Laurie Anderson Introduces Her Virtual Reality Installation That Lets You Fly Magically Through Stories

in Art, Technology | September 19th, 2017

While the sci-fi dreams of vir­tu­al and “aug­ment­ed” real­i­ty are now with­in the grasp of artists and game design­ers, the tech­nol­o­gy of the adult human brain remains root­ed in the stone age—we still need a good sto­ry to accom­pa­ny the flick­er­ing shad­ows on the cave wall. An artist as wise as Lau­rie Ander­son under­stands this, but—given that it’s Lau­rie Anderson—she isn’t going to retread famil­iar nar­ra­tive paths, espe­cial­ly when work­ing in the vehi­cle of VR, as she has in her new piece Chalk­room, cre­at­ed in a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Tai­wanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang.

The piece allows view­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to trav­el not only into the space of imag­i­na­tion a sto­ry cre­ates, but into the very archi­tec­ture of sto­ry itself—to walk, or rather float, through its pas­sage­ways as words and let­ters drift by like tufts of dan­de­lion, stars, or, as Ander­son puts it, like snow. “They’re there to define the space and to show you a lit­tle bit about what it is,” says the artist in the inter­view above, “But they’re actu­al­ly frac­tured lan­guages, so it’s kind of explod­ed things.” She explains the “chalk­room” con­cept as resist­ing the “per­fect, slick and shiny” aes­thet­ic that char­ac­ter­izes most com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed images. “It has a cer­tain tac­til­i­ty and made-by-hand kind of thing… this is grit­ty and drip­py and filled with dust and dirt.”

Chalk­room, she says, “is a library of sto­ries, and no one will ever find them all.” It sounds to me, at least, more intrigu­ing than the premise of most video games, but the audi­ence for this piece will be lim­it­ed, not only to those will­ing to give it a chance, but to those who can expe­ri­ence the piece first­hand, as it were, by vis­it­ing the phys­i­cal space of one of Anderson’s exhi­bi­tions and strap­ping on the VR gog­gles. Once they do, she says, they will be able to fly, a dis­ori­ent­ing expe­ri­ence that sends some peo­ple falling out of their chair. Last spring, Chalk­room became part of an ongo­ing exhib­it at the Mass­a­chu­setts Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, a “Lau­rie Ander­son pil­grim­age,” as Mass MoCA direc­tor Joseph C. Thomp­son describes it, that also fea­tures a VR expe­ri­ence called Aloft.

In August, Chalk­room appeared at the Louisiana Muse­um of Mod­ern Art in Den­mark, where the inter­view above took place. Watch­ing it, you’ll see why the piece has gen­er­at­ed so much buzz, win­ning “Best VR Expe­ri­ence” at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val and vis­it­ing major muse­ums around Europe and the U.S. “Most­ly VR is kind of task-ori­ent­ed,” she says, “you get that, you do that, you shoot that.” Chalk­room feels more like nav­i­gat­ing cat­a­combs, tra­vers­ing dark labyrinths punc­tu­at­ed by bril­liant con­stel­la­tions of light made out of words, as Anderson’s voice pro­vides enig­mat­ic nar­ra­tion against a back­drop of three-dimen­sion­al sound design. It’s an immer­sive jour­ney that seems, as promised, like the one we take as read­ers, pur­su­ing elu­sive mean­ings that can seem tan­ta­liz­ing­ly just out of reach.

via @WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lau­rie Anderson’s Top 10 Books to Take to a Desert Island

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Lau­rie Ander­son, David Byrne, Umber­to Eco, Pat­ti Smith & More

Go Inside the First 30 Min­utes of Kubrick’s The Shin­ing with This 360º Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Video

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

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New Study Reveals How the Neanderthals Made Super Glue 200,000 Years Ago: The World’s Oldest Synthetic Material

in History, Technology | September 19th, 2017

It’s become increas­ing­ly clear how much we’ve under­es­ti­mat­ed the Nean­derthals, the archa­ic humans who evolved in Europe and went extinct about 40,000 years ago. Though we’ve long used them as a byword for a lum­ber­ing, beast-like lack of devel­op­ment and intel­li­gence — com­pared, of course, to we glo­ri­ous exam­ples of Homo sapi­ens — evi­dence has come to reveal a greater sim­i­lar­i­ty between us and Homo nean­derthalen­sis than we’d imag­ined. Not only did they devel­op stone tools, they even invent­ed a kind of “super glue,” one that, as you can see in the NOVA seg­ment above, we have dif­fi­cul­ty repli­cat­ing even today.

