This is another fragment of one of the interviews I did when I was at Science Online ‘09. I saw Cathy Davies‘ sheet music (Mozart) lying around during a break. She was preparing for a concert with the Newark Ecumenical Chorus which took place on February 14.
One group of people that I sadly did not get to talk to when I was at the Science Online 09 conference last month was Miss Baker’s Biology Class. Stacy Baker’s interactive teaching methods were recently profiled in The Scientist, and she brought a few of her students to Science Online 09, where they were the life of the party. I missed their session, but everyone who did go there later mentioned that as their favourite session of the conference!
Today I found the class online again, when one of the students, Jennifer, put up a video of herself performing a song she wrote about malaria:
I have started doing research interviews with people who are somehow involved in both music and science. My first set of interviews was carried out at the Science Online 09 conference in North Carolina last month. I interviewed four people there, and only just got around to editing the interviews into little snippets. I don’t want to give away all my info, and am deliberately holding back the most interesting bits, but I do want to share some bits of the research interviews I recorded, and will be posting those as I go along.
The interviews are recorded with the Zoom H2, which looks like a cross between a 1930s jazz club microphone and something out of an old science fiction movie. I guess that’s a science/music connection in itself.
The first interview I’m going to put up is the one I did with Victor Henning of Mendeley. It is also the longest audio file I have. Everyone else I managed to shorten to one or two minute soundbites, but Victor’s stories were too long and interconnected to do that with, and I could not trim it down any further than 5 minutes.
Mendeley is a reference manager tool that can be used to store and organize academic papers. Interestingly, it is developed, run, and supported by people with a background in the music business. Listen what Victor has to say about his own past in the music industry, about the similarities between Mendeley and LastFM, and about the music connection of one of Mendeley’s new investors (Their funding deal was reported today in Tech Crunch).
(If the player doesn’t work, the file is also here)
Through a post on The Gulf Stream I found out that singer José González started his PhD in Biochemistry before switching to a full-time music career.
González does the music for this overall amazing Sony advertisement:
I found this interview about his previous work in science, and why he left the lab for music. Time was the main concern. When music became a full time job, he could no longer do science as well.
“I miss Biochemistry, but I still feel that there is a lot I can do with music” – José González
The logo of this blog is the same erlenmeyer flask used on my easternblot blog, but half-morphed into a treble clef. It symbolizes the science/music connection, but could easily have been the personal logo of Alexander Borodin.
The erlenmeyer flask was invented by German chemist Emil Erlenmeyer in 1861. Around this same time, from 1859 to 1862, Erlenmeyer was also supervisor to Alexander Borodin, who did a postdoctoral fellowship in Erlenmeyer’s lab. Borodin was a prolific chemist, who got his name in chemistry textbooks as one of the discoverers of the aldol reaction, but in his spare time he was a composer. He managed to be in touch with prominent people in both fields: Aside from working with Erlenmeyer, Borodin was also friends with Mendeleev – the inventor of the periodic table – and with composer Rimsky-Korsakov. The latter completed Borodin’s opera Prince Igor after he died in 1887, at a fancy dress party, from a burst artery in the heart.
Borodin considered himself mostly a chemist, and didn’t think much of his musical work. He referred to himself as a “Sunday composer”, but these days he is better known for his music than for his science. In 1953 he was posthumously awarded a Tony Award for the musical Kismet, which was based on his original scores. Some of Borodin’s most famous works are the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and the Nocturne from his String Quartet No. 2 in D.
Mikhail Fokine’s choreography for the Polovtsian Dances by Borodin, as performed by the Kirov Opera and Ballet under Valery Gergiev.
Pacific Strings play Nocturne from String Quartet No. 2 in D
Richard Feynman playing the bongos:
This clip is part of a documentary by Christopher Sykes, who left the following comment on the YouTube video: “For the record, this scene was recorded by my wife, Lotte, in 1987, as part of a film we made for the BBC Horizon science series, called ‘The Quest for Tannu Tuva’”
Thanks to Mark Tovey for showing me this video
Einstein was a violinist, Elgar had a home chemistry lab, and many other people are active in music and science.
Both scientists and musicians work long and odd hours for little pay, and have very little chance at reaching the top of their respective fields. Why would anyone pursue either career, let alone both? Why even make one or the other a hobby on top of an already challenging job?
I’ve been thinking about these questions for a few years. Initially, I thought I’d write a book about it. However, books don’t come with sound, and I needed sound to tell the story of people who spend their days in between humming lab apparatus and their nights tuning guitars or violins.
About a year and a half ago I started toying with the idea of making a documentary about people who are both scientists and musicians. Unlike books, documentaries have sound. It would be perfect, I thought, to find some scientists/musicians and follow them around for a bit, to try and tell the story of these busybodies. I was very quiet about the idea at first. After all, I had no experience at all at making documentaries. I had no camera, my laptop wasn’t good enough for editing, I didn’t have a budget, and I certainly didn’t have time to even be thinking about it.
A few months ago I found a little more time to daydream, and while I still didn’t have experience, a camera, editing software, or a budget, I started talking about this documentary more seriously. I mentioned the idea to a few people, and they liked it. I talked to scientists and musicians and those who do neither but like both. Every time I told someone my idea, they came with several suggestions for things I should do and people I should talk to. After only seriously discussing the topic with five people, I already have pages and pages of notes and leads and websites.
In October I took two workshops to learn how to start making a documentary. Here I learned about budgets and the importance of good cameras and the need for a good proposal and the time it takes to do research before you can even start shooting. Lots of things felt far out of my reach for now, but I thought there is no better way to start than to just start. The research part I don’t yet need a camera for, so I plan to start doing research interviews as soon as January 2009. I have some people in mind who I would like to talk to.
Since this is by no means a day job, and I already have several other projects on the go, it’s going to take me a long time to even get ready to actually shoot, and I figured that in that time I might find someone with a camera and/or editing software willing to jump on board. (Or at least I can put off worrying about it for a while…)
I’ll document the progress of my research and my endeavours into the world of documentary making in this blog, and will also put some general thoughts about music and science in here.
