Watch J.S. Bach’s “Air on the G String” Played on the Actual Instruments from His Time

in Music | November 5th, 2019

There is no wrong way to lis­ten to the music of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach. You may pre­fer the aus­tere, idio­syn­crat­ic piano inter­pre­ta­tions of Glenn Gould; you may pre­fer the ground­break­ing ana­log-syn­the­siz­er ren­di­tions painstak­ing­ly record­ed by Wendy Car­los (whose ear­ly fans includ­ed Gould him­self); or you may pre­fer faith­ful per­for­mances using only the instru­ments extant in the late 17th to mid-18th cen­tu­ry peri­od in which Bach lived. In that last case, the San Fran­cis­co ear­ly-music ensem­ble Voic­es of Music has you cov­ered. You may remem­ber us pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tur­ing their per­for­mances of Vival­di and Pachel­bel; in the video above, you can hear and see them play Bach.

More specif­i­cal­ly, you can hear them play the sec­ond move­ment, Aria, from Bach’s orches­tral suite in D Major, BWV 1068. The instru­ments they play it on include an Ital­ian baroque vio­lin from 1660 and an Aus­tri­an baroque vio­la from 1680, as well as more recent­ly craft­ed exam­ples rig­or­ous­ly mod­eled after instru­ments from that same era. “As instru­ments became mod­ern­ized in the 19th cen­tu­ry, builders and play­ers tend­ed to focus on the vol­ume of sound and the sta­bil­i­ty of tun­ing,” says VoM’s expla­na­tion of their use of peri­od instru­ments. “Mod­ern steel strings replaced the old­er mate­ri­als, and instru­ments were often machine made. His­tor­i­cal instru­ments, built indi­vid­u­al­ly by hand and with over­all lighter con­struc­tion, have extreme­ly com­plex over­tones — which we find delight­ful.”

Any lover of Bach’s music has heard this piece many times, not least due to its pop­u­lar­iza­tion in the late 19th cen­tu­ry, in an arrange­ment by Ger­man vio­lin­ist August Wil­helmj, as “Air on the G String.” The orig­i­nal work dates to “some time between the years 1717 and 1723,” writes music blog­ger Özgür Nevres, when Bach com­posed it for his patron Prince Leopold of Anhalt. It also holds the hon­or of being the first work by Bach ever record­ed, “by the Russ­ian cel­list Alek­san­dr Verzh­bilovich and an unknown pianist, in 1902 (as the Air from the Over­ture No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068).” But no mat­ter how many dif­fer­ent record­ings from dif­fer­ent eras of Bach’s orches­tral suite in D Major in which you’ve steeped your­self, if you’ve only heard it played on mod­ern instru­ments, a per­for­mance like Voic­es of Music’s shows that it still has sur­pris­es to offer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Sounds of the Actu­al Instru­ments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Han­del Orig­i­nal­ly Com­posed Their Music

The Authen­tic Vivaldi’s The Four Sea­sons: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on Orig­i­nal Man­u­scripts & Played with 18th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

The Authen­tic Pachelbel’s Canon: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on the Orig­i­nal Man­u­script & Played with Orig­i­nal 17th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

Watch Glenn Gould Per­form His Last Great Stu­dio Record­ing of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions (1981)

All of Bach for Free! New Site Will Put Per­for­mances of 1080 Bach Com­po­si­tions Online

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Women Scientists Launch a Database Featuring the Work of 9,000 Women Working in the Sciences

in Gender, Science | November 5th, 2019

“Why are there so few women in sci­ence?” has almost become a tire­some refrain over the years, giv­en how lit­tle the answers engage with the thou­sands of female sci­en­tists work­ing all over the world. “Too often,” writes the project 500 Women Sci­en­tists, “high-pro­file arti­cles, con­fer­ence pan­els, and boards are filled with a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of male voic­es. News sto­ries are report­ed by more men by a huge mar­gin, and this imbal­ance is reflect­ed in how fre­quent­ly women are quot­ed in news sto­ries unless jour­nal­ists make a con­scious effort to reach out.

