I first heard about Norwegian Slow TV a decade after it began. I watch a half hour of one of the rail trips. It didn't do anything for me. Other than hearing about other hits like chopping wood and knitting, I almost forgot about it. Two months into the pandemic I found my watching a semi-live train trip across Norway. Much of the scenery was similar to where I grew up and I found myself watching. It wasn't long until I found myself daydreaming, creating my own narrative to match the flowing images. Two hour later I stopped a dream-like story in my head.
About four in the morning the next day I was jolted out of bed with an interesting approach to some physics that I had abandoned months before due to lack of process. Having your mind work on something when you're not working on it is well known. I suspect the neural connects I had was making in the narrative I was writing in my imagination had a good deal to do with it.
This morning I caught an episode of Invisibilia that dives into the subject. Recommended if you have an interest in narrative in any form. Slow TV is an hours or days long TV show without plot, characters, or tension. How Norwegians responded as a shared experience is the most fascinating part
I've done a bit of work in remote audio ambiances. A few created serendipity. Here's an excerpt from an old post on one:
5:25 am - excellent!
I brush the last of the snow from my coat and switch on the lights before taking my seat. few minutes of silence and then a door opens and closes reverberating for about three seconds. The clicking of shoes echoes through Warner Hall as she makes her way to the bench. A minute of preparation and then the Praeludium in G by Bach fills her space and mine. I sit back and shut all but the Bach from my mind.
She's doing an excellent job until - rats. Bach derails and I sit up in my chair looking around. A female shout fills the space reverberating for about three seconds.
sh*tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt!
She goes back a few bars and dances through the problem smoothly. Now a piece I don't recognize, but it is still clearly Bach until about 6:55. Her shoes and coat go on and steps click to the door in the distance.
And a little magic as a female voice is softly singing Bach.
A door opens and closes. The reverberation is about three seconds and then silence. Time to switch off the amplifiers and make some hot chocolate before getting to work.
She was an organ student in Oberlin and I was in a special room in New Jersey where we were working on the reconstruction sound fields. A special seven microphone array had been installed in the hall with a computer handling compression mixing and compression in realtime. The bitstream made traveled eastward to our room where a reasonably convincing illusion of the hall's sound space was created. We had created a virtual acoustic reality.
breadth and depth
His parents were Danish, hers Swedish. By some measures it was a mixed marriage with any number of small cultural differences. He noted and took delight in these small differences and ambiguities. Rather than hunting, fishing or bowling he'd hike in the Summer and take long walks the rest of the year. He liked to walk by himself and I suspect thinking about the stories he'd tell to friends and family about once a week. He said storytelling was in his family and he had a great voice for it. We'd sit in his yard and listen. Some were short, some took a half hour. They were imaginative with emotional moments coming in unsuspecting places. They weren't the polished work of a writer, but left you wondering how he made those connections. Only years later did I learn what an amazingly varied background he had and continually sought out.
My sister is a visual storyteller. It took her half a lifetime to come to a place where she realized a single frame made of many images could be a short story that left you with questions and an open invitation to wonder. She's extremely creative. The stories come to her quickly, but require a week or two to realize. I suspect my Dad was a big influence. He believed the best answers were incomplete and led to deeper questions. He believed breadth was required to see simple answers weren't simple. Corinne went for breadth, unfortunately I started down a path that was deeper than broad.
A trigger for this post was a recent newsletter from David Epstein (The Sports Gene, Range). He begins by talking about Emma Raducanu at the US Open:
Earlier this month, 18-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title. It was a shock; she entered the tournament with 400-to-1 odds. One of my favorite sportswriters, the Guardian’s Sean Ingle, asked Raducanu’s former coach about the factors that helped her talent blossom. Here’s what the coach said:
“From my perspective one of the best things with Emma is that she was exposed to a lot of sports from a young age, and didn’t go too specific into tennis straight away. I see that on court. When she’s learning a new skill, or trying something a little bit different, she has the ability and coordination to pick things up very quickly, even if it’s quite a big technical change.”
Raducanu added this:
“I was initially in ballet, then my dad hijacked me from ballet and threw me into every sport you could imagine. I was doing horse riding, swimming, tap dancing, basketball, skiing, golf and, from the age of five to eight, I was go-karting…From the age of nine I started motocross in a forest somewhere for a year. This was all alongside tennis.”
Although there are a few athletic geniuses like Tiger Woods who focus early, most elite athletes follow a very different path building a broad set of varied skills before specializing. Epstein goes into depth in both of his books. Outside of athletics, the generalists he focuses on in Range have richly diverse backgrounds. Something very different that the experience many have in trade school and college programs. These people have built the tools they need to think creatively. They're often better than narrow experts when confronted with a novel challenge.
I'm sometimes asked to speak on the importance of STEM education at a local school and am doing it again. I tell them STEM ok, but overemphasized in K12. I think a broader liberal arts education leads to flexibility and creativity later on in life. Unfortunately that isn't reflected in many (most?) hiring practices. The lack of intellectual flexibility and diversity has lead to serous problems in some companies (tech in particular). One can always add breadth later, but that can be inefficient once you're out of school.
I don't mean to disrespect STEM subjects. Assuming the curriculum allows, they can be made relevant and exciting to those who won't use them in their work. They add to breadth and can be a starting point for depth. There are wonderful math and science books and teaching approaches that unlock wonder without getting bogged down in minutia. Enough information and wonder that perhaps students will become citizens who can make informed choices.
Over the decades I've slowly broadened muself by talking to people and getting involved with their ideas and projects. Many of you have your own diverse lists. My short and incomplete list includes human powered airplanes, done strange things with sound, learned a little about animated film making, been around story tellers, learned a bit of anthropology and sociology, done art history research, learned about fashion and how clothes are made, learned a bit about diabetes, been involved in sandbending, the mental side of elite sport, and even know a bit about the fluid dynamics of balls used in sports. Many of my guides and friends see this blog and I need to say thank you! It amazes me how some of this triggers a thought in something I'm working on later. You find yourself becoming more creative with age. Who would have thought that the math for thinking about boundary layer separation on an almost non-spinning beach volleyball would help thinking about neutron star atmospheres. Or the linkage between animation and fabric design, or... the list goes on and on...
Depth is great, but you need breadth to be creative.
Posted at 10:20 AM in art, book recommendation, building insight, critical thinking, education, general comments, story time | Permalink | Comments (0)
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