The First High-Resolution Map of America’s Food Supply Chain: How It All Really Gets from Farm to Table
The phrase “farm to table” has enjoyed vogue status in American dining long enough to be facing displacement by an even trendier successor, “farm to fork.” These labels reflect a new awareness — or an aspiration to awareness — of where, exactly, the food Americans eat comes from. A vast and fertile land, the United States produces a great deal of its own food, but given the distance of most of its population centers from most of its agricultural centers, it also has to move nearly as great a deal of food over long domestic distances. Here we have the very first high-resolution map of that food supply chain, created by researchers at the University of Illinois studying “food flows between counties in the United States.”
“Our map is a comprehensive snapshot of all food flows between counties in the U.S. – grains, fruits and vegetables, animal feed, and processed food items,” writes Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Megan Konar in an explanatory post at The Conversation. (The top version shows the total tons of food moved, and the bottom one is broken down to the county scale.)
“All Americans, from urban to rural are connected through the food system. Consumers all rely on distant producers; agricultural processing plants; food storage like grain silos and grocery stores; and food transportation systems.” The map visualizes such journeys as that of a shipment of corn, which “starts at a farm in Illinois, travels to a grain elevator in Iowa before heading to a feedlot in Kansas, and then travels in animal products being sent to grocery stores in Chicago.”
Konar and her collaborators’ research arrives at a few surprising conclusions, such as that Los Angeles county is both the largest shipper and receiver of food in the U.S. Not only that, but almost all of the nine counties “most central to the overall structure of the food supply network” are in California. This may surprise anyone who has laid eyes on the sublimely huge agricultural landscapes of the Midwest “Cornbelt.” But as Konar notes, “Our estimates are for 2012, an extreme drought year in the Cornbelt. So, in another year, the network may look different.” And of the grain produced in the Midwest, much “is transported to the Port of New Orleans for export. This primarily occurs via the waterways of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.”
Konar also warns of troubling frailties: “The infrastructure along these waterways—such as locks 52 and 53—are critical, but have not been overhauled since their construction in 1929,” and if they were to fail, “commodity transport and supply chains would be completely disrupted.” The analytical minds at Hacker News have been discussing the implications of the research shown on this map, including whether the U.S. food supply chain is really, as one commenter put it, “very brittle and contains many weak points.” The American Society of Civil Engineers, as Konar tells Food & Wine, has given the country’s civil engineering infrastructure a grade of D+, which at least implies considerable room for improvement. But against what from some angles look like long odds, food keeps getting from American farms to American tables — and American forks, American mouths, American stomachs, and so on.
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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.
Read More...Pretty Much Pop #19 Discusses Race and the Target Audience w/ Rodney Ramsey
We’ve all felt at various points (maybe at most points) that some media creation has reached us by mistake, that we are not the target audience. 20th century American TV was aimed largely at a white majority, with a parallel, underfunded channel of content aimed at people of color.
So how have things changed? There still seem to be “black shows,” but how do they fit in to a landscape where inclusiveness is a tool by which shows attempt to appeal to everyone (i.e. get all the money)? Comedian/actor/writer/producer Rodney Ramsey joins Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to discuss the experience of watching outside your demographic, whether identifying with characters requires physical commonalities, “black voice,” and the evolving TV landscape.
We touch on Watchmen, Atlanta, Black Panther, Insecure, Sorry to Bother You, BlacKkKlansman, Tyler Perry, Dear White People, Black Jesus, and the black Herminone issue.
Some of the articles we considered included:
- “What Does It Mean to ‘Sound’ Black?” by Hannah Giorgis
- “A Racial Divide Widens on Network TV” by James Strerngold (in 1998!)
- “Why White People Don’t Like Black Movies” by Andre Seewood (2014)
- “Moving Beyond Audience Segmentation: What Marketers Can Learn from Post-Demographic Consumerism” by Lauren McMenemy
Follow Rodney @Rodney_Ramsey.
This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.
Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.
Read More...John Cleese’s Eulogy for Monty Python’s Graham Chapman: ‘Good Riddance, the Free-Loading Bastard, I Hope He Fries’
The British comedian Graham Chapman delighted in offending people. As a writer and actor with the legendary Monty Python troupe, he pushed against the boundaries of propriety and good taste. When his writing partner John Cleese proposed doing a sketch on a disgruntled man returning a defective toaster to a shop, Chapman thought: Broken toaster? Why not a dead parrot? And in one particularly outrageous sketch written by Chapman and Cleese in 1970, Chapman plays an undertaker and Cleese plays a customer who has just rung a bell at the front desk:
“What can I do for you, squire?” says Chapman.
