Everything at the Membrane Domain
A conversation on FaceBook about the Universal Hum / Om:
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Also of interest:
When an opera singer shatters glass — standing wave
* resonant vibration *
“A standing wave is formed when energy moves in two directions at once.”
Flamenco is a genre of music (song and dance) from Andalusia, Spain. The style includes cante (singing), toque (guitar playing), baile (dance) and palmas (handclaps).
Song and Video Inspired by Flash Mob Flamenco
Lately, protestors have incorporated Flamenco into flash mob demonstrations. Following are some headlines:
“Spanish Bank Protested By Flash Mob Of Flamenco Dancers – Rumba Rave “banquero” en el Banco de Santander”
“In the last couple of years, flamenco has found its footing in flash mobs. In September, the closing ceremony of the Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla was preluded by a flash mob set to a four-minute piece choreographed by Rafaela Carrasco and performed to Fernando Terromoto’s “Nadie lo sepá.” Dancers outside Seville also learned the steps from Carrasco’s online video and staged simultaneous flash mobs in Rome, Budapest, London, and Milan.”
“A flamenco flash mob dance in front of the Alamo. The 20 flamenco dancers were from San Antonio and Austin, Texas. They danced for 15 minutes and disappeared.”
“Angry demonstrations are one thing but the irate in Spain are stomping their Flamenco heels and robbing supermarkets to give to the poor.”
A British start-up company has invented a new type of piano.
“Evolved from the piano keyboard, the Seaboard is a new musical instrument which bridges the gap between acoustic and digital music by putting the control of pitch, volume and timbre right at your fingertips.”
The way in which you touch the keys changes the sound. For instance, you can bend notes similar to how you would on a guitar.
“The patent-pending SEA Interface is ROLI’s disruptive platform sensor technology. SEA stands for Sensory, Elastic and Adaptive. SEA Interfaces are highly precise, information-rich, and pressure-sensitive, and can be built in any form factor. They enable seamless transitions between discrete and continuous input, and capture three-dimensional gestures while simultaneously providing the user with tactile feedback.”
Every brain has a soundtrack. Its tempo and tone will vary, depending on mood, frame of mind, and other features of the brain itself. When recorded and played back to an emergency responder, say a firefighter, it may sharpen their reflexes during a crisis, and calm their nerves afterward.
Over the past decade, the influence of music on cognitive development, learning, and emotional well-being has emerged as a hot field of scientific study. To explore music’s potential relevance to emergency response, the Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) has begun a study into a form of neurotraining called “Brain Music” that uses music created in advance from listeners’ own brain waves to help them deal with common ailments like insomnia, fatigue, and headaches stemming from stressful environments.
“Because of the strains that come with an emergency response job, we are interested in finding ways to help these workers remain at the top of their game when working and get quality rest when they go off a shift,” said Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Program Manager Robert Burns. “Our goal is to find new ways to help first responders perform at the highest level possible, without increasing tasks, training, or stress levels.”
If the brain “composes” the music, the first job of scientists is to take down the notes. Each recording is converted into two unique musical compositions designed to trigger the body’s natural responses, for example, by improving productivity while at work, or helping adjust to constantly changing work hours. The compositions are clinically shown to promote one of two mental states in each individual: relaxation – for reduced stress and improved sleep; and alertness – for improved concentration and decision-making.
Each 2–6 minute track is a composition performed on a single instrument, usually a piano. The relaxation track may sound like a “melodic, subdued Chopin sonata,” while the alertness track may have “more of a Mozart sound,” according to Burns. (It seems there’s a classical genius—or maybe two genii—in all of us.) Listen to an example of an instrumental alert track.
After their brain waves are set to music, each person is given a specific listening schedule, such as once an hour for four hours each day, personalized to their work environment and needs. After an extended length of time, people may be able to listen to the music more sporadically. If used properly, the music can boost productivity and energy levels, or trigger a body’s natural responses to stress. A selected group of firefighters will be the first emergency responders taking part in the project.
