Artificial Intelligence Creates Realistic Photos of People, None of Whom Actually Exist

in Photography, Technology | December 24th, 2018

Each day in the 2010s, it seems, brings anoth­er star­tling devel­op­ment in the field of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence — a field wide­ly writ­ten off not all that long ago as a dead end. But now AI looks just as alive as the peo­ple you see in these pho­tographs, despite the fact that none of them have ever lived, and it’s ques­tion­able whether we can even call the images that depict them “pho­tographs” at all. All of them come, in fact, as prod­ucts of a state-of-the-art gen­er­a­tive adver­sar­i­al net­work, a type of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence algo­rithm that pits mul­ti­ple neur­al net­works against each oth­er in a kind of machine-learn­ing match.

These neur­al net­works have, it seems, com­pet­ed their way to gen­er­at­ing images of fab­ri­cat­ed human faces that gen­uine humans have trou­ble dis­tin­guish­ing from images of the real deal. Their archi­tec­ture, described in a paper by the Nvidia researchers who devel­oped it, “leads to an auto­mat­i­cal­ly learned, unsu­per­vised sep­a­ra­tion of high-lev­el attrib­ut­es (e.g., pose and iden­ti­ty when trained on human faces) and sto­chas­tic vari­a­tion in the gen­er­at­ed images (e.g., freck­les, hair), and it enables intu­itive, scale-spe­cif­ic con­trol of the syn­the­sis.” What they’ve come up with, in oth­er words, has made it not just more pos­si­ble than ever to cre­ate fake faces, but made those faces more cus­tomiz­able than ever as well.

“Of course, the abil­i­ty to cre­ate real­is­tic AI faces rais­es trou­bling ques­tions. (Not least of all, how long until stock pho­to mod­els go out of work?)” writes James Vin­cent at The Verge. “Experts have been rais­ing the alarm for the past cou­ple of years about how AI fak­ery might impact soci­ety. These tools could be used for mis­in­for­ma­tion and pro­pa­gan­da and might erode pub­lic trust in pic­to­r­i­al evi­dence, a trend that could dam­age the jus­tice sys­tem as well as pol­i­tics.”

But still, “you can’t doc­tor any image in any way you like with the same fideli­ty. There are also seri­ous con­straints when it comes to exper­tise and time. It took Nvidia’s researchers a week train­ing their mod­el on eight Tes­la GPUs to cre­ate these faces.”

Though “a run­ning bat­tle between AI fak­ery and image authen­ti­ca­tion for decades to come” seems inevitable, the cur­rent abil­i­ty of com­put­ers to cre­ate plau­si­ble faces cer­tain­ly fas­ci­nates, espe­cial­ly when com­pared to their abil­i­ty just four years ago, the hazy black-and-white fruits of which appear just above. Put that against the grid of faces at the top of the post, which shows how Nvidi­a’s sys­tem can com­bine the fea­tures of the faces on one axis with the fea­tures on the oth­er, and you’ll get a sense of the tech­no­log­i­cal accel­er­a­tion involved. Such a process could well be used, for exam­ple, to give you a sense of what your future chil­dren might look like. But how long until it puts con­vinc­ing visions of mov­ing, speak­ing, even think­ing human beings before our eyes?

via Petapix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sci­en­tists Cre­ate a New Rem­brandt Paint­ing, Using a 3D Print­er & Data Analy­sis of Rembrandt’s Body of Work

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Writes a Piece in the Style of Bach: Can You Tell the Dif­fer­ence Between JS Bach and AI Bach?

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

Google Launch­es a Free Course on Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learn­ing Crash Course”

Google Launch­es Three New Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Exper­i­ments That Could Be God­sends for Artists, Muse­ums & Design­ers

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 or on Face­book.

David Byrne Curates a Playlist of Great Protest Songs Written Over the Past 60 Years: Stream Them Online

in Music | December 13th, 2018

When you hear the words “protest song,” what do you see? Is it a folkie like Bob Dylan or Joan Baez deliv­er­ing songs about injus­tice? Is it an earnest young thing with a gui­tar? Is it trapped in 1960s amber, while time has moved on to more ambi­gu­i­ty, more nihilism, more solip­sism?

British writers–and may we add ama­teur folksingers–Jonathan Lux­moore and Chris­tine Ellis made this lament over two years ago in the pages of The Guardian, in an opin­ion piece enti­tled, “Not talkin’ bout a rev­o­lu­tion: where are all the protest songs?” Here they blame the imme­di­a­cy of social media, the rise of aspi­ra­tional hip hop, and the decline of rad­i­cal pol­i­tics. They end, pre­scient­ly, with a Jere­my Cor­byn-shaped hope for change. Well, look where we are now. Things devel­oped rather quick­ly, did they not?

(And as a side note, I would sug­gest the 1980s as a way more protest-filled music decade than the 1960s. Because of the self-aggran­dize­ment of 1960s cura­tors, they claim more than they did. But near­ly every pop, rock, r’n’b, and hip hop act of the ‘80s has at least one polit­i­cal song in its discog­ra­phy.)