“Archae­ol­o­gists first found tar-cov­ered stones and black lumps at Nean­derthal sites across Europe about two decades ago,” writes the New York Times’ Nicholas St. Fleur. “The tar was dis­tilled from the bark of birch trees some 200,000 years ago, and seemed to have been used for haft­ing, or attach­ing han­dles to stone tools and weapons. But sci­en­tists did not know how Nean­derthals pro­duced the dark, sticky sub­stance, more than 100,000 years before Homo sapi­ens in Africa used tree resin and ocher adhe­sives.” But in a new study in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports, “a team of archae­ol­o­gists has used mate­ri­als avail­able dur­ing pre­his­toric times to demon­strate three pos­si­ble ways Nean­derthals could have delib­er­ate­ly made tar.”

The process might have looked some­thing like that in the video above, an attempt by archae­ol­o­gists Wil Roe­broeks and Friedrich Palmer to make this of old­est known syn­thet­ic mate­r­i­al just as the Nean­derthals might have exe­cut­ed it. Their only mate­ri­als: “an upturned ani­mal skull to catch the pitch; a small stone on which the pitch would con­dense; some rolls of birch bark, the source of the pitch; and a lay­er of ash, to exclude oxy­gen and pre­vent the bark from burn­ing.”

Image by Paul Kozowyk

They tech­ni­cal­ly get it to work, man­ag­ing to heat the bark to just the right tem­per­a­ture, but the exper­i­ment does­n’t pro­duce very much of this ancient super glue — cer­tain­ly not as much as Nean­derthals would have used to make spears, which might turn out to have been the very first indus­tri­al process in his­to­ry. Inno­va­tion, in the 21st cen­tu­ry as well as 250,000 years ago, does tend to come from unex­pect­ed places.

You can read more about arche­ol­o­gists lat­est the­o­ries on the mak­ing of Nean­derthal super glue over at Sci­en­tif­ic Reports.

via Giz­mo­do

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Did the Voice of Nean­derthals, Our Dis­tant Cousins, Sound Like?: Sci­en­tists Demon­strate Their “High Pitch” The­o­ry

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Nev­er a First Human Being

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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 Map of Computer Science: New Animation Presents a Survey of Computer Science, from Alan Turing to “Augmented Reality”

in Computer Science, Science, Technology | September 8th, 2017

I’ve nev­er want­ed to start a sen­tence with “I’m old enough to remem­ber…” because, well, who does? But here we are. I remem­ber the enor­mous­ly suc­cess­ful Apple IIe and Com­modore 64, and a world before Microsoft. Smart phones were sci­ence fic­tion. To do much more than word process or play games one had to learn a pro­gram­ming lan­guage. These ancient days seemed at the time—and in hind­sight as well—to be the very dawn of com­put­ing. Before the per­son­al com­put­er, such devices were the size of kitchen appli­ances and were hid­den away in mil­i­tary instal­la­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, and NASA labs.

But of course we all know that the his­to­ry of com­put­ing goes far beyond the ear­ly 80s: at least back to World War II, and per­haps even much far­ther. Do we begin with the aba­cus, the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, the astro­labe, Ada Lovelace and Charles Bab­bage? The ques­tion is maybe one of def­i­n­i­tions. In the short, ani­mat­ed video above, physi­cist, sci­ence writer, and YouTube edu­ca­tor Dominic Wal­li­man defines the com­put­er accord­ing to its basic bina­ry func­tion of “just flip­ping zeros and ones,” and he begins his con­densed his­to­ry of com­put­er sci­ence with trag­ic genius Alan Tur­ing of Tur­ing Test and Bletch­ley Park code­break­ing fame.

Turing’s most sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to com­put­ing came from his 1936 con­cept of the “Tur­ing Machine,” a the­o­ret­i­cal mech­a­nism that could, writes the Cam­bridge Com­put­er Lab­o­ra­to­ry “sim­u­late ANY com­put­er algo­rithm, no mat­ter how com­pli­cat­ed it is!” All oth­er designs, says Walliman—apart from a quan­tum computer—are equiv­a­lent to the Tur­ing Machine, “which makes it the foun­da­tion of com­put­er sci­ence.” But since Turing’s time, the sim­ple design has come to seem end­less­ly capa­ble of adap­ta­tion and inno­va­tion.