The music is created by Human Bionics LLC, with the project conducted through the TechSolutions Program, in conjunction with the Human Factors Behavior Sciences Division. It is being tested as part of the Readiness Optimization Program (ROP), a wellness program that combines nutrition education and neurotraining to evaluate a cross population of first responders, including federal agents, police, and firefighters.
Since the ROP is supposed to help them sleep more soundly and eat healthier, the benefits should extend beyond the work environment and ultimately improve one’s entire life.
The nutrition component of the ROP has grown out of numerous clinical studies on nutrition and brain development, sleep, and aging, as well as from the fields of military and sports medicine. The Brain Music component is derived from patented technology developed at Moscow University to use brain waves as a feedback mechanism to correct physiological conditions.
The concept of Brain Music is to use the frequency, amplitude, and duration of musical sounds to move the brain from an anxious state to a more relaxed state. In British philosopher John Locke’s terms, Brain Music brings new meaning to his famous phrase: “A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World.”
To request more information about this story, please e-mail st.snapshots@hq.dhs.gov.
New songs with music and lyrics inspired by Thanksgiving, Christmas and the holidays. Free MP3 downloads.
A free album of new Christmas music and songs for the holiday season. MP3’s and music videos about the last Christmas on Earth?
Single: Peace, Love and Harmony (Free MP3 Download or Streaming Audio)
Songs:
What do grasshoppers do to deal with human’s noise pollution?
PARIS – For city grasshoppers, noise just isn’t cricket. Loud traffic drowns out the song the male grasshopper makes, rubbing a toothed file on his hind legs against a protruding vein on his front wings, to lure a mate. But, German biologists have discovered, the clever insect has found a way to get his offer of romance through the din.
Grasshoppers change the song so that it boosts lower-frequency notes, making it audible over the rumble from the road.
Ulrike Lampe and colleagues from the University of Bielefeld captured 188 male bow-winged grasshoppers (Chorthippus biguttulus), half from quiet locations and half from beside busy roads. The team made nearly 1,000 lab recordings of each grasshopper, placing a cute female grasshopper nearby to encourage a serenade.
“Bow-winged grasshoppers produce songs that include low- and high-frequency components,” said Lampe.
“We found that grasshoppers from noisy habitats boost the volume of the lower-frequency part of their song, which makes sense since road noise can mask signals in this part of the frequency spectrum.”
The findings add insects to the list of animals, including species of birds, whales and frogs, that have been found to alter their sounds in order to cope with man-made noise. The paper appears in Functional Ecology, published by the British Ecological Society (BES). Bow-winged grasshoppers are a common species in central Europe.
The male’s courtship song consists of up to half a dozen phrases, each about two or three seconds long. The phrase starts with a ticking sound, becomes louder and ends in a buzz. – Sapa-AFP
It is impossible to unpublish something. Unpublish is not even a word.
To attempt to unpublish something is worse than futile. Please, just consider the last of the famous to try.
Book burning – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burningBook burning (also biblioclasm or libricide) is the practice of destroying, often …. A much-quoted line in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is … Fahrenheit 451, stating, “It follows then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, …
Then, please consider basic human law:
First Amendment to the United States Constitution – Wikipedia, the …
en.wikipedia.org/…/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constit…The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an …
My suggestion: if you do not like the truth that has been published, please create a better reality for us. Thank you.
by Daniel Brouse
Equation for The Meaning Of Live
Ironically, the Brouses coined the phrase “In God We Trust” for the United States Mint.
What is the meaning of life? What makes man different from other animals?
Baby Formula: Equation for the Meaning of Life .mp4 Video
You might think that creating the perfect piece of music – whether it’s a classical great, jazz masterpiece or pop hit – is all down to the composer’s talent, flair or even genius.
Not so, according to Armand Leroi from Imperial College London.
“What we are trying to find out is whether you need a composer to make music,” says the professor of evolutionary developmental biology.
“And we don’t think you do.”
He believes a much more fundamental force of nature is at work.
“We don’t often think of music as evolving, but everybody knows it has a history and it has traditions. But if you think about it, it really has evolved, it is changing continuously,” Prof Leroi explains.