Enter David Byrne, whose mis­sion apart from his day job as a musi­cian is to bring hope to the mass­es with a deter­mined opti­mism. He’s here to say that the protest song nev­er went away, only our def­i­n­i­tion of it. And he’s brought the receipts, or rather the playlist above, to prove his point:

…in fact, they now come from all direc­tions in every pos­si­ble genre—country songs, giant pop hits, hip hop, clas­sic rock, indie and folk. Yes, maybe there weren’t many songs ques­tion­ing the wis­dom of invad­ing Iraq, but almost every oth­er issue has been addressed.

Stretch­ing over six decades, the playlist demon­strates the var­i­ous forms protest can take, from describ­ing racial vio­lence (Bil­lie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talm­bout”) to bemoan­ing eco­nom­ic injus­tice (The Spe­cials’ “Ghost Town”) and rail­ing against war and con­flict (U2’s “Sun­day Bloody Sun­day”, Edwin Starr’s “War”). Some­times declar­ing the pos­i­tive and gain­ing a voice is enough of a protest: you could argue that James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” did more for equal­i­ty than any song about racism. Biki­ni Kills’ “Rebel Girl” does sim­i­lar things for third-wave fem­i­nism.

But Byrne wise­ly gives voice to those who feel they’re swim­ming against any resis­tance tide:

I’ve even includ­ed a few songs that “protest the protests.” Buck Owens, the clas­sic coun­try artist from Bak­ers­field, for exam­ple, has two songs here. “Red­necks, White Socks and Blue Rib­bon Beer,” is a cel­e­bra­tion of Amer­i­cans who feel they are unno­ticed, left behind. One might call it a pop­ulist anthem, but I think the ref­er­ence to white socks is inten­tion­al­ly meant to be funny—in effect, it says: “we know who we are, we know how uncool white socks are.”

Look, it’s easy to believe that songs “changed the world” when they are eas­i­ly acces­si­ble to hear decades lat­er but the boots-on-the-ground march­es and rev­o­lu­tion­ary acts from which they sprang are now just pho­tographs, film reels, and fog­gy mem­o­ries. But who can deny the gut punch of this year’s “This Is Amer­i­ca” from Child­ish Gam­bi­no, the con­tin­ued excel­lence of Killer Mike and/or Run the Jew­els, and any num­ber of songs that doc­u­ment our out­rage? The songs of protest con­tin­ue as long as there is injus­tice.

And in the case of David Byrne, cov­er­ing a mod­ern protest song and adding to its list of names, is what can keep an idea, a mem­o­ry, and a feel­ing alive for a new audi­ence. Here he is at the encore of his cur­rent tour, cov­er­ing Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talm­bout,” a memo­r­i­al to all the black lives killed by law enforce­ment.

“Here was a protest song that doesn’t hec­tor or preach at us,” he said in an arti­cle for the Asso­ci­at­ed Press. “It sim­ply asks us to remem­ber and acknowl­edge these lives that have been lost, lives that were tak­en from us through injus­tice, though the song leaves that for the lis­ten­er to put togeth­er. I love a drum line, so that aspect of the song sucked me in imme­di­ate­ly as well. The song musi­cal­ly is a cel­e­bra­tion and lyri­cal­ly a eulo­gy. Beau­ti­ful.”

He also wise­ly asked per­mis­sion to cov­er such a recent song, espe­cial­ly when it’s an old­er white man lend­ing his voice to it. But Mon­ae gave her bless­ing:

“I thought that was so kind of him and of course I said yes. The song’s mes­sage and names men­tioned need to be heard by every audi­ence.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When South Africa Banned Pink Floyd’s The Wall After Stu­dents Chant­ed “We Don’t Need No Edu­ca­tion” to Protest the Apartheid School Sys­tem (1980)

Tom Waits Releas­es a Time­ly Cov­er of the Ital­ian Anti-Fas­cist Anthem “Bel­la Ciao,” His First New Song in Two Years

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

David Byrne Cre­ates a Playlist of Eclec­tic Music for the Hol­i­days: Stream It Free Online

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

David Byrne Creates a Playlist of Eclectic Music for the Holidays: Stream It Free Online

in Music | December 5th, 2018

Whose music do you put on when the hol­i­day sea­son comes around? Per­haps musi­cians like Lon­nie Hol­ley, Gur­ru­mul, Erkin Koray, and Juan Luis Guer­ra? Maybe you’ve just thrilled with recog­ni­tion at one or more of those names, or maybe you’ve nev­er heard of any of them — but in either case, you should get ready for a high­ly uncon­ven­tion­al hol­i­day expe­ri­ence fea­tur­ing their songs and those of many oth­ers, all of them curat­ed by David Byrne. Each month the peri­patet­ic, oft-col­lab­o­rat­ing musi­cian and for­mer Talk­ing Heads front­man posts a new playlist on Radio David Byrne, and the lat­est, “Eclec­tic for the Hol­i­days,” will get us into a kind of sea­son­al spir­it into which we’ve nev­er got before.