“Most keynote speak­ers at con­fer­ences are men. Pan­els are so fre­quent­ly all-male that a new word evolved to describe the phe­nom­e­non: manels. These imbal­ances add up and rein­force the inac­cu­rate per­cep­tion that sci­ence is stale, pale and male.” The next time the ques­tion arises—“why are there so few women in science?”—or any oth­er ques­tion need­ing sci­en­tif­ic exper­tise, one need only ges­ture silent­ly to 500 Women Sci­en­tists, a grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion con­sist­ing of far more sci­en­tists than its title sug­gests.

Described as “a resource for jour­nal­ists, edu­ca­tors, pol­i­cy mak­ers, sci­en­tists and any­one need­ing sci­en­tif­ic exper­tise,” the project began in 2016 as an open let­ter penned by its founders, then grad­u­ate stu­dents at Col­orado Uni­ver­si­ty, Boul­der, who decid­ed to re-affirm their val­ues against reac­tionary attacks by amass­ing 500 sig­na­tures on an open let­ter. They’ve since built a search­able data­base of over 9,000 women researchers from around the world, and a resource that helps build local sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ties.

Since launch­ing last year, their Request a Sci­en­tist data­base has shown “the excuse that you can’t find a qual­i­fied woman just does­n’t hold,” says co-founder and micro­bial ecol­o­gist Dr. Kel­ly Ramirez-Don­ders. It has also pro­vid­ed much more detailed data on women in sci­ence, which was pub­lished in a paper at PLOS Biol­o­gy in April. “The group has ambi­tious plans to keep expand­ing its reach,” writes STAT. “They’re rais­ing mon­ey to start a fel­low­ship for women of col­or… and they have already launched an affil­i­ate group, 500 Women in Med­i­cine.”

“We’re sci­en­tists. We’re lovers of evi­dence and data points,” says co-founder Maryam Zaring­ha­lam, a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist. “And so now any­time some­body tells us they couldn’t find some­one or there just aren’t enough women in STEM fields, we can point them to [the data­base] and say, ‘Well, actu­al­ly, this is the tip of the ice­berg, and there’s over 8,000.’… ensur­ing that women’s voic­es are rep­re­sent­ed in the media nar­ra­tives is real­ly essen­tial for show­ing that, ‘No, we are here, it’s just that peo­ple haven’t nec­es­sar­i­ly been aware of us or done the work to find us.’”

Cor­rect­ing mis­per­cep­tions not only helps reduce bias­es with­in sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ties; it also encour­ages bud­ding sci­en­tists who might oth­er­wise be dis­cour­aged from the pur­suit. “It’s not that girls are not inter­est­ed in sci­ence,” co-founder Jane Zeliko­va tells Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca. “Some­thing hap­pens where they don’t see women or girls rep­re­sent­ed as sci­en­tists and they don’t think it’s for them.” 500 Women in Sci­ence proves that notion wrong—science is for them, and for every­one who wants to devote their lives to sci­en­tif­ic research. Just look at the data.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Women’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tions to Mod­ern Genet­ics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Foot­notes

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Real Women Talk About Their Careers in Sci­ence

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

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The Very First Picture of the Far Side of the Moon, Taken 60 Years Ago

in Astronomy, History, Photography | November 5th, 2019

Six­ty years ago, mankind got its very first glimpse of the far side of the Moon, so called because it faces away from the Earth. (And as astronomers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson have long tak­en pains to point out to Pink Floyd fans, it isn’t “dark.”) Tak­en by the Sovi­et Union, that first pho­to may not look like much today, espe­cial­ly com­pared to the high-res­o­lu­tion col­or images sent back from the sur­face itself by Chi­na’s Chang’e‑4 probe ear­li­er this year. But with the tech­nol­o­gy of the late 1950s, even the tech­nol­o­gy com­mand­ed by the Sovi­ets’ then-world-beat­ing space pro­gram, the fact that it was tak­en at all seems not far short of mirac­u­lous. How did they do it?