Wal­li­man illus­trates the com­put­er’s expo­nen­tial growth by point­ing out that a smart phone has more com­put­ing pow­er than the entire world pos­sessed in 1963, and that the com­put­ing capa­bil­i­ty that first land­ed astro­nauts on the moon is equal to “a cou­ple of Nin­ten­dos” (first gen­er­a­tion clas­sic con­soles, judg­ing by the image). But despite the hubris of the com­put­er age, Wal­li­man points out that “there are some prob­lems which, due to their very nature, can nev­er be solved by a com­put­er” either because of the degree of uncer­tain­ty involved or the degree of inher­ent com­plex­i­ty. This fas­ci­nat­ing, yet abstract dis­cus­sion is where Walliman’s “Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence” begins, and for most of us this will prob­a­bly be unfa­mil­iar ter­ri­to­ry.

We’ll feel more at home once the map moves from the region of Com­put­er The­o­ry to that of Com­put­er Engi­neer­ing, but while Wal­li­man cov­ers famil­iar ground here, he does not dumb it down. Once we get to appli­ca­tions, we’re in the realm of big data, nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing, the inter­net of things, and “aug­ment­ed real­i­ty.” From here on out, com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy will only get faster, and weird­er, despite the fact that the “under­ly­ing hard­ware is hit­ting some hard lim­its.” Cer­tain­ly this very quick course in Com­put­er Sci­ence only makes for an intro­duc­to­ry sur­vey of the dis­ci­pline, but like Wallman’s oth­er maps—of math­e­mat­ics, physics, and chem­istry—this one pro­vides us with an impres­sive visu­al overview of the field that is both broad and spe­cif­ic, and that we like­ly wouldn’t encounter any­where else.

As with his oth­er maps, Wal­li­man has made this the Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence avail­able as a poster, per­fect for dorm rooms, liv­ing rooms, or wher­ev­er else you might need a reminder.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

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

Watch Break­ing the Code, About the Life & Times of Alan Tur­ing (1996)

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

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

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The Planetarium Table Clock: Magnificent 1775 Timepiece Tracks the Passing of Time & the Travel of the Planets

in Art, Technology | September 6th, 2017

If you’re in Zurich, head over to the Bey­er Clock and Watch Muse­um, which presents the his­to­ry of time­keep­ing and time­keep­ing instru­ments, from 1400 BC to mod­ern times. On dis­play, you’ll find sun­di­als, water and tow­er clocks, Renais­sance automa­ta, and pen­du­lum clocks. And the Plan­e­tar­i­um Table Clock fea­tured above.

Made cir­ca 1775, the plan­e­tar­i­um clock keeps time … and so much more. Accord­ing to the Muse­um of Arti­facts web­site, the earth (look in the glass orb) “rotates around the sun in per­fect real time.” And the “oth­er five plan­ets rotate as well–they “go up, down, around, in rela­tion to the etched con­stel­la­tions of pre­cise­ly posi­tioned stars on the crys­tal globe, which if you are smart enough will reveal what sea­son it is.” This fine time­keep­ing piece was the joint cre­ation of Nicole-Reine Lep­aute, a French astronomer who pre­dict­ed the return of Hal­ley’s Comet, and her hus­band, Jean-André Lep­aute, who presided over a clock­mak­ing dynasty and became hor­loger du Roi (clock­mak­er to the king).

It’s hard to imag­ine that the Plan­e­tar­i­um clock did­n’t some­how inspire a more mod­ern creation–the Mid­night Plané­tar­i­um, an astro­nom­i­cal watch that shows the rota­tion of five plan­ets — Mer­cury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Sat­urn. It has a price tag of $220,000 (exclud­ing sales tax). See it on dis­play below.