“So… who rec­om­mends this stuff to me?” Byrne asks. “I’ve known Lon­nie Hol­ley as an artist for quite some time. I saw him do a show at Nation­al Saw­dust not too long ago with trom­bon­ist Dave Nel­son, who toured with St. Vin­cent and I a few years ago.”

“I heard an orches­tral inter­pre­ta­tion of this song by Gur­ru­mul when I was wait­ing to do an inter­view at the radio sta­tion in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia. I asked, ‘Whose music is that?’ ” “Erkin Koray I heard after first hear­ing Barış Manço, who may have been rec­om­mend­ed by some friends in Istan­bul when I was there years ago… Turkey had a seri­ous psy­che­del­ic peri­od.” “Juan Luis Guer­ra may have been rec­om­mend­ed many years ago by music jour­nal­ist Daisann McLane at a music fes­ti­val in Carta­ge­na, Colom­bia.”

The 41-song jour­ney that is “Eclec­tic for the Hol­i­days,” which you can stream below or on Byrne’s offi­cial site, offers not just a chance to hap­pen upon intrigu­ing artists you’d nev­er come across before — as hap­pened to Byrne in all those chance encoun­ters that went into its con­struc­tion — but a break from the same fif­teen or twen­ty songs that have long dom­i­nat­ed the hol­i­day-sea­son rota­tion in homes and pub­lic spaces around the world. The hol­i­days them­selves teach us that tra­di­tion has its place, but Byrne, whose com­pul­sion to dis­cov­er new music from an ever far­ther-flung range of soci­eties and sub­cul­tures, shows us that you can’t let them get you com­fort­able enough to close your ears.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radio David Byrne: Stream Free Music Playlists Cre­at­ed Every Month by the Front­man of Talk­ing Heads

David Byrne Cre­ates a Playlist of Cre­ative Music From Africa & the Caribbean—or What One Name­less Pres­i­dent Has Called “Shit­hole Coun­tries”

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­men­tal Christ­mas Mix­tape: A Rare & For­got­ten Record­ing from 1965

Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rock­ing & Swing­ing Christ­mas Albums: From James Brown and John­ny Cash to Christo­pher Lee & The Ven­tures

Hear the Christ­mas Car­ols Made by Alan Turing’s Com­put­er: Cut­ting-Edge Ver­sions of “Jin­gle Bells” and “Good King Wences­las” (1951)

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 or on Face­book.

Japanese Artist Creates Bookshelf Dioramas That Magically Transport You Into Tokyo’s Back Alleys

in Art, Books | November 23rd, 2018

Should you find your­self in a Japan­ese city, spend time not on the Star­bucks- and McDon­ald’s-lined boule­vards but on the back streets that wind in all direc­tions behind them. Or bet­ter yet, head into the back alleys branch­ing off those streets, those half-hid­den spaces that offer the most evoca­tive glimpses of life in urban Japan by far. Only there can you find pas­sage into the won­der­ful­ly idio­syn­crat­ic busi­ness­es tucked into the cor­ners of the city, from bars and restau­rants to cof­fee shops and of course book­stores. Those book­stores have long occu­pied Japan’s back alleys, but now an artist by the name of Monde has brought the back alleys onto book­shelves.

Mon­de’s hand­craft­ed wood­en book­end dio­ra­mas, which you can see on his Twit­ter feed as well as in a Buz­zfeed Japan arti­cle about them, repli­cate the back alleys of his home­town of Tokyo. They do it in minia­ture, and down to the small­est detail — even the elec­tric lights that illu­mi­nate the real thing at night.

Scaled to the height of not just a book but a small Japan­ese paper­back, the likes of which fill those back-alley book­stores from floor to ceil­ing, they’re designed to slot right into book­shelves, pro­vid­ing a wel­com­ing street scene to those brows­ing through their own or oth­ers’ vol­umes in the same way that the actu­al alleys they mod­el come as a pleas­ant sur­prise to passers­by on the main streets.

Tokyo has become a beloved city to Japan­ese and non-Japan­ese alike for count­less rea­sons, but who can doubt the appeal of the way it com­bines the feel­ing of small-town life in its many neigh­bor­hoods that togeth­er make for a megac­i­ty scale? Mon­de’s dio­ra­mas cap­ture the dis­tinc­tive mix­ture of domes­tic­i­ty and den­si­ty in the cap­i­tal’s back alleys, reflect­ing the nar­row­ness of the spaces in form and their some­how organ­i­cal­ly man­made nature — step­ping stones, pot­ted-plant gar­dens, and all the small pieces of infra­struc­ture that have accu­mu­lat­ed to sup­port life in the homes of so many — in con­tent. Though Tokyo has for decades been regard­ed, espe­cial­ly from the West, as a place of thor­ough hyper­moder­ni­ty, its alleys remind us that with­in the some­times over­whelm­ing present exists a mix­ture of eras that feel time­less — just like the con­tent of a well-curat­ed book­shelf.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

The Toky­oi­ter: Artists Pay Trib­ute to the Japan­ese Cap­i­tal with New York­er-Style Mag­a­zine Cov­ers

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

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 or on Face­book.