“Um, well, I wonder if you can help me,” says Cleese. “You see, my mother has just died.”
“Ah, well, we can ‘elp you. We deal with stiffs,” says Chapman. “There are three things we can do with your mother. We can burn her, bury her, or dump her.”
“Dump her?”
“Dump her in the Thames.”
“What?”
“Oh, did you like her?”
“Yes!”
“Oh well, we won’t dump her, then,” says Chapman. “Well, what do you think? We can bury her or burn her.”
“Which would you recommend?”
“Well, they’re both nasty.”
From there, Chapman goes on to explain in the most graphic detail the unpleasant aspects of either choice before offering another option: cannibalism. At that point (in keeping with the script) outraged members of the studio audience rush onto the stage and put a stop to the sketch.
Chapman and Cleese had been close friends since their student days at Cambridge University, and when Chapman died of cancer at the age of 48 on October 4, 1989, Cleese was at his bedside. Out of respect for Chapman’s family, the members of Monty Python decided to stay away from his private funeral and avoid a media circus. Instead, they gathered for a memorial service on October 6, 1989 in the Great Hall at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. When Cleese delivered his eulogy for Chapman, he recalled his friend’s irreverence: “Anything for him, but mindless good taste.” So Cleese did his best to make his old friend proud. His off-color but heartfelt eulogy that evening has become a part of Monty Python lore, and you can watch it above. To see a longer clip, with moving words from Michael Palin and a sing-along of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” led by Eric Idle, watch below:
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in February 2013.
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A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game
I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.
–Marcel Duchamp
“Over the roughly one and half millennia of its existence, chess has been known as a tool of military strategy, a metaphor for human affairs, and a benchmark of genius,” points out the TED-Ed animated history of the game by Alex Gendler, above. The first records of chess date to the 7th century, but it may have originated even a century earlier, in India, where we find mention of the first game to have different moves for different pieces, and “a single king piece, whose fate determined the outcome.”
It was originally called “chaturanga,” a word that Yoga practitioners will recognize as the “four-limbed staff pose,” but which simply meant “four divisions” in this context. Once it spread to Persia, it became “chess,” meaning “Shah,” or king. It took root in the Arab world, and traveled the Silk Road to East and Southeast Asia, where it acquired different characteristics but used similar rules and strategies. The European form we play today became the standard, but it might have been a very different game had the Japanese version—which allowed players to put captured pieces into play—dominated.
Chess found ready acceptance everywhere it went because its underlying principles seemed to tap into common models of contest and conquest among political and military elites. Though written over a thousand years before “chaturanga” arrived in China—where the game was called xiangqi, or “elephant game”—Sun Tzu’s Art of War may as well have been discussing the critical importance of pawns in declaring, “When the officers are valiant and the troops ineffective the army is in distress.”
Chess also speaks to the hierarchies ancient civilizations sought to naturalize, and by 1000 AD, it had become a tool for teaching European noblemen the necessity of social classes performing their proper roles. This allegorical function gave to the pieces the roles we know today, with the piece called “the advisor” being replaced by the queen in the 15th century, “perhaps inspired by the recent surge of strong female leaders.”
Early Modern chess, freed from the confines of the court and played in coffeehouses, also became a favorite pastime for philosophers, writers, and artists. Treatises were written by the hundreds. Chess became a tool for summoning inspiration, and performing theatrical, often Punic games for audiences—a trend that ebbed during the Cold War, when chessboards became proxy battlegrounds between world superpowers, and intense calculation ruled the day.
The arrival of IBM’s Deep Blue computer, which defeated reigning champion Garry Kasparov in 1996, signaled a new evolution for the game, a chess singularity, as it were, after which computers routinely defeated the best players. Does this mean, according to Marcel Duchamp’s observation, that chess-playing computers should be considered artists? Chess’s earliest adopters could never have conceived of such a question. But the game they passed down through the centuries may have anticipated all of the possible outcomes of human versus machine.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch the Serpentine Dance, Created by the Pioneering Dancer Loie Fuller, Performed in an 1897 Film by the Lumière Brothers
Whatever their views on copyright, artists and inventors of all kinds can agree on one thing: all dread having their ideas stolen without so much as a footnote of credit. Such thefts have led to tanked careers, lifelong resentments, homicidal rivalries, and lawsuits to fill libraries. They have allowed many a thief to prosper and many an injured party to surrender.
