Mister Rogers Demonstrates How to Cut a Record

in K-12, Music, Technology, Television | August 23rd, 2019

When I was a lit­tle boy, I thought the great­est thing in the world would be to be able to make records. — Fred Rogers

By 1972, when the above episode of Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood aired, host Fred Rogers had already cut four records, includ­ing the hit-filled A Place of Our Own.

But a child­like curios­i­ty com­pelled him to explore on cam­era how a vir­gin disc could become that most won­drous thing—a record.

So he bor­rowed a “spe­cial machine”—a Rek-O-Kut M12S over­head with an Audax mono head, for those keep­ing score at home—so he could show his friends, on cam­era, “how one makes records.”

This tech­nol­o­gy was already in decline, oust­ed by the vast­ly more portable home cas­sette recorder, but the record cut­ter held far more visu­al inter­est, yield­ing hair-like rem­nants that also became objects of fas­ci­na­tion to Mis­ter Rogers.

What we wouldn’t give to stum­ble across one of those machines and a stash of blank discs in a thrift store…

Wait, scratch that, imag­ine run­ning across the actu­al plat­ter Rogers cut that day!

Though we’d be remiss if we failed to men­tion that a mem­ber of The Secret Soci­ety of Lathe Trolls, a forum devot­ed to “record-cut­ting deviants, rene­gades, pro­fes­sion­als & exper­i­menters,” claims to have had an aunt who worked on the show, and accord­ing to her, the “repro­duc­tion” was faked in post.

(“It sound­ed like they record­ed the repro on like an old Stenorette rim dri­ve reel to reel or some­thing and then piped that back in,” anoth­er com­menter prompt­ly responds.)

The Trolls’ episode dis­cus­sion offers a lot of vin­tage audio nerd nit­ty grit­ty, as well as an inter­est­ing his­to­ry of the one-off self-recod­ed disc craze.

The mid-cen­tu­ry gen­er­al pub­lic could go to a coin-oper­at­ed portable sound booth to record a track or two. Spo­ken word mes­sages were pop­u­lar, though singers and bands also took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to lay down some grooves.

Radio sta­tions and record­ing stu­dios also kept machines sim­i­lar to the one Rogers is seen using. Sun Records’ sec­re­tary, Mar­i­on Keisker, oper­at­ed the cut­ting lathe the day an unknown named Elvis Pres­ley showed up to cut a lac­quered disc for a fee of $3.25.

The rest is his­to­ry.

More recent­ly, The Shins, The Kills, and Sea­sick Steve, below, record­ed live direct-to-acetate records on a mod­i­fied 1953 Scul­ly Lathe at Nashville’s Third Man Records.

(Leg­end has it that James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s World” was cut on that same lathe… Cut a hit of your own dur­ing a tour of Third Man’s direct-to-acetate record­ing facil­i­ties.)

via @wfmu

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Old School Records Were Made, From Start to Fin­ish: A 1937 Video Fea­tur­ing Duke Elling­ton

Watch a Nee­dle Ride Through LP Record Grooves Under an Elec­tron Micro­scope

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

An Inter­ac­tive Map of Every Record Shop in the World

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine, cur­rent issue the just-released #60.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Cy Kuckenbaker’s Time Collapse Videos Let You See Daily Life As You’ve Never Seen It Before

in Photography, Random, Software, Technology, Travel | August 19th, 2019

There are apps to track the num­ber of dai­ly min­utes you habit­u­al­ly frit­ter away on social media, but can your smart­phone help you get a han­dle on the auto­mo­tive col­or pref­er­ences of mid­day San Diego dri­vers?

Or the num­ber of planes land­ing at San Diego Inter­na­tion­al Air­port on the day after Thanks­giv­ing?

Or, for that mat­ter, the traf­fic pat­terns of non-pro­fes­sion­al surfers hop­ing to catch a wave at at Point Loma?

No, but film­mak­er Cy Kuck­en­bak­er can.

His “time col­lapse” videos stemmed from a desire to get to know the city in which he lives with the same vig­or he brought to bear as a Peace Corps vol­un­teer in his 20s, explor­ing Iraq, Africa, and East­ern Europe.

This impulse might lead oth­ers to join a club, take a class, or check out restau­rants in an unfa­mil­iar neigh­bor­hood.

For Kuck­en­bak­er, it means set­ting up his cam­era for a fixed shot, uncer­tain if his exper­i­ment will even work, then spend­ing hours and hours in the edit­ing room, remov­ing the time between events with­out alter­ing the speed of his sub­jects.