The Making of “Bohemian Rhapsody”: Take a Deep Dive Into the Iconic Song with Queen’s 2002 Mini Documentary

in Music | November 22nd, 2018

Despite being fraught with pro­duc­tion dif­fi­cul­ties, an absent direc­tor, and a crit­i­cal quib­bling over its sex­u­al­i­ty pol­i­tics, Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, the biopic of Fred­die Mer­cury and Queen, has been doing very well at the box office. And though it has thrust Queen’s music back into the spot­light, has it even real­ly gone away?

The song itself, the 6 minute epic “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” was the top of the UK sin­gles charts for nine weeks upon its release and hasn’t been for­got­ten since. It’s part of our col­lec­tive DNA, but with a cer­tain caveat…it’s noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult to cov­er. It is so fine­ly con­struct­ed that it can’t be decon­struct­ed, leav­ing artists to stand in the shad­ow of Mercury’s deliv­ery. Bri­an May, in the above video, gives cred­it to Axl Rose for get­ting close to the pow­er­ful high reg­is­ters of Mer­cury, but even that was a kind of karaoke. And let’s not even talk about Kanye West’s stab at it.

So it’s a good time to check in with this 45 minute-long mini-doc on the mak­ing of the song, which took the band into the stratos­phere. Pro­duced in 2002 for the band’s Great­est Hits DVD, it fea­tures gui­tarist Bri­an May and drum­mer Roger Tay­lor. The first part is on the writ­ing of the song, the sec­ond part on the mak­ing of the music video, and the third, the bulk of the doc, on the pro­duc­tion.

Don’t expect any expla­na­tion of the sub­ject mat­ter of the song–as May says, Mer­cury would have shrugged off any inter­pre­ta­tion and dis­missed any search for depth. And while Mer­cury always took care over his lyrics, the pow­er is all there in the music.

As for the video, that came about from neces­si­ty, as the band want­ed to be on Top of the Pops and tour at the same time. By using their rehearsal stage at Elstree stu­dios for the per­for­mance footage and a side area for the choral/­close-up seg­ments, they made a strange­ly icon­ic video. (Who doesn’t think of Queen’s four mem­bers arranged in a dia­mond when those vocals start up?). The two main effects were a prism lens on the cam­era and video feed­back, all done live.

The last part is fas­ci­nat­ing and a deep dive into the mix. Bri­an May, along­side stu­dio engi­neer Justin Shirley Smith, play just the piano, bass, and drums from the song at first. Mer­cury was a self-taught pianist who played “like a drum­mer,” with a metronome in his head, says May.

The gui­tarist also iso­lates his var­i­ous gui­tar parts, includ­ing the har­mon­ics dur­ing the open­ing bal­lad por­tion, the “shiv­ers down my spine” sound made by scrap­ing the strings, and the famous solo, which he wrote as a coun­ter­point to Mercury’s melody. It’s geek­ery of the high­est order, but it’s for a song that deserves such atten­tion.

Inside The Rhap­sody will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Made Fred­die Mer­cury the Great­est Vocal­ist in Rock His­to­ry? The Secrets Revealed in a Short Video Essay
Hear Fred­die Mer­cury & Queen’s Iso­lat­ed Vocals on Their Endur­ing Clas­sic Song, “We Are The Cham­pi­ons”

Fred­die Mercury’s Final Days: Watch a Poignant Mon­tage That Doc­u­ments the Last Chap­ter of the Singer’s Life

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Free Guided Imagery Recordings Help Kids Cope with Pain, Stress & Anxiety

in Health, Psychology | October 23rd, 2018

I don’t have to tell you mod­ern life is full of stres­sors that exac­er­bate hyper­ten­sion, depres­sion, and every­thing in-between. Ther­a­peu­tic stress reduc­tion tech­niques based in mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, trau­ma research, and a num­ber of oth­er fields have pro­lif­er­at­ed in our dai­ly lives and every­day con­ver­sa­tion, help­ing peo­ple cope with chron­ic pain, career anx­i­ety, and the tox­ic mias­ma of our geopol­i­tics.

These meth­ods have been very suc­cess­ful among adult populations—of monks, vet­er­ans, clin­i­cal sub­jects, etc.—but adults process infor­ma­tion very dif­fer­ent­ly than chil­dren. And as every par­ent knows, kids get major­ly stressed out too, whether they’re absorb­ing our anx­i­eties sec­ond-hand or feel­ing the pres­sures of their own social and edu­ca­tion­al envi­ron­ments.

