Download 10,000 of the First Recordings of Music Ever Made, Courtesy of the University of California-Santa Barbara 

in History, Music | January 25th, 2023

Edison_Minstrel-Record

Three min­utes with the min­strels / Arthur Collins, S. H. Dud­ley & Ancient City. Edi­son Record. 1899.

Long before vinyl records, cas­sette tapes, CDs and MP3s came along, peo­ple first expe­ri­enced audio record­ings through anoth­er medi­um — through cylin­ders made of tin foil, wax and plas­tic. In recent years, we’ve fea­tured cylin­der record­ings from the 19th cen­tu­ry that allow you to hear the voic­es of Leo Tol­stoy, Tchaikovsky, Walt Whit­man, Otto von Bis­mar­ck and oth­er his­toric fig­ures. Those record­ings were orig­i­nal­ly record­ed and played on a cylin­der phono­graph invent­ed by Thomas Edi­son in 1877. But those were obvi­ous­ly just a hand­ful of the cylin­der record­ings pro­duced at the begin­ning of the record­ed sound era.

Thanks to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia-San­ta Bar­bara Cylin­der Audio Archive, you can now down­load or stream a dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of more than 10,000 cylin­der record­ings. “This search­able data­base,” says UCSB, “fea­tures all types of record­ings made from the late 1800s to ear­ly 1900s, includ­ing pop­u­lar songs, vaude­ville acts, clas­si­cal and oper­at­ic music, comedic mono­logues, eth­nic and for­eign record­ings, speech­es and read­ings.” You can also find in the archive a num­ber of “per­son­al record­ings,” or “home wax record­ings,” made by every­day peo­ple at home (as opposed to by record com­pa­nies).

If you go to this page, the record­ings are neat­ly cat­e­go­rized by genre, instru­ment, subject/theme and ethnicity/nation of ori­gin. You can lis­ten, for exam­ple, to record­ings of Jazz, Hawai­ian Music, Operas, and Fid­dle Tunes. Or hear record­ings fea­tur­ing the Man­dolin, Gui­tar, Bag­pipes and Ban­jo. Plus there are the­mat­i­cal­ly-arranged playlists here.

Host­ed by Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia-San­ta Bar­bara, the archive is sup­port­ed by fund­ing from the Insti­tute of Muse­um and Library Ser­vices, the Gram­my Foun­da­tion, and oth­er donors.

Above, hear a record­ing called “Three min­utes with the min­strels,” by Arthur Collins, released in 1899. Below that is “Alexan­der’s rag­time band med­ley,” fea­tur­ing the ban­jo play­ing of Fred Van Eps, released in 1913.

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Singers from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera Record Their Voic­es on Tra­di­tion­al Wax Cylin­ders

A Beer Bot­tle Gets Turned Into a 19th Cen­tu­ry Edi­son Cylin­der and Plays Fine Music

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

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Bell Telephone Launched a Mobile Phone During the 1940s: Watch Bell’s Film Showing How It Worked

in Film, History, Technology | January 24th, 2023

“Here comes a trail­er truck out on the open high­way, miles from the near­est town,” says the nar­ra­tor of the short film above. Sud­den­ly, it becomes “impor­tant for some­one to get in touch with the dri­vers of this out­fit. How can it be done?” Any mod­ern-day view­er would respond to this ques­tion in the same way: you just call the guys. But Mobile Tele­phones dates from the nine­teen-for­ties, well before the epony­mous devices were in wide use — about four decades, in fact, before even the mas­sive Motoro­la DynaT­AC 8000X came on the mar­ket. The idea of call­ing some­one not at home or the office, let alone a truck­er on the road, would have seemed the stuff of sci­ence fic­tion.

Yet the engi­neers at Bell had made it pos­si­ble, using a sys­tem that trans­mits con­ver­sa­tions “part­way by radio, part­way by tele­phone lines.” This neces­si­tat­ed “a num­ber of trans­mit­ting and receiv­ing sta­tions con­nect­ed to tele­phone lines,” installed “at inter­vals along the high­way so that one will always be in range of the mov­ing vehi­cle.”

As dra­ma­tized in Mobile Tele­phones, the process of actu­al­ly ring­ing up the dri­ver of a vehi­cle involves call­ing a clas­sic for­ties switch­board oper­a­tor and ask­ing her to make the con­nec­tion. But oth­er­wise, the process won’t feel entire­ly unfa­mil­iar to the mobile phone users today — that is, to the major­i­ty of the peo­ple in the world.

Cell­phones have become such an inte­gral part of life in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry that few of us real­ly feel the need to under­stand just how they work. But three quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry ago, the idea of tak­ing or mak­ing calls on the go was unfa­mil­iar enough that view­ers of a film like this would have want­ed the mechan­ics laid out in some detail. Sure­ly that held espe­cial­ly true for the indus­tri­al clients of Bel­l’s ear­ly mobile-tele­phone sys­tem, for whom its reli­able func­tion­al­i­ty would trans­late into greater prof­its. Tak­ing the longer view, this tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment marks, as the nar­ra­tor reminds us over swelling music, “one more step toward tele­phone ser­vice for any­one, any time, any­where”: a once-futur­is­tic vision that now sounds prac­ti­cal­ly mun­dane.

Relat­ed con­tent:

“When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones”: A 1920s Com­ic Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts Our Cell­phone-Dom­i­nat­ed Lives

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vin­tage Film

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

In 1953, a Tele­phone-Com­pa­ny Exec­u­tive Pre­dicts the Rise of Mod­ern Smart­phones and Video Calls

The First Cell­phone: Dis­cov­er Motorola’s DynaT­AC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

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Robots Are Carving Replicas of the Parthenon Marbles: Could They Help the Real Ancient Sculptures Return to Greece?

in Computer Science, Design, History, Museums, Technology | January 24th, 2023

Art forgery is a stur­dy trope of film and fic­tion. We’re all famil­iar with the spec­ta­cle of a rar­i­fied expert exam­in­ing a work, while a wealthy col­lec­tor anx­ious­ly wrings their hands near­by.

As Mag­gie Cao observes in the Guardian:

Forg­eries expose some of the art world’s most psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­plex fig­ures: the col­lec­tor and the coun­ter­feit­er. What com­pels the pro­to­typ­i­cal col­lec­tor to accu­mu­late objects of beau­ty is usu­al­ly a pecu­liar devo­tion to the pow­er of sin­gu­lar­i­ty. The col­lec­tor wor­ships art’s pow­er to move us, a pow­er we imag­ine emanates from unique objects. Mean­while, what moti­vates the coun­ter­feit­er is an undue con­fi­dence in the pos­si­bil­i­ties of repli­ca­tion. To deceive a view­er with a copy is to affirm that copy’s inter­change­abil­i­ty with the orig­i­nal.

But what if art forgery can be used for good?

That’s the hope of Roger Michel, founder of the Insti­tute for Dig­i­tal Archae­ol­o­gy, who employs tech­no­log­i­cal advances to pre­serve cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant objects and offer acces­si­ble tac­tile expe­ri­ences to those with vision impair­ment.

Short­ly after ISIS destroyed the Mon­u­men­tal Arch of Palymyra, he har­nessed 3D tech­nol­o­gy to recre­ate the 1800-year old land­mark in two-thirds scale Egypt­ian mar­ble.

The pub­lic was able to get up close and per­son­al with the mod­el in var­i­ous loca­tions around the world, includ­ing New York’s City Hall Park, Florence’s Piaz­za del­la Sig­no­ria, and London’s Trafal­gar Square, where Michel enