Hear 1,500+ Genres of Music, All Mapped Out on an Insanely Thorough Interactive Graph
If you are ready for a time-suck internet experience that will also make you feel slightly old and out of step with the culture, feel free to dive into Every Noise at Once. A scatter-plot of over 1,530 musical genres sourced from Spotify’s lists and based on 35 million songs, Every Noise at Once is a bold attempt at musical taxonomy. The Every Noise at Once website was created by Glenn McDonald, and is an offshoot of his work at Echo Nest (acquired by Spotify in 2014).
McDonald explains his graph thus:
This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1,536 genres by Spotify. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
It’s also egalitarian, with world dominating “rock-and-roll” given the same space and size as its neighbors choro (instrumental Brazilian popular music), cowboy-western (Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard, et. al.), and Indian folk (Asha Bhosle, for example). It also makes for some strange bedfellows: what factor does musique concrete share with “Christian relaxitive” other than “reasons my college roommate and I never got along.” Now you can find out!
Click on any of the genres and you’ll hear a sample of that music. Double click and you’ll be taken to a similar scatter-plot graph of its most popular artists, this time with font size denoting popularity and a similar sample of their music.
I’ve been spending most of my time exploring up in the top right corner where all sorts of electronic dance subgenres hang out. I’m not too sure what differentiates “deep tech house” from “deep deep house” or “deep minimal techno” or “tech house” or even “deep melodic euro house” but I now know where to come for a refresher course.
Spotify and other services depend on algorithms and taxonomies like this to deliver consistent listening experiences to its users, and they were attracted to Echo Nest for its work with genres. Echo Nest was originally based on the dissertation work of Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman at the MIT Media Lab, who over a decade ago were trying to understand the “fingerprints” of recorded music. Now when you listen to Spotify’s personalized playlists, Echo Nest’s research is the engine working in the background.
McDonald says in this 2014 Daily Dot article this isn’t about a machine guessing our taste.
“No, the machines don’t know us better than we do. But they can very easily know more than we do. My job is not to tell you what to listen to, or to pass judgment on things or ‘make taste.’ It’s to help you explore and discover. Your taste is your business. Understanding your taste and situating it in some intelligible context is my business.”
If you’d like a more passive journey through the ever expanding music genre universe, there’s a Spotify playlist of one song from each genre (all 1,500+) above. See you in the deep, deep house!
via Kottke.org
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...If You Drive Down a Stretch of Route 66, the Road Will Play “America the Beautiful”
If you find yourself in New Mexico, traveling down a stretch of Route 66, you can drive over a quarter mile-long rumble strip and your car’s tires will play “America the Beautiful.” That’s assuming you’re driving at the speed limit, 45 miles per hour. Don’t believe me? Watch the clip above.
As Atlas Obscura explains, the “Musical Highway” or “Singing Highway” was “installed in 2014 as part of a partnership between the New Mexico Department of Transportation and the National Geographic Channel.” It’s all part of an elaborate attempt to get drivers to slow down and obey the speed limit. “Getting the rumble strips to serenade travelers required a fair bit of engineering. The individual strips had to be placed at the precise distance from one another to produce the notes they needed to sing their now-signature song.”
You’ll find this particular stretch of road between Albuquerque and Tijeras. Here’s the location on Google Maps. Other musical rumble strips have popped up in Denmark, Japan and South Korea.
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Read More...Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Other Great Works by Shakespeare, Dante & Coleridge
Would Benedict Cumberbatch have such ardent fans if he couldn’t read poetry so well? Almost certainly he would, although his way with verse still seems not like a bonus but an integral component of his dramatic persona. Though not easily explained, that relationship does come across if you hear any of the actor’s readings of poetry. In the video above, Cumberbatch performs “Ode to a Nightingale,” the longest and best-known of John Keats’ 1819 odes that casts into verse the poet’s discovery of “negative capability,” or as he defined it in a letter two years earlier, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Yet one senses that the Cumberbatch fans who put up these videos, such as the one accompanying “Ode to a Nightingale” with imagery reminiscent of a Tiger Beat pictorial, care less about his negative capability than certain other qualities. His voice, for instance: the uploader of the video combining five poems just above describes as “the velvety dulcet tones of a jaguar hiding in a cello.”