We can’t expect young chil­dren to sit still and pay atten­tion to their breath for thir­ty min­utes, or to change their men­tal scripts with cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­a­py. It’s far eas­i­er for kids to process things through their imag­i­na­tion, chan­nel­ing anx­i­ety through play, or art, or—as pedi­atric psy­chol­o­gists at the Children’s Hos­pi­tal of Orange Coun­ty (CHOC) explain—guided men­tal visu­al­iza­tion, or “guid­ed imagery,” as they call it. How does it work?

Guid­ed imagery involves envi­sion­ing a cer­tain goal to help cope with health prob­lems or the task or skill a child is try­ing to learn or mas­ter. Guid­ed imagery is most often used as a relax­ation tech­nique that involves sit­ting or lying qui­et­ly and imag­in­ing a favorite, peace­ful set­ting like a beach, mead­ow or for­est.

The ther­a­pists at CHOC “teach patients to imag­ine sights, sounds, smells, tastes or oth­er sen­sa­tions to cre­ate a kind of day­dream that ‘removes’ them from or gives them con­trol over their present sit­u­a­tion.” In the video at the top, Dr. Cindy Kim describes the tech­nique as “akin to biofeed­back,” and it has been espe­cial­ly help­ful for chil­dren fac­ing a scary med­ical pro­ce­dure.

While all of us might need to go to our hap­py place once in a while, most kids find it hard to relax with­out some form of cre­ative redi­rec­tion, like the guid­ed imagery pro­gram above from Johns Hop­kins All Children’s Hos­pi­tal. At the CHOC web­site, you’ll find over a dozen oth­er audio pro­grams tai­lored for pain and stress man­age­ment and relax­ation, for both young chil­dren and ado­les­cents. Lifehacker’s par­ent­ing edi­tor Michelle Woo describes a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­pling of the pro­grams:

• For pain man­age­ment for young kids, lis­ten to “The Spe­cial Cake.” Sam­ple line: “With your next deep breath in, notice the sweet smell of the yum­my frost­ing.”
• For pain man­age­ment for teens, lis­ten to “Climb­ing a Lad­der.” Sam­ple line: “Let’s have a look at the first step. As you put your foot on it, you begin to remem­ber a time when you real­ize that you can have con­trol over your body.”
• For anx­i­ety, lis­ten to “The Mag­ic Kite.” Sam­ple line: “All of the uncom­fort­able feel­ings or sad­ness or anger or pain or wor­ry are all on the ground and you are fly­ing away from it.”

As kids lis­ten to audio, Woo writes, “have them notice how their body feels—their breath­ing may slow and their mus­cles might relax.” And hey, there’s no rea­son guid­ed imagery can’t work for grown-ups too. Try it if you’re feel­ing stressed and let us know how it works for you.

via Life­hack­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Moby Lets You Down­load 4 Hours of Ambi­ent Music to Help You Sleep, Med­i­tate, Do Yoga & Not Pan­ic

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

How Stress Can Change Your Brain: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Med­i­ta­tion 101: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Beginner’s Guide

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

The History of Philosophy Visualized in an Interactive Timeline

in Design, Philosophy | October 10th, 2018

The con­nec­tions we make between var­i­ous philoso­phers and philo­soph­i­cal schools are often con­nec­tions that have already been made for us by teach­ers and schol­ars on our paths through high­er edu­ca­tion. Many of us who have tak­en a phi­los­o­phy class or two leave it at that, con­tent we’ve got the gist of things and that spe­cial­ists can parse the details per­fect­ly well with­out us. But there are those curi­ous peo­ple who con­tin­ue to read abstruse and dif­fi­cult phi­los­o­phy after their intro class­es are over, for the sheer, per­verse joy of it, or from a burn­ing desire to under­stand truth, beau­ty, jus­tice, or what­ev­er.

And then there are those who embark on a thor­ough self-guid­ed tour of West­ern philo­soph­i­cal his­to­ry, attempt­ing, with­out the aid of uni­ver­si­ty depart­ments and fad­dish inter­pre­tive schemes, to weave the dis­parate strains of thought togeth­er. One such auto­di­dact and aca­d­e­m­ic out­sider, design­er Deniz Cem Önduygu of Istan­bul, has com­bined an ency­clo­pe­dic mind with a tal­ent for rig­or­ous out­line orga­ni­za­tion to pro­duce an inter­ac­tive time­line of the his­to­ry of philo­soph­i­cal ideas. It is “a pure­ly per­son­al project,” he writes, “that I’m doing in my own time, with my lim­it­ed knowl­edge, for myself.”

Önduygu shares the project not to show off his learn­ing but, more humbly, to “get feed­back and to make it acces­si­ble to those who are inter­est­ed.” It may be pre­cious few peo­ple who have both the time and incli­na­tion to teach them­selves the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy, but if you are one of them, this incred­i­bly dense info­graph­ic is as good a place to start as any, and while it may appear intim­i­dat­ing at first glance, its menu in the upper right cor­ner allows users to zero in on spe­cif­ic thinkers and schools, and to con­fine them­selves to small­er, more man­age­able areas of the whole.

