For those of Scandinavian heritage - or those who lived in regions with high conconcentrations of Swedes - Happy Santa Lucia.
A very unusual holiday devoted to an Italian saint with an unsual piece of music. little girls with fire in their hair, and wonderful saffron buns called lussekatter and ginger snaps.
and a bit on their work the the web audio api to recreate some of the early audio kit from the workshop. You'll need Chrome for this and a bit of playing around to get it working for the ring modulator - which, of course, is what you will want to play with:-)
The BBC Radiophonice Workshop pioneering more than a bit of electronic music and sound effects beginning in 1958 with a 40 year run before digital tools made it "irrelevent" ... of course it wasn't and now it is being recast as The New Radiophonic Workshop.
This version will be virtual - I hope it works, but I have real worries about not having people rub shoulders with each other.
Take a look at their webpage - and a great video on a bit of the BBC unit's history
Every now and again there is a bit a serendipity... I was reading this column on the ten guiding principles of Romneyism by Robert Reich happy that a robotic plutocrat won't be our overlord and the holiday song Chiron Beta Prime came up on the iPod.
A nice fit:-)
If you like it, buy it on iTunes and throw a buck to the musician...
and the principles:
1. Corporations are the basic units of society. Corporations are people, and the overriding purpose of an economy is to maximize corporate profits. When profits are maximized, the economy grows fastest. This growth benefits everyone in the form greater output, better products and services, and higher share prices.
2. Workers are a means to the goal of maximizing corporate profits. If workers do not contribute to that goal, they should be fired. If they cannot then find other work that helps maximize profits in another company, their wages must be too high, and they must therefore accept steadily lower wages until they find a job.
3. All factors of production – capital, physical plant and equipment, workers – are fungible and should be treated the same. Any that fail to deliver high competitive returns should be replaced or discarded. This keeps an economy efficient. Fairness is and should be irrelevant.
4. Pollution, unsafe products, unsafe working conditions, financial fraud, and other negative side effects of the pursuit of profits are the price society pays for profit-driven growth. They should not be used as excuses to constrain the pursuit of profits through regulation.
5. Individual worth depends on net worth — how much money one has made, and the value of the assets that money has been invested in. Any person with enough intelligence and ambition can make a fortune. Failure to do so is sign of moral and intellectual inferiority.
6. People who fail in the economy should not be coddled. They should not receive food stamps, Medicaid, or any other form of social subsidy. Coddling leads to a weaker society and a weaker economy.
7. Taxes are inherently bad because they constrain profit-making. It is the right and responsibility of individuals and corporations to exploit every tax loophole they (and their tax attorneys) can find in order to pay the lowest taxes possible.
8. Politics is a game whose only purpose is to win. Any means used to win the game is legitimate even if it involves lying and cheating, as long as it gains more supporters than it loses.
9. Democracy is dangerous because it is forever vulnerable to the votes of a majority intent on capturing the wealth of the successful minority, on whom the economy depends. The rich must therefore do whatever is necessary to prevent the majority from exercising its will, including spending large sums of money on lobbyists and political campaigns. The most virtuous among the rich will go a step further and run for president.
10. The three most important aspects of life are family, religion, and money. Patriotism is a matter of guarding our economy from unfair traders and undocumented immigrants, rather than joining together for the common good. We owe nothing to one another as citizens of the same society.
What music is optimal for your heart? Music recommendation via bio-feedback and collaboration. Some interesting work by folks at the University of Virginia and Microsoft. A preprint of their paper here
MusicalHeart: A Hearty Way of Listening to Music
Shahriar Nirjon, Robert F. Dickerson, Qiang
Li, Philip Asare, and John A. Stankovic
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia, USA
Dezhi Hong, Ben Zhang, Xiaofan Jiang,
Guobin Shen, and Feng Zhao
Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China
Abstract
MusicalHeart is a biofeedback-based, context-aware, au-
tomated music recommendation system for smartphones.
We introduce a new wearable sensing platform, Septimu,
which consists of a pair of sensor-equipped earphones that
communicate to the smartphone via the audio jack. The
Septimu platform enables the MusicalHeart application to
continuously monitor the heart rate and activity level of the
user while listening to music. The physiological information
and contextual information are then sent to a remote server,
which provides dynamic music suggestions to help the user
maintain a target heart rate. We provide empirical evidence
that the measured heart rate is 75% − 85% correlated to the
ground truth with an average error of 7.5 BPM. The accu-
racy of the person-specific, 3-class activity level detector is
on average 96.8%, where these activity levels are separated
based on their differing impacts on heart rate. We demon-
strate the practicality of MusicalHeart by deploying it in two
real world scenarios and show that MusicalHeart helps the
user achieve a desired heart rate intensity with an average
error of less than 12.2%, and its quality of recommendation
improves over time.
I don't see a lot of movies that I love. Last night I saw one that took me .. Moonrise Kingdom. A very quirky Bruce Willis piece with great lighting, strange story and amazing music.
A sweet version of Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" by the Canadian Group Walk off the Earth
and, for completeness here is Malvina who, as Pete Seeger observed, is just like everyone else except she woke up and wrote a new song every morning before breakfast...
santa lucia day
For those of Scandinavian heritage - or those who lived in regions with high conconcentrations of Swedes - Happy Santa Lucia.
A very unusual holiday devoted to an Italian saint with an unsual piece of music. little girls with fire in their hair, and wonderful saffron buns called lussekatter and ginger snaps.
The beginning of the holiday season in Sweden.
07:01 in General Commentary, Music, Religion | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)