If you’re driving faster than the speed limit, the app makes your music slow down. If when you’re exceeding the speed limit by more than 10 km per hour, the music stops completely.
Over in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, they’ve take to the streets and placed a groove in the road, resulting in “Melody Road”:
Another version of a soundtrack for the speed limit, created by the folks over at Dentsu London. They say the Japanese road has been successful in reducing the number of accidents and increasing the number of tourists.
To fully see (i.e., hear), watch the video to the end. Fascinatingly, this is not the first. As designers, when are we interfering?
When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday. …. Each language is a unique expression of human creativity.
We would be outraged if Notre Dame Cathedral or the Great Pyramid of Giza were demolished to make way for modern buildings. We should be similarly appalled when languages — monuments to human genius far more ancient and complex than anything we have built with our hands — erode.
From spoonerisms to malapropisms, “Evolving English,” now at the British Library, recaptures some.
The basic meaning is visible above the surface, but we can only guess at the shape of the vast chambers of meaning below. And every language has particularly hard-to-translate terms, such as the Portuguese saudade, or “the feeling of missing someone or something that is gone,” or the Japanese ichigo-ichie, meaning “the practice of treasuring each moment and trying to make it perfect.” Linguists refer to the distance between these words and their rough translations as a lacuna, which comes from the Latin word for “pool” or “lake.” There’s a space we need to swim across to reach the other side.
Not everyone feels this way:
A few years ago, a French businessman and thinker named Jean-Paul Nerriere noticed a trend among non-native English speakers he encountered at meetings: They were using a stripped-down version of the language, and they could communicate more easily with each other than with native English speakers. It was as if they had found a way to drain all the lacunas and meet on a tiny island where only the most utilitarian words would be needed.
Alex Ross points out that John Cage once defined music as “the art of listening to other people,” and there’s no better way to be. Language has always felt like that to me: when you’re listening to an unfamiliar language, there’s an art to it that isolates the absolutely concrete sounds so they emerge as essential. Like squinting at a piece of art. Or taking a piece through a crushing editorial process. Each has ways of closing up the lacunas.
I got the idea [for the chapter] from a book by Jacob Slichter, the drummer of a band called Semisonic. Semisonic’s most famous song, “Closing Time,” contains what Slichter calls a “Clearmountain pause,” named after Bob Clearmountain, who produced and mixed the song, and is apparently known for inserting pauses into the music he works on.
And that chapter looks different from the rest of the book:
I’d also become obsessed with the idea of writing a story in PowerPoint — a program I did not own and had never used. I remember exactly when that idea came to me: I was reading an article about the Obama campaign’s turnaround two summers ago, and it mentioned that a particular PowerPoint presentation about the campaign’s shortcomings had led to a successful strategy shift. The fact that the presentation in question wasn’t referred to as a “paper,” or a “document” or a “memo,” but as a “PowerPoint,” really struck me. I thought: PowerPoint has become a literary genre; I’d love to write a story in it.
Peter del Tredici on wildlife that surrounds us every day, but often has an image problem, goes unnoticed, unattended, unvalued — the weed:
There is no denying the fact that many — if not most — of the plants … suffer from image problems associated with the label “weeds,” or, to use a more recent term, “invasive species.” From the plant’s perspective, invasiveness is just another word for successful reproduction — the ultimate goal of all organisms, including humans. …. The term is a value judgment that humans apply to plants we do not like, not a biological characteristic.
Later on:
Most people tend to interpret the presence of spontaneous urban vegetation in their neighborhood as a visible manifestation of dereliction and neglect while viewing the same plants growing in a suburban or rural context as “wildflowers.” Clearly the context in which a plant exists has everything to do with how people feel about it.
See also: The ubiquitous Ailanthus, or “Tree of Heaven,” described in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is never counted in street tree inventories because no one ever “planted it.”
“Spontaneous urban vegetation,” or the weed, is easier to consider kindly when you examine it this way. I walk by unknowingly, perhaps step on even, lambsquarters on the south end of Prospect Park, then purchase it for several dollars at the north end of the park at the farmers’ market. Sure, the common reed is an invasive here in North America, but in the European range, it’s seen as being in an ecological crisis. Context! It’s curious to consider what else in the world — design, music, architecture, more — might be victim to this kind of weed-accusation when taken out of context.
1. I added a bunch of mail filters.
2. I don’t use a computer at home.
3. We don’t turn our TV on unless we’re watching something with undivided attention.
4. We replaced all of our big squishy furniture with smaller, more designed, mid-century inspired pieces.
5. I carry less.
6. I listen to much less music.
7. I’ve been trying to cook more.
8. I’ve been eating much better.
9 . I’ve been going to bed before midnight.
10. I unsubscribed from Google Alerts.
11. I’ve been much more disciplined in avoiding and ignoring pointlessly negative voices.
12. I’ve thrown out almost everything.
I’ve been doing some of the same, including only carrying the keys I need (rather than mindlessly grabbing all I own), only cooking out of one publication or by winging it (rather than from any on the shelves), and being diligent about how much sleep I get (life changing on its own). What’s especially cheering about the list is that it has a Harper’s Index-esque effect in that #5 influences #6, #7 influences #8, and #12 makes just about everything more palatable.
At fourteen, Ray Cramer and I were at odds because he didn’t appreciate my sight-reading tendencies. I, one of his newer students, arrived at piano lessons each week, ready to play, posturing practice on pieces we’d already learned. And I, a pleasure-seeing student, sought approval, yet practice was not what I had done. What I truly excelled at, what I was unstoppable at, what we both knew, was I could sight-read. “You blaze through new pieces with no patience for those you know.” And some days the unspoken, “I have no patience for you.” It was clear Mr. Cramer and I didn’t see eye to eye.
