What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

in History, Music, Technology, Television | August 15th, 2024

Survey the British public about the most important institution to arise in their country after World War II, and a lot of respondents are going to say the National Health Service. But keep asking around, and you’ll sooner or later encounter a few serious electronic-music enthusiasts who name the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Established in 1958 to provide music and sound effects for the Beeb’s radio productions — not least the documentaries and dramas of the artistically and intellectually ambitious Third Programme — the unit’s work eventually expanded to work on television shows as well. One could scarcely imagine Doctor Who, which debuted in 1963, without the Radiophonic Workshop’s sonic aesthetic.

By the end of the nineteen-sixties, the Radiophonic Workshop had been creating electronic music and injecting it into the lives of ordinary listeners and viewers for more than a decade. Even so, that same public didn’t necessarily possess a clear understanding of what, exactly, electronic music was. Hence this explanatory BBC television clip from 1969, which brings on Radiophonic Workshop head Desmond Briscoe as well as composers John Baker, David Cain, and Daphne Oram (previously featured here on Open Culture).

Having long since built her own studio, Oram also demonstrates her own techniques for creating and manipulating sound, few of which will look familiar to fans of electronic music in our digital culture today.

Even in 1969, none of Oram’s tools were digital in the way we now understand the term. In fact, the working process shown in this clip was so thoroughly analog as to involve painting the forms of sound waves directly onto slides and strips of film. She crafted sounds by hand in this way not purely due to technical limitation, but because extensive experience had shown her that it produced more interesting results: “if one does it by purely electronic means, one tends to get fixed on one vibration, one frequency of vibrato, which becomes dull.” Believing that “music should be a projection of a thought process in the mind of a human being,” Oram expressed reservations about a future in which computers pump out “music by the yard”: a future that, these 55 years later, seems to have arrived.

Meet Delia Derbyshire, the Dr. Who Composer Who Almost Turned The Beatles’ “Yesterday” Into Early Electronica

Meet Four Women Who Pioneered Electronic Music: Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliveros

Hear Electronic Ladyland, a Mixtape Featuring 55 Tracks from 35 Pioneering Women in Electronic Music

New Documentary Sisters with Transistors Tells the Story of Electronic Music’s Female Pioneers

Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938–2014)

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

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The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965)

in History, Music, Television | July 29th, 2024

Howlin’ Wolf may well have been the greatest blues singer of the 20th century. Certainly many people have said so, but there are other measurements than mere opinion, though it’s one I happen to share. The man born Chester Arthur Burnett also had a profound historical effect on popular culture, and on the way the Chicago blues carried “the sound of Jim Crow,” as Eric Lott writes, into American cities in the north, and into Europe and the UK. Recording for both Chess and Sun Records in the 50s (Sam Phillips said of his voice, “It’s where the soul of man never dies”), Burnett’s raw sound “was at once urgently urban and country plain… southern and rural in instrumentation and howlingly electric in form.”

He was also phenomenal on stage. His hulking six-foot-six frame and intense glowering stare belied some very smooth moves, but his finesse only enhanced his edginess. He seemed at any moment like he might actually turn into a wolf, letting the impulse give out in plaintive, ragged howls and prowls around the stage. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” he said, “so I turned to howlin’. And it’s done me just fine.” He played a very mean harmonica and did acrobatic guitar tricks before Hendrix, picked up from his mentor Charlie Patton. And he played with the best musicians, in large part because he was known to pay well and on time. If you wanted to play electric blues, Howlin’ Wolf was a man to watch.

This reputation was Wolf’s entrée to the stage of ABC variety show Shindig! in 1965, opening for the Rolling Stones. He had just returned from his 1964 tour of Europe and the UK with the American Folk Blues Festival, playing to large, appreciative crossover crowds. He’d also just released “Killing Floor,” a record Ted Gioia notes “reached out to young listeners without losing the deep blues feeling that stood as the cornerstone of Wolf’s sound.” The following year, the Rolling Stones insisted that Shindig!’s producers “also feature either Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf” before they would go on the show. Wolf won out over his rival Waters, toned down the theatrics of his act for a more prudish white audience, and “for the first time in his storied career, the celebrated bluesman performed on a national television broadcast.”

Why is this significant? Over the decades, the Stones regularly performed with their blues heroes. But this was new media ground. Brian Jones’ shy, starstruck introduction to Wolf before his performance above conveys what he saw as the importance of the moment. Jones’ biographer Paul Trynka may overstate the case, but in some degree at least, Wolf’s appearance on Shindig! “built a bridge over a cultural abyss and connected America with its own black culture.” The show constituted “a life-changing moment, both for the American teenagers clustered round the TV in their living rooms, and for a generation of blues performers who had been stuck in a cultural ghetto.” One of these teenagers described the event as “like Christmas morning.”