That compilation includes “Ode to a Nightingale” as well as Shakespeare’s “The Seven Ages of Man” (“All the world’s a stage”), Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” a piece of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” With Coleridge’s dream of Asia and Dante’s Italian vision of the afterlife, this poetic mix does get more exotic than it might seem (at least by the standards of the eras from which it draws).
But Cumberbatch, who in 2015 received the honor of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire from the Queen and even read at the reburial ceremony of King Richard III, clearly matches best with the canon of his native England. As a versatile performer, and thus one who presumably understands all about the need for negative capability, Cumberbatch and his cello-hidden jaguar delivery (a poetic description, in its own way) has done justice in the past to Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, and Moby-Dick. Still, one wonders what poem Cumberbatch could perform in order to achieve an unsurpassable state of peak Englishness. How long could it take for him to get around, for instance, to “If—”?
Cumberbatch’s reading of “Ode” will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
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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.
Read More...The Hummingbird Whisperer: Meet the UCLA Scientist Who Has Befriended 200 Hummingbirds
Common wisdom, and indelible memories of The Birds, warn that feeding seagulls, pigeons and other creatures who travel in flocks is a can of worms best left unopened.
But what about hummingbirds?
Melanie Barboni is research geochemist in UCLA’s Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. Near the UCLA Court of Sciences she took a break from volcanos and the moon long enough to hang a feeder filled with sugar water outside her ground floor office window.
This complimentary buffet proved such a hit, she hung up more.
Two years later, Barboni is serving a colony of over 200 hummingbirds from four 80-ounce feeders. Their metabolism requires them to consume 8 to 10 times their body weight on a daily basis.
Barboni’s service to her tiny jewel-toned friends extends well beyond the feeders. She’s diverted campus tree trimmers from interfering with them during nesting season, and given public talks on the habitat-destroying effects of climate change. She’s collaborating with another professor and UCLA’s Chief Sustainability Officer Nurit Katz to establish a special garden on campus for hummingbirds and their fellow pollinators.
The intimacy of this relationship is something she’s dreamed of since her birdwatching childhood in Switzerland where the only hummingbirds available for her viewing were the ones in books. Her dream came true when a fellowship took her from Princeton to Los Angeles, where hummingbirds live year-round.
Some longtime favorites now perch on their benefactor’s hand while feeding, or even permit themselves to be held and stroked. A few like to hang out inside the office, where the warm glow of Barboni’s computer monitor is a comforting presence on inclement days.
She’s bestowed names on at least 50: Squeak, Stardust, Tiny, Shy…
(Show of hands from those who wish she’d named them all after noted geologists: Mary Anning, Eugene Merle Shoemaker, Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin…)
Get to know the UCLA hummingbirds better through Melanie Barboni’s up-close-and-personal documentary photos. Learn more about the species itself through the National Geographic documentary below.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...How Marilyn Monroe Helped Break Ella Fitzgerald Into the Big Time (1955)
Think of movie stars, and you’ll almost certainly think of Marilyn Monroe; think of jazz singers, and you’ll almost certainly think of Ella Fitzgerald. Their skills as performers, their inherent iconic qualities, the time of the mid-twentieth century in which they rose to fame, and other factors besides, have ensured that these two women still define the images of their respective crafts. But before their ascension to cultural immortality, the Angeleno Monroe and the New Yorker Fitzgerald’s paths crossed down here on Earth in 1955, and, when they did, the movie star played an integral role in breaking the jazz singer into the big time.
If you wanted to play to an influential crowd in Hollywood back in the 1950s, you had to play the Mocambo, the Sunset Strip nightclub frequented by the likes of Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Lana Turner, Bob Hope, Sophia Loren, and Howard Hughes. But at the time, a singer of the reputedly scandalous new music known as jazz didn’t just waltz onto the stage of such a respectable venue, especially given the racial attitudes of the time. But as luck would have it, Fitzgerald found an advocate in Monroe, who, “tired of being cast as a helpless sex symbol, took a break from Los Angeles and headed to New York to find herself,” writes the Independent’s Ciar Byrne.