For glider pilots, it’s essential to be able to recognize cumulus clouds because they tell them where warm air is rising, enabling pilots to fly longer and higher and farther. For sight-readers, it’s essential to recognize and connect key notes and make music between them, enabling us to play longer and faster and more meaningfully. Whether we’re reading clouds as a sign of where to fly or reading notes as a sign of what to play, it’s an exercise in the familiar being used unconsciously.
Mark up
Whether the written text — of cumulus clouds, of notes, of serifs, of CSS, of whatever your markup — gives us content, or whether we read significance into that content and make meaning, no matter. We use signs to assimilate words, freely interpreting and creating new meanings, new languages even, giving way to new content and interpretations.
You can get bogged down in details, knowing the average paperback has 50 characters to the line, 35 lines to the page and 250 pages of text. You can sort through a publication dedicated to the advancement of soaring, or learn the proper way to get into soaring. You can know the details. First, however, it’s essential to ascertain how to sight-read, connecting spaces in between.
Familiar sights
Use familiar knowledge unconsciously. Sight-read. Make your own pieces with the notes you know well and the rest of the piece, the story, the language, will fall into place. Often you’ll see that most won’t agree with your version. And that just means it’s working.
A scientist in Massachusetts thinks she’s discovered a link between the interval of a minor third (C major to E flat, say) and expressions of sadness in human speech. Meagan Curtis found in her study that the speech-melodies of actors’ voices (the movement of pitch in their intonation) happened to encompass a minor third when they were asked to communicate sadness. And when listeners were played the same speech-melodies, shorn of the words, they accurately interpreted the actors’ emotion.
The research asks a chicken-and-egg question, then, of the music-and-language pair:
[W]hich came first, the sad minor third in music or the sad minor third in speech? Have centuries of music in minor keys conditioned us to the sound of sadness, or has music through the ages drawn from the cadences of our speech and heightened its emotional power?
My grandfather wrote a lullaby. Five decades ago, he passed it down to my mother, who, a few years ago, passed it down to me. The piece — never written down — was gifted to me at the piano bench, side by side with my mother one evening. Not an occasion. Not a ceremony. I believe there were running, barking dogs. Dishes clanking in the next room. As she revealed stories of her father who she, at that time, hadn’t seen in several difficult years, she played from memory. While the chords in the piece are major, the sentiments were clearly minor as she spoke.
Today I play variations of that lullaby. I play when I should be practicing. When I should be leaving for work or meeting a friend. When I should be sleeping. I play, and the sentiment is major. Its interpretation is mine. The links we make between music and story, between theirs and ours, between craft and narrative, are our own.
Christophe Abric, a journalist, was looking for a new way to share music, so he explored how he could capture instances. The result: “Concerts-a-emporter” or Take Away Shows:
Every week, we invite an artist or a band to play in the streets, in a bar, a park, or even in a flat or in an elevator, and we film the whole session. Of course, what makes the beauty of it is all the little incidents, hesitations, and crazy stuff happening unexpectingly. Besides, we do not edit the videos so they look perfectly flawless, instead we keep the raw sound of the surroundings. Our goal is to try and capture instants, film the music just like it happens, without preparation, without tricks. Spontaneity is the keyword.
The result is to the internet streaming world what MTV’s Unplugged was to television, a rare look at musicians and performers stripped of the celebrity aura to celebrate music.
Nothing quite like what’s added when you take away. And that’s that.
Forget about writing for a moment. Try making extravagant movements with your pen. Don’t be timid. Thrash your hand about from the wrist. When you’ve filled a few pages of scribbles, you can introduce some discipline. Make zigzags on lined paper. You want the picket fence effect: slightly slanted lines, evenly spaced. Then add recognition points, and you’ve got handwriting.
I’ve been getting back to playing cello more regularly recently. So neglected it was for a few months, the entire bridge had become displaced and strings undone. I polished it up for daily playing again, and thought of David B., my extraordinary cello teacher who makes music from his modest brick apartment complex deep in Queens, four transport forms away.
You see, for every person stuck writing in all caps trying to flow into italic curves, there’s a classical musician, trying to loosen up, to be free. Forget about the music, forget about the notes, play anything, let go, David would say. Make extravagant movements, let your bow hand wander where the hand wants, and you’ll be surprised what the scribbles of sounds will produce. Then, add a bit of dynamic, intention, notes in the right places. And before you know it, the picket fence effect has taken hold. You have music. You’ve got handwriting. Or whatever it was that needed some some simple scribbling first.
In the ‘50s and ’60s, celebrated photographer W. Eugene Smith recorded the sights and sounds of hundreds of people in and around a loft building in Manhattan where major jazz musicians and others flocked to play music. It marks a kind of cultural heritage of that time unlike others.
From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan’s wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. Smith’s work has remained in archives until now. The Jazz Loft Project is dedicated to uncovering the stories behind this legendary moment in American cultural history.
From this moment in 2009, in which everything anyone thinks or says is twittered or blogged or in some way used, it is revealing to go back 50 years and listen, closely, to something that was never intended to be used in any way. Because of that, it sounds different. The music is less structured, less self-conscious, more exploratory. The conversation is uninhibited, frank and sometimes just plain boring. The creaky steps and squeaky door of the building people describe as ‘smelly’ add to the profile of a place that was simply not ‘for show’ in any way whatsoever.