As for the time­line itself, “view­ers can zoom in and out,” notes Dai­ly Nous, “and see philoso­phers list­ed in chrono­log­i­cal order, with ideas they’re asso­ci­at­ed with list­ed beneath them. These ideas, in turn, are con­nect­ed by green lines to sim­i­lar or sup­port­ing ideas else­where on the time­line, and con­nect­ed by red lines to oppos­ing or refut­ing ideas else­where on the time­line. If you hov­er your mouse cur­sor over a sin­gle idea, all but it and its con­nect­ed ideas fade. You can then click on the idea to bring those con­nect­ed ideas clos­er for ease of view­ing.”

The design­er admits this is a “nev­er-end­ing work in progress” and main­ly a source for remind­ing him­self of the main argu­ments of the philoso­phers he’s sur­veyed. The major sources for his time­line are “Bryan Magee’s The Sto­ry of Phi­los­o­phy and Thomas Baldwin’s Con­tem­po­rary Phi­los­o­phy, along with oth­er works for spe­cif­ic philoso­phers and ideas.” But many of the con­nec­tions Önduygu draws in this exten­sive web of green and red are his own.

He explains his ratio­nale here, not­ing, “The lines here do not always depict a direct trans­fer between two peo­ple; I think of them as trac­ing the devel­op­ment of an idea through­out time with­in our col­lec­tive con­cep­tion.” Spend some more time with this impres­sive project at the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Sum­ma­rized & Visu­al­ized (the site works best in Chrome), and feel free to get in touch with its cre­ator with con­struc­tive crit­i­cism. He wel­comes feed­back and is open to oppos­ing ideas, as every life­long learn­er should be.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

150+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times 

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

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

The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue

in Music | October 2nd, 2018

Among a num­ber of influ­en­tial women in elec­tron­ic music whom we’ve pro­filed here before, French avant-garde com­pos­er Eliane Radigue stands out for her sin­gle-mind­ed ded­i­ca­tion to “a cer­tain music that I wished to make,” as she says in the video por­trait above, “this par­tic­u­lar music and no oth­er.” Her com­po­si­tions are haunt­ing and med­i­ta­tive, “pre­fig­ur­ing the con­cept of ‘deep lis­ten­ing,’ expressed by Pauline Oliv­eros some years lat­er,” as Red Bull Acad­e­my notes in an exten­sive pro­file of Radigue.

Using feed­back, tape loops, field record­ings, and, begin­ning in the 70s, the ARP 2500 mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­er, Radigue “devel­oped sound­scapes… an inter­weav­ing of elec­tron­ic drones, sub­se­quent­ly assim­i­lat­ed to what would lat­er be called drone music.” But she has reject­ed the term as too sta­t­ic, stress­ing the vari­a­tions and con­stant change in her music:

In Radigue’s work, sounds inter­act with each oth­er like the cells of an organ­ism, pro­gress­ing in glis­san­do in an extreme­ly slow and sub­tle way. “I had found my own vocab­u­lary. For me, main­tain­ing the sound did not inter­est me as such; it was pri­mar­i­ly a means to bring out the over­tones, har­mon­ics and sub­har­mon­ics. This is what made it pos­si­ble to devel­op this inner rich­ness of sound.”

Radigue seems par­tic­u­lar­ly self-assured, pos­sessed of an intu­itive sense of her work’s direc­tions from the begin­ning. “I can­not start a piece if I don’t have an idea of what it would become, but what I would call the spir­it,” she says in an inter­view with Elec­tron­ic Beats.

“The spir­it of what I want­ed to do should be there… And I keep that spir­it, that theme in mind, quite often sev­er­al months before I start to do some­thing. So, when I come to make the sounds it’s already there.”

But her career took many turns on a path through the com­po­si­tion­al cen­ters of mid-cen­tu­ry avant-garde music. After study­ing tra­di­tion­al music the­o­ry as a child, she left her home in Nice at 19 and mar­ried the artist Arman. She was swept into an “excit­ing bohemi­an life” that would soon take her, in 1955, into the orbit of musique con­crete pio­neers Pierre Scha­ef­fer and Pierre Hen­ry.

While work­ing as an intern for the com­posers (“If I claimed to be more, I don’t think they would have accept­ed me, because they were both the damn­d­est machos!”), Radigue learned their meth­ods and col­lab­o­rat­ed on their com­po­si­tions. In 1967, she worked with Hen­ry on L’Apocalypse de Jean, a piece designed to last for 24 hours. She end­ed her (unpaid) appren­tice­ship that year and began focus­ing on her own work, like Vice Ver­sa (1970, excerpt­ed fur­ther up) and Geerl­rian­dre (1972, above) and Trip­tych (1978, below).