It’s a form that requires a lot of patience on the part of its cre­ator.

He esti­mates that he spent 2 hours edit­ing for every sec­ond of Mid­day Traf­fic Time Col­lapsed and Reor­ga­nized by Col­or: San Diego Study #3, above, pro­vid­ing him ample time to lis­ten to the fol­low­ing audio­books (get your free Audi­ble tri­al here):

Rev­o­lu­tion 1989 by Vic­tor Sebestyen

How Music Works by David Byrne

Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Hen­ry Dana

Super Sad True Love Sto­ry by Gary Shteyn­gart

1493 by Charles Mann

1491 by Charles Mann

With the Old Breed by E. Sledge

The Emper­or of Mal­adies by Sid­dhartha Mukher­jee

The Unbear­able Light­ness of Being by Milan Kun­dera

Each car was keyed out of the orig­i­nal shot, then ranked and rein­sert­ed based on col­or. 28 of the raw footage’s 462 didn’t make the cut due to errat­ic shape or move­ment. See if you can spot them in the extreme­ly ordi­nary-look­ing orig­i­nal footage, below. Extra cred­it for spot­ting the emp­ty Gatorade bot­tle that made it into every frame of the com­pres­sion:

His stud­ies may not reveal much about his home city to the aver­age tourist, but Kuck­en­bak­er him­self is able to inter­pret the num­bers in ways that go beyond mere quan­ti­ty and aver­ages, such as San Die­gans’ appar­ent vehic­u­lar col­or pref­er­ence:

Nation­al­ly, red is a more pop­u­lar col­or than blue. But not San Diego. San Diego, there’s more blue than red, so it’s like, you know, an out­lier. And I thought about that for a while and it’s like, per­son­al­ly, the way I under­stand the city, that makes sense to me. The sort of tone of the city, the atti­tude of the city—it’s an ocean city. I can see why peo­ple would think, “Well, I live in San Diego. Why would I have a red… I want a blue car!”

His Point Loma com­pres­sion boiled an hour’s surf­ing down to 2 min­utes and 15 sec­onds that KPBS’ David Wag­n­er her­ald­ed as “a surfer­’s wildest dream come true, a fan­ta­sy break where per­fect waves roll in one after anoth­er like clock­work, no lulls in between.”

The raw footage and Kuckenbaker’s doc­u­men­ta­tion of the After Effects tech­nique used to com­pos­ite the waves speaks to a slight­ly more tedious real­i­ty. No word on what audio books got him through this one, though he goes into the tech­ni­cal specs and quotes Joseph Con­rad on his blog.

The com­pres­sion of the near­ly 70 arriv­ing Black Fri­day flights that kicked off Kuckenbaker’s San Diego-based time col­laps­es in 2012 feels a bit mar­tial, espe­cial­ly if Ride of the Valkyries just hap­pens to be play­ing in the back­ground. It makes me wor­ry for San Diego, and also wish for a Kuck­en­bak­er to come col­lapse time in my town.

See more of Cy Kuckenbaker’s Time Col­lapse videos here.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

Becom­ing: A Short Time­lapse Film Shows a Sin­gle Cell Mor­ph­ing Into a Com­plete, Com­plex Liv­ing Organ­ism

The Milky Way in Time-Lapse Video

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Hear Glenn Gould Celebrate the Moog Synthesizer & Wendy Carlos’ Pioneering Album Switched-On Bach (1968)

in Music, Radio, Technology | August 12th, 2019

Glenn Gould made his name as a pianist with his stark, idio­syn­crat­ic inter­pre­ta­tions of the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and espe­cial­ly Bach. He left behind not just a high­ly respect­ed body of work in the form of record­ed per­for­mances, but also a host of strong opin­ions about music itself and all that cul­tur­al­ly and com­mer­cial­ly sur­round­ed it. His enthu­si­asms weren’t always pre­dictable: in 1967 he went on CBC radio to lav­ish praise on the pop singer Petu­la Clark, and the next year he returned to the air­waves to make a hearty endorse­ment of a record for which not every­one in the clas­si­cal music world would admit to an appre­ci­a­tion: Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach.