“This pho­to­graph was tak­en by the Sovi­et space­craft Luna 3, which was launched a month after the Luna 2 space­craft became the first man-made object to impact on the sur­face of the Moon,” explains astronomer Kevin Hain­line in a recent Twit­ter thread. “Luna 2 fol­lowed Luna 1, the first space­craft to escape a geo­syn­chro­nous Earth orbit.” Luna 3 was designed to take pho­tographs of the Moon, hard­ly an uncom­pli­cat­ed prospect: “To take pic­tures you have to be sta­ble on three-axes. You have to take the pho­tographs remote­ly. AND you have to some­how trans­fer those pic­tures back to Earth.” The first three-axis sta­bi­lized space­craft ever sent on a mis­sion, Luna 3 “had to use a lit­tle pho­to­cell to ori­ent towards the Moon so that now, while sta­bi­lized, it could take the pic­tures. Which it did. On PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM.”

Even those of us who took pic­tures on film for decades have start­ed to take for grant­ed the con­ve­nience of dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy. But think back to all the has­sle of tra­di­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy, then imag­ine mak­ing a robot car­ry them out in space. Once tak­en Luna 3’s pho­tos “were then moved to a lit­tle CHEMICAL PLANT to DEVELOP AND DRY THEM.” (In oth­er words, “Luna 3 had a lit­tle 1 Hour Pho­to inside.”) Then they con­tin­ued into “a device that shone a cath­ode ray tube, like in an old­er TV, through them, towards a device that record­ed the bright­ness and con­vert­ed this to an elec­tri­cal sig­nal.” You can read about what hap­pened then in more detail at Damn Inter­est­ing, where Alan Bel­lows describes how the space­craft sent “the light­ness and dark­ness infor­ma­tion line-by-line via fre­quen­cy-mod­u­lat­ed ana­log sig­nal — in essence, a fax sent over radio.”

Sovi­et Sci­en­tists could thus “retrieve one pho­to­graph­ic frame every 30 min­utes or so. Due to the dis­tance and weak sig­nal, the first images received con­tained noth­ing but sta­t­ic. In sub­se­quent attempts in the fol­low­ing few days, an indis­tinct, blotchy white disc began to resolve on the ther­mal paper print­outs at Sovi­et lis­ten­ing sta­tions.” As Luna 3’s pho­tos became clear­er, they revealed, as Hain­line puts it, that “the back­side of the moon was SO WEIRD AND DIFFERENT” — cov­ered in the craters, for exam­ple, which have become its visu­al sig­na­ture. For a mod­ern-day equiv­a­lent to this achieve­ment, we might look not just to Chang’e‑4 but to the image of a black hole cap­tured by the Event Hori­zon Tele­scope this past April — the one that led to an abun­dance of arti­cles like “In Defense of the Blur­ry Black Hole Pho­to” and “We Need to Admit That the Black Hole Pho­to Isn’t Very Good.” Astropho­tog­ra­phy has come a long way, but at least back in 1959 it did­n’t pro­duce quite so many takes.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mankind’s First Steps on the Moon: The Ultra High Res Pho­tos

8,400 Stun­ning High-Res Pho­tos From the Apol­lo Moon Mis­sions Are Now Online

How Sci­en­tists Col­orize Those Beau­ti­ful Space Pho­tos Tak­en By the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope

There’s a Tiny Art Muse­um on the Moon That Fea­tures the Art of Andy Warhol & Robert Rauschen­berg

The Glo­ri­ous Poster Art of the Sovi­et Space Pro­gram in Its Gold­en Age (1958–1963)

Won­der­ful­ly Kitschy Pro­pa­gan­da Posters Cham­pi­on the Chi­nese Space Pro­gram (1962–2003)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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The Time When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest & Came in 20th Place

in Comedy, Film | November 4th, 2019

chaplin contest

Char­lie Chap­lin start­ed appear­ing in his first films in 1914—40 films, to be precise—and, by 1915, the Unit­ed States had a major case of “Chap­lini­tis.” Chap­lin mus­tach­es were sud­den­ly pop­ping up every­where–as were Chap­lin imi­ta­tors and Chap­lin look-alike con­tests. A young Bob Hope appar­ent­ly won one such con­test in Cleve­land. Chap­lin Fever con­tin­ued burn­ing hot through 1921, the year when the Chap­lin look-alike con­test, shown above, was held out­side the Lib­er­ty The­atre in Belling­ham, Wash­ing­ton.

