn dig­i­tized the film and it was recent­ly screened at the Bay Area Edi­son The­ater while on its way to the Library of Con­gress, just before the 112th anniver­sary of the quake. The Miles broth­ers, says Kiehn, “shot almost two hours of film after the earth­quake and very lit­tle of it sur­vives. I think this is one of the longest sur­viv­ing pieces.” It begins with a har­row­ing trip down Mar­ket Street, reduced from bustling city cen­ter to waste­land.

The quake, writes Bill Van Niek­erken at the San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle, caused “unfath­omable dev­as­ta­tion… At least 700 are thought to have per­ished, with some esti­mates at more than 3,000…. 490 city blocks were lev­eled, with 28,188 build­ings destroyed. More than 200,000 peo­ple were left home­less.” From this hor­ror, Niek­erkan draws inspi­ra­tion. “San Fran­cis­co, how­ev­er, rose from the ash­es, rebuilt and became a greater city, a shin­ing sym­bol of the West.”

Per­haps the les­son, should sci­en­tists who fore­cast anoth­er major quake be right, is that the city can rebuild again. And in part because of the “wealth of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge” seis­mol­o­gists gained from the 1906 quake, it is much bet­ter pre­pared for such a calami­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Lon­don in Vivid Col­or 125 Years Ago: See Trafal­gar Square, the British Muse­um, Tow­er Bridge & Oth­er Famous Land­marks in Pho­tocrom Prints

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Charlie Chaplin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

Char­lie Chap­lin was an actor and film­mak­er com­mit­ted to his craft–a per­fec­tion­ist, in short. When direct­ing City Lights (1931), Chap­lin demand­ed as many as 342 takes of a fair­ly straight­for­ward three-minute scene. That’s what it took to get it right.

Above, we find an ear­li­er exam­ple of the film­mak­er’s atten­tion to detail … and his appetite for risk. In the 1928 film, The Cir­cus, Chap­lin took more than 200 takes to com­plete the Lion’s Cage scene shown above. Many of those takes, the offi­cial Char­lie Chap­lin web­site reminds us, took place inside the lion’s cage itself. As the scene unfolds, the ten­sion builds and Chap­lin puts in a per­for­mance that helped him secure his first Acad­e­my Award.

Enjoy.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Watch Char­lie Chap­lin Demand 342 Takes of One Scene from City Lights

When Char­lie Chap­lin Entered a Chap­lin Look-Alike Con­test and Came in 20th Place

Char­lie Chap­lin Gets Strapped into a Dystopi­an “Rube Gold­berg Machine,” a Fright­ful Com­men­tary on Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

The Gig When Miles Davis Jammed with Carlos Santana & Robben Ford (Giants Stadium, 1986)

The old joke about super­groups being less than the sum of their parts often holds true in rock and pop. Too many cooks, and all that. But what hap­pens when you bring togeth­er super­stars from dif­fer­ent gen­res? This was basi­cal­ly the idea of jazz fusion, and espe­cial­ly of Miles Davis, one of fusion’s prin­ci­ple pio­neers in the late six­ties and ear­ly sev­en­ties. It’s a genre of music peo­ple seem to either love or hate. Those who fall into the lat­ter camp often cite the ten­den­cy of jazz-rock ensem­bles to over­play, to the detri­ment of both jazz and rock.

Fol­low­ing Davis’ inno­va­tions, vir­tu­oso col­lab­o­ra­tors like John McLaugh­lin went on to form their own super­groups, while the star trum­peter checked out for a while. But “after five years of silence,” as Peo­ple mag­a­zine wrote in 1981, his trum­pet was “once again heard in the land.”

Davis assem­bled a few bands and charged ahead in an even more fusion‑y direc­tion, despite some severe crit­i­cism from music writ­ers, fans, and fel­low per­form­ers. He cov­ered Cyn­di Lau­per and Michael Jack­son and col­lab­o­rat­ed with new wave bands and pop stars like Toto. He seemed deter­mined to mix it up with as many major play­ers as he could.

The results were some­times less than the sum of their parts, though his exper­i­men­ta­tion crys­tal­ized in an excel­lent record in 1986, the Mar­cus Miller-pro­duced jazz/funk/pop/R&B album Tutu. That same year, Davis and a loose­ly-assem­bled band took the stage at Giants Sta­di­um for a short set at an Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al ben­e­fit con­cert, where they were joined by jazz and rock gui­tarist Robben Ford and, on the last song, by spe­cial guest star Car­los San­tana. Tutu, notes The Last Miles—web­site for George Cole’s book of the same name—“was still a few months away from its offi­cial release.”

The band jammed through two of the new album’s tunes, the title track and “Splatch.” Then, for the final song, “Burn”—“a rock-funk num­ber that Miles first heard in 1980”—Santana took the stage. You can see video of them play­ing that song at the top of the post and hear the full audio of the short per­for­mance, less than 30 min­utes, fur­ther up. The eight-piece band plays a typ­i­cal­ly busy fusion set, with solo after amaz­ing solo over a full-on wall of elec­tri­fied sound. I con­fess, I find this side of Miles a lit­tle assaultive next to the restraint of much ear­li­er work, but that’s a mat­ter of per­son­al taste. It’s impos­si­ble to say a bad word about the qual­i­ty of these per­for­mances.