After voic­ing his dis­taste for com­pi­la­tion albums, com­par­ing them to Read­er’s Digest con­densed lit­er­a­ture, Gould informs his lis­ten­ers that “the record of the year — no, let’s go all the way, the decade — is an unem­bar­rassed com­pote of Bach’s great­est hits.” The whole record, he claims, “is one of the most star­tling achieve­ments of the record­ing indus­try in this gen­er­a­tion, cer­tain­ly one of the great feats in the his­to­ry of key­board per­for­mance,” and “the surest evi­dence, if evi­dence be need­ed, that live music nev­er was best.” Gould had retired from the “anachro­nis­tic” prac­tice of live per­for­mance four years ear­li­er, seek­ing his own kind of musi­cal per­fec­tion with­in the tech­no­log­i­cal­ly enhanced con­fines of the record­ing stu­dio.

On that lev­el, it makes sense that a metic­u­lous­ly, painstak­ing­ly craft­ed record­ing — not to men­tion one impos­si­ble, at the time, to repro­duce live — like Switched-On Bach would appeal to Gould. He also takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty on this broad­cast to intro­duce the Moog syn­the­siz­er, which Car­los used to pro­duce every note on the record. “The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, the Moog can be encour­aged to imi­tate vir­tu­al­ly any instru­men­tal sound known to man, and there are moments on this disc which sound very like an organ, a dou­ble bass or a clavi­chord,” Gould says, “but its most con­spic­u­ous felic­i­ty is that, except when cast­ing gen­tle asper­sions on more famil­iar baroque instru­men­tal arche­types, the per­former shuns this kind of elec­tron­ic exhi­bi­tion­ism” — a sure way of scor­ing points with the restraint-lov­ing Gould.

The broad­cast includes not just Gould’s thoughts on Switched On-Bach and the Moog but two inter­views, one with poet and essay­ist Jean Le Moyne on “the human fact of automa­tion, its soci­o­log­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions,” and one with Car­los her­self. Asked about the choice of Bach, Car­los frames it as a test of how the new tech­nol­o­gy of the syn­the­siz­er would fare when used to play not avant-garde music, as it then usu­al­ly was, but music with the most impec­ca­ble aes­thet­ic cre­den­tials pos­si­ble. “We’re just a baby,” Car­los says of the enter­prise of syn­the­siz­er-dri­ven elec­tron­ic music. “Although now we can see that the child is going to grow into a rather excit­ing adult, we’ve still got to take one step at a time. It will become assim­i­lat­ed. The gim­mick val­ue — thank god — is going to be lost, and true musi­cal expres­sion, and that alone, will result.”

via Syn­th­topia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Glenn Gould Chan­nel Mar­shall McLuhan and Cre­ate an Exper­i­men­tal Radio Doc­u­men­tary Ana­lyz­ing the Pop Music of Petu­la Clark (1967)

Watch a 27-Year-Old Glenn Gould Play Bach & Put His Musi­cal Genius on Dis­play (1959)

Lis­ten to Glenn Gould’s Shock­ing­ly Exper­i­men­tal Radio Doc­u­men­tary, The Idea of North (1967)

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach Turns 50 This Month: Learn How the Clas­si­cal Synth Record Intro­duced the World to the Moog

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell & 350 Other Artists to Visually Document America’s Space Program

in Art, Astronomy, History, Science, Technology | August 9th, 2019

It’s hard to imag­ine that the space-crazed gen­er­al pub­lic need­ed any help get­ting worked up about astro­nauts and NASA in the ear­ly 60s.

Per­haps the wild pop­u­lar­i­ty of space-relat­ed imagery is in part what moti­vat­ed NASA admin­is­tra­tor James Webb to cre­ate the NASA Art Pro­gram in 1962.

Although the pro­gram’s hand­picked artists weren’t edit­ed or cen­sored in any way, they were briefed on how NASA hoped to be rep­re­sent­ed, and the emo­tions their cre­ations were meant capture—the excite­ment and uncer­tain­ty of explor­ing these fron­tiers.

NASA was also care­ful to col­lect every­thing the artists pro­duced while par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pro­gram, from sketch­es to fin­ished work.

In turn, they received unprece­dent­ed access to launch sites, key per­son­nel, and major events such as Project Mer­cury and the Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion.

Over 350 artists, includ­ing Andy Warhol, Nor­man Rock­well, and Lau­rie Ander­son, have brought their unique sen­si­bil­i­ties to the project. (Find NASA-inspired art by Warhol and Rock­well above.)

