LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman Creates a New Podcast Offering Wisdom on Nurturing & Scaling New Businesses
How do you create and eventually scale a successful business? It’s a complicated question. And you can do worse than get answers from Reid Hoffman. He’s currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. But you probably know him best as the co-founder of LinkedIn, the professional social network site recently acquired by Microsoft for $26 billion dollars. In his new podcast, Masters of Scale, Hoffman looks at how companies grow from zero users to a gazillion by interviewing fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have crossed that bridge. Guests include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg & Sheryl Sandberg, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, and Google’s Eric Schmidt, among others.
Even if you work in a business with more modest aspirations, there’s some wisdom you can take away from these wide-ranging conversations. Hoffman’s conversation with Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky (above) about hand-crafting customer experiences would help you run almost any business. You can find the Masters of Scale podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Entrepreneur.com, Spotify, and Google Play. Also find courses from other seasoned entrepreneurs right below.
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 to Start a Start-Up: A Free Course from Y Combinator Taught at Stanford
Seth Godin’s Startup School: A Free Mini-Course for New Entrepreneurs
Peter Thiel’s Stanford Course on Startups: Read the Lecture Notes Free Online
Start Your Startup with Free Stanford Courses and Lectures
Download Marc Andreessen’s Influential Blog (“Pmarca”) as a Free eBook
150 Free Online Business Courses
Read More...When Bowie & Jagger’s “Dancing in the Street” Music Video Becomes a Silent Film
You might remember it. Back in 1985, Mick Jagger and David Bowie recorded “Dancing in the Street” to raise money for Live Aid, the famine relief mega-concerts organized by Bob Geldof. Originally written by Marvin Gaye, and first made famous by Martha and the Vandellas in 1964, “Dancing in the Street” topped the British charts when Bowie and Jagger recorded their version in 13 short hours. The collaboration also yielded what’s possibly the worst music video ever made. Or so this survey by The Guardian would conclude. NME ranks it as the 11th worst of all-time.
Shot by David Mallet at the London Docklands, the original video (see below) features “Bowie in an oversized yellow raincoat and leopardish jumpsuit and Jagger in yellow sneakers and a flouncy electric-green blouse,” writes Mark Kurlansky in his book, Ready For a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem.
He adds, “It is hard to understand what is going on in this video of two men dancing and hopping around each other.” And if you turn the sound off, it only gets worse … if that’s possible.
Above, see what happened when writer & director Strack Azar created a “silent” version of the Jagger/Bowie video last year. It’s laugh-out-loud funny at times. It’s also a good reminder that when you watch something visual, you can’t discount the impact that the soundtrack makes on the total experience.
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:
David Bowie Releases 36 Music Videos of His Classic Songs from the 1970s and 1980s
Read More...Relax with 8 Hours of Classical Space Music: From Richard Strauss & Haydn, to Brian Eno, Philip Glass & Beyond
If I had one piece of advice to pass on to a younger generation it would be this: listen to more space rock. The 60s/70s subgenre of progressive/psychedelic rock gets its name as much from its subject matter as from its loose, hypnotic, futuristic sonic character—“Third Stone from the Sun,” “Space Oddity,” “Interstellar Overdrive,” “Dark Side of the Moon,” “Silver Machine”… you know…. It mellows you out, man, something everyone could use right now, and inspires visions of a groovier future, though not without the occasional dystopic edge.
Alternately, I would recommend that everyone acquire a collection of cosmic jazz, the Afrofuturist genre pioneered by Sun Ra and John and Alice Coltrane. But maybe you don’t like space rock or free jazz, yet you still dream about space? Maybe you prefer more classical, minimalist, or ambient fare? Never fear, we’ve got a soundtrack for you—one sure to mellow you out and inspire you, whoever you are.
Created to celebrate Stephen Hawking’s 75th birthday this past January, the “Space-Themed Classical Music” Playlist below draws together pieces you’ll recognize from classic sci-fi films, like Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra; pieces written especially for such films—such as John Williams’ E.T. score and Jerry Goldsmith’s main title for Alien; and music inspired by space themes, such as Brian Eno’s “Under Stars” and Judith Lang Zaimont’s Jupiter’s Moons. The Spotify playlist contains a total of 75 tracks of space-themed or inspired classical works. (If you need Spotify’s free software download it here.) The YouTube version at the top only has 62 of those tracks.