There Monroe “immersed herself in jazz,” recognizing in Fitzgerald “the creative genius she herself longed to possess.” Together with Fitzgerald’s manager, jazz impresario and Verve Records founder Norman Granz, Monroe pressured the glamorous Hollywood club to book Ella. “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt,” Fitzgerald said later, in 1972. “She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night.” He agreed, and true to her word, “Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.”
Though Monroe’s efforts didn’t make Fitzgerald the first black performer to take the Mocambo’s stage — Herb Jeffries, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryant had played there in 1952 and 1953 — she did use it as a platform to ascend to unusually great career heights, comparable to the way Frank Sinatra launched his solo career there. The story has remained compelling enough for several retellings, including Bonnie Greer’s musical Marilyn and Ella and, more recently, through the hilarious unreliability of an episode of Drunk History. As real history would have it, Fitzgerald would go on to enjoy a much longer and more varied career than the tragic Monroe, but she did her own part to repay the favor by adding nuance to Monroe’s superficial public image: “She was an unusual woman — a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”
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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.
Read More...Three Blade Runner Prequels: Watch Them Online
Even if you’ve spent each and every day since you first saw Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner waiting for a sequel, you still might not be fully prepared for Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 when it opens in theaters this Friday. The 1981 original took place in the Los Angeles of the then-far-flung future of 2019, meaning that 30 years have elapsed in the Blade Runner universe between its first feature film and its second. Much has taken place over those three decades, some of it portrayed by the three official short prequels released to the internet over the past month. Today we present them all in chronological order to catch you up with what happened after Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner Rick Deckard picked up that origami unicorn and left the building.
In 2020, the year after Blade Runner, the artificial-being-making Tyrell Corporation introduces a new model of replicant, with a longer lifespan, called the Nexus 8S. Two years later comes “the Blackout,” an electromagnetic pulse attack that destroys all technology within its reach. You can see it happen in Blade Runner Black Out 2022, the short at the top of the post directed by respected Japanese animator Shinichiro Watanabe (and featuring a score by Flying Lotus as well as a reprisal of the role of the quasi-Esperanto-speaking police officer Gaff by Edward James Olmos).
Replicants having taken the blame for the Blackout, their production gets legally prohibited until the efforts of an organization called the Wallace Corporation get the ban overturned in 2030. The man at the top of the Wallace Corporation, a certain Niander Wallace, first appears in 2036: Nexus Dawn (middle video), directed by Ridley Scott’s son Luke.
In that prequel we see Wallace, who rose to prominence on his company’s solution to global food shortages, submitting for approval his latest replicant, the Nexus 9 (although his negotiation strategy leaves little room for compromise). The younger Scott’s 2048: Nowhere to Run (below), which introduces a new and imposing replicant character by the name of Sapper Morton, takes place just a year before the sequel, by which time, according to the timeline unveiled at this past summer’s Comic-Con, “life on Earth has reached its limit and society divides between replicant and human.” Enter Ryan Gosling’s K, one of a new generation of replicant- hunters, who goes out in search of a predecessor who went missing some 30 years ago. All of this, of course, still leaves questions unanswered. Chiefly: will Blade Runner 2049 deliver what we’ve been waiting even more than three deacades for?
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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.
Read More...The Famously Controversial “Monty Hall Problem” Explained: A Classic Brain Teaser
When the news broke last week of the death of game-show host Monty Hall, even those of us who couldn’t quite put a face to the name felt the ring of recognition from the name itself. Hall became famous on the long-running game show Let’s Make a Deal, whose best-known segment “Big Deal of the Day” had him commanding his players to choose one of three numbered doors, each of which concealed a prize of unknown desirability. It put not just phrases like “door number three” into the English lexicon but contributed to the world of stumpers the Monty Hall Problem, the brain-teaser based on the much-contested probability behind which door a contestant should choose.
Let’s Make a Deal premiered in 1963, but only in 1990, when Marilyn vos Savant wrote one of her Q&A columns about it in Parade magazine, did the Monty Hall Problem draw serious, frustrated public attention.
“Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats,” went the question, setting up a Let’s Make a Deal-like scenario. “You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, ‘Do you want to pick door No. 2?’ Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?” Yes, replied the unhesitating Savant and her Guinness World Record-setting IQ, you should switch. “The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance.”
This logic, which you can see broken down by University of California, Berkeley statistics professor Lisa Goldberg in the Numberphile video at the top of the post, drew about 10,000 letters of disagreement in total, many from academics at respectable institutions. Michael Shermer received a similarly vehement response when he addressed the issue in Scientific American eighteen years later. “At the beginning of the game you have a 1/3rd chance of picking the car and a 2/3rds chance of picking a goat,” he explained. “Switching doors is bad only if you initially chose the car, which happens only 1/3rd of the time. Switching doors is good if you initially chose a goat, which happens 2/3rds of the time.” Thus the odds of winning by switching becomes two out of three, double those of not switching.
Useful advice, presuming you’d prefer a Bricklin SV‑1 or an Opel Manta to a goat, and that the host opens one of the unselected doors every time without fail, which Hall didn’t actually do. When he did open it, he later explained, the contestants made the same assumption many of Savant and Shermer’s complainants did: “They’d think the odds on their door had now gone up to 1 in 2, so they hated to give up the door no matter how much money I offered. By opening that door we were applying pressure.” Ultimately, “if the host is required to open a door all the time and offer you a switch, then you should take the switch. But if he has the choice whether to allow a switch or not, beware. Caveat emptor. It all depends on his mood” — a rare consideration in anything related to mathematics, but when dealing with the Monty Hall problem, one ignores at one’s peril the words of Monty Hall.
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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.
Read More...An Intimate Look at Alberto Giacometti in His Studio, Making His Iconic Sculptures (1965)
A visit to an artist’s studio can shed light on his or her work.
The British Arts Council’s short film above affords an intimate glimpse into Alberto Giacometti’s studio in Montparnasse circa 1965, the year when he was the subject of major retrospectives at both the Tate Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The artist passed most of his working life in cramped space at 46 rue Hippolyte. Early on, he entertained plans to relocate “because it was too small – just a hole.”
Others visitors to the studio described the artist’s environs in more literary terms:
In a charming little forgotten garden he has a studio, submerged in plaster, and he lives next to this in a kind of hangar, vast and cold, with neither furniture nor food. He works very hard for fifteen hours at a stretch, above all at night: the cold, his frozen hands – he takes no notice, he works. - Simone de Beauvoir
And:
This ground floor studio… is going to cave in at any moment now. It is made of worm-eaten wood and grey powder.… Everything is stained and ready for the bin, everything is precarious and about to collapse, everything is about to dissolve, everything is floating.… And yet it all appears to be captured in an absolute reality. When I leave the studio, when I am outside on the street, then nothing that surrounds me is true. — Playwright Jean Genet
And:
The whole place looking as if it had been thrown together with a few old sticks and a lot of chewing gum.… In short, a dump. Anyway he said come in when I knocked.… He turned and glanced at me, holding out his hand which was covered in clay, so I shook his wrist.… He immediately resumed work, running his fingers up and down the clay so fiercely that lumps fell onto the floor - Essayist James Lord
These impressions paint a portrait of a driven, and disciplined artist, who logged untold hours modeling his formes elongee in clay, unceremoniously crumpling and rebuilding in the pursuit of excellence.
The camera documents this intensity, though his untranslated remarks suggest a man capable of taking himself lightly, certainly more so than the accompanying narration does.
Like the narration, Roger Smalley’s dissonant score lays it on thick, the sonic equivalent of heads like blades and “limbs bound as though bandaged for the grave.” Perhaps we should conceive of the studio as a scary place?
In actuality, it proved a hospitable work environment and the impulse to relocate eventually waned, with the artist observing that “the longer I stayed, the bigger it became. I could fit anything I wanted into it.”
Explore the recent Tate Modern Giacometti retrospective here and take a closer look at the studio via Ernst Scheidegger’s photos.
