Tag Archives: music

Blasphemous Geometries

The criticism of video games

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This month Blasphemous Geometries turns a conceptual corner, as Jonathan McCalmont decides to refocus the critical crosshairs on video games.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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Back in the 1930s, a number of physicists (including Einstein) argued that our universe is oscillatory. What this meant was that after the Big Bang, the universe expands until it reaches a certain level of density and gravitational pull, at which point it begins to contract until it ends with a Big Crunch. This idea still has some devotees. However, what made the Oscillatory Theorists interesting was the belief that after the universe had contracted back to its original singularity, it would then bounce back again; expanding until its physical limits were met and another Big Crunch was initiated. This meant that, according to the Oscillatory Theorists, the universe was stuck in a cycle of eternal destruction and rebirth. This has always struck me as a rather useful analogy for certain internet debates. “Is Science Fiction Dying?” is one such debate but another is “Where is the Lester Bangs of Video Games?”. Continue reading The criticism of video games →

The Adam Roberts Project

Power of Ten Billion Butterfly Sneezes – To Our Children’s Children’s Children by The Moody Blues

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The Adam Roberts Project

The Moody Blues‘ 1969 album To Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children employs the full tidal panoply of 1960s hippy musical effects (guitars, full orchestra, a forty-strong choir going ‘ahh! ahh! ahh! ahh!’ in the background, the sounds of rockets launching and various galactic boingings, plus lyrics spoken ponderously rather than sung) to celebrate the Apollo 11 moon landing. And what a tremendous achievement for humanity it was. The moon landing, I mean. Not the Moody Blues’ album. The Moody Blues’ album is really very bad, a walnut-whirling, quintuple-choc, bathful-of-treacle, gag-reflex confection that embodies all the most sicky-sicky aspects of 1960s music. The opposite of an achievement. A zchievement, perhaps.

The Moody Blues - To Our Children's Children's ChildrenThis is an album that takes the listener, via the Apollo programme, on a tour of the future solar system up to the year 1,000,000. The main themes are love, peace, children, innocence, children, our children, hope and our children. It’s as if the various members of the band were in competition with one another to put in as many heartfelt references as possible to ‘the eyes of a child’ and ‘the innocence of our children’, to ‘the web of love and peace’ and to ‘the eyes of a child’ again. Track 2 is called “The Eyes of a Child”. So is track 4. Actually track 4 is called “The Eyes of a Child part 2” but it amounts to the same thing. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m a father. I consider my children’s eyes to be perfectly lovely, thank you very much. It’s just that I don’t think it likely that either the beauty of my child’s eyes or the cause of world peace will be materially improved by wibbly hippy meanderings of the calibre of, say, the chorus to track 10 “Candle of Life”:

So Love!
Everybody!
And Make Them!
Your Friend!
So Love!
Everybody!
And Make Them!
Your Friend!

Two things are going to strike the listener as he or she wades through the goo that is To Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children. One, inevitably, concerns the name of the band itself. The Moody Blues. The Moody Blues? At some point one of the founding members must have been listening to Blind Lemon Jefferson or Robert Johnson or some other great Blues musician singing about their dirt-poverty, the misery and hopelessness of their existence, about selling their souls to the devil or being crossed-in-love and shooting down their rivals-and they must have thought to themselves: ‘blimey! he’s a bit moody.’

One word to that: no.

The second thing that strikes the listener is the frankly odd mathematical principle at work throughout the album. Track 12 is called “I Never Thought I’d Live To Be A Million”. This is Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children we’re talking about. Three generations, or an average life expectancy of over three hundred thousand years each. Is it that people in the future will live so long, or only that it will seem to be so long, because they’ll be listening to tar like this?

Then there’s the album’s first track, “Higher and Higher”, which begins with the sound of a Saturn V Launch. Then drummer Graeme Edge intones:

Blasting, billowing, bursting forth with the
Power of ten billion butterfly sneezes,
Man with his flaming pyre has conquered the wayward breezes.

Now every schoolchild knows that, breathing as they do through spiracles (those tiny holes in their flanks), butterflies don’t actually sneeze. But putting that on one side for a moment.