Accord­ing to leg­end, some­where between 1915 and 1921, Chap­lin decid­ed to enter a Chap­lin look-alike con­test, and lost, bad­ly.

A short arti­cle called “How Char­lie Chap­lin Failed,” appear­ing in The Straits Times of Sin­ga­pore in August of 1920, read like this:

Lord Des­bor­ough, pre­sid­ing at a din­ner of the Anglo-Sax­on club told a sto­ry which will have an endur­ing life. It comes from Miss Mary Pick­ford who told it to Lady Des­bor­ough, “Char­lie Chap­lin was one day at a fair in the Unit­ed States, where a prin­ci­pal attrac­tion was a com­pe­ti­tion as to who could best imi­tate the Char­lie Chap­lin walk. The real Char­lie Chap­lin thought there might be a chance for him so he entered for the per­for­mance, minus his cel­e­brat­ed mous­tache and his boots. He was a fright­ful fail­ure and came in twen­ti­eth.

A vari­a­tion on the same sto­ry appeared in a New Zealand news­pa­per, the Pover­ty Bay Her­ald, again in 1920. As did anoth­er sto­ry in the Aus­tralian news­pa­per, the Albany Adver­tis­er, in March, 1921.

A com­pe­ti­tion in Char­lie Chap­lin imper­son­ations was held in Cal­i­for­nia recent­ly. There was some­thing like 40 com­peti­tors, and Char­lie Chap­lin, as a joke, entered the con­test under an assumed name. He imper­son­at­ed his well known film self. But he did not win; he was 27th in the com­pe­ti­tion.

Did Chap­lin come in 20th place? 27th place? Did he enter a con­test at all? It’s fun to imag­ine that he did. But, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, many con­sid­er the sto­ry the stuff of urban leg­end. When one researcher asked the Asso­ci­a­tion Chap­lin to weigh in, they appar­ent­ly had this to say: “This anec­dote told by Lord Des­bor­ough, who­ev­er he may have been, was quite wide­ly report­ed in the British press at the time. There are no oth­er ref­er­ences to such a com­pe­ti­tion in any oth­er press clip­ping albums that I have seen so I can only assume that this is the source of that rumour, urban myth, what­ev­er it is. How­ev­er, it may be true.”

I’d like to believe it is.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in ear­ly 2016.

via France Cul­ture/Stack Exchange

Relat­ed Con­tent:

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

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

 

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Oscar-Nominated Composer Danny Elfman Teaches an Online Course on Writing Music for Film: A Look Inside His Creative Process

in Film, Music | November 4th, 2019


FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

To have watched some of the great­est film and tele­vi­sion in the last thir­ty-five years is to have been immersed in the music of Mark Moth­ers­baugh and Dan­ny Elfman—two artists who have scored Hol­ly­wood block­busters and indie hits alike since the mid-eight­ies when they start­ed on TV’s Pee-wee’s Play­house and Tim Burton’s 1985 com­e­dy Pee-wee’s Big Adven­ture, respec­tive­ly. They also hap­pen to have played in two of the 1980’s weird­est, most exper­i­men­tal New Wave bands, Devo and Oin­go Boin­go.

Moth­ers­bough went on to score every­thing from Rugrats to Thor: Rag­narok, but he’s maybe best known for his work with Wes Ander­son. Like­wise, Elfman—who has worked with every­one from Gus Van Sant to Bri­an De Pal­ma to Peter Jack­son to Ang Lee—formed a cre­ative bond with Bur­ton, to such a degree that it’s near impos­si­ble to imag­ine a Tim Bur­ton film with­out a Dan­ny Elf­man score.

