Oramics
In early November I visited the Science Museum in London, to see the Oramics exhibit. Oramics is a musical technique developed by Daphne Oram in the late 1950s, while she worked for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The idea is based on the concept of depicting sound as graphs (where you can see, for example, how the amplitude of the graph gets bigger as the sound gets louder. I use that feature of Garageband to help me edit the interviews I’ve posted). Daphne Oram thought that if you can turn sound into a graph, you should also be able to start with the graph and turn that into sound.
She created the Oramics Machine, which did exactly that. As input it used film strips, on which Daphne had painted graphs and shapes. The shapes she drew were interpreted by the machine, and converted into sound.
The museum exhibit not only had the original Oramics machine on display (shown above) but also an interactive digital replica, where you could draw shapes and modify graphs, and hear the sounds change. You can’t hear the sound very well in the video, because it was coming from headphones.
After starting a study in electrotheraphy, Daphne was offered a place at the Royal College of Music, but instead she chose to combine the fields of electronics and music, and took a job as music engineer for the BBC. She was involved in the creation of the Radiophonic Workshop, but left a year after its inception to set up her own studio.
Science Showoff – my talk!
Here (at the bottom of this post) is the full talk I gave at Science Showoff on December 7.
Notice how I neatly kept it within the allotted 9 minutes! I did cut out about three words where I was bumbling a bit, but otherwise this is the full thing. For quality purposes, I edited the original audio files in rather than the recording of them being played over the PA system.
To understand the groans at the mention of chemistry, and my toast comment, you need to know that at the start of the evening compere Steve Cross did an extensive joke about how all the Royal Society of Chemistry’s press releases are about toast rather than about chemistry. (Case in point: the toast sandwich.)
Here’s the talk:
I was also a prop/”volunteer” in Rob Wells’ set that night, playing the part of the Hubble Telescope, and I appear to have also won the exam that was passed around during Tom Whyntie’s set (assignment: make art using Feynman diagrams) so it was a busy (and fun!) evening.
Science Showoff!
Next week, on December 7, I’ll be speaking in London as part of Science Showoff. I’ll have tiny fragments from some of the interviews on here, as well as anecdotes about slightly more famous scientist-musicians.
Some of the other performers that night are actually making music about science, but there’s also comedy and sports – all related to science!
Do come if you’re in or near London!
The Sci Foo Files 2010 – Part 2: Stephon Alexander
When I hosted the scientists/musicians session at Sci Foo 2010, I had left a recorder running. Unfortunately, it ran out of batteries halfway through, and after recovering the files, I noticed it was missing a large chunk of Stephon Alexander’s fabulous talk about a three dimensional circle of fifths. (No, it’s not a circle if it’s three dimensional, but that’s the best way I can describe it.) Luckily, he was full of amazing stories, and a great speaker, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy these two other audio fragments.
Stephon Alexander is an Associate Professor of Physics at Haverford College. He’s also a saxophone player, and he could very easily have made a career out of music. So why didn’t he? In this first audio fragment he tells the story of growing up in the Bronx and having his music career all laid out for him.
This second audio fragment ends close to where the recording stopped, and I don’t remember how it ended, but it’s the highly entertaining story of how Stephon found an interesting diagram that John Coltrane gave to Yusuf Lateef, and later, on a whim, called Yusuf Lateef out of the blue…
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Scientist-musician wins Nobel Prize
Happy to hear that Saul Perlmutter has won a Nobel Prize today! We met at SciFoo 2010 and I’ve spoken with him last year (and earlier this year, according to my email archives) about a music-in-physics course he organised. He’s also a musician himself, and plays violin. Congrats to Saul, and I will schedule an interview once I make my way out of the backlog of other things. (Same goes for the 15 or so other people who I promised to catch up with and who may not have won any Nobel Prizes.)
Interview with me
Remember the interview with Princess Ojiaku? She has also been interviewing scientist-musicians, and she interviewed me as well. We did the interview about a year ago, but it’s now up on her site.
The SciFoo Files 2010 – Part 1: Hari Manoharan
Oh dear, has it really been a year?
In the summer of 2010 I was at Sci Foo camp – a gathering for scientists, writers, computer geeks, artists, and likeminded folk. Somehow, an entire year has passed since then, and Sci Foo 2011 is currently underway, but I never got around to uploading the wonderful things I have from last year!
At Sci Foo, participants create the schedule. There are empty programs on which you can suggest something you want to talk about. On opening night, there is a mad rush to get a time slot, and I managed to get a session about science and music on the program. There were 12 concurrent sessions and my session attracted about 8 people if I remember correctly. I shared what I’d been doing with this project, and played an audio file of a compilation of some of my interviewees talking about making the decision between science and music and we discussed among the audience there how they saw the connection between science and music. I have several audio clips from that discussion which I will upload next time, but here is a more complete story from one of the participants.
What does a copper atom sound like?
After proposing this talk, I got an email from fellow Sci Foo attendee Hari Manoharan, who had brought some science/music-related things of his own, so we decided to combine forces, and he let us see and HEAR the research he’d been doing.
His lab found a way to physically manipulate atoms, one by one, but the probe they use can either see or move an atom – not both at once. Due to this limitation, they could only visualize stationary states, not the movement itself. But there was a way to follow the movement via audio, and Hari explains this in the following talk. Near the end, you will be able hear some of his research, and hear how different atoms and molecules sound!
(Sorry the volume of this file is so low…)
Visit Hari’s lab website to find out more.
Interview with Baba Brinkman
After talking to several musicians who had a formal background in science, I thought it was time to interview someone who ended up in science communication by way of music.
Listen to find out how Baba Brinkman “evolved” from medieval literature scholar to evolution rapper:
Baba is currently currently working on adapting his “Rap Guide to Evolution” to a DVD with some funding from the Wellcome Trust, but he’s also raising additional funding to make the videos just that more awesome. This is done through crowdsourcing, where you can donate a small amount in exchange for digital downloads of the final product, or more in exchange for a future physical DVD, or even more for their own image in the music videos. There are still 18 days left in the funding drive, with a few thousand pounds still to go, so help him out if you can. Here’s the trailer for the DVD:
Rock Stars of Science
Last year, GQ magazine posted a photo spread of scientists posing with rock stars. This year, they’re doing it again! More scientists, different musicians, and a slightly more serious tone in the photos. The feature is co-presented by GQ and the Geoffrey Beene foundation to promote awareness about scientists, and put some names to research people may have read about.
Five of the seventeen scientists featured are musicians as well: Stephen Baylin and William Nelson play guitar, Frank Longo plays keyboard in a band, Mehmet Oz plays piano, and Michael Weiner is a jazz musician. But they’re not the only scientist/musicians in the feature. Hip-hop artist and record producer Jay Sean, surrounded by MDs in his GQ photo, was once a medical student himself. When he was halfway through med school in London, he got his first record deal, and dropped out to pursue music professionally. His pull-quote on the photo: “I’ll always be fascinated with science.”
Check GQ next week, or the Rock Stars of Science website to see which other musicians and scientists are featured in the Rock Stars of Science feature. (Or visit the Node, where I posted the complete list and gave some more details about the project.)
Interview with Helen Arney
Helen Arney is a comedian who sings hilarious songs about dates gone wrong, unfortunate romantic gestures, biology, ostheopaths, and statistics… We talked about her background in science, about giving audiences something to think about, and the scientific experimental aspect of comedy.
And two songs – one slightly geekier than the other, but both are hilarious:
