A Master List of 1,250 Free Courses From Top Universities: 40,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures

in Online Courses | September 29th, 2016

Image by Car­los Del­ga­do, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

For the past ten years, we’ve been busy rum­mag­ing around the inter­net and adding cours­es to an ever-grow­ing list of Free Online Cours­es, which now fea­tures 1,250+ cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties. Let’s give you the quick overview: The list lets you down­load audio & video lec­tures from schools like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Har­vard. Gen­er­al­ly, the cours­es can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or uni­ver­si­ty web sites, and you can lis­ten to the lec­tures any­time, any­where, on your com­put­er or smart phone. We haven’t done a pre­cise cal­cu­la­tion, but there’s about 40,000 hours of free audio & video lec­tures here. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time.

Right now you’ll find 146 free phi­los­o­phy cours­es, 88 free his­to­ry cours­es, 125 free com­put­er sci­ence cours­es, 78 free physics cours­es and 55 Free Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es in the col­lec­tion, and that’s just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face. You can peruse sec­tions cov­er­ing Astron­o­my, Biol­o­gy, Busi­ness, Chem­istry, Eco­nom­ics, Engi­neer­ing, Math, Polit­i­cal Sci­ence, Psy­chol­o­gy and Reli­gion.

Here are some high­lights from the com­plete list of Free Online Cours­es. We’ve added a few unconventional/vintage cours­es in the mix just to keep things inter­est­ing.

The com­plete list of cours­es can be accessed here: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More.

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Watch John Malkovich Portray David Lynch and Lynch’s Famous Characters from Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks & More

in Film | September 29th, 2016

John Malkovich’s fil­mog­ra­phy includes not Wild at Heart but Places in the Heart, not Inland Empire but Empire of the Sun, not Mul­hol­land Dri­ve but Mul­hol­land Falls. This respect­ed actor, in short, has nev­er appeared in a David Lynch film, but he recent­ly demon­strat­ed that he could have starred in all of them — and can even por­tray the direc­tor him­self. In Psy­chogenic Fugue, Malkovich slips into a vari­ety of Lynchi­an per­sonas, from heroes like Eraser­head’s icon­i­cal­ly pil­lar-haired Hen­ry Spencer and Twin Peaks’ square­ly cof­fee-lov­ing Spe­cial Agent Dale Coop­er to vil­lains like Blue Vel­vet’s Frank Booth and Lost High­way’s Mys­tery Man, to even the Ladies Log and in the Radi­a­tor.

Those names, I assure film­go­ers not so up on their Lynch, will mean a great deal to fans, whether of the direc­tor or of the actor. Though both are Amer­i­can men of cin­e­ma, both of the same gen­er­a­tion, Lynch and Malkovich would at first appear to have lit­tle in com­mon: the for­mer, who’s made ten fea­tures in the past forty years, has spent his career div­ing deep­er and deep­er into stranger and more per­son­al (but ulti­mate­ly, some­how, acces­si­ble) psy­cho­log­i­cal waters, while the lat­ter, pro­lif­ic in his screen act­ing with almost 100 appear­ances to his cred­it, hops between huge­ly dis­parate per­son­al­i­ties, time peri­ods, and intel­lec­tu­al lev­els with­out seem­ing to break a sweat. But both of them do tend to attract the same descrip­tor: intense.

The ver­sa­tile Malkovich also knows what it means to look inside him­self, hav­ing starred in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, which famous­ly includes a scene where every human being has turned into a ver­sion of John Malkovich. This minute-long trail­er for Psy­chogenic Fugue may remind you of that unfor­get­table view­ing expe­ri­ence, but if you want the full, twen­ty-minute ver­sion, it comes with only a ten-dol­lar dona­tion (accom­pa­nied by more good­ies at high­er dona­tion lev­els) to the David Lynch Foun­da­tion, which you can make at playinglynch.com. The fact that the mon­ey won’t go to fund anoth­er Lynch fea­ture may dis­ap­point some, but at least if he even­tu­al­ly decides to make a not just psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly but lit­er­al­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal film, he’ll know exact­ly who to cast in the lead.

