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In 2017, an AI system called Amper composed and produced original music for an album called I AM AI. The chord structures, instrumentation, and percussion were developed by Amper, which used initial parameters like genre, mood, and length to generate a full-length song in just a few minutes. Taryn Southern, a human…
Though it has become a naturalized part of music-making since the first one was built in 1710, the pianoforte (its name means "soft-loud") was a technical marvel for its time, a machine that changed music in ways that are hard to imagine. Computer pioneer Alan Kay once observed that any technological advance is…
Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science -- these are good things. (Applause.) These are qualities you want in people making policy. These are qualities you want to continue to cultivate in yourselves as citizens. (Applause.) That might seem obvious. (Laughter.) That's why we honor Bill Moyers or…
When you hear someone longing for the "good old days," take it with a grain of salt. (Laughter and applause.) Take it with a grain of salt. We live in a great nation and we are rightly proud of our history. We are beneficiaries of the labor and the grit and the courage of generations who came before. But I guess it's…
Music makes things in our minds, but afterward most of them fade away. What remains? In one old story about Mozart, the wonder child hears a lengthy contrapuntal mass and then writes down the entire score. I do not believe such tales, for history documents so few of them that they seem to be mere legend, though by…
But our unconscious feats of unweaving and weaving are greater even than this. Think what is happening when you listen to a whole orchestra. Imagine that, superimposed on a hundred instruments, your neighbour in the concert is whispering learned music criticism in your ear, others are coughing and, lamentably…
There was once a brainy baboon, Who always breathed down a bassoon, For he said, 'It appears That in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune'.
It is possible that this appearance of non-particulateness is illusory, and that the analogy with genes does not break down. After all, if we look at the inheritance of many genetic characters such as human height or skin-colouring, it does not look like the work of indivisible and unblendable genes. If a black and a…
谜 = 讠 辶 米 (riddle) 迷 = 辶 米 (to get lost)
Wherever we seek to find constancy we discover change. Having looked at the old woodlands in Hutcheson Forest, at Isle Royale, and in the wilderness of the boundary waters, in the land of the moose and the wolf, and having uncovered the histories hidden within the trees and within the muds, we find that nature…
In the 2020s, the religious right grabbed control of the life-death question. Evangelicals filled the courts with lawsuits, and doctors became even more afraid to pull the plug. The same mind-set that created the need for a Walter Masters made the Cass family more money than they had ever imagined. Their Compassionate…
The sound of the insect orchestra swells and throbs night after night, from midsummer until autumn ends and the frosty nights make the tiny players stiff and numb, and finally the last note is stilled in the long cold. An hour of hunting out the small musicians by flashlight is an adventure any child would love. It…
One had to be a Newton to see that the Moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't. - Paul Valery
Whether by coincidence or by memetic transmission, Beethoven is the favourite example for illustrating this problem. Brodie (1996) uses Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Dawkins (1976) uses the Ninth and Dennett (1995) uses both the Fifth and the Seventh. Dennet adds that the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth are a…
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. the content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content…