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:

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

An Ani­mat­ed Alan Watts Wax­es Philo­soph­i­cal About Time in The Fine Art of Goof­ing Off, the 1970s “Sesame Street for Grown-Ups”

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lec­tures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar Sys­tem … For Kids (1977)

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

in Gender, Science, Software, Technology | August 30th, 2017

Pho­to cour­tesy of MIT Muse­um

When I first read news of the now-infa­mous Google memo writer who claimed with a straight face that women are bio­log­i­cal­ly unsuit­ed to work in sci­ence and tech, I near­ly choked on my cere­al. A dozen exam­ples instant­ly crowd­ed to mind of women who have pio­neered the very basis of our cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy while oper­at­ing at an extreme dis­ad­van­tage in a cul­ture that explic­it­ly believed they shouldn’t be there, this shouldn’t be hap­pen­ing, women shouldn’t be able to do a “man’s job!”

The memo, as Megan Molteni and Adam Rogers write at Wired, “is a species of dis­course pecu­liar to polit­i­cal­ly polar­ized times: cher­ry-pick­ing sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to sup­port a pre-exist­ing point of view.” Its spe­cious evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy pre­tends to objec­tiv­i­ty even as it ignores real­i­ty. As Mul­der would say, the truth is out there, if you care to look, and you don’t need to dig through clas­si­fied FBI files. Just, well, Google it. No, not the pseu­do­science, but the careers of women in STEM with­out whom we might not have such a thing as Google.

Women like Mar­garet Hamil­ton, who, begin­ning in 1961, helped NASA “devel­op the Apol­lo program’s guid­ance sys­tem” that took U.S. astro­nauts to the moon, as Maia Wein­stock reports at MIT News. “For her work dur­ing this peri­od, Hamil­ton has been cred­it­ed with pop­u­lar­iz­ing the con­cept of soft­ware engi­neer­ing.” Robert McMil­lan put it best in a 2015 pro­file of Hamil­ton:

It might sur­prise today’s soft­ware mak­ers that one of the found­ing fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they con­sid­er why the gen­der inequal­i­ty of the Mad Men era per­sists to this day.

Hamil­ton was indeed a moth­er in her twen­ties with a degree in math­e­mat­ics, work­ing as a pro­gram­mer at MIT and sup­port­ing her hus­band through Har­vard Law, after which she planned to go to grad­u­ate school. “But the Apol­lo space pro­gram came along” and con­tract­ed with NASA to ful­fill John F. Kennedy’s famous promise made that same year to land on the moon before the decade’s end—and before the Sovi­ets did. NASA accom­plished that goal thanks to Hamil­ton and her team.

Pho­to cour­tesy of MIT Muse­um

Like many women cru­cial to the U.S. space pro­gram (many dou­bly mar­gin­al­ized by race and gen­der), Hamil­ton might have been lost to pub­lic con­scious­ness were it not for a pop­u­lar redis­cov­ery. “In recent years,” notes Wein­stock, “a strik­ing pho­to of Hamil­ton and her team’s Apol­lo code has made the rounds on social media.” You can see that pho­to at the top of the post, tak­en in 1969 by a pho­tog­ra­ph­er for the MIT Instru­men­ta­tion Lab­o­ra­to­ry. Used to pro­mote the lab’s work on Apol­lo, the orig­i­nal cap­tion read, in part, “Here, Mar­garet is shown stand­ing beside list­ings of the soft­ware devel­oped by her and the team she was in charge of, the LM [lunar mod­ule] and CM [com­mand mod­ule] on-board flight soft­ware team.”

As Hank Green tells it in his con­densed his­to­ry above, Hamil­ton “rose through the ranks to become head of the Apol­lo Soft­ware devel­op­ment team.” Her focus on errors—how to pre­vent them and course cor­rect when they arise—“saved Apol­lo 11 from hav­ing to abort the mis­sion” of land­ing Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon’s sur­face. McMil­lan explains that “as Hamil­ton and her col­leagues were pro­gram­ming the Apol­lo space­craft, they were also hatch­ing what would become a $400 bil­lion indus­try.” At Futur­ism, you can read a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with Hamil­ton, in which she describes how she first learned to code, what her work for NASA was like, and what exact­ly was in those books stacked as high as she was tall. As a woman, she may have been an out­lier in her field, but that fact is much bet­ter explained by the Occam’s razor of prej­u­dice than by any­thing hav­ing to do with evo­lu­tion­ary deter­min­ism.