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear John Malkovich Read Plato’s “Alle­go­ry of the Cave,” Set to Music Mixed by Ric Ocasek, Yoko Ono & Sean Lennon, OMD & More

Hear John Malkovich Read From Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons, Then Hear Kurt Von­negut Do the Same

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

A Young David Lynch Talks About Eraser­head in One of His First Record­ed Inter­views (1979)

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear the First Recording of Computer Generated Music: Researchers Restore Music Programmed on Alan Turing’s Computer (1951)

in Computer Science, Music, Technology | September 28th, 2016

1944colossus

How­ev­er you feel about elec­tron­ic music, you’ll still find your­self lis­ten­ing to it most places you go. For bet­ter or worse, it has become mood music, sooth­ing the jan­gled nerves of cus­tomers in cof­fee shops and lulling bou­tique shop­pers into a pleas­ant sense of hip. Some com­put­er music pio­neers have moved on from com­pos­ing their own music to mak­ing com­put­ers do it for them. It’s pre­cise­ly the kind of thing I imag­ine Alan Tur­ing might have pur­sued had the com­put­er sci­ence giant also been a musi­cian.

In fact, Tur­ing did inad­ver­tent­ly cre­ate a com­put­er that could play music when he input a sequence of instruc­tions into it, which relayed sound to a loud­speak­er Tur­ing called “the hoot­er.” By vary­ing the “hoot” com­mands, Tur­ing found that he could make the hoot­er pro­duce dif­fer­ent notes, but he was “not very inter­est­ed in pro­gram­ming the com­put­er to play con­ven­tion­al pieces of music,” note Jack Copeland and Jason Long at the British Library’s Sound and Vision blog. Tur­ing “used the dif­fer­ent notes” as a rudi­men­ta­ry noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem, “to indi­cate what was going on in the com­put­er.”

Instead, the task fell to school­teacher, pianist, and future com­put­er sci­en­tist Christo­pher Stra­chey to cre­ate the first com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed music, using Turing’s gigan­tic Mark II, its pro­gram­ming man­u­al, and “the longest com­put­er pro­gram ever to be attempt­ed.” After an all-night ses­sion, Stra­chey had taught the com­put­er to hoot out “God Save the Queen.” Upon hear­ing the com­po­si­tion the next morn­ing, Tur­ing exclaimed, “good show,” and Stra­chey received a job offer just a few weeks lat­er.

Once the BBC heard of the achieve­ment, they vis­it­ed Turing’s Com­put­ing Machine Lab­o­ra­to­ry and made the record­ings above in 1951, which include a ver­sion of Strachey’s “God Save the Queen” pro­gram and ren­di­tions of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” The “orig­i­nal 12-inch disc the melodies were record­ed on,” writes The Verge, “has been known about for a while, but when Copeland (a pro­fes­sor) and Long (a com­pos­er) lis­tened to it, they found the audio was not accu­rate.” The two describe in their blog post how they went about restor­ing the audio and how it came to exist in the first place.

While the music Turing’s com­put­er pro­duced sounds painful­ly prim­i­tive, it would be sev­er­al more years before com­posers began to real­ly exper­i­ment with com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed music beyond the rudi­men­ta­ry first steps, and well over a decade before the design of sys­tems that could oper­ate in real time.

Now, although they still require human input (“the sin­gu­lar­i­ty isn’t upon us,” writes Spin), com­put­ers have begun to com­pose their own music, like “Daddy’s Car,” a Bea­t­les-esque song gen­er­at­ed by a SONY CSL Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry AI called Flow Machine. Here, a com­pos­er mix­es and match­es dif­fer­ent ele­ments, a style, melody, lyrics, etc. from var­i­ous data­bas­es. The machine pro­duces the sounds. SONY labs have been gen­er­at­ing com­put­er-made jazz and clas­si­cal music for some time now—some of which we may have already heard as back­ground music.