But not legendary modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller.
“Short, plump, and thirty years old,” the dancer from Illinois arrived in Paris in 1892, fresh off the “mid-level vaudeville” circuit, writes Rhonda K. Garelick at Public Domain Review, and bent on proving herself to Édouard Marchand, director of the Folies-Bergère. She scored an interview within days of her arrival.
Alighting from her carriage in front of the theater, she stopped short at the sight of the large placard depicting the Folies’ current dance attraction: a young woman waving enormous veils over her head, billed as the “serpentine dancer.” “Here was the cataclysm, my utter annihilation,” Fuller would later write, for she had come to the Folies that day precisely to audition her own, new “serpentine dance,” an art form she had invented in the United States.
The imposter, an American named Maybelle Stewart, had seen Fuller perform in New York and had lifted her act and taken it to Paris. Rather than succumb to rage or despair, Fuller sat through the matinee performance and was moved from a cold sweat to renewed confidence. “The longer she danced,” she wrote, “the calmer I became.” After Stewart left the stage, Fuller ascended in her serpentine costume and auditioned for Marchand, who agreed to take her on and fire Stewart.
The story gets stranger. The show had been promoted with Stewart’s name, and so, to avoid bad publicity, Fuller agreed to perform the first two nights as Stewart, “dancing her own imitation of Stewart’s imitation of the serpentine dance,” a “triple-layer simulation,” Garelick writes, “worthy of an essay by Jean Baudrillard”—and emblematic of a career in dance marked by “self-replication, mirrored images, and identity play.”
Thus did the woman named Loie Fuller (born Mary-Louise Fuller), begin “what was to become an unbroken thirty-year reign as one of Europe’s most wildly celebrated dancers.” Fuller was “the only female entertainer to have her own pavilion” at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, writes Natalie Lemie at Artsy. “Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec featured her in a number of prints; Auguste Rodin commissioned a series of photographs of the dancer with plans to sculpt her; and the Lumière brothers released a film about her in 1897.”
Fuller’s dance personified Art Nouveau, expressing its elegant, flowing lines in her billowing silk gowns, which she moved by means of bamboo sewn into her sleeves. As she danced “colored lights were projected onto the flowing fabric, and as she twirled, she seemed to metamorphose into elements from the natural world: a flower, a butterfly, a tongue of flame.” Everyone came to see her. The Folies, which “typically attracted working class patrons,” now had aristocratic newcomers lining up outside.
See the serpentine dance that launched her career at the top in the Lumière Brothers’ 1897 film and below it in a colorized excerpt, with the bewitching music of Sigur Ros added for effect. Other films and clips here from other early cinema pioneers show the medium’s embrace of Fuller’s choreography. Ironically, none of this footage, it seems, shows Fuller herself, but only her imitators. “Unfortunately none of the surviving films seem to contain a performance by the original dancer/choreographer,” notes cinema history channel Magical Motion Museum, “despite some of them carrying her name in the title or otherwise crediting her as the dancer.”
Her name carried a lot of weight. Fuller was not only a celebrated dancer, but also a manager, producer, and lighting designer with “over a dozen patents related to her costumes and innovations in stage lighting.” (She was so interested in the “luminous properties” of radium that she sought out and “befriended its discoverers, Pierre and Marie Curie.”) By 1908, however, she had left behind some of these elaborate stage effects to focus on “natural dancing’—dance inspired by nature, which was the forerunner of modern dance.”
And she had taken on a young dancer in her company named Isadora Duncan, often referred to as the “Mother of Modern Dance.” Fuller deserves credit, too, but she didn’t seem to care about this overmuch. She was, notes Oberlin College dance professor Ann Cooper Albright, “way more interested in making things happen than creating a name for herself.” Fame came as a byproduct of her creativity rather than its sought-after reward. She was still renowned after she left the stage, and given a retrospective at The Louvre in 1924.