When Bur­ton first approached him for Pee-wee’s Big Adven­ture, the Oin­go Boin­go front­man was just about to release “Weird Sci­ence,” for the infa­mous John Hugh­es film of the same name. Already a band with a mas­sive cult fol­low­ing, they became pop stars, and Elf­man became one of the most dis­tinc­tive film com­posers of the last sev­er­al decades.

He scored Beetle­juice, Bat­man, Edward Scis­sorhands, Bat­man Returns, Sleepy Hol­low, The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, Corpse Bride, and, most recent­ly, Burton’s Dum­bo. Now he’s shar­ing his secrets for aspir­ing film com­posers every­where with his very own Mas­ter­class. “I’m going to tell you from my per­spec­tive,” he says in the trail­er above, “how I do these things”: things includ­ing instru­men­ta­tion, orches­tra­tion, melody, and tone—“the most impor­tant thing you’re going to cap­ture in a film score.”

In the screen­shots here, see excerpts of the course top­ics, which include units on the films Milk, The Unknown Known, and The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, an exam­ple of “writ­ing specif­i­cal­ly for a character”—a char­ac­ter, Jack Skelling­ton, whose singing voice Elf­man also pro­vid­ed.

For those who feel they’ll nev­er mea­sure up to a career like Dan­ny Elfman’s, he intro­duces all impor­tant units on inse­cu­ri­ty and fail­ure. Per­haps the most impor­tant les­son of all, he says above, with infec­tious enthu­si­asm, is learn­ing that “it’s okay to fail, to feel inse­cure. Doubt­ing your­self, find­ing con­fi­dence and mov­ing for­ward, and then doubt­ing what you’ve just done…. I think this is the life of a com­pos­er. I think it’s the life of an artist.”

Can such things be taught, or can they only be lived? Each teacher and stu­dent of the arts must at some point ask them­selves this ques­tion. Per­haps they only learn the answer when they try, and fail, and try again any­way. Sign up for Elman’s course here.

You can take this class by sign­ing up for a Mas­ter­Class’ All Access Pass. The All Access Pass will give you instant access to this course and 85 oth­ers for a 12-month peri­od.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Take Every Mas­ter­Class Course For Less Than a Cup of Good Cof­fee

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

All of the Music from Mar­tin Scorsese’s Movies: Lis­ten to a 326-Track, 20-Hour Playlist

Bri­an Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Sound­tracks

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

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Art Class Instead Of Jail: New Program Lets Young Offenders Take Free Art Classes Rather Than Spend Time in the Criminal System

in Art, Life, Museums | November 4th, 2019

Art saves lives, and art can also save an indi­vid­ual from the stig­ma of an arrest record, pro­vid­ed that the arrest is for one of 15 non-vio­lent mis­de­meanors.

Project Reset, a muse­um-based ear­ly diver­sion pro­gram in three of New York City’s five bor­oughs, aims to reframe the way youth­ful (and not so youth­ful) offend­ers see them­selves, by con­sid­er­ing an art­work via a col­lec­tive inter­pre­tive process, before using it as the inspi­ra­tion for a col­lage or oil pas­tel-based project of their own.

The stakes are high­er and far more per­son­al than they are on the aver­age pub­lic school field trip. Upon com­ple­tion of a class rang­ing from 2.5 to 4 hours, the participant’s record is wiped clean and their assigned court date is ren­dered moot.

Rather than being herd­ed through a num­ber of gal­leries, par­tic­i­pants zero in on a sin­gle work.

At the Brook­lyn Muse­um, par­tic­i­pants in the under-25 age range get a crash course in Shift­ing the Gaze, Titus Kaphar’s inten­tion­al palimpsest, in which all the fig­ures in a repli­ca of Frans Hals’ Fam­i­ly Group in a Land­scape are whit­ed out so view­ers may focus in on the only char­ac­ter of col­or, a young boy who appears to be a fam­i­ly ser­vant.

Old­er par­tic­i­pants under­take a sim­i­lar­ly deep dive on The Judge­ment by Bob Thomp­son, an African Amer­i­can artist who was inspired by the con­stant inter­play between good and evil.