As Spin points out, already a new start­up called Jukedeck promis­es to “gen­er­ate a song in the genre and mood of your choos­ing…” per­haps as “back­ground music for adver­tise­ments or YouTube vlogs.” True to the spir­it of the man who inad­ver­tent­ly invent­ed com­put­er music, and who the­o­rized how a com­put­er might demon­strate con­scious­ness, the soft­ware will ask you to con­firm that you are not a robot.

via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu in Anime: A First Glimpse

in Animation, Literature | September 28th, 2016

Mark it on your cal­en­dars. 2018 will bring an ani­me adap­ta­tion of the pop­u­lar card game Force of Will. An omnibus col­lec­tion of six ani­ma­tions, the film will include one short cre­at­ed by Shuhei Mori­ta, whose 2013 ani­ma­tion “Pos­ses­sions” already earned him an Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tion. Mori­ta’s next task–to bring to life H.P. Love­craft’s “Cthul­hu.” We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly high­light­ed Love­craft’s 1934 draw­ings of the mon­ster to which he gave lit­er­ary life in 1928. (See “The Call of Cthul­hu.”) Above, catch a very first glimpse of Mori­ta’s take on the gigan­tic octo­pus. Below, in the Relat­eds, find a good deal of mate­r­i­al on Cthulhu–drawings, radio drama­ti­za­tions and much more.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Kotaku

Relat­ed Con­tent

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

Hear Drama­ti­za­tions of H.P. Lovecraft’s Sto­ries On His Birth­day: “The Call of Cthul­hu,” “The Dun­wich Hor­ror,” & More

Down­load Issues of “Weird Tales” (1923–1954): The Pio­neer­ing Pulp Hor­ror Mag­a­zine Fea­tures Orig­i­nal Sto­ries by Love­craft, Brad­bury & Many More

23 Hours of H.P. Love­craft Sto­ries: Hear Read­ings & Drama­ti­za­tions of “The Call of Cthul­hu,” “The Shad­ow Over Inns­mouth,” & Oth­er Weird Tales

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When L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz Series Was Banned for “Depicting Women in Strong Leadership Roles” (1928)

in Books, K-12, Literature, Politics | September 28th, 2016

wizard_oz_1900_cover

We’ve reached the final stretch of the most infu­ri­at­ing, unset­tling elec­tion I’ve ever expe­ri­enced. And we find the U.S. so polar­ized  that—as The Wall Street Jour­nal chill­ing­ly demon­strates in their “Blue Feed Red Feed” feature—the left and right seem to live in two entire­ly dif­fer­ent real­i­ties. Still, one would have to work very hard on either side, I think, to deny the role sex­ism has played. One can­di­date, a known and well-doc­u­ment­ed misog­y­nist, leads mil­lions of sup­port­ers call­ing for his opponent’s death, impris­on­ment, and humil­i­a­tion. That oppo­nent, of course, hap­pens to be the first woman to run on a major par­ty tick­et in a gen­er­al elec­tion.

Do many Amer­i­cans still have a prob­lem with accept­ing women as lead­ers? I per­son­al­ly don’t think there’s much of an argu­ment there, and peo­ple who see the ques­tion as redun­dant mar­vel at how long archa­ic atti­tudes about women in pow­er have per­sist­ed. At least these days we can open­ly have the—often high­ly inflamed—conversation about sex­ism in busi­ness, enter­tain­ment, and gov­ern­ment. And we can sup­port a cul­tur­al indus­try thriv­ing on strong female char­ac­ters in fic­tion, film, and tele­vi­sion. Not so much in 1928, when the Chica­go Pub­lic Library banned The Wiz­ard of Oz, writes Kristi­na Rosen­thal at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tul­sa Depart­ment of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, “argu­ing that the sto­ry was ungod­ly for ‘depict­ing women in strong lead­er­ship roles.’”