Fuller continued to work behind the scenes after the Art Nouveau movement gave way to new modernisms and supported and inspired younger artists until her death in 1928. Her work deserves a prominent place in the history of modern dance, but Fuller herself “was—and remains—elusive,” Lemie writes, “something of a phantom.” Others might have stolen, borrowed, or imitated the serpentine dance, but Lois Fuller became it, going beyond competition and into a realm of magic.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Virtual Choir: Watch a Choir Conductor Digitally Unite 3500 Singers from Around the World
For decades we’ve been hearing promises about how communication technology will one day eliminate distance itself, making everyone around the globe feel as if they might as well be in the same room. Such a future would have its downside as well as its upside, but even now, approaching the third decade of the 21st century, it hasn’t quite arrived yet. Nevertheless, we’ve already grown so used to the idea of real-time global collaboration that it takes an extraordinarily ambitious project to let us step back and appreciate the technological reality that makes it possible. Take, for example, conductor Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, whose performance of Whitacre’s own piece “Lux Arumque” appears above.
“Virtual,” here, is a bit of a misnomer, encouraging as it does Gibsonian visions of the 100-percent digital voices of synthetic singers resonating purely in cyberspace. And while Whitacre’s project wouldn’t have been possible without streaming digital audio and video technology — as well as the infrastructure of what we may as well still call cyberspace — it begins with the real voices of 100-percent analog humans.
185 such humans, to be precise, based in twelve countries, and all of them visible on their separate screens as Whitacre plays the role of conductor on his own. The much larger-scale performance of “Water Night,” a piece composed for the poetry of Octavio Paz, brings together 3,746 videos from 73 countries, necessitating a credits sequence longer than the piece itself.
The Virtual Choir grew, as many such immense works do, from a small seed: “It all started with this one young girl who sent me this video of herself singing one of my choral pieces,” says Whitacre in this video on the preparation for the Virtual Choir’s “Sleep” video. “I was struck so hard by the beauty, the intimacy of it, the sweetness of it, and I thought, ‘Boy, it would be amazing if we could get 100 people to do this and cut it all together.” The experience of assembling this virtual choir, or even hearing it, shows that “singing together and making music together is a fundamental human experience,” and on a scale hardly imaginable a generation or two ago. But on the most basic level, even this new way of making music is merely an expansion of the oldest way of making music: with one human voice, then another, and another.
via Swiss Miss
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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 Facebook.
Read More...Watch the Buddhism-Inspired Video for Leonard Cohen’s Newly-Released Song, “Happens to the Heart”
Leonard Cohen had an intimate relationship with despair. “I’ve seen the future,” he deadpanned, “Brother, it is murder.” But for many people, there is no one from whom we’d rather hear the news. In her harrowing essay “Facing Extinction,” meditation teacher and former climate journalist Catherine Ingram frames the catastrophe of climate change with Cohen’s lyrics and the many conversations she had with him before his death in 2016.
Cohen “understood human nature and assumed we would do ourselves in,” Ingram writes. Yet, with his razor-sharp gallows wit, he delivered his grim prophecies with deep love and concern. Confronting her own despair, Ingram asked the ailing poet for advice on how to wake up people who’d rather tune it all out. “There are things,” he said, “we don’t tell the children.”
Coming from someone else, this might sound supremely patronizing. From Cohen, it reminds me of what Japanese Zen master Dogen called “grandmother mind”—protective, unconditional compassion for others who may not, and may never, be ready to take in the facts. It also speaks of someone living with clinical depression, carrying the weight of the world. Cohen once called the condition a lifelong “background of anguish and anxiety.”
He met his suffering with meditation, practicing Rinzai Zen for decades and living as a monk for five years at the Mount Baldy monastery in Los Angeles. This period provides the inspiration for the new video above, directed by Daniel Askill, that dramatizes Cohen’s transformation from grief to “ordinary silence,” the meaning of his Japanese ordination name, Jikan.
Askill calls the video a “quiet, symbolic narrative that charts the letting go of ego and the trappings of fame.” The interpretation is “straightforward—almost pious,” says Matthew Gindin at Tricycle, and also “an intelligent update and homage” to imagery from Cohen’s first album.
The song, “Happens to the Heart” is the first on “an unexpected harvest of new songs” released on the posthumous album Thanks for the Dance, coming November 22. “Happens to the Heart,” is a distillation of classic Cohen themes: the weariness of pleasure, cosmic absurdity, compassion, and despair.
I had no trouble betting
On the flood against the ark
You see I knew about the ending
What happens to the heart
Its title refrain turns each stanza into a case for how and why to care, investigating the mind’s lifetime of turnings from “the heart”—the constant splitting in two that Zen sees as the source of suffering. “I fought for something final,” Cohen intones at the song’s end, “not the right to disagree.”