Note: You can now find Hamil­ton’s code on Github.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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Alice in Wonderland Gets Re-Envisioned by a Neural Network in the Style of Paintings By Picasso, van Gogh, Kahlo, O’Keeffe & More

in Art, Technology | August 30th, 2017

An artist just start­ing out might first imi­tate the styles of oth­ers, and if all goes well, the process of learn­ing those styles will lead them to a style of their own. But how does one learn some­thing like an artis­tic style in a way that isn’t sim­ply imi­ta­tive? Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and espe­cial­ly the cur­rent devel­op­ments in mak­ing com­put­ers not just think but learn, will cer­tain­ly shed some light in the process — and pro­duce, along the way, such fas­ci­nat­ing projects as the video above, a re-envi­sion­ing of Dis­ney’s Alice in Won­der­land in the styles of famous artists: Pablo Picas­so, Geor­gia O’Ke­effe, Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai, Fri­da Kahlo, Vin­cent van Gogh and oth­ers.

The idea behind this tech­no­log­i­cal process, known as “style trans­fer,” is “to take two images, say, a pho­to of a per­son and a paint­ing, and use these to cre­ate a third image that com­bines the con­tent of the for­mer with the style of the lat­er,” says an explana­to­ry post at the Paper­space Blog.

“The cen­tral prob­lem of style trans­fer revolves around our abil­i­ty to come up with a clear way of com­put­ing the ‘con­tent’ of an image as dis­tinct from com­put­ing the ‘style’ of an image. Before deep learn­ing arrived at the scene, researchers had been hand­craft­ing meth­ods to extract the con­tent and tex­ture of images, merge them and see if the results were inter­est­ing or garbage.”

Deep learn­ing, the fam­i­ly of meth­ods that enable com­put­ers to teach them­selves, involves pro­vid­ing an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tem called a “neur­al net­work” with huge amounts of data and let­ting it draw infer­ences. In exper­i­ments like these, the sys­tems take in visu­al data and make infer­ences about how one set of data, like the con­tent of frames of Alice in Won­der­land, might look when ren­dered in the col­ors and con­tours of anoth­er, such as some of the most famous paint­ings in all of art his­to­ry. (Oth­ers have tried it, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured, with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Run­ner.) If the tech­nol­o­gy at work here piques your curios­i­ty, have a look at Google’s free online course on deep learn­ing or this new set of cours­es from Cours­era— it prob­a­bly won’t improve your art skills, but it will cer­tain­ly increase your under­stand­ing of a devel­op­ment that will play an ever larg­er role in the cul­ture and econ­o­my ahead.

Here’s a full list of painters used in the neur­al net­worked ver­sion of Alice:

Pablo Picas­so
Geor­gia O’Ke­effe
S.H. Raza
Hoku­sai
Fri­da Kahlo
Vin­cent van Gogh
Tar­si­la
Saloua Raou­da Chou­cair
Lee Kras­ner
Sol Lewitt
Wu Guanzhong
Elaine de Koon­ing
Ibrahim el-Salahi
Min­nie Pwer­le
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Edvard Munch
Natalia Gon­charo­va

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Ren­dered in the Style of Picas­so; Blade Run­ner in the Style of Van Gogh

What Hap­pens When Blade Run­ner & A Scan­ner Dark­ly Get Remade with an Arti­fi­cial Neur­al Net­work

Google Launch­es Free Course on Deep Learn­ing: The Sci­ence of Teach­ing Com­put­ers How to Teach Them­selves

New Deep Learn­ing Cours­es Released on Cours­era, with Hope of Teach­ing Mil­lions the Basics of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

The First Film Adap­ta­tion of Alice in Won­der­land (1903)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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 What Music Sounds Like When It’s Created by Synthesizers Made with Artificial Intelligence

in Music, Technology | August 23rd, 2017

When syn­the­siz­ers like the Yama­ha DX7 became con­sumer prod­ucts, the pos­si­bil­i­ties of music changed for­ev­er, mak­ing avail­able a wealth of new, often total­ly unfa­mil­iar sounds even to musi­cians who’d nev­er before had a rea­son to think past the elec­tric gui­tar. But if the peo­ple at Project Magen­ta keep doing what they’re doing, they could soon bring about a wave of even more rev­o­lu­tion­ary music-mak­ing devices. That “team of Google researchers who are teach­ing machines to cre­ate not only their own music but also to make so many oth­er forms of art,” writes the New York Times’ Cade Metz, work toward not just the day “when a machine can instant­ly build a new Bea­t­les song,” but the devel­op­ment of tools that allow artists “to cre­ate in entire­ly new ways.”