First pub­lished in 1900, L. Frank Baum’s fan­ta­sy nov­el ini­ti­at­ed a series of 13 Oz-themed sequels, all of which became immense­ly pop­u­lar after MGM’s 1939 film adap­ta­tion. (You can find them all in text and audio for­mat here.) And yet, “through­out the years the books have been opposed for their pos­i­tive por­tray­als of fem­i­nin­i­ty.” Var­i­ous libraries used sim­i­lar excus­es to ban the books through­out the 50s and 60s. The Detroit pub­lic library banned the Oz books in 1957, stat­ing they had “no val­ue for chil­dren of today.” The ban remained in place until 1972. One Flori­da librar­i­an cir­cu­lat­ed a memo to her col­leagues call­ing the books “unwhole­some,” among oth­er things, and caus­ing a run on local book­stores as chil­dren des­per­ate­ly tried to find them.

Oth­er groups decid­ed that the books pro­mot­ed witch­craft in charges sim­i­lar to those levied at the Har­ry Pot­ter series. In 1986, a group of Fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian fam­i­lies in Ten­nessee came togeth­er to remove the The Wiz­ard of Oz from their schools’ cur­ricu­lum, protest­ing “the novel’s depic­tion of benev­o­lent witch­es.” They argued, writes Rosen­thal, “that all witch­es are bad, there­fore it is ‘the­o­log­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble ‘for good witch­es to exist.” Many seek­ing to ban the books since have sim­i­lar­ly referred to their pos­i­tive depic­tions of mag­ic and “god­less super­nat­u­ral­ism,” but the Ten­nessee case stands as a land­mark in the Reli­gious Right’s liti­gious cru­sade against the gov­ern­ment. The attor­ney who rep­re­sent­ed plain­tiff Vic­ki Frost called on “every born-again Chris­t­ian to get their chil­dren out of pub­lic schools.”

It’s odd to think of whim­si­cal children’s lit­er­a­ture so seem­ing­ly innocu­ous as The Wiz­ard of Oz books as ter­ri­to­ry in the long cul­ture wars of the 20th cen­tu­ry. But as we are remind­ed every year dur­ing Banned Books Week (Sep­tem­ber 25 − Octo­ber 1, 2016), lit­er­a­ture often arous­es the ire of those incensed by change and dif­fer­ence. Yet their attempts to sup­press cer­tain books have always back­fired, mak­ing the tar­gets of their cen­sor­ship even more pop­u­lar and sought-after. If you’d like to read Baum’s Oz books now, you needn’t con­front a gate­keep­ing librar­i­an; sim­ply head over to our post on the com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz series, with free eBooks and audio books of all 14 female-cen­tric fan­ta­sy clas­sics.

via The Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

The Com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz Series, Avail­able as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

North Car­oli­na Coun­ty Cel­e­brates Banned Book Week By Ban­ning Ralph Ellison’s Invis­i­ble Man … Then Revers­ing It

74 Free Banned Books (for Banned Books Week)

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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J.G. Ballard’s Experimental Text Collages: His 1958 Foray into Avant-Garde Literature

in Literature | September 28th, 2016

text-collages-by-j-add_ms_88938_3_3a

Image by J. G. Bal­lard, via the British Library

J.G. Bal­lard became famous for his 1985 auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el Empire of the Sun (lat­er turned by Steven Spiel­berg into a major motion pic­ture). Before that, he became well-known for his con­tro­ver­sial, car-wreck-eroti­ciz­ing 1973 nov­el Crash (lat­er turned by David Cro­nen­berg into a semi-major motion pic­ture). Before that, he made cul­tur­al waves with the exper­i­men­tal 1970 col­lec­tion of “con­densed nov­els” The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion and the both post-apoc­a­lyp­tic and psy­cho­log­i­cal Drowned World tril­o­gy of the 1960s. Go just a bit deep­er back into the Bal­lard canon and you find a work, in its way, even more dar­ing still: 1958’s Project for a New Nov­el.