The compilation does give a little nod to space rock with the inclusion, at the very end, of Pink Floyd’s “Keep Talking” from The Division Bell. And the penultimate track nods to the very space-inspired genre of trip-hop, with John D. Boswell’s Carl Sagan- and Stephen Hawking-sampling “A Glorious Dawn.” I don’t know about you, but Sagan’s mellifluous voice—autotuned or no—never fails to brighten my mood and make me more curious about what’s out there.
Of course, apart from sci-fi soundtracks, there is a long tradition of composers writing space-inspired music, stretching back before scientists like Sagan and his Russian counterparts helped send astronauts and satellites into orbit. Classical station WQXR has put together a list of 11 such composers: from the 18th century Franz Joseph Haydn to the 20th century Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Then there’s Gustav Holst, who wrote a suite about all 8 planets between 1914 and 1916—before Pluto’s discovery (and later disqualification). I’ve always been partial to the bombastic “Jupiter,” above. Even if you haven’t heard it, Holst’s suite will sound very familiar, having inspired everything from video game music, to the Rugby World Cup theme, to the score for Braveheart. It has also—showing that classical space music is a bona fide subgenre in conversation with itself—directly influenced John Williams’ Star Wars music and the main theme of Battlestar Galactica. In whatever form it takes, I think we could all do with a lot more space music in our lives. Listen, for example, to the excerpt from Alan Silvestri’s score for the 2014 Cosmos reboot, below, and tell me otherwise. For another flavor of a spaceman’s soundtrack, check out Space.com’s “Astronaut’s Playlist” here.
Related Content:
The Classical Music in Stanley Kubrick’s Films: Listen to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist
Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Provides a Soundtrack for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Why Catchy Songs Get Stuck in Our Brains: New Study Explains the Science of Earworms
What’s your current earworm?
For obvious yet sad reasons, “Raspberry Beret” and “Ashes to Ashes” have tunneled into my brain in the past year. Can’t seem to shake ‘em loose, though it certainly could be worse. Wander through a shopping mall (while they still exist), go to a chain restaurant or grocery store. You may pick up an unwanted passenger—the tune of a song you loathe, yet cannot for the life of you forget.
But can the Prince/Bowie soundtrack in my mind properly be called an “earworm”? According to researchers at Durham University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Tubingen, this is a scientific question. Music psychologist Kelly Jakubowski of Durham University and her colleagues published a study last year titled “Dissecting an Earworm: Melodic Features of Song Popularity Predict Involuntary Musical Imagery.” In it, they define the properties of songs that produce “involuntary” recall.
You can read the study yourself here. It begins with a summary of the previous research on “the concepts of musical ‘catchiness’ and song ‘hooks,’” as well as the advice successful musicians often give for writing “hooks” that will stick with listeners for life. It’s not as easy as it looks, though one of the hallmarks of a successful earworm is simplicity. As Joanna Klein writes at the New York Times, Jakubowski and her colleagues “found that earworm songs tended to be fast, with a common, simple melodic structure that generally went up and down and repeated, like ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’”
However, earworms also unsettle our expectations of simple melodies, with “surprising, unusual intervals,” as in the chorus of Lady Gaga’s insidious “Bad Romance” or, bane of every guitar store employee, Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Research on earworms began, notes Klein, in 2001, “when James Kellaris, a marketing researcher and composer at the University of Cincinnati translated the German word for earwig, Ohrwürmer, into that ‘cognitive itch’ he called an ‘earworm.’”
Kellaris estimated that around “98 percent of people experience this phenomenon at some point in time.” In order to analyze the earworm, Jakubowski and her team collected lists of songs from 3,000 study participants. They attempted to isolate variables such as “popularity and recency” that “could affect the likelihood of the song becoming stuck in the mind.” Before controlling for these factors, “Bad Romance” appeared at the top of a list of “Songs Most Frequently Named as Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI).”