(And hey, no shame if you mis­tak­en­ly assumed Warhol’s 1987 Moon­walk 1 was cre­at­ed as a pro­mo for MTV…)

Jamie Wyeth’s 1964 water­col­or Gem­i­ni Launch Pad includes a hum­ble bicy­cle, the means by which tech­ni­cians trav­eled back and forth from the launch pad to the con­crete-rein­forced block­house where they worked.

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Annie Lei­bovitz offers two views of NASA’s first female pilot and com­man­der, Eileen Collins—with and with­out hel­met.

Postage stamp design­er, Paul Calle, one of the inau­gur­al group of par­tic­i­pat­ing artists, pro­duced a stamp com­mem­o­rat­ing the Gem­i­ni 4 space cap­sule in cel­e­bra­tion of NASA’s 9th anniver­sary. When the Apol­lo 11 astro­nauts suit­ed up pri­or to blast off on July 16, 1969, Calle was the only artist present. His quick­ly ren­dered felt tip mark­er sketch­es lend a back­stage ele­ment to the hero­ic iconog­ra­phy sur­round­ing astro­nauts Arm­strong, Aldrin and Collins. One of the items they car­ried with them on their jour­ney was the engraved print­ing plate of Calle’s 1967 com­mem­o­ra­tive stamp. They hand-can­celed a proof aboard the flight, on the assump­tion that post offices might be hard to come by on the moon.

More recent­ly, NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry has enlist­ed a team of nine artists, design­ers, and illus­tra­tors to col­lab­o­rate on 14 posters, a visu­al throw­back to the ones the WPA cre­at­ed between 1938 and 1941 to spark pub­lic inter­est in the Nation­al Parks. You can see the results at the Exo­plan­et Trav­el Bureau.

View an album of 25 his­toric works from NASA’s Art Pro­gram here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lau­rie Ander­son Cre­ates a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Instal­la­tion That Takes View­ers on an Uncon­ven­tion­al Tour of the Moon

Star Trek‘s Nichelle Nichols Cre­ates a Short Film for NASA to Recruit New Astro­nauts (1977)

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How Margaret Hamilton Wrote the Computer Code That Helped Save the Apollo Moon Landing Mission

in Computer Science, History, Technology | August 8th, 2019

From a dis­tance of half a cen­tu­ry, we look back on the moon land­ing as a thor­ough­ly ana­log affair, an old-school engi­neer­ing project of the kind sel­dom even pro­posed any­more in this dig­i­tal age. But the Apol­lo 11 mis­sion could nev­er have hap­pened with­out com­put­ers and the peo­ple who pro­gram them, a fact that has become bet­ter-known in recent years thanks to pub­lic inter­est in the work of Mar­garet Hamil­ton, direc­tor of the Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing Divi­sion of MIT’s Instru­men­ta­tion Lab­o­ra­to­ry when it devel­oped on-board flight soft­ware for NASA’s Apol­lo space pro­gram. You can learn more about Hamil­ton, whom we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, from the short MAKERS pro­file video above.

Today we con­sid­er soft­ware engi­neer­ing a per­fect­ly viable field, but back in the mid-1960s, when Hamil­ton first joined the Apol­lo project, it did­n’t even have a name. “I came up with the term ‘soft­ware engi­neer­ing,’ and it was con­sid­ered a joke,” says Hamil­ton, who remem­bers her col­leagues mak­ing remarks like, “What, soft­ware is engi­neer­ing?”

But her own expe­ri­ence went some way toward prov­ing that work­ing in code had become as impor­tant as work­ing in steel. Only by watch­ing her young daugh­ter play at the same con­trols the astro­nauts would lat­er use did she real­ize that just one human error could poten­tial­ly bring the mis­sion into ruin — and that she could min­i­mize the pos­si­bil­i­ty by tak­ing it into account when design­ing its soft­ware. Hamil­ton’s pro­pos­al met with resis­tance, NASA’s offi­cial line at the time being that “astro­nauts are trained nev­er to make a mis­take.”