Scientists think that creating good music may not be the sole preserve of composers such as Mozart“There are all the same forces of change, variation, selection and recombination as different musical traditions join together, transmute and fuse and divide again.
“This is all the stuff that is familiar from our understanding of the biological world, but we see it here in music as well.”
He adds: “We believe music evolves by a fundamentally Darwinian process – so we wanted to test that idea.”
Enter Dr Bob MacCallum, mosquito researcher at Imperial College London by day, creator of DarwinTunes by night.
The idea behind it is simple: to see if music can evolve out of noise – without the controlling hand of a composer.
To begin with, the computer program randomly churned out two short loops of noise.
“The notes are in any place, in any order, and the types of sound – the instrument – is completely randomly generated as well,” says Dr MacCallum.
Then, as in nature, the program let the two original loops to “breed”, to recombine and mix up their material, with some random mutations thrown in for good measure, to create four new loops.
The big result of the experiment is that you can evolve music without a composer”
Prof Armand Leroi Imperial College London
Those four went on to “reproduce” to create 16 new loops, and so on – until 100 random tunes were in the musical mixing pot.
At which point, the public were brought in.
Through the internet, volunteers were asked to rate the songs that were being produced: from love to indifference to pure hatred.
Those tunes that were detested were thrown out. But the more popular ones were kept and allowed to “breed” to create a new generation of songs.
“In the beginning, [the loops were] pretty horrible,” says Dr MacCallum.
“But occasionally, one was slightly less horrible, so the volunteer would give that a higher rating, and that loop and a few others that were slightly less bad than the others would go forward and have offspring. And then as evolution proceeds the music does get better.”
Tastes plateau
The team found that the quality of the music improved quickly from its discordant beginnings.
The tunes improved as more and more generations of music evolvedA few hundred generations down the line and the clashing chords began to vanish and better rhythms started to emerge.
A few thousand generations on, and the music improved again. But the random mutations that happened every now and again also started to give rise to some musical surprises.
Dr MacCallum says: “After about 3,000 generations had been listened to, there starts to be a kick drum or a bass drum, and that just spontaneously came, we didn’t put any drum sounds into the algorithm.”
But then, the standard of the songs started to plateau, according to a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).
Market forces – consumer choice – is itself a creative force, one that is actually much more important than we appreciate”
Prof Armand Leroi Imperial College London
Prof Leroi says that this was partly because of some limitations with the program, but it was also reflective of a process that can occur in life.
“Evolution of all sorts, whether you are talking about out there in the wild or in the lab, you always find you get a rapid phase of very fast evolution, and then it slows down,” he says.
“Of course it never slows down forever, it never just stays there. Eventually you will get another burst of evolution as something new comes along and breaks through a boundary, and we think that will happen here too.”
He also added that the system missed out one other crucial factor: the influence of our peers.
He says: “We know from studies that when kids are allowed to see what other people are choosing, what they choose is very different from actually what they decide themselves is the best.
“And it turns out that when that happens you get very different evolutionary dynamics, and if you throw marketing into that equation, the influence of big business then it changes all over again.”
Future music
However, despite some limitations, Prof Leroi says the results from DarwinTunes confirmed his suspicions.
The scientists believe the system could create the ultimate music if it was scaled up“You can evolve music without a composer,” he explains.
“It’s just a matter of market forces. It tells us that market forces – consumer choice – is itself a creative force, one that is actually much more important than we appreciate.”
But if musicians and composers aren’t already quaking in their boots, Prof Leroi has a grand vision for the future of the Darwinian music machine.
He says: “I’ve no doubt that if we ran this experiment for longer, using bigger, faster computers, and millions of people rather than thousands, and for years, instead of months, we could evolve fantastic music.
“Would it be Mozart? No, I don’t think so. It would have no composer behind it, it wouldn’t be the act of any individual musical genius, it would just be the people’s music in its purest form.”
By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News
Professor Armand Leroi from Imperial College London explains why he thinks a Darwinian computer program that can evolve music from noise could kill off the composer
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