It’s a tune that might—under certain circumstances, be used as a weapon—along with two other Gaga songs at numbers 8 and 9. See the full list below:
1. “Bad Romance,” Lady Gaga
2. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” Kylie Minogue
3. “Don’t Stop Believing,” Journey
4. “Somebody That I Used to Know,” Gotye
5. “Moves Like Jagger,” Maroon 5
6. “California Gurls,” Katy Perry
7. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Queen
8. “Alejandro,” Lady Gaga
9. “Poker Face,” Lady Gaga
The study goes on, in some technical detail, to account for chart position, length of time on the charts, etc. Unless you’re familiar with the methods and jargon of this particular kind of psychological research, it’s a bit difficult to follow. But Klein summarizes some of the upshot: “While it may feel like earworms exist only to annoy you, researchers say they may actually serve a purpose.… earworms could be remnants of how we learned before written language, when information was more often passed through song.”
The survival of this mechanism can be used for good or ill—as was so humorously illustrated in my favorite scene from Pixar’s psycho-dramedy for kids, Inside Out. Advertising jingles, annoying pop songs that we mindlessly buy and stream because we can’t stop singing them, and—not least—perhaps the most effective earworms of all time, TV sitcom theme songs.
The heyday of unforgettable theme songs, the 80s, left us with some real gems: Klein names Growing Pains (“show me that smile again!”). But I’m guessing we could get together in the thousands for an impromptu chorus of Cheers, Charles in Charge, Family Ties, Family Matters, Step by Step, or my new earworm Silver Spoons (thanks YouTube). As these examples—and so many hundreds more—prove, musical earworms have been used by clever hacks to hack into our brains for quite some time now. When songwriters we like do it, we can at least enjoy the involuntary intrusions.
Feel free to share your own unshakeable earworms in the comments section below.
Related Content:
The Neuroscience & Psychology of Procrastination, and How to Overcome It
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch Matthew McConaughey’s Audition Tape for Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, the Indie Comedy That Made Him a Star
In 1992, Richard Linklater faced one of the most formidable challenges in the life of any successful filmmaker: following up on his breakthrough. The previous year he’d become an art-house star with Slacker, an examination of the various lives aimlessly but amusingly lived at the Generation‑X periphery of Austin, Texas, a film whose deliberately wandering form perfectly matched its substance. That got him enough of a profile to command the relatively huge budget of $8 million (versus Slacker’s $23,000) to make Dazed and Confused, the story of a bunch of Austin teenagers on the last day of high school in 1976. While the movie hardly turned blockbuster, it did help solidify Linklater’s place among the American auteurs — and almost accidentally launched the career of one of today’s biggest movie stars.
Matthew McConaughey stole Dazed and Confused’s show, as many critics and fans saw it, as David Wooderson, an early-twentysomething who still prefers the company of high-schoolers. You can watch a piece of his original audition tape, made available by the Criterion Collection, at the top of the post. “He is a character we’re all too familiar with in the movies,” wrote the Austin Chronicle’s Marjorie Baumgarten, “but McConaughey nails this guy without a hint of condescension or whimsy, claiming this character for all time as his own.”
Some of the most memorable moments of his performance, which you can see in its final form in the clips just above and below, owe to its improvisatory nature: originally a small part with just a couple of lines, the character of Wooderson grew with every resonant on-set invention.
“Of the many great people I met in the process of casting this movie, you were selected because I had a gut impulse about you,” wrote Linklater in the letter that accompanied the 1970s mixtape he sent out to inspire Dazed and Confused’s cast. “Know your character so we can forget about it and build something new, something special, in its likeness. As I’ve said before, if the final movie is 100% word-for-word what’s in the script, it will be a massive underachievement.” And in a sense, McConaughey’s casting itself, as he and casting director Don Phillips told it in a Texas Monthly oral history of the movie, happened improvisationally as well. It came as the result of a chance encounter at an Austin hotel, where Phillips spotted “this really good-looking girl at the end of the bar with this pretty cool-looking guy.”
That cool-looking guy was, of course, McConaughey, who’d turned up for the drink discount from the bartender, his film-school buddy. “Hey, man, the guy down at the end of the bar is in town producing a film,” said the bartender to the aspiring actor by way of a tip, and before they know it, in McConaughey’s words, “We’re talking about life and women and some great golf hole he’s played.” By the time of their ejection from the bar, they’d developed enough instant camaraderie for Phillips to offer McConaughey an audition: “Maybe we’ll put you on tape to see what you look like.” Though Linklater at first balked at his fellow Texan’s excessive handsomeness, he eventually came to realize his suitability for the part, and the rest — up to and including McConaughey’s reprisal as a fortysomething but otherwise unchanged Wooderson in the music video for The Black Widows’ “Synthesizers” — is cinema history.