Using neur­al net­works, “com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal sys­tems allow machines to learn spe­cif­ic behav­ior by ana­lyz­ing vast amounts of data” (the kind that gen­er­at­ed all those dis­turb­ing “Deep­Dream” images a while back), Magen­ta’s researchers “are cross­breed­ing sounds from very dif­fer­ent instru­ments — say, a bas­soon and a clavi­chord — cre­at­ing instru­ments capa­ble of pro­duc­ing sounds no one has ever heard.”

You can give one of the results of these exper­i­ments a test dri­ve your­self with NSynth, described by its cre­ators as “a research project that trained a neur­al net­work on over 300,000 instru­ment sounds.” Think of Nsynth as a syn­the­siz­er pow­ered by AI.

Fire it up, and you can mash up and play your own son­ic hybrids of gui­tar and sitar, pic­co­lo and pan flute, ham­mer dul­cimer and dog. In the video at the top of the post you can hear “the first tan­gi­ble prod­uct of Google’s Magen­ta pro­gram,” a short melody cre­at­ed by an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tem designed to cre­ate music based on infer­ences drawn from all the music it has “heard.” Below that, we have anoth­er piece of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-gen­er­at­ed music, this one a poly­phon­ic piece trained on Bach chorales and per­formed with the sounds of NSynth.

If you’d like to see how the cre­ation of nev­er-before-heard instru­ments works in a bit more depth, have a look at the demon­stra­tion just above of the NSynth inter­face for Able­ton Live, one of the most DJ-beloved pieces of audio per­for­mance soft­ware around, just above. Hear­ing all this in action brings to mind the moral of a sto­ry Bri­an Eno has often told about the DX7, from which only he and a few oth­er pro­duc­ers got inno­v­a­tive results by actu­al­ly learn­ing how to pro­gram: as much as the prospect of AI-pow­ered music tech­nol­o­gy may astound, the music cre­at­ed with it will only sound as good as the skills and adven­tur­ous­ness of the musi­cians at the con­trols — for now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Cre­ativ­i­ty Machine Learns to Play Beethoven in the Style of The Bea­t­les’ “Pen­ny Lane”

Watch Sun­spring, the Sci-Fi Film Writ­ten with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Star­ring Thomas Mid­dled­itch (Sil­i­con Val­ley)

Two Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Chat­bots Talk to Each Oth­er & Get Into a Deep Philo­soph­i­cal Con­ver­sa­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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 Nano Guitar: Discover the World’s Smallest, Playable Microscopic Guitar

in Music, Technology | August 9th, 2017

In 1997, the Cor­nell Chron­i­cle announced: “The world’s small­est gui­tar — carved out of crys­talline sil­i­con and no larg­er than a sin­gle cell — has been made at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty to demon­strate a new tech­nol­o­gy that could have a vari­ety of uses in fiber optics, dis­plays, sen­sors and elec­tron­ics.”

Invent­ed by Dustin W. Carr, the so-called “nano­gu­i­tar” mea­sured 10 microm­e­ters long–roughly the size of your aver­age red blood cell. And it had six strings, each “about 50 nanome­ters wide, the width of about 100 atoms.”

Accord­ing to The Guardian, the vin­tage 1997 nano­gu­i­tar was actu­al­ly nev­er played. That hon­or went to a 2003 edi­tion of the nano­gu­i­tar, whose strings were plucked by minia­ture lasers oper­at­ed with an atom­ic force micro­scope, cre­at­ing “a 40 mega­hertz sig­nal that is 130,000 times high­er than the sound of a full-scale gui­tar.” The human ear could­n’t hear some­thing at that fre­quen­cy, and that’s a prob­lem not even a good amp–a Vox AC30, Fend­er Deluxe Reverb, etc.–could fix.

Thus con­cludes today’s adven­ture in nan­otech­nol­o­gy.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Richard Feyn­man Intro­duces the World to Nan­otech­nol­o­gy with Two Sem­i­nal Lec­tures (1959 & 1984)

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

A Boy And His Atom: IBM Cre­ates the World’s Small­est Stop-Motion Film With Atoms

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