Eric Lott points to the show’s formative importance to the Stones, who “sit scattered around the Shindig! set watching Wolf in full-metal idolatry” as he sings “How Many More Years,” a song Led Zeppelin would later turn into “How Many More Times.” (See the Stones do their Shindig! performance of jangly, subdued “The Last Time,” here.) The performance represents more, however, than the “British Invasion embrace” of the blues. It shows Wolf’s mainstream breakout, and the Stones paying tribute to a founding father of rock and roll, an act of humility in a band not especially known or appreciated for that quality.

“It was altogether appropriate,” says music writer Peter Guralnick, “that they would be sitting at Wolf’s feet… that’s what it represented. His music was not simply the foundation or the cornerstone; it was the most vital thing you could ever imagine.” Guralnick, notes John Burnett at NPR, calls it “one of the greatest cultural moments of the 20th century.” At minimum, Burnett writes, it’s “one of the most incongruous moments in American pop music”—up until the mid-sixties, at least.

Whether or not the moment could live up to its legend, the people involved saw it as groundbreaking. The venerable Son House sat in attendance—“the man who knew Robert Johnson and Charley Patton,” remarked Brian Jones in awe. And the Rolling Stone positioning himself in deference to “Chicago blues,” Trynka writes, “uncompromising music aimed at a black audience, was a radical, epoch-changing step, both for baby boomer Americans and the musicians themselves. Fourteen and fifteen-year-old kids… hardly understood the growth of civil rights; but they could understand the importance of a handsome Englishman who described the mountainous, gravel-voiced bluesman as a ‘hero’ and sat smiling at his feet.”

The Rolling Stones Jam With Their Idol, Muddy Waters

The Story of the Rolling Stones: A Selection of Documentaries on the Quintessential Rock-and-Roll Band

Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sister Rosetta Tharpe & Other American Blues Legends Perform in the UK (1963–66)

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

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Martin Mull (RIP) Satirically Interviews a Young Tom Waits on Fernwood 2 Night (1977)

in Music, Television | July 1st, 2024

These days, references to seventies television increasingly require prefatory explanation. Who under the age of 60 recalls, for example, the cultural phenomenon that was Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, an absurdist satire so faithful to the soap-opera form it parodied that it aired every weeknight, putting out 325 episodes between early 1976 and mid-1977? And even for those who do remember the show, it would surely require a stretch of the memory to summon to mind its minor character Garth Gimble, an abusive husband who meets his grisly fate on the sharp end of an aluminum Christmas tree. (We’ll set the question of how many remember aluminum Christmas trees aside for the holiday season.)

Garth Gimble was the breakout role for a musical comedian turned actor called Martin Mull, who died last week at the age of 80. Tributes have mentioned the characters he played on shows from Roseanne and Sabrina the Teenage Witch to Arrested Development and Veep.

But to those who were watching TV in the summer of 1977, Mull has always been — and will always be — not Garth Gimble but his twin brother Barth, host of a low-budget late-night talk show in the small town of Fernwood, Ohio, the setting of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Fernwood-2-Night premiered as a temporary replacement for that show (and thus as yet another expansion of the televisual universe created by mega-producer Norman Lear), but it soon took on a countercultural life of its own.

The fictional talk-show form of Fernwood-2-Night was ahead of its time; more daring still was its occasional arrangement of real-life guests. That roster included a young Tom Waits, himself a living embodiment of the blurred line between reality and fiction. As the show’s announcer Jerry Hubbard, Fred Willard puts all of his distinctive delivery into declaring Waits “very famous for Fernwood.” Mull plays Gimble as the kind of man on which the appeal of Waits’ art is wholly lost: “I know he sells a lot of albums, and he makes about half a million big ones in one year,” he says by way of introduction. “In my book, that spells talent.”

Naturally, Gimble is game to set the liquor-swigging singer up for an old groaner by remarking on the strangeness of talking to a guest with a bottle in front of him. “Well, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” Waits growls in compliance. This comes after his performance of the song “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)” from his then-most recent album Small Change. It’s safe to say that many viewers on Fernwood-2-Night’s wavelength became fans of Waits as soon as they heard it. Nearly half a century later, they no doubt still remember his appearance fondly — at least as fondly as they remember the Wonderblender.

Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pioneering Animated Music Video from 1979

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

Tom Waits’ Many Appearances on David Letterman, From 1983 to 2015

RIP Norman Lear: Watch Full Episodes of His Daring 70s Sitcoms, Including All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, and More

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Stephen King Names His Five Favorite Works by Stephen King

in Books, Television | June 3rd, 2024

Stephen King has no doubt forgotten writing more books than most of us will ever publish. But even now, in his prolific “late career,” if you ask him to name his own most favored works, he can do it without hesitation. Stephen Colbert tried that out a few years ago on The Late Show, when the writer made an appearance to promote his then-latest book Billy Summers. The first of Stephen King’s top five by Stephen King is “Survivor Type,” a 1982 short story about “a physician who gets stranded on a little island, and he’s smuggling heroin, and he’s starving, so he eats himself piece by piece.”

“Survivor Type” may be a deep cut — and one that initially struggled for publication, being so disturbing that King remembers “even men’s magazines” turning it down — but it’s nevertheless been adapted into five different films since the twenty-tens alone. King may have enjoyed massive book sales throughout almost the entirety of his career, but it certainly hasn’t hurt his brand that so many of his works have become movies and television shows, many of them cultural phenomena in their own right. Take the case of Misery, another of King’s selections, the 1990 feature-film version of which gave us Kathy Bates’ Oscar-winning performance as a crazed fan who kidnaps her favorite novelist.

Misery was directed by Rob Reiner, who’d worked with King’s material before: in 1986, he turned the story “The Body” into Stand by Me, which is now considered a high point in the categories of eighties teen-star vehicles and early-sixties nostalgia pictures. After seeing its first screening, King declared it “the best film ever made out of anything I’ve written” — before characteristically adding, “which isn’t saying much.” (That same year, recall, King not just wrote but directed Maximum Overdrive, a spectacle of malevolent machines taking over a truck stop that he later described as a “moron movie.”)

King also enthuses about his 2006 novel Lisey’s Story, as well as its Apple TV+ series adaptation, which had just come out at the time. Also still-new was the second televisual rendition of The Stand, King’s 1978 novel set in the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic. “Any similarities to what’s going on now are just too close for comfort,” he says to Colbert in this COVID-era clip, though it’s ambiguous whether the book actually makes his top five. Colbert suggests filling out the list with Billy Summers, presumably on the principle that every writer favors his most recent work. But where would King rank the three novels he’s cranked out since?

Stephen King Creates a List of His 10 Favorite Novels

Stephen King Recommends 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read

How Stanley Kubrick Adapted Stephen King’s The Shining into a Cinematic Masterpiece

Pretty Much Pop #18 Discusses Stephen King’s Media Empire

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

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When a Drunken Charles Bukowski Walked Off the Prestigious French Talk Show Apostrophes (1978)

in Literature, Television | June 3rd, 2024

Charles Bukowski didn’t do TV — or at least he didn’t do American TV. Like a Hollywood movie star shooting a Japanese commercial, he did make an exception for a gig abroad. It happened in 1978, when the poet received an invitation from the popular French literary talk show Apostrophes. Bukowski wasn’t the first foreigner to grace its set: a few years earlier, Vladimir Nabokov had come in advance of the French translation of Ada, but only under the conditions that he be allowed to pre-write his answers and read them off notecards, and to drink whiskey from a teapot during the interview. No such niceties for the author of Ham on Rye, who was set up with earpiece interpretation and Sancerre straight from the bottle.

Or rather, bottles, plural: Bukowski had polished off one of them by the time Apostrophes host Bernard Pivot opened the live broadcast by asking him how it felt to be celebrated on French television. Already drunk, Bukowski responded in a slurred and dismissive fashion. Things deteriorated from there, and Bukowski kept rambling as the other panelists tried to carry on their conversation. At one point François Cavanna ventured a “Bukowski ta gueule”; soon thereafter, Pivot opted for a more direct “Bukowski, shut up,” which prompted the guest of honor’s unsteadily impromptu departure. “Pivot bid him au revoir with a Gallic shrug,” writes Howard Sounes in Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life.

“The next day, he didn’t remember anything, of course, but the whole of France was running to book shops to buy his books,” says Barfly director Barbet Schroeder in the documentary The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski. “In a few hours they were all sold out.” This succès de scandale made Bukowski even more of a literary rock star in France than he’d already become. The episode has also been widely remembered in the Francophone world since the death of Bernard Pivot earlier this month, never failing to make the much-circulated lists of Apostrophes’ most memorable broadcasts during its fifteen-year run.