Related Content:
Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slacker, the Classic Gen‑X Indie Film
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch The Cure’s First TV Appearance in 1979 … Before The Band Acquired Its Signature Goth Look
Many fans of the Cure first encountered them with 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, a double album filled with bouncy pop confections like “Why Can’t I Be You?” and “Just Like Heaven,” or with Disintegration, 1989’s swirling atmospheric masterpiece that nails the sound of severe depressive episodes. On these albums, Robert Smith & company’s coverage of each “point on a bipolar scale” wasn’t an affectation—it was a lifestyle. Or so it seemed to the average listener given the band’s peculiar look: pancake makeup and weeping willow hair that gave them the air of stage clowns in a Restoration madhouse.
So associated are they with an arthouse look and new wave pop-to-tortured goth sound that many people find it jarring to discover just how punk they once were. Though able from the start to rip out pop gems like “Boys Don’t Cry,” the band inhabited a harder-edged territory in their first few years. In the late 70s, along with The Damned, Joy Division, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, they carved out the space of British post-punk and new wave before there was any such thing as “goth.”
As you can see from their first TV appearance, at the top, the spare, spiky hooks and atmospherics that form the basis of their sound predated the distinctive look, one so easily packaged, copied, and parodied later on—and turned to excellent cinematic account by Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands and Sean Penn in This Must Be the Place.
The televised performance took place at Theatre de l’Empire in Paris on December 3rd of 1979, by which time the band had been already been together for several years, though they were still very young (Smith only 21), and had only just released their first studio album, Three Imaginary Boys. In the full performance, above, see them play the title track and their controversial, Camus-inspired, first single “Killing an Arab.” They open, in the first clip, with a new song that would appear on the next record, Seventeen Seconds. It’s one that presages the supremely moody ambiance of Disintegration, but without that album’s lyrical focus. Here, what would become “A Forest” is played as “At Night,” with entirely different lyrics.
In these early performances, we see how formidable The Cure was as a minimalist punk band, and how effective is Robert Smith’s angular guitar work, which earned him a spot in the touring version of Siouxsie and the Banshees that year as well. (See him play “Love in a Void” with them above in a ’79 television performance.) Like that band’s earliest work, The Cure drew directly on the raw energy of punk in both their musical and sartorial choices. Only later did they develop into the gloriously mopey goths fans know and love, as the 80s made more flamboyant demands on music fashion, apparently, and Smith became a more eccentric version of himself, turning his extreme introversion into a series of theatrical, tragicomic personas.
via Laughing Squid
Related Content:
Three-Hour Mixtape Offers a Sonic Introduction to Underground Goth Music
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Artificial Intelligence: A Free Online Course from MIT
Today we’re adding MIT’s course on Artificial Intelligence to our ever-growing collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. That’s because, to paraphrase Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, artificial intelligence (AI) is “not just in the first inning of a long baseball game, but at the stage where the very first batter comes up.” Look around, and you will find AI everywhere–in self driving cars, Siri on your phone, online customer support, movie recommendations on Netflix, fraud detection for your credit cards, etc. To be sure, there’s more to come.
Featuring 30 lectures, MIT’s course “introduces students to the basic knowledge representation, problem solving, and learning methods of artificial intelligence.” It includes interactive demonstrations designed to “help students gain intuition about how artificial intelligence methods work under a variety of circumstances.” And, by the end of the course, students should be able “to develop intelligent systems by assembling solutions to concrete computational problems; understand the role of knowledge representation, problem solving, and learning in intelligent-system engineering; and appreciate the role of problem solving, vision, and language in understanding human intelligence from a computational perspective.”
Taught by Prof. Patrick Henry Winston, the lectures can all be viewed above. Or watch them on YouTube and iTunes. Related course materials (including a syllabus) can be found on this MIT website. The textbook, available on Amazon, was written by Professor Winston.
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:
Free Online Computer Science Courses
Artificial Intelligence Program Tries to Write a Beatles Song: Listen to “Daddy’s Car”
Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
Read More...The Sounds of Blade Runner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Ridley Scott’s Futuristic World
Blade Runner, among its many other achievements, stands as quite possible the only 35-year-old science-fiction movie whose visual effects still hold up. Director Ridley Scott and his collaborators’ thoroughly realized vision of 2019 Los Angeles rewards a seemingly infinite number of viewings, revealing something new to the viewer each and every time. Yet the sheer amount to look at can also distract from all there is to listen to. For a visual medium, movies stand or fall to a surprising extent on the quality and design of their sound, and if Blade Runner remains convincing and compelling, it does so in large part not because of what see when we watch it, but what we hear.