While this may strike some as a cushy pun­ish­ment, it’s a legit­i­mate attempt to acquaint par­tic­i­pants with the very real impact their actions could have on future plans—including col­lege admis­sions and job appli­ca­tions.

Man­hat­tan Dis­trict Attor­ney, Cyrus Vance Jr., one of Project Reset’s archi­tects, shared a non-par­ti­san fis­cal take with City Lab’s Rebec­ca Bel­lan that may per­suade naysay­ers who feel the pro­gram rewards bud­ding crim­i­nals by giv­ing them an easy out:

If you jump sub­way turn­stiles in Man­hat­tan, you nev­er go to jail. You can do it 100 times and no court is ever going to send you to jail. So we spend about $2,200 to process a theft of ser­vices arrest for a $2.75 fare. Our jus­tice sys­tem falls most heav­i­ly on com­mu­ni­ties of col­or, and we real­ly need to rethink how we approach these cas­es, both to get bet­ter out­comes, but also to reduce the impact which is very often viewed as tar­get­ed and unfair on par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ties.

Above is a list of the non-vio­lent mis­de­meanors that can chan­nel first timers toward the apt­ly named Project Reset.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Med Schools Are Requir­ing Stu­dents to Take Art Class­es, and How It Makes Med Stu­dents Bet­ter Doc­tors

Won­der­ful­ly Off­beat Assign­ments That Artist John Baldessari Gave to His Art Stu­dents (1970)

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC for her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How to Find Silence in a Noisy World

in Life, Nature | November 1st, 2019

“Take a walk at night,” wrote avant-garde com­pos­er Pauline Oliv­eros in her 1974 “Son­ic Med­i­ta­tions,” a set of instruc­tions for what she called deep lis­ten­ing. “Walk so silent­ly that the bot­tom of your feet become ears.” Lis­ten­ing to silence opens up rich new worlds of sound. It can be a life-chang­ing expe­ri­ence.

“It’s hard to imag­ine that a sound can trans­form some­one’s life, but it hap­pened to me,” says acoustic ecol­o­gist Gor­don Hemp­ton in the short 360-degree doc­u­men­tary above, “How to Find Silence in a Noisy World.” Hemp­ton learned to walk silent­ly while car­ry­ing a micro­phone, doc­u­ment­ing his lis­ten­ing jour­ney through remote places like the Hoh Rain­for­est in Wash­ing­ton state, con­sid­ered one of the qui­etest places in North Amer­i­ca.

“By hold­ing a micro­phone, I became a bet­ter lis­ten­er. I learned that the micro­phone doesn’t lis­ten for what’s impor­tant, it doesn’t judge, it doesn’t inter­fere.” The micro­phone, that is, has no ego. Record­ed and ampli­fied, the silence of the Hoh becomes cacoph­o­ny, or a sym­pho­ny, depend­ing on how we describe it. Maybe any descrip­tion gets in the way of lis­ten­ing. “Just lis­ten,” says Hemp­ton. “Silence is the poet­ics of space. What it means to be in a place… Silence isn’t the absence of some­thing, but the pres­ence of every­thing

If silence is full of sound, why might we crave it when we’re stressed? Because we are bom­bard­ed by noise pol­lu­tion, “sounds that have noth­ing to do with the nat­ur­al acoustic sys­tem.” These sounds have been encroach­ing on places like the Hoh Rain­for­est for many decades, and Hemp­ton has doc­u­ment­ed their incur­sion over the past 30 years, build­ing a col­lec­tion of over 100 record­ings “equipped with a 3‑D micro­phone sys­tem that repli­cates human hear­ing,” notes Brain Pick­ings.

“Ema­nat­ing from his col­lec­tion… is the idea that ‘there is a fun­da­men­tal fre­quen­cy for each habitat’—a tonal qual­i­ty that shapes the sense of place and qual­i­ty of pres­ence.” Hempton’s work com­ple­ments the nature record­ings of Bernie Krause, for­mer musi­cian turned renowned expert on nat­ur­al sound, whose the­o­ry of bio­pho­ny describes how nat­ur­al sounds work togeth­er to fill in the spec­trum, each one estab­lish­ing its own spe­cif­ic band­width so as not to drown out the oth­ers.

