Is it Nostalgia Music, or just a Blip on your Screen?

Haeyoung Kim, a classical pianist, took the stage at a hip Manhattan art space before a crowd of twenty- and thirty-somethings, many shaggy-haired and wearing T-shirts and glasses.

oOo The new long-hairs and beat generation. . . ? oOo

But this was no far-out modern classical music scene. Instead, soon the room was filled with electronic beeps and buzzes of a 1980's video game pulsing to a danceable beat, as if Mario were hosting a rave. oOo Not an electronic piano, not a synthesizer, but her instrument of choice: a Nintendo Game Boy. oOo oOo

The performance was part of Blip Festival, [ check out the retro website! ] a four-day celebration of music made with obsolete computers and electronics. So-called "chiptune" or "8-bit" music is building a cult audience among former Atari jockeys. [ Atari-who?? oOo ]

"We are the first generation for whom video games and computers played an important role in our childhood," said Mike Rosenthal, 29, one of Blip Festival's organizers. "Now [the sound of these toys] has taken on meaning, and many of us are at an age where we want to take apart our toys and see what else we can make them do." oOo sort of Re-purposing your childhood. . . oOo

Chiptune includes pop, metal and other styles. The electronic, tinny sound oOo oOo which is not unlike the dinn of today's Brittney wannabees oOo of the first commercial video games has aged enough to feel nostalgic: oOo

The eclectic artist Beck has even released an EP of chiptune remixes. oOo What's next - "Chipmonk" tunes? Aaarrrgh! oOo

The scene is informed by the do-it-yourself ethic of punk rock and hacker culture, oOo read: hacks, not pros,

where everyone Ass-umes that "they" can be a musician or artist, without hard life-long sweat and tears or inborn gifted talent oOo

Favorite "new" instruments include the Commodore 64 and Atari 800, but the most popular chiptune gadget may be the Game Boy, which Nintendo debuted in 1989. These modified thinga-ma-rigs have only a fraction of the computing power of today's average cell phone, but that's part of the appeal. oOo let's bust out the washboards and mouth-organs, too. Everybody needs some kind of personal, grass-roots expression. . . oOo

I guess most subcultures need to rediscover their down-home ways of making noises after they've been marginalized as mere bits and bytes in the mega techno-power commercialized entertainment grid. oOo oOo

It's also about subversion and working within constraints. Great artists have always known a struggle with the grit of available materials to use, versus the ideas to express. "It makes you more creative to work within the tight limitations of the technology," said Jordi Huguet, one half of the Barcelona-based chiptune duo "Yes, Robot".

oOo Let's just not go the route of lowest-common denominator in art and music, where any old crap "you" want to churn out is worthwhile to expose "the rest of us" to. Self-censorship never hurt anyone - it usually spares your reputation, and the rest of us from embarrassing IBS and severely ruptured eyeballs and eardrums. oOo oOo

Deep-Voiced Men Have More Kids

From: Livescience, Mon Sep 24

If you want to have lots of kids, look for a Barry White oOo . . .Oh, yeah. . .Baby. . . oOo instead of a Justin Timberlake. Whaaaaaatt?! oOo Men with a deep voices have more offspring, a new study suggests.

Previous studies conducted by David Feinberg of McMaster University in Canada have shown that women are more attracted to men with deeper voices, judging them to be older, healthier and more masculine than their higher-pitched rivals.

Men, on the other hand, go for women with higher pitched voices because they find them more attractive, subordinate, feminine, healthier and younger-sounding. oOo and not the least bit Bimbo-ish, either. . . oOo

"We find in this new study that voice pitch is not related to offspring mortality rates," Feinberg said. [ But, did they test the survival rates of the grownups and neighbors, who had to endure the pitiful groanings of the low-pitched gutteral grunters? ] oOo

To look for any relationship between voice pitch and birth rates, the researchers studied the Hadza tribe of Tanzania, one of the last true hunter-gatherer cultures. Because the Hadza have no modern birth control, the researchers were able to compare birth rates without any outside influencing factors. oOo So their lifestyle is really a lot like ours, right? This should yield some accurate data. oOo