Cohen talks about his journey into the monastery in the interview further up. “Maybe this whole activity,” the formal practice of Zen, “is a response to a sense of despair that I’ve always had.… By and large, I didn’t have what it took to really enjoy my success, or my celebrity. I was never able to locate it. I was never able to use it.” He learned how to disassociate and quarantine himself.
In the prison of the gifted
I was friendly with the guards
So I never had to witness
What happens to the heart
In the austerities of the monastery, Cohen discovered “a voluptuous sense of economy that you can’t find anywhere else,” a daily practice “necessary to open the heart to the fact that you’re not alone,” even if, as he says wryly in “The Goal,” above—the first release from Thanks for the Dance—you “can’t stop the rain, can’t stop the snow.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...A Schoolhouse Rock-Inspired Guide to Impeachment
How does a bill become a law? You can’t hear the question and not hum a few bars from Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill.” The groovy cartoon civics lesson was for millions the first they learned about the legislative process. Ask another question, however, like “how does impeachment work,” and you may hear more crickets than 70’s educational TV jingles.
Surely we took something from Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial besides cigars, stained blue dresses, and the spectacle of morally compromised politicians wagging their fingers at a morally compromised politician? Surely we’ve all read the Watergate transcripts, and can quote more from that history than Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” (muttered before he resigned instead of facing the charges)?
Maybe not. Despite the talk of closed-door hearings and conflicted jurors, many of us have not paid close attention to the particulars of the process, given that impeachment trials can make for such compellingly broad political theater. And we never got our Schoolhouse Rock impeachment episode. Until now.
Seeing as how the president faces public, televised impeachment hearings next week, there may be no more opportune time to get caught up on some details with Jonathan Coulton’s Schoolhouse Rock-inspired “The Good Fight.” Its animation style and catchy tune recalls the 70s educational series, but Coulton doesn’t address the kids at home as his primary audience.
“Your tiny hands may scratch and claw,” sings Coulton, “but nobody’s above the law.” You won’t win any prizes for guessing who this means—a person in need of a childlike explainer on basic government, it seems. More verbal jabs are thrown, and the alleged crimes enumerated, ending with treason (and a misplaced, anachronistic hammer and sickle by animators Head Gear Animation). The video finally gets into the impeachment process over a minute in, past the halfway mark.
Viewers might find the first half emotionally satisfying, with its characterization of impeached presidents as wayward children in need of correction by a swaggering Constitution and a sassy band of founders. It’s cute but leaves precious little time for learning how this accountability process is supposed to work. Coulton rushes through the explanation, and you may find yourself skipping back to hear it several times.
Never fear: Google—or the search engine of your choice—is here to ferry you to thousands of guides to the impeachment process. “The Good Fight” isn’t, after all, actually a Schoolhouse Rock ad, but a fun civic-minded reminder to everyone that the president is not above the law, and that Congress is entitled by the Constitution to hold the holder of that office, whomever they may be, accountable. An explainer by Vox appears below:
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch Nirvana Go Through Rehearsals for Their Famous MTV Unplugged Sessions: “Polly,” “The Man Who Sold the World” & More (1993)
“Fame is a prison,” tweeted Lady Gaga, and many Twitter wars ensued. She was only echoing an old sentiment passed down through the entertainment ages, from Greta Garbo (“I detest crowds”) to Don Johnson. The emotional toll of celebrity is so well-known as to have become a standard, almost cliché, theme in storytelling, and no recent artist has exemplified the tortured, reluctant celebrity more prominently than Kurt Cobain.
Cobain may have wanted to be famous when Nirvana broke out of Washington State and signed with major label Geffen, but he did not want the kind of thing he got. At the end 1993, when the band recorded their MTV Unplugged in New York special, he seemed positively suffocated by stardom. “We knew Cobain didn’t seem all that happy being a rock star,” recalls music journalist David Browne, who sat in the audience for that legendary performance, “and that Nirvana was essentially acquiescing to industry dictates by taping one of these shows.”
Cobain’s rare talent was to take his bitterness, despair, and rage and turn them back into deftly arranged melodic songs, stripped down in “one of the greatest live albums ever,” writes Andrew Wallace Chamings at The Atlantic. “An unforgettable document of raw tension and artistic genius. While intimacy was an intended part of the [Unplugged] concept… parts of the Nirvana set at Sony’s Hells Kitchen studio feel so personal it’s awkward.”