“Bal­lard formed the ‘nov­el’ from sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal mate­r­i­al cut from pro­fes­sion­al lit­er­a­ture,” says the page at the British Library where you can see images of the work, the process of whose com­po­si­tion bears a resem­blance to William Bur­roughs’ famous “cut-up writ­ing” tech­nique. “Let­ters, words and sen­tence frag­ments are past­ed onto back­ing sheets with glue. Their design visu­al­ly ref­er­ences every­day media, with head­lines, body text and dou­ble-page spreads sug­gest­ing a mag­a­zine lay­out. Orig­i­nal­ly Bal­lard planned to dis­play the work on bill­boards, as if it was a pub­lic adver­tise­ment.”

Bal­lard him­self described the Project as “sam­ple pages of a new kind of nov­el, entire­ly con­sist­ing of mag­a­zine-style head­lines and lay­outs, with a delib­er­ate­ly mean­ing­less text, the idea being that the imag­i­na­tive con­tent could be car­ried by the head­lines and over­all design, so mak­ing obso­lete the need for a tra­di­tion­al text except for vir­tu­al­ly dec­o­ra­tive pur­pos­es.”

text-collages-by-j-add_ms_88938_3_3c

Image by J. G. Bal­lard, via the British Library

Employ­ment at a Lon­don chem­i­cal soci­ety jour­nal gave him access not just to pho­to­copy­ing facil­i­ties (then a rar­i­ty) but the mag­a­zine Chem­i­cal and Engi­neer­ing News, which became his basic mate­r­i­al: “I liked the styl­ish typog­ra­phy. I also like the sci­en­tif­ic con­tent, and used sto­ries to pro­vide the text of my nov­el. Curi­ous­ly enough, far from being mean­ing­less, the sci­ence news sto­ries some­how become fic­tion­al­ized by the head­ings around them.”

That quote comes from an arti­cle by Rick McGrath at jgballard.ca, who points out that “many of the char­ac­ters and con­cerns in Project have resur­faced over the years” in his sub­se­quent writ­ings such as The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion and The Ter­mi­nal Beach: “Ballard’s ‘col­lage of things’ spawned such char­ac­ters as Coma, Kline and Xero, and such phras­es as ‘the ter­mi­nal beach’, ‘Mr F is Mr F’, ‘tho­racic drop’ ‘inter­time’ ‘T‑12’ and many more Bal­lar­dian tropes now famil­iar to his read­ers today.”

Though Bal­lard’s work remained imag­i­na­tive in a way that no oth­er writer has repli­cat­ed, he nev­er, after the Project for a New Nov­el and the pieces of 1970s fol­low-up Adver­tis­er’s Announce­ments (“ ‘ads’ in the same sense that Project For A New Nov­el is a ‘nov­el‘”), got so exper­i­men­tal again. “Fas­ci­nat­ed with the causal­i­ty of time, Ballard’s first step is to remove it. Bored with action/reaction, Bal­lard inverts it,” writes McGrath. “Unwill­ing to accept the fic­tions of the world, Bal­lard cre­ates a per­son­al real­i­ty. The result is an autop­sy report, or a box of tools, or a line­up of ser­vice sta­tion atten­dants at a police sta­tion. It’s up to you to make a kind of per­son­al sense of it all” — a bit like the mod­ern world itself.

via The Scofield

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Very First Film of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Star­ring Bal­lard Him­self (1971)

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

J.G. Bal­lard on Sen­sa­tion

William S. Bur­roughs on the Art of Cut-up Writ­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Sights & Sounds of 18th Century Paris Get Recreated with 3D Audio and Animation

in History, Philosophy, Technology | September 27th, 2016

In what is often called the “Ear­ly Mod­ern” peri­od, or the “Long Eigh­teenth Cen­tu­ry,” Europe wit­nessed an explo­sion of satire, not only as a polit­i­cal and lit­er­ary weapon, but as a means of react­ing to a whole new way of life that arose in the cities—principally Lon­don and Paris—as a dis­placed rur­al pop­u­la­tion and expand­ing bour­geoisie rad­i­cal­ly altered the char­ac­ter of urban life. In Eng­land, poets like Alexan­der Pope and Jonathan Swift sav­aged their rivals in print, while also com­ment­ing on the increas­ing pace and declin­ing tastes of the city.