At launch a Saturn V rocket puts out about 35 million newtons of thrust. Dividing by ten billion gives us 0.0035 newtons per butterfly sneeze. This is the power to accelerate about a third of a gram (a paperclip, say) one metre per second squared, which I consider impressive sneezing power. You could probably flick a paperclip with your finger such that it accelerates at one metre per second squared. But you are much bigger than a butterfly. Butterflies vary in weight from 0.0003 to 3 grams. Even if we take a median figure the song is suggesting that a butterfly can accelerate something weighing, let’s say, a tenth of its own bodyweight simply by contracting its spiracles. Scaling up, this would be equivalent to a grown man sneezing so hard than an artificial leg flew off the table in front of him with the velocity of a greyhound out of the starting gate. Which, now that I come to think of it, is a suitable image with which to round-up this account of the Moody Blues 1969 SF album To Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children.

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Stephen King, Amazon’s Kindle and the death of publishing as we know it

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Amazon Kindle ebook readerWe’ve been mentioning ebooks a lot lately here at Futurismic, as the big publishing companies have suddenly woken up to the fact that the 21st Century has well and truly arrived… and isn’t going to go away.

One can look at the ebook as a way for the publishers to move away from the increasingly expensive and wasteful dead-tree model and reinvigorate themselves in the process. But there is a flipside, of course, as pointed out by The Guardian‘s Naomi Alderman:

… if ebook readers took off, big-name authors such as [Stephen] King may be able to move to self-publishing. And that could mean the end of our current publishing system. Because of the way the publishing business is structured, big-name authors who sell millions of books are, in effect, supporting the industry. I’ve heard various estimates of the percentage of books that actually turn a profit. One agent I spoke to said 95% of published books make a loss. Others have put the figure lower. Either way, everyone agrees that a large majority of profits come from a small minority of authors.

If King, Dan Brown, JK Rowling and Patricia Cornwell were all to decide to move to selling their books online themselves, rather than going through a publisher, they’d certainly benefit financially. Typically, an author only receives about £1 for every copy of their book sold. Rather than relying on a publisher, big-name authors could afford to simply employ an editor, a PR person, a typesetter and a designer. They could price their books at only £2 or £3 and still make much more money than under the current system.

There’s obviously a few flaws in Alderman’s reasoning here: first of all she’s discounting the nurturing aspect of the publishing industry, its ability to bring the next generation of Kings, Cornwells and (universe forfend) Browns up through the ranks; secondly, a shift to ebooks should see the loss margins on a title by a smaller author drop considerably, as there’ll be no massive pile of unsold books to pulp (not to mention much smaller distribution costs).

But what is plain is that book publishing needs to learn in adavance from the messy lessons that the record companies are still struggling with now. A look at the music industry blogs will show you that Alderman’s speculation above is an almost perfect mirror of what’s already happening with middle-band musicians as they (and their fanbase) realise the labels are primarily concerned with wringing the last few drops of profit out of a dead business model, and decide to leave them behind.

As has been pointed out before, the principle difference between the publishers and the record labels is that publishers haven’t yet been forced to innovate by the pressures of piracy. It looks as if they’d be wise to jump ship and start swimming for shore right now, rather than waiting to be made to walk the plank. [Image coutesy Wikimedia Commons]

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Vinyl archaeology

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vinylAs formats wither and die and the digital dark age trundles ever on enterprising hackers are already developing techniques for extracting data from older formats. Here a gentleman has extracted discernible sound recording from a photograph of a vinyl disk:

Remember those flat round things you may have found lying around the house. Those that never really worked well as flying saucers? Well, the other day I happenned to have a good look at one through a magnifying glass. I was able to discern something waveform’esqe in the shape of the groove. I thought, “groovy, there must be a way to extract something sensible off of that” (actual thought quoted).

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Once the image was ready, writing the decoder was very simple. All it did was rotate a “needle” around a given center at some predefined angular velocity, attempting to keep track of the groove the needle was initially positioned on. The offsets (dr) between this track and the basic radial were bunched into a sequence of samples. these were later converted into wav files.

It’s a beautiful project – and it actually sorta works. You can listen to the results and compare it to a recording direct from the disk (or were they called discs?).

[via Short Sharp Science][image from Hryck on flickr]