You can hear more of Radigue’s work at Ubuweb, includ­ing a more recent syn­the­siz­er piece record­ed in 1992, as well as a 1980 inter­view for pro­gram The Morn­ing Con­cert with Charles Amirkhan­ian. That same year, she became a con­vert to Tibetan Bud­dhism, and her work—like the Adnos series, below—was inspired by the religion’s his­to­ry, her own med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, and texts like the Bar­do Thodol.

As the puls­ing, dron­ing, hum­ming com­po­si­tions she cre­at­ed through­out the late 20th cen­tu­ry have become inte­gral to the sound of the 21st, Radique has moved on, since 2001, to writ­ing work for acoustic instru­ments. She made her last elec­tron­ic piece, I’lle-Re-sonante, in 2000. The move came in part from requests she received from musi­cians, but it also rep­re­sents a delib­er­ate turn away from mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy. “There’s always some­thing miss­ing with dig­i­tal,” she says, even if it is some­how clean­er and clear­er.”

Radigue has always favored the absorp­tion of ana­logue sound, intent on tam­ing its unpre­dictabil­i­ty as a med­i­ta­tor tames the dart­ing, leap­ing, busy mind. “My music is always chang­ing,” she says, “It comes from the first access I had to elec­tron­ic sounds which was the wild sounds com­ing from feed­back,” the noise of a micro­phone and a speak­er get­ting too close to each oth­er. “If you find the right place, which is very nar­row, then you can move it very slow­ly and it changes but that requires a lot of patience.”

The word could define her entire approach, one rad­i­cal­ly opposed to instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion and quick fix­es, focused sin­gu­lar­ly on out­comes while also ful­ly present for the process.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

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

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

Brian Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Soundtracks

in Music | September 27th, 2018

Think of “inter­view­ing Bri­an Eno” (lis­ten to it here) like a piece of his gen­er­a­tive music. Yes, the man has no prob­lems talk­ing and actu­al­ly encour­ages it. But input the same old ques­tions about those same four albums (you know them, right?) and you get the same old answers as out­put. Feed in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent subject–like his favorite film soundtracks–and lo and behold, a very intrigu­ing 80 min­utes fol­lows.

That’s what hap­pened when Hugh Corn­well (lead vocal­ist of The Stran­glers) inter­viewed Mr. Peter George St John le Bap­tiste de la Salle Eno–that’s Bri­an to you–in 2013 for his short-lived inter­net radio show on film.

Eno has always had an inter­est in film. As he men­tions in the sec­ond half of the show, he pro­duced his 1976/78 album Music for Films not for any spe­cif­ic film, but in the hopes that they would be used for sound­tracks in the future. Also, he hoped that the descrip­tive titles–“Alternative 3,” “Patrolling Wire Borders”–and the evoca­tive music would lead lis­ten­ers to cre­ate films in their heads. Since then every track has been used at least once, and doc­u­men­tar­i­ans like Adam Cur­tis have used Eno to great effect.

The only track, he reveals, on that album to be writ­ten for a film was clos­er “Final Sun­set” put to great, tran­scen­dent use in Derek Jarman’s 1976 film Sebas­tiane.

But if you think Eno might choose sim­i­lar ambi­ent tracks or instru­men­tals dur­ing the rest of the inter­view, you’re in for a sur­prise.

As he grew up, Eno had no expo­sure to what was “cool” and what was not. And that led to an ear that heard things stripped of cul­tur­al con­text. When he plays a track from the musi­cal Okla­homa called “The Farmer and the Cow­boy,” we might just be able to put aside our mem­o­ries of high school pro­duc­tions and hear the weird, humor­ous and very excit­ing vocal arrange­ment under­neath. Sim­i­lar­ly, despite not being the biggest fan of Elvis Pres­ley at the time (“I was a snob,” Eno says), he selects this jaun­ty pop num­ber “Did­ja Ever” from G.I. Blues. “One of the wit­ti­est, clever­est bits of writ­ing,” as he calls it, writ­ten by Sid Wayne and Sher­man Edwards, who wrote at least one song in every sub­se­quent Pres­ley movie.

Eno also has space for the jazz of Miles Davis and the evoca­tive score for Louis Malle’s 1961 film Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows, in par­tic­u­lar how it was record­ed: impro­vised live while watch­ing the screen. (Not men­tioned: its huge influ­ence on Ange­lo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks sound­track.)