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“Six million people watched him,” writes Adam Nossiter in Pivot’s New York Times obituary, “and nearly everybody wanted to be on his show. And nearly everybody was, including French literary giants like Marguerite Duras, Patrick Modiano, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Marguerite Yourcenar and Georges Simenon.” (One very special episode even brought on “a haggard-looking Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, not long out of the Soviet Union.”) Apart from Bukowski, Apostrophes’ guest list also included a very different American with an equally enthusiastic French readership: the late Paul Auster, who — like most of the cultural figures whose appearances on the show you can sample on this Youtube playlist — preceded Pivot to that great talk show in the sky.

“Don’t Try”: The Philosophy of the Hardworking Charles Bukowski

Hear 130 Minutes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Recorded Readings (1968)

Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

Bukowski: Born Into This — The Definitive Documentary on the Hard-Living American Poet (2003)

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

RIP David Sanborn: See Him Play Alongside Miles Davis, Randy Newman, Sun Ra, Leonard Cohen and Others on His TV Show Night Music

in Music, Television | May 17th, 2024

It’s late in the evening of Saturday, October 28th, 1989. You flip on the television and the saxophonist David Sanborn appears onscreen, instrument in hand, introducing the eclectic blues icon Taj Mahal, who in turn declares his intent to play a number with “rural humor” and “world proportions.” And so he does, which leads into performances by Todd Rundgren, Nanci Griffith, the Pat Metheny Group, and proto-turntablist Christian Marclay (best known today for his 24-hour montage The Clock). At the end of the show — after a vintage clip of Count Basie from 1956 — everyone gets back onstage for an all-together-now rendition of “Never Mind the Why and Wherefore” from H.M.S. Pinafore.

This was a more or less typical episode of Night Music, which aired on NBC from 1988 to 1990, and in that time offered “some of the strangest musical line-ups ever broadcast on network television.” So writes E. Little at In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi, who names just a few of its performers: “Sonic Youth, Miles Davis, the Residents, Charlie Haden and His Liberation Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Pharoah Sanders, Karen Mantler, Diamanda Galas, John Lurie, and Nana Vasconcelos.”

One especially memorable broadcast featured “a 15-minute interview-performance by Sun Ra’s Arkestra that finds the composer-pianist-Afrofuturist at the peak of his experimental powers, moving from piano to Yamaha DX‑7 and back again while the Arkestra flexes its cosmic muscles.”

“Sanborn hosted the eminently hip TV show,” writes jazz journalist Bill Milkowski in his remembrance of the late saxman, who died last weekend, “not only providing informative introductions but also sitting in with the bands.” One night might see him playing with Al Jarreau, Paul Simon, Marianne Faithfull, Bootsy Collins, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dizzy Gillespie, — or indeed, some unlikely combination of such artists. “The idea of that show was that genres are secondary, an artificial division of music that really isn’t necessary; that musicians have more in common than people expect,” Sanborn told DownBeat in 2018. “We wanted to represent that by having a show where Leonard Cohen could sing a song, Sonny Rollins could play a song, and then they could do something together.”

Having wanted to pursue that idea further since the show’s cancellation — not the easiest task, given his ever-busy schedule of live performances and recording sessions across the musical spectrum — he created the YouTube channel Sanborn Sessions a few years ago, some of whose videos have been re-uploaded in recent weeks. But much also remains to be discovered in the archives of the original Night Music for broad-minded music lovers under the age of about 60 — or indeed, for those over that age who never tuned in back in the late eighties, a time period that’s lately come in for a cultural re-evaluation. Thanks to this YouTube playlist, you can watch more than 40 broadcasts of Night Music (which was at first titled Sunday Night) and listen like it’s 1989.

Chuck Berry & the Bee Gees Perform Together in 1973: An Unexpected Video from The Midnight Special Archive

How American Bandstand Changed American Culture: Revisit Scenes from the Iconic Music Show

All the Music Played on MTV’s 120 Minutes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Public Access TV (1978–82)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

in History, Literature, Technology, Television | May 10th, 2024

Just a couple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted out a video promoting, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created.” The response has been overwhelming, and overwhelmingly negative: for many viewers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crushing a heap of musical instruments, art supplies, and vintage entertainment into a single tablet inadvertently articulated a discomfort they’ve long felt with technology’s direction in the past couple of decades. As the novelist Hari Kunzru put it, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized branded slab is pretty much where the tech industry is at in 2024.”

One wonders whether this would have surprised Aldous Huxley. He understood, as he explains in the 1961 BBC interview above, that “if you plant the seed of applied science or technology, it proceeds to grow, and it grows according to the laws of its own being. And the laws of its being are not necessarily the same as the laws of our being.”