They found that Hadza men with deeper voices had more children than those with higher voices. ? How many, bubba? oOo

Well, I call this real Schnizz-whacky.*

This relationship could give insight into the evolution of the human voices. . . [ Duh-Oh? - Whaaaaaattt?! Wrong! Counter evidence: Even today, I still run into people with Monkey-breath, who sound like one, too! ]

The study continues, "If our ancestors went through a similar process," Feinberg said, [ Remember, we are probably "related" to those in the Hadza tribe of Tanzania - since they had no modern birth control, they had more children than we do, and could not prevent us from being born down their lineage - thus, they are our "ancestors". ] oOo oOo
"this could be one reason why men's and women's voices sound different."

oOo So that's the diff between M and F! . . .
Don't you just love a hairy-sounding woman's voice. . . ?
Oh yeah. . . Baby. . . oOo oOo

* Schnizz-whacky -- My new "Word-of-the Day". Some other time I'll get around to a definition for it. . .

Technorati Tags: voice, evolution, attraction

Listen to the 'Singing' Sun

Wow, now THIS is exciting. You've heard of the ancient, Medieval concept of the Music of the Spheres?* Musicians have intuitivley known for centuries that what we do, the "materials" we work with, have far greater connections to universal operations of matter, energy and substance than merely emotional expression.

The roots and resonances of music reach deeply into the human ( and the physical world's?) situation. Is life merely a play acted on a stage, as Shakespeare said, "all sound and fury, signifying nothing?" oOo Or does the analogy of music woven throughout creation show that there is truly deep meaning, both within us and surrounding us, almost infinitely?
[ What is the Harmony of Life? ] oOo

SPACE.com

Thu Apr 19, 11:30 AM ET, Jeanna Bryner

Astronomers have recorded heavenly music bellowed out by the Sun's atmosphere.

oOo Snagging orchestra seats for this solar symphony would be fruitless, however, as the frequency of the sound waves is below the human hearing threshold. While humans can make out sounds between 20 and 20,000 hertz, the solar sound waves are on the order
of milli-hertz--a thousandth of a hertz.

The study,presented this week at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Lancashire, England, reveals that the looping magnetic fields along the Sun's outer regions, called the corona, carry magnetic sound waves in a similar manner to musical instruments such as guitars
or pipe organs. oOo oOo

Making music

Robertus von Fay-Siebenurgen of the Solar Physics and Space Plasma Research Center at the University of Sheffield and his colleagues combined information gleaned
from sun-orbiting satellites with theoretical models of solar processes, such as coronal mass
ejections.

They found that explosive events at the Sun's surface appear to trigger acoustic waves that bounce back and forth between both ends of the loops, a phenomenon known as a standing wave. oOo oOo

In the cosmic equivalent of a guitar pick, so-called microflares at the base of loops
could be plucking the magnetic loops and setting the sound waves in motion, the
researchers speculate. oOoWhile solar flares are the largest explosions in the solar system, microflares are a
million times smaller but much more frequent; both phenomena are now thought to
funnel heat into the Sun's outer atmosphere.

The acoustic waves can be extremely energetic, reaching heights of tens of miles,
and can travel at rapid speeds of 45,000 to 90,000 miles per hour. "These
[explosions] release energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs," von Fay-Siebenburgen said.

"These
energies are plucking these magnetic strings or standing pipes, [the acoustic phenomenon utilized in production of the extreme range of audible pipe organ tone] oOo which set up standing waves--exactly the same waves you see on a guitar string," vonFay-Siebenburgen told SPACE.com. The "sound booms" decay to silence in
less than an hour, dissipating in the hot solar corona.

Remember another recent story about sound frequencies in space-- that our galaxy might be emitting the Ur "groundbass" frequency equivalent to a sub-sub-sub acoustic B-flat tone?! Sounds Astounding! :-O oOo


* Check out some "Music of the Spheres" concerts here.

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