Nat­ur­al sounds cre­ate a kind of self-reg­u­lat­ing har­mo­ny. In order to ful­ly inhab­it the space we’re in, we must be able to hear them. But as the record­ings made by Hemp­ton and Krause show us, humans have a unique abil­i­ty to feel our­selves deeply immersed in oth­er places, too, by lis­ten­ing to record­ings of their silences. Hemp­ton implies that record­ings may soon be all we have left.

“Silence,” he says, “is on the verge of extinc­tion. There is not one place left on plan­et Earth that is set aside and off lim­its to noise pol­lu­tion.” It inter­feres with the cycles of mat­ing ani­mals, dis­rupts call and response pat­terns ecosys­tems use to coor­di­nate them­selves. Silence is part of a glob­al biofeed­back sys­tem, telling us to qui­et down, slow down, and become part of all that’s hap­pen­ing around us. We ignore it to our great detri­ment.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Free: Down­load the Sub­lime Sights & Sounds of Yel­low­stone Nation­al Park

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

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

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The Entire History of the British Isles Animated: 42,000 BCE to Today

in Animation, History | November 1st, 2019

The Unit­ed King­dom is a con­fus­ing place for many peo­ple, and their not-quite-answered ques­tions about it go all the way to what does and does not con­sti­tute the Unit­ed King­dom in the first place. Not to give the end­ing away, but the ani­mat­ed map above by his­tor­i­cal-car­to­graph­i­cal Youtu­ber Ollie Bye even­tu­al­ly reveals that, if you’re look­ing at the British Isles, you’re look­ing at the UK — unless, of course, you’re look­ing at the Repub­lic of Ire­land. But tak­ing the long view, the polit­i­cal divi­sion of the British Isles has sel­dom been so sim­ple. We know they were pop­u­lat­ed by what we now call cau­ca­soids at least 44,000 years ago, but by 700 BC three groups had divid­ed them up: the Britons, the Picts, and the Gaels.

The com­pli­ca­tions real­ly start at the time of the Roman Empire, when, depend­ing on where in the British Isles you went, you’d have encoun­tered the Icenii, the Parisi, the Cale­donii, the Iverni, and many oth­er dis­tinct peo­ples besides. When the Roman Empire gave way to the Roman Repub­lic, Bri­tan­nia, or Roman Britain, began its expan­sion (and its road-build­ing) across the Isles, start­ing from the south­east.

But with Rome’s with­draw­al in 410 a great many new bor­ders appear like spi­der­web cracks across the land. For cen­turies there­after, the British Isles is a place of many king­doms: Mer­cia, Wes­sex, Northum­bria, Gwynedd, and Deheubarth, to name but a few. (Not to men­tion the Vikings.) And then you have a year like 1066, when the Nor­man con­quest redraws a large chunk of the map at a stroke.

Even those most igno­rant of British his­to­ry will rec­og­nize a few of the king­doms that arise lat­er on in this peri­od: the King­dom of Scot­land, for exam­ple, or the King­dom of Wales. Start­ing from the mid-12th cen­tu­ry, a cer­tain King­dom of Eng­land begins to paint the map red. By 1604, the British Isles are clean­ly divid­ed between the King­dom of Eng­land and the King­dom of Scot­land; by 1707, the King­dom of Great Britain is run­ning the whole place. The sit­u­a­tion has­n’t changed much since, though any­one who has trav­eled across the British Isles knows that the osten­si­ble lack of polit­i­cal frac­tious­ness masks many endur­ing cul­tur­al divi­sions sub­tle to the out­sider: while every­one liv­ing every­where from John o’ Groats to Land’s End may offi­cial­ly be British, few would coun­te­nance being lumped togeth­er with all the rest of them.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Ani­mat­ed Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

The His­to­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion Mapped in 13 Min­utes: 5000 BC to 2014 AD

5‑Minute Ani­ma­tion Maps 2,600 Years of West­ern Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

A His­to­ry of the Entire World in Less Than 20 Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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