Moonrise Kingdom by the wonderfully clever Wes Anderson is up there in my top ten list of films. Anderson's films have strong visual and musical themes in addition to the storytelling. A major theme by Alexandre Desplat repeats a few times. Near the end of the film, in a homage to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, it's narrated by a child. Individual instruments are identified and the listener gets a sense of textures and scale they build in combination. (go to part 7 at around 13 minutes .. the YT version of The Heroic Weather Conditions of the Universe is low quality. Try it on a high quality streaming service. I recommend Apple's .. if you subscribe. I configure for lossless. )
So where am I going with this?
It turns out we're bad - make that really bad - at recognizing the number of objects visually. Most of us can tell the different between six and seven randomly arranged objects instantly, but it quickly falls apart at larger numbers. We end up relying on other proxies, but it's difficult to get a gut feeling. For example - the Sun's diameter is about 107 times that of the Earth. I sense that as really big, but I need to see a visual model to grasp it. And how do you communicate something like the diversity of an ecosystem to the non-technical voting public? Can you make an emotional connection?
Listening to CBC's wonderful weekly science program Quirks and Quarks came an answer that made me think of the music in Moonrise Kingdom. Listen to the A scientist recreates avian soundscapes so we can hear what we're missing segment in the 21st of May edition.
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