How did these super­stars end up work­ing togeth­er, not only at this ben­e­fit but in oth­er con­certs and record­ings? Find out in the inter­views above from San­tana and Ford, both of whom describe their expe­ri­ences as major career high­lights. The respect in both cas­es, a rar­i­ty with Miles Davis, was mutu­al.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miles Davis Dish­es Dirt on His Fel­low Jazz Musi­cians: “The Trom­bone Play­er Should be Shot”; That Ornette is “F‑ing Up the Trum­pet”

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970: Hear the Com­plete Record­ings

Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sor­ry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fill­more East (1970)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

What Is Blockchain? Three Videos Explain the New Technology That Promises to Change Our World

You’ve heard the word “blockchain” many times now, but prob­a­bly not quite as many as you’ve heard the word “bit­coin.” Yet you sure­ly have a sense that the ref­er­ents of those two words have a con­nec­tion, and even if you haven’t yet been inter­est­ed in either, you may well know that blockchain, a tech­nol­o­gy, makes Bit­coin, a cur­ren­cy, pos­si­ble in the first place. Their sheer nov­el­ty has already giv­en rise to a mini-indus­try of explain­er videos, more of them deal­ing direct­ly with bit­coin than blockchain, but in time the lat­ter could poten­tial­ly over­take the for­mer in impor­tance, to the degree that it becomes as vital to soci­ety as the pro­to­cols that under­gird the inter­net itself.

Or at least you could come away con­vinced of that after watch­ing the blockchain explain­er videos fea­tured here. The short­est of the three, the one by the Insti­tute for the Future at the top of the post, attempts to break down, in just two min­utes, the prin­ci­ples behind this tech­nol­o­gy, still in its infan­cy, in which so many see such rev­o­lu­tion­ary poten­tial.

“Blockchains store infor­ma­tion across a net­work of per­son­al com­put­ers, mak­ing them not just decen­tral­ized but dis­trib­uted,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor. “This means no cen­tral com­pa­ny or per­son owns the sys­tem, yet every­one can use it and help run it.” And accord­ing to blockchain’s boost­ers, that very decen­tral­iza­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion makes it that much more trustable and less hack­able.

In the Wired video just above, blockchain researcher Bet­ti­na War­burg explains her sub­ject in five dif­fer­ent ways to peo­ple at five dif­fer­ent stages of life, from a five-year-old girl to a ful­ly grown aca­d­e­m­ic. Actu­al­ly, that last inter­locu­tor, an NYU his­to­ri­an named Finn Brun­ton, does much of the explain­ing him­self, and right at the begin­ning of his seg­ment (at 9:48) rolls out one of the clear­er and more intrigu­ing run­down of the nature of blockchain cur­rent­ly float­ing around on the inter­net:

A tech­ni­cal def­i­n­i­tion of blockchain is that it is a per­sis­tent, trans­par­ent, pub­lic, append-only ledger. So it is a sys­tem that you can add data to, and not change pre­vi­ous data with­in. It does this through a mech­a­nism for cre­at­ing con­sen­sus between scat­tered, or dis­trib­uted, par­ties that do not need to trust each oth­er. They just need to trust the mech­a­nism by which their con­sen­sus is arrived at. In the case of blockchain, it relies on some form of chal­lenge such that no one actor on the net­work is able to solve this chal­lenge more con­sis­tent­ly than any­one else on the net­work. It ran­dom­izes the process, and in the­o­ry ensures that no one can force the blockchain to accept a par­tic­u­lar entry onto the ledger that oth­ers dis­agree with.

Brun­ton also empha­sizes that â€śalmost every aspect of it that is con­nect­ed with the con­cept of mon­ey” — includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to Bit­coin — “is wild­ly over-hyped.” Those who can look past the Gold Rush-style bal­ly­hoo­ing of those ear­ly appli­ca­tions of blockchain can bet­ter grasp what role the tech­nol­o­gy, which essen­tial­ly enables the build­ing of sys­tems to secure­ly exchange infor­ma­tion over the inter­net that no one per­son or com­pa­ny owns, might one day play in many parts of our lives, from finance to ener­gy to health care. â€śCred­it scores that aren’t con­trolled by a hand­ful of high-risk, data-breach-prone com­pa­nies,” promis­es Caris­sa Carter of Stan­ford’s d.school, “cred­i­ble news sys­tems that resist cen­sor­ship; effi­cient pow­er grids that could low­er your pow­er bills.”

Before it can bring those won­ders, Bit­coin must first over­come for­mi­da­ble tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions: as Com­put­er­world’s Lucas Mear­i­an writes, for instance,” the Bit­coin blockchain har­ness­es any­where between 10 and 100 times as much com­put­ing pow­er com­pared to all of Google’s serv­ing farms put togeth­er.”  But then, few of the first devel­op­ers of the tech­nolo­gies that dri­ve the inter­net could have imag­ined all we do with them across the world today, and those who did must have had a sol­id under­stand­ing of its most basic ele­ments. How do you know when you’ve attained that under­stand­ing? “If you can’t explain it sim­ply, you don’t under­stand it well enough,” as Albert Ein­stein once said, and as Citi Inno­va­tion Lab CTO Shai Rubin quotes him as say­ing at the begin­ning of his own blockchain explain­er, per­formed in less than fif­teen min­utes using no pieces of tech­nol­o­gy more rev­o­lu­tion­ary than a white­board and mark­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Actu­al­ly Is Bit­coin? Princeton’s Free Course “Bit­coin and Cur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies” Pro­vides Much-Need­ed Answers

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

Bit­coin and Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies: A Free Course from Prince­ton

The Prince­ton Bit­coin Text­book Is Now Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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