“Giacometti” will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...1,000+ Historic Japanese Illustrated Books Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)
Surely we’ve all wondered what we might do as prominent nineteenth-century industrialists, and more than a few of us (especially here in the Open Culture crowd) would no doubt invest our fortunes in the art of the world. Railcar manufacturing magnate Charles Lang Freer did just that, as we can see today in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Together with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Sackler having made it as “the father of modern pharmaceutical advertising”), it constitutes the Smithsonian Institution’s national museum of Asian art, gathering everything from ancient Egyptian stone sculpture to Chinese paintings to Korean pottery to Japanese books.
We like to highlight Japanese book culture here every so often (see the related content below) not just because of its striking aesthetics and consummate craftsmanship but because of its deep history. You can now experience a considerable swath of that history free online at the Freer|Sacker Library’s web site, which just this past summer finished digitizing over one thousand books — now more than 1,100, which breaks down to 41,500 separate images — published during Japan’s Edo and Meiji periods, a span of time reaching from 1600 to 1912. “Often filled with beautiful multi-color illustrations,” writes Reiko Yoshimura at the Smithsonian Libraries’ blog, “many titles are by prominent Japanese traditional and ukiyo‑e (‘floating world’) painters such as Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), Andō Hiroshige (1797–1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849).”
Yoshimura directs readers to such volumes as Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Utagawa Toyokuni’s Thirty-Six Popular Actors, and artist, craftsman, and designer Kōetsu’s collection of one hundred librettos for noh theater performances. Even those who can’t read classical Japanese will admire an aesthete like Kōetsu’s way with what Yoshimura calls his “caligraphic ‘font,’ ” all “skillfully printed on luxurious mica embellished papers using wooden movable-type.”
While the online collection’s scans come in a more than high enough resolution for general appreciation, to get the full effect of bookmaking techniques like mica embellishment — which only sparkles when seen in real life — you’d have to visit the physical collection. Some things, it seems, can’t yet be digitized.
Enter the collection of Japanese Illustrated Books here.
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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.
Read More...How Did the Egyptians Make Mummies? An Animated Introduction to the Ancient Art of Mummification
Not every child looks forward to a trip to the museum, but how many have failed to thrill at the sight of an ancient Egyptian mummy? How many adults, for that matter, can resist the fascination of this well over 5000-year-old process of preserving dead bodies in a state if not perfectly lifelike then at least eerily intact? If you’ve ever wondered exactly how mummification worked — or if you’ve simply forgotten the descriptions accompanying the displays you saw on those museum trips — this short video from the Getty Museum’s Youtube channel provides an insight into how the ancient Egyptians did it.
The video uses a real mummy as a case study, the preserved body of a twenty-year-old man named Herakleides (as we know because his mummifiers, though themselves unidentified, wrote it on his feet), who died in the first century A.D. He had most of his internal organs removed — even his heart, which common practice usually dictated leaving in, but for some reason not his lungs — and spent forty days buried in salt that drew every last bit of moisture out of him.
He then received rubbings of perfumed oils, followed by a poured-on layer of resin to which strips of linen (the mummy’s characteristically copious “bandages” of popular culture) could adhere. Wrapped onto a board, equipped with a “mysterious pouch” as well as a mummified ibis, and covered with an unusual red shroud emblazoned with symbols and a portrait of himself, Herakleides was ready for his journey into the afterlife.
“Such elaborate burial practices might suggest that the Egyptians were preoccupied with thoughts of death,” says the Smithsonian’s page on Egyptian mummies. “On the contrary, they began early to make plans for their death because of their great love of life. They could think of no life better than the present, and they wanted to be sure it would continue after death.” The ancient Egyptians believed “that the mummified body was the home for this soul or spirit. If the body was destroyed, the spirit might be lost.”
If you find yourself sharing these beliefs, do have a look at National Geographic’s guide on how to make a mummy in 70 days or less. And just as you’d need to arrange the right ingredients to prepare a satisfying meal, something else the Egyptians enjoyed, don’t attempt any mummification at home without making sure you’re fully stocked with resin, ointments, lichen, strawdust, beeswax, palm wine, incense, and myrrh. And it goes without saying that however many feet of wrappings you’ve got, it couldn’t hurt to have more.
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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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