But Hamil­ton per­sist­ed, pre­vailed, and was vin­di­cat­ed dur­ing the moon land­ing itself, when an astro­naut did make a mis­take, one that caused an over­load­ing of the flight com­put­er. The whole land­ing might have been abort­ed if not for Hamil­ton’s fore­sight in imple­ment­ing an “asyn­chro­nous exec­u­tive” func­tion capa­ble, in the event of an over­load, of set­ting less impor­tant tasks aside and pri­or­i­tiz­ing more impor­tant ones. “The soft­ware worked just the way it should have,” Hamil­ton says in the Christie’s video on the inci­dent above, describ­ing what she felt after­ward as “a com­bi­na­tion of excite­ment and relief.” Engi­neers of soft­ware, hard­ware, and every­thing else know that feel­ing when they see a com­pli­cat­ed project work — but sure­ly few know it as well as Hamil­ton and her Apol­lo col­lab­o­ra­tors do.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­garet Hamil­ton, Lead Soft­ware Engi­neer of the Apol­lo Project, Stands Next to Her Code That Took Us to the Moon (1969)

How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Tech­nol­o­gy Behind Wi-Fi & Blue­tooth Dur­ing WWII

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

How Ada Lovelace, Daugh­ter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Com­put­er Pro­gram in 1842–a Cen­tu­ry Before the First Com­put­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Moonlight Strikes 107,000 Solar Mirrors & Creates a Portrait of Apollo 11 Computer Programmer Margaret Hamilton

in Technology | July 28th, 2019

In the mid­dle of the Mojave Desert, Google has cre­at­ed a high-tech trib­ute to Mar­garet Hamil­ton, the lead soft­ware engi­neer of the Apol­lo space pro­gram. Google writes: “The trib­ute was cre­at­ed by posi­tion­ing over 107,000 mir­rors at the Ivan­pah Solar Facil­i­ty in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun, like the mir­rors nor­mal­ly do. The result is a 1.4‑square-mile por­trait of Mar­garet, big­ger than New York’s Cen­tral Park.” You can learn more about Hamil­ton and her con­tri­bu­tions to the 1960s space pro­gram here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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:

Mar­garet Hamil­ton, Lead Soft­ware Engi­neer of the Apol­lo Project, Stands Next to Her Code That Took Us to the Moon (1969)

How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Tech­nol­o­gy Behind Wi-Fi & Blue­tooth Dur­ing WWII

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

How Ada Lovelace, Daugh­ter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Com­put­er Pro­gram in 1842–a Cen­tu­ry Before the First Com­put­er

NASA Puts Its Soft­ware Online & Makes It Free to Down­load

 

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Can Artificial Intelligence Decipher Lost Languages? Researchers Attempt to Decode 3500-Year-Old Ancient Languages

in History, Technology | July 23rd, 2019

Image by Olaf Tausch via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We may not see warp dri­ves any time soon, but anoth­er piece of Star Trek tech, the uni­ver­sal trans­la­tor, may become a real­i­ty in our life­time, if it hasn’t already. Machine learn­ing “has proven to be very com­pe­tent” when it comes to trans­la­tion, “so much so that the CEO of one of the world’s largest employ­ers of human trans­la­tors has warned that many of them should be fac­ing up the stark real­i­ty of los­ing their job to a machine,” writes Bernard Marr at Forbes.

But the fact that AI can do things humans can does­n’t mean that it does those things well. One Google researcher put the case plain­ly in an inter­view with Wired: “Peo­ple naive­ly believe that if you take deep learn­ing and… 1,000 times more data, a neur­al net will be able to do any­thing a human being can do, but that’s just not true.” AI trans­la­tors have advanced sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the past few years, with Google’s Trans­la­totron pro­to­type (yes, that’s its real name), promis­ing to inter­pret “tone and cadence.” Still, AI trans­la­tions are often stilt­ed, awk­ward, and occa­sion­al­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble approx­i­ma­tions that no human would come up with.

Does AI’s lim­i­ta­tions with liv­ing lan­guage hin­der its abil­i­ty to deci­pher very long dead ones, whose orthog­ra­phy, gram­mar, and syn­tax have been com­plete­ly lost? Yuan Cao from Google’s AI lab and Jiaming Luo and Regi­na Barzi­lay from MIT put machine learn­ing to the test when they devel­oped a “sys­tem capa­ble of deci­pher­ing lost lan­guages.” They took a very dif­fer­ent approach “from the stan­dard machine trans­la­tion tech­niques,” reports the MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review, using less data instead of more, a tech­nique they call “min­i­mum-cost flow.”