Even six decades ago, he and certain others had the sense, which has since become fairly common, that “man is being subjected to his own inventions, that he is now the victim of his own technology”; that “the development of recent social and scientific history has created a world in which man seems to be made for technology rather than the other way around.”

Having written his acclaimed dystopian novel Brave New World thirty years earlier, Huxley was established as a seer of possible technology-driven totalitarian futures. He understood that “we are a little reluctant to embark upon technology, to allow technology to take over,” but that, “in the long run, we generally succumb,” allowing ourselves to be mastered by our own creations. In this, he resembles the Julia of Byron’s Don Juan, who, “whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’ – consented.” Huxley also knew that “it is possible to make people content with their servitude,” even more effectively in modernity than antiquity: “you can provide them with bread and circuses, and you can provide them with endless amounts of distraction and propaganda” — delivered, here in the twenty-first-century, straight to the device in our hand.

An Animated Aldous Huxley Identifies the Dystopian Threats to Our Freedom (1958)

Aldous Huxley Tells Mike Wallace What Will Destroy Democracy: Overpopulation, Drugs & Insidious Technology (1958)

Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

Hear Aldous Huxley Narrate His Dystopian Masterpiece Brave New World

Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD (1963)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Learn How to Create Your Own Custom AI Assistants Using OpenAI GPTs: A Free Course from Vanderbilt University

in Artificial Intelligence, Television | April 18th, 2024

Last fall, OpenAI started letting users create custom versions of ChatGPT–ones that would let people create AI assistants to complete tasks in their personal or professional lives. In the months that followed, some users created AI apps that could generate recipes and meals. Others developed GPTs to create logos for their businesses. You get the picture.

If you’re interested in developing your own AI assistant, Vanderbilt computer science professor Jules White has released a free online course called “OpenAI GPTs: Creating Your Own Custom AI Assistants.” On average, the course should take seven hours to complete.

Here’s how he frames the course:

This cutting-edge course will guide you through the exciting journey of creating and deploying custom GPTs that cater to diverse industries and applications. Imagine having a virtual assistant that can tackle complex legal document analysis, streamline supply chain logistics, or even assist in scientific research and hypothesis generation. The possibilities are endless! Throughout the course, you’ll delve into the intricacies of building GPTs that can use your documents to answer questions, patterns to create amazing human and AI interaction, and methods for customizing the tone of your GPTs. You’ll learn how to design and implement rigorous testing scenarios to ensure your AI assistant’s accuracy, reliability, and human-like communication abilities. Prepare to be amazed as you explore real-world examples and case studies, such as:

1. GPT for Personalized Learning and Education: Craft a virtual tutor that adapts its teaching approach based on each student’s learning style, providing personalized lesson plans, interactive exercises, and real-time feedback, transforming the educational landscape.

2. Culinary GPT: Your Personal Recipe Vault and Meal Planning Maestro. Step into a world where your culinary creations come to life with the help of an AI assistant that knows your recipes like the back of its hand. The Culinary GPT is a custom-built language model designed to revolutionize your kitchen experience, serving as a personal recipe vault and meal planning and shopping maestro.

3. GPT for Travel and Business Expense Management: A GPT that can assist with all aspects of travel planning and business expense management. It could help users book flights, hotels, and transportation while adhering to company policies and budgets. Additionally, it could streamline expense reporting and reimbursement processes, ensuring compliance and accuracy.

4. GPT for Marketing and Advertising Campaign Management: Leverage the power of custom GPTs to analyze consumer data, market trends, and campaign performance, generating targeted marketing strategies, personalized messaging, and optimizing ad placement for maximum engagement and return on investment.

You can sign up for the course at no cost here. Or, alternatively, you can elect to pay $49 and receive a certificate at the end.

As a side note, Jules White (the professor) also designed another course previously featured here on OC. It focuses on prompt engineering for ChatPGPT.

Google & Coursera Launch New Career Certificates That Prepare Students for Jobs in 2–6 Months: Business Intelligence & Advanced Data Analytics

Computer Scientist Andrew Ng Presents a New Series of Machine Learning Courses–an Updated Version of the Popular Course Taken by 5 Million Students

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965)

Martin Mull (RIP) Satirically Interviews a Young Tom Waits on Fernwood 2 Night (1977)

Stephen King Names His Five Favorite Works by Stephen King

When a Drunken Charles Bukowski Walked Off the Prestigious French Talk Show Apostrophes (1978)

RIP David Sanborn: See Him Play Alongside Miles Davis, Randy Newman, Sun Ra, Leonard Cohen and Others on His TV Show Night Music

Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

Learn How to Create Your Own Custom AI Assistants Using OpenAI GPTs: A Free Course from Vanderbilt University

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