This in addition to all it makes us think about, some of which the video essayist Evan Puschak, better known as Nerdwriter, explained in “Blade Runner: The Other Side of Modernity.” Apparently as big a fan of the film as we here at Open Culture, Puschak has also made another video essay focusing on the masterpiece’s aural dimension, “Listening to Blade Runner.”
As everyone interested in its making knows, Blade Runner wouldn’t quite have been Blade Runner without its music by Vangelis, a composer who used synthesizers (especially the legendary Yahama CS80) in a way seldom if ever heard at that time. But as Puschak points out, “the score isn’t laid on top of the visuals. It’s not a guide or an addition” but “baked into the DNA of the movie itself.”
Every piece of audio in Blade Runner, “including score, sound design, and dialogue,” is tightly integrated: “each blurs into the others.” Puschak shows us how, as in the scene above, the film keeps the audience unaware of “where the music ends and the world begins,” by matching the qualities of the music to the qualities of the space and light, incorporating “faint computer‑y noises,” and applying still-new digital reverberation technology Vangelis uses on both the music and the dialogue to “fold separate audio sources into one master track,” creating a “cohesive acoustic environment” that emphasizes different dimensions of sound at different times in different ways — in service, of course, to different elements of the story.
Though still active as a composer, Vangelis, alas, hasn’t returned to do the score for Blade Runner 2049, Dennis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated sequel coming out later this year. But the sonic world he created in 1982 has had a more recent tribute paid to it in the form of the unofficial so-called “Esper edition” of the Blade Runner soundtrack. The existing editions, say the two fans who assembled it, “never ‘got it right’ in terms of chronology‚ or thoroughness,” so, “like taking pieces from a puzzle‚ we decided to simply ‘cut and paste’ from all the exciting releases…‚ 1982 video‚ 1992 directors cut… and construct something fresh.” The nearly two-hour listening experience will underscore just how much putting in the right music and sound can do for a movie.
Conversely, watching the five minutes of Harrison Ford’s now-excised voiceovers from the original theatrical release below will underscore how much taking out certain sounds can do for one as well:
Related Content:
Stream 72 Hours of Ambient Sounds from Blade Runner: Relax, Go to Sleep in a Dystopian Future
How Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner Illuminates the Central Problem of Modernity
Watch an Animated Version of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner Made of 12,597 Watercolor Paintings
The Blade Runner Sketchbook Features The Original Art of Syd Mead & Ridley Scott (1982)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...
Watch Clouds Roil Through the Grand Canyon: A Beautiful Timelapse Film Captures a Rare Full Cloud Inversion
From producer and editor Harun Mehmedinovic comes a pretty breathtaking timelapse film of a rare phenomenon at the Grand Canyon. Writes Mehmedinovic:
Millions of visitors a year come to Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park, one of the seven natural wonders of the world and the most visited national park in the western United States. However, on extremely rare days when cold air is trapped in the canyon and topped by a layer of warm air, which in combination with moisture and condensation, form the phenomenon referred to as the full cloud inversion. In what resembles something between ocean waves and fast clouds, Grand Canyon is completely obscured by fog, making the visitors feel as if they are walking on clouds.
This video was filmed as part of SKYGLOW (skyglowproject.com), an ongoing crowdfunded quest to explore the effects and dangers of urban light pollution in contrast with some of the most incredible dark sky areas in North America. This project is being produced in collaboration with International Dark-Sky Association (darksky.org), a non-profit fighting for the preservation of night skies around the globe.
The film was shot on Canon 5DSR & 5DIII cameras and lenses. You can download high resolution stills via this zip file. Enjoy.
via Twisted Sifter
Related Content:
Mesmerizing Timelapse Film Captures the Wonder of Bees Being Born
Google Street View Takes You on a Panoramic Tour of the Grand Canyon
Albert Einstein Sports a Native American Headdress and a Peace Pipe at the Grand Canyon, 1931
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
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.
Advertise With Us