The researchers test­ed their trans­la­tion machine on both the 3500-year-old Lin­ear B and Ugarit­ic, an ancient form of Hebrew, both of which have already been deci­phered by peo­ple. Still, the AI was “able to trans­late both lan­guages with remark­able accu­ra­cy,” with a rate of 67.3% in the trans­la­tion of cog­nates in Lin­ear B. The far old­er Bronze Age Minoan script Lin­ear A, how­ev­er (see it at the top), “one of the ear­li­est forms of writ­ing ever dis­cov­ered… is con­spic­u­ous for its absence.” No human has yet been able to deci­pher it.

A lost lan­guage trans­la­tor machine that only works on lan­guages that have already been trans­lat­ed (it needs pre­ex­ist­ing data on the prog­en­i­tor lan­guage to func­tion) may not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful. Then again, it could be one step in the direc­tion of what the authors call the “auto­mat­ic deci­pher­ment of lost lan­guages,” those that humans can’t already work out on their own. Read the paper “Neur­al Deci­pher­ment via Min­i­mum-Cost Flow: From Ugarit­ic to Lin­ear B” at arX­iv.

via MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence for Every­one: An Intro­duc­to­ry Course from Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Cours­era

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Iden­ti­fies the Six Main Arcs in Sto­ry­telling: Wel­come to the Brave New World of Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism

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

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What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Listens to John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space & Starts to Create Its Own Free Jazz

in Music, Technology | July 22nd, 2019

Some enjoy free jazz as soon as they first hear it; oth­ers think it sounds like music from an alien civ­i­liza­tion, a lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence fit only for a jazz fan as high as a kite. But how about as high as a space probe? Out­er­he­lios, a 24/7 stream of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-gen­er­at­ed free jazz, comes designed for broad­cast into out­er space by Dad­abots, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between musi­cians-turned-pro­gram­mers CJ Carr and Zack Zukows­ki (or, accord­ing to their about page, “a cross between a band, a hackathon team, and an ephemer­al research lab”). Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly built an AI-gen­er­at­ed death met­al stream (about whose cre­ation you can read in this com­put­er sci­ence paper), they’ve looked to the skies and trained their neur­al net­work on John Coltrane’s Inter­stel­lar Space.

“These duets between Coltrane on tenor (and bells) and Rashied Ali on drums sound like an annoy­ance until you con­cen­trate on them,” writes Robert Christ­gau in his orig­i­nal review of the 1974 album, “at which point the inter­ac­tions take on pace and shape.” The neur­al net­work “lis­tened to the album 16 times,” says the offi­cial Data­bots descrip­tion on the Out­er­he­lios stream, “then con­tin­ued to make music in the style.”

The project draws inspi­ra­tion from NASA’s probes Voy­ager 1 and 2, which “launched in 1977 car­ry­ing a mix­tape Carl Sagan made called The Sounds of Earth. It fea­tured Blind Willie John­son, Chuck Berry, record­ings of laugh­ter, Beethoven, Bach, Stravin­sky, along with dia­grams of human repro­duc­tive organs,” all “intend­ed for an audi­ence of intel­li­gent extrater­res­tri­al life­forms.”

Where­as The Sounds of Earth “used a sta­t­ic music for­mat pre­vi­ous­ly record­ed by peo­ple,” Out­er­he­lios fol­lows on Bri­an Eno’s ideas about gen­er­a­tive music by invent­ing a Coltrane album that nev­er sounds the same twice. “For a few min­utes, it’ll pro­duce plau­si­ble-sound­ing free jazz,” writes Futurism.com’s Jon Chris­t­ian. “Then the drums will segue into an inhu­man trill, or the horns will dis­in­te­grate into a cacoph­o­nous wash of sound. Let’s just say that it’s not your dad’s jazz” — even if your dad hap­pens to be John Coltrane, or indeed Bri­an Eno. But per­haps it will give NASA just the inspi­ra­tion it needs to get the next Voy­ager launched. The sound of the orig­i­nal Inter­stel­lar Space got Christ­gau think­ing beyond nations: “Euro­pean, Ori­en­tal, African — I don’t know. But amaz­ing.” Could the likes of Out­er­he­lios get us think­ing beyond the solar sytem?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Sent Music & Pho­tos Into Space So That Aliens Could Under­stand Human Civ­i­liza­tion (Even After We’re Gone)

Hear the Declas­si­fied, Eerie “Space Music” Heard Dur­ing the Apol­lo 10 Mis­sion (1969)

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Ein­stein & Coltrane Shared Impro­vi­sa­tion and Intu­ition in Com­mon

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Space Jazz, a Son­ic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hub­bard, Fea­tur­ing Chick Corea (1983)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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