There’s much more in the inter­view to check out, includ­ing the source of a sam­ple used in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and one of David Bowie’s best but most under­rat­ed songs. Lis­ten here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bri­an Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Cre­ative Work: Don’t Get a Job

The “True” Sto­ry Of How Bri­an Eno Invent­ed Ambi­ent Music

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

A Brief History of Guitar Distortion: From Early Experiments to Happy Accidents to Classic Effects Pedals

in Music, Technology | September 25th, 2018

The sound of rock and roll is the sound of a dis­tort­ed gui­tar, but the his­to­ry of that sound pre­dates the genre by a few years. It start­ed out with blues and West­ern swing gui­tarists, search­ing “for a dirt­i­er sound,” writes Noisey in a brief his­to­ry, “a sound that reflect­ed the grit­ti­ness of their music.” That sound was pio­neered by a gui­tarist named Junior Barnard, who played with Bob Wills and his Texas Play­boys and designed his own hum­buck­ing pick­ups to pro­duce a fat­ter, loud­er tone and push his small amp into over­drive. As the Poly­phon­ic video above notes, Barnard was an aggres­sive play­er who need­ed aggres­sive tones, and so, as gui­tarists have always done, he invent­ed the means him­self.

Oth­er fore­run­ners achieved dis­tort­ed tones by crank­ing ear­ly amps like the 18-watt Fend­er Super, first intro­duced in 1947, all the way up, until the vac­u­um tubes clipped the sig­nal to keep from break­ing. Goree Carter, some­times cred­it­ed with record­ing the first rock and roll song, “Rock A While,” pushed the over­driv­en sound in a heav­ier direc­tion than Barnard, play­ing dirty Chuck Berry-like licks in 1949 before Chuck Berry’s first hit. Dis­tor­tion, a sound audio engi­neers strug­gled might­i­ly to avoid in live sound and record­ing, gave blues-based gui­tarists exact­ly what they need­ed for the loud, lewd post­war sounds of rock.

The dis­tort­ed tones of the 40s came from a delib­er­ate desire for grit. Lat­er, even dirt­i­er, gui­tar tones were the result of hap­py acci­dents. Anoth­er con­tender for the first rock and roll recording—Ike Turn­er & His Kings of Rhythm’s 1951 “Rock­et 88”—con­tains some very dis­tort­ed rhythms from gui­tarist Willie Kizart, who, leg­end has it, dropped his tweed Fend­er amp before the ses­sion. Sam Phillips “leaned into” the sound, notes Poly­phon­ic, imme­di­ate­ly hear­ing its serendip­i­tous poten­tial.

Sev­en years lat­er, the evil over­drive of Link Wray’s instru­men­tal “Rum­ble”—so sin­is­ter it was once banned from radio—came from an inten­tion­al equip­ment fail­ure. Wray repeat­ed­ly stabbed the speak­er cone of his amp with a pen­cil.

Do-it-your­self dis­tor­tion con­tin­ued into the six­ties. Fol­low­ing Wray’s lead, the Kinks’ Dave Davies slashed his amp’s speak­er with a razor blade for the fuzzed-out attack of “You Real­ly Got Me” in 1965. But a few years ear­li­er, “fuzz” had already been cod­i­fied in an effects ped­al: Gibson’s 1962 Mae­stro FZ‑1 Fuzz-Tone, part­ly inspired by anoth­er acci­dent, a faulty mix­ing board con­nec­tion that dis­tort­ed Grady Martin’s bass solo in the Mar­ty Rob­bins’ 1961 coun­try tune “Don’t Wor­ry” (below, at 1:25). The Fuzz-Tone most famous­ly drove Kei­th Richards’ riff in “Sat­is­fac­tion,” but it did­n’t sell well. Oth­er, more pop­u­lar fuzz box­es fol­lowed, like the Arbiter Fuzz Face, Jimi Hendrix’s choice for his dis­tort­ed tones.

Hen­drix bril­liant­ly inno­vat­ed new gui­tar effects, and the pow­er­ful Mar­shall amps he played through also drove the dis­tort­ed sounds of Clap­ton, Town­shend, Page, Black­more, etc., who com­pet­ed for grit­ti­er and heav­ier tones and in the process more or less invent­ed met­al gui­tar. In the sev­en­ties and eight­ies, dis­tort­ed tones took on some stan­dard­ized forms, thanks to tran­sis­tors and clas­sic effects ped­als like the Ibanez Tube Scream­er, Pro­Co Rat, and Boss DS‑1. Dis­tinc­tions between over­drive, dis­tor­tion, and fuzz effects can get tech­ni­cal, but in the ear­ly days of rock and roll, dis­tort­ed gui­tar tones came from what­ev­er worked, and it’s that wild ear­ly sound of gear pushed to its lim­its and beyond that every mod­ern dis­tor­tion effect attempts to repli­cate.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Only Instru­men­tal Ever Banned from the Radio: Link Wray’s Seduc­tive, Raunchy Song, “Rum­ble” (1958)

Two Gui­tar Effects That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Rock: The Inven­tion of the Wah-Wah & Fuzz Ped­als

How a Record­ing Stu­dio Mishap Cre­at­ed the Famous Drum Sound That Defined 80s Music & Beyond

Hear the Only Instru­men­tal Ever Banned from the Radio: Link Wray’s Seduc­tive, Raunchy Song, “Rum­ble” (1958)

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