sherbetbizarre
Special Branch
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2004
- Messages
- 5,247
The Hearse Song (the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3qIBHStUc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3qIBHStUc0
gncxx said:Wasn't sure whether to put this here or in the WTF? thread, but check out the Children Medieval Band:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqpRoVxH2jc
Heard about this on 6 Music this morning and it's every bit as weird as they said. The drummer!
Brain scans of rappers shed light on creativity
http://www.nature.com/news/brain-scans- ... ty-1.11835
Functional magnetic resonance imaging shows what happens in the brain during improvisation.
Daniel Cressey
15 November 2012
Open Mike Eagle, one of the authors of the latest study, performs on Knocksteady TV.
Rappers making up rhymes on the fly while in a brain scanner have provided an insight into the creative process.
Freestyle rapping — in which a performer improvises a song by stringing together unrehearsed lyrics — is a highly prized skill in hip hop. But instead of watching a performance in a club, Siyuan Liu and Allen Braun, neuroscientists at the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, and their colleagues had 12 rappers freestyle in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.
The artists also recited a set of memorized lyrics chosen by the researchers. By comparing the brain scans from rappers taken during freestyling to those taken during the rote recitation, they were able to see which areas of the brain are used during improvisation. The study is published today in Scientific Reports1.
The results parallel previous imaging studies in which Braun and Charles Limb, a doctor and musician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, looked at fMRI scans from jazz musicians2. Both sets of artists showed lower activity in part of their frontal lobes called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during improvisation, and increased activity in another area, called the medial prefrontal cortex. The areas that were found to be ‘deactivated’ are associated with regulating other brain functions.
“We think what we see is a relaxation of ‘executive functions’ to allow more natural de-focused attention and uncensored processes to occur that might be the hallmark of creativity,” says Braun.
He adds that this suggestion is “a little bit controversial in the literature”, because some studies have found activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in creative behaviour. He suggests that the discrepancy might have to do with the tasks chosen to represent creativity. In studies that found activation, the activities — such as those that require recall — may actually be less creative.
“We try to stick with more natural creative processing, and when we do that we see this decrease in the dorsal lateral regions,” says Braun.
Pump down the volume
Rex Jung, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, has also studied the link between brain structures and creativity, finding an inverse relationship between the volume of some frontal lobe structures and creativity3. “Some of our results imply this downregulation of the frontal lobes in service of creative cognition. [The latest paper] really appears to pull it all together,” he says. “I’m excited about the findings.”
Jung says that this downregulation is likely to apply in other, non-musical areas of creativity — including science.
The findings also suggest an explanation for why new music might seem to the artist to be created of its own accord. With less involvement by the lateral prefrontal regions of the brain, the performance could seem to its creator to have “occurred outside of conscious awareness”, the authors write.
Michael Eagle, a study co-author who raps under the name Open Mike Eagle, agrees: “That’s kind of the nature of that type of improvisation. Even as people who do it, we’re not 100% sure of where we’re getting improvisation from.”
Liu says that the researchers are now working on problems they were unable to explore with freestylers — such as what happens after the initial burst of creative inspiration.
"We think that the creative process may be divided into two phases," he says. "The first is the spontaneous improvisatory phase. In this phase you can generate novel ideas. We think there is a second phase, some kind of creative processing [in] revision."
The researchers would also like to look at how creativity differs between experts and amateurs of a similar artistic ilk to freestylers: poets and storytellers.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.11835
References
Liu, S., et al. Sci. Rep. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep00834 (2012).
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Limb, C. J. & Braun, A. R. PLoS ONE 3, e1679 (2008).
ArticlePubMedChemPort
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Jung, R. E., Grazioplene, R., Caprihan, A., Chavez, R. S. & Haier, R. J. PLoS ONE 5, e9818 (2010).
ArticlePubMedChemPort
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bobby mcferrin ? although i think he drew the line ...gncxx said:Maybe should have put this in Notes and Queries, but I'll see if anyone here knows what I'm on about. There was a "song", or a piece of music, I heard on John Walters' show Walters' Weekly back in the 1980s which consisted of the "musician" "playing" his body parts.
So what you heard was a lot of slapping and knocking, along with - and this is what was so memorable - farting. But no singing, oddly. Must have been from the 70s, but does anyone know what that might have been?
Made in 1970, this remarkable study of the human body is neither scientific nor medical; it is, rather, a deeply intimate feature-length film exploring the physical experience of being human.
Narrated by Vanessa Redgrave and Frank Finlay with a commentary by poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell, The Body traces the human life-cycle from conception to death. Photographic techniques never seen by cinema audiences at the time of release - including the use of internal cameras - allow an unprecedented insight into the body's functions; these visuals are beautifully complemented by a soundtrack by Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and pioneering composer Ron Geesin, incorporating the latter's experiments in biomusic - in this case, sounds created by the human body itself.
Glad to be of help - and yes, quite the coincidence!gncxx said:That's it! What an amazing coincidence I was reminded of it the week before it's out on DVD!
For those who are keen to hear the music in isolation, though, the producers of the DVD have thoughtfully included it as a 38 minute "music suite" in the extras. The music is accompanied with kaleidoscopic imagery.
In 1964, a computer - the IBM 1401 Data Processing System - arrived in Iceland, one of the very first computers to be imported into the country. The 1401 has been called the "Model T" of the computer industry - the first affordable, mass produced digital business computer . The chief maintenance engineer for this machine was Jóhann Gunnarsson, my father. A keen musician, he learned of an obscure method of making music on this computer - a purpose for which this business machine was not at all designed. The method was simple. The computer's memory emitted strong electromagnetic waves and by programming the memory in a certain way and by placing a radio receiver next to it, melodies could be coaxed out - captured by the receiver as a delicate, melancholy sine-wave tone.
When the IBM 1401 was taken out of service in 1971, it wasn't simply thrown away like an old refrigerator, but was given a little farewell ceremony, almost a funeral, when its melodies were played for one last time. This "performance" was documented on tape along with recordings of the sound of the machine in operation.
When my father told me about this in the year 2001, I felt that, besides being a nice, touching story, it reflected many things that I was interested in. Man-machine interaction, old, discarded technology, the nostalgia for old computers, human and artificial intelligence, technological progress and human evolution, the "spirit" and the machine. I started to write music using those themes, basing it on those 30 year old recordings of the IBM 1401 computer...
gncxx said:Got my copy this week, might give it a spin at the weekend. Worried that review describes it as "hard to watch" in places, though, I get squeamish about that sort of thing!
Edit: The choir of voices behind the opera singer is actually a recording of crickets slowed right down - an effect apparently discovered by a guy called Jim Wilson. ('Apparently' because some people believe the effect is faked - and I don't know nearly enough about the subject to make a call). There's a sample of his work here: God's Cricket Chorus.
The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutlergncxx said:One of the greatest musical eccentrics of the twentieth century has to be Ivor Cutler, and his last album, A Flat Man, has just been reissued by his family. I was listening to it tonight, and although it's supposed to be his "darkest" album there was still stuff that had me laughing out loud. Nice to hear his weirdness didn't mellow with old age.