The performance reveals “a singer uncomfortable in his own skin, through addiction and depression” and the continued demands that he make nice for the crowds. The clipped interactions between Cobain and his bandmates, especially Dave Grohl, have become as much a part of the Nirvana Unplugged mythology as that frumpy green thrift-store cardigan (which recently sold at auction for $137,500).
Kurt’s disheveled crankiness may have been part of Nirvana’s act, but he also never seemed more authentically himself than in these performances, and it’s riveting, if painful, to see and hear. Five months later, he was dead, and. Unplugged would become Nirvana’s first posthumous release in November 1994. In the quarter century since, “accounts have emerged,” writes Browne, that show exactly “what was taking place in the days leading up to that taping.”
“The rehearsals were tense,” Browne continues, “MTV brass weren’t thrilled when the promised guests turned out to be the Meat Puppets and not, say, anyone from Pearl Jam. Cobain was going through withdrawal that morning.” And yet every song came together in one take—only one of three Unplugged specials in which that had ever happened. “The entire performance made you feel as if Cobain would perhaps survive…. The quiet seemed to be his salvation, until it wasn’t.”
Marking the album’s 25th anniversary this month, Geffen has rereleased Unplugged in New York both digitally and as a 2 LP set, announcing the event with more behind-the-scenes glimpses in the rehearsal footage here, previously only available on DVD. At the top, see the band practice “Polly,” and see a frustrated Grohl, whom Cobain considered leaving out of the show entirely, smoke and joke behind the scowling singer.
Further up, see Cobain strain at the vocals in “Come as You Are,” while Grohl shows off his newfound restraint and the band makes the song sound as watery and wobbly as it does fully electrified. Above, Cobain and guitarist Pat Smear work out their dynamic on Bowie’s “The Man Whole Sold the World,” while cellist Lori Goldston helps them create “the prettiest noise the band has ever made,” writes Chamings. Even 25 years on, “there is no way of listening to Unplugged in New York without invoking death; it’s in every note.” Somehow, this grim intensity made these performances the most vital of Nirvana’s career.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...An MRI Shows How a Singer Sings Two Tones at Once (With the Music of Mozart and Brian Eno)
When people hear Anna-Maria Hefele sing, they wonder how she does it, and not just because of her impressive traditional chops. “While most of us struggle to voice one clear, distinct note,” writes the Independent’s Christopher Hooton, the polyphonic overtone singer Hefele “can sing two at once, and move them around in separate scales.” Also known as “throat singing,” this technique “allows her to establish a fundamental note and then move the overtone above it through different notes, creating an astounding, ethereal effect.” With nothing more than what nature gave her, in other words, Hefele manages to achieve a vocal effect more striking than most anything heard as a result of even today’s most complicated digital processes.
But what, exactly, is going on when she sings? These two videos, recorded with Hefele performing inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine at the Institute for Musician’s Medicine at the University Medical Center Freiburg, shed light on the mechanics of polyphonic overdone singing. “What you see in this dynamic MRI-recording is the tongue movement in the vocal tract while doing overtone singing and normal singing,” says the description.
“The positions of the tongue forms the resonance cavities which delete all not-wanted overtones in the sound of the voice at a certain point in time, and then amplify a single overtone that is left, which can be heard as a separate note above the fundamental.” It has, in other words, as much to do with suppressing all the tones you don’t want to sing as with emphasizing the ones you do. Hardly the easiest musical trick to pull off, much less inside an environment as unforgivingly noisy as an MRI machine.
But you can still learn the basic techniques, and from Hefele herself at that: previously here on Open Culture we’ve featured Hefele’s own demonstration of and how-to lessons on overtone singing. No matter how well we ourselves learn to sing two notes at once, though, we’d nevertheless have little idea what’s going on to let us make such sounds without these revealing MRI videos. (Others have similarly exposed the inner workings of beatboxing and opera singing.) The footage also underscores the respectable musical taste of Hefele herself or her collaborators in this research project, selecting as they have the musical examples of “Sehnsucht nach dem Frühlinge” by Hefele’s countryman Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and “By This River” from singing advocate Brian Eno’s classic LP Before and After Science — though you might call this an example of music made during science.
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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 Facebook.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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