In France, Voltaire punched up, using his pen to nee­dle Parisian author­i­ties, serv­ing 11 months in the Bastille for a satir­i­cal verse accus­ing the Regent of incest. Despite the huge­ly suc­cess­ful pre­miere of his play Oedi­pus sev­en months after his release, Voltaire would ulti­mate­ly be exiled from his beloved city for 28 years, return­ing in 1778 at the age of 83.

Now, of course, Parisians cel­e­brate Voltaire in every pos­si­ble way, but what would it have been like to have expe­ri­enced the city dur­ing his life­time, when it became the buzzing cen­ter of Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­al life? In the video recre­ation above, we can par­tial­ly answer that ques­tion by expe­ri­enc­ing what 18th cen­tu­ry Paris may have looked and sound­ed like, accord­ing to musi­col­o­gist Mylène Par­doen, who designed this “his­tor­i­cal audio recon­sti­tu­tion,” writes CNRS News, with a “team of his­to­ri­ans, soci­ol­o­gists and spe­cial­ists in 3D rep­re­sen­ta­tions.”

The team chose to ani­mate “the Grand Châtelet dis­trict, between the Pont au Change and Pont Notre Dame bridges” because, Par­doen explains, the neigh­bor­hood “con­cen­trates 80% of the back­ground and sound envi­ron­ments of Paris in that era, whether through famil­iar trades—shopkeepers, crafts­men, boat­men, wash­er­women on the banks of the Seine… or the diver­si­ty of acoustic pos­si­bil­i­ties, like the echo heard under a bridge or in a cov­ered pas­sage­way.” The result is “the first 3D recon­struc­tion based sole­ly on a son­ic back­ground.”

“We are the whipped cream of Europe,” Voltaire once said of his Paris, a lux­u­ri­ous, aris­to­crat­ic world. But 18th cen­tu­ry Paris was also a grimy city full of ordi­nary labor­ers and mer­chants, of “cesspools and kennels”—as a com­men­tary on Dick­ens’ A Tale of Two Cities notes—and of wine-stained streets with­out prop­er drainage. And it was a city on the verge of a rev­o­lu­tion from below, inspired by icon­o­clasts from above like Voltaire. In the 3D video and audio recre­ation above, we get a small, video-game-like taste of a bustling city caught between immense lux­u­ry and crush­ing pover­ty, between medieval the­ol­o­gy and human­ist phi­los­o­phy, and between the rule of divine kings and a bloody sec­u­lar rev­o­lu­tion to come.

We start­ed the video above at the 2:06 mark when the ani­ma­tions kick in. Feel free to start the video from the very begin­ning.

via @WFMU/CNRS News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fly Through 17th-Cen­tu­ry London’s Grit­ty Streets with Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tions

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

What Makes Paris Look Like Paris? A Cre­ative Use of Google Street View

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” Played on a 1929 Theremin

in Music | September 27th, 2016

Here in Amer­i­ca, we’re liv­ing in some anx­ious times. And frankly my nerves are a lit­tle torn and frayed–especially after the run-up to last night’s debate. Maybe some of you feel the same. Maybe you could stand to relax a bit. Maybe this will do the trick.

Above, watch Peter Pringle per­form on the theremin “Over the Rain­bow,” the song orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten for 1939’s The Wiz­ard of Oz. And it’s not just any theremin. It’s the 1929 RCA theremin that belonged to the Hol­ly­wood therem­i­nist, Dr. Samuel Hoff­man. In fact, it’s the very same one that Hoff­man played on The Tonight Show with John­ny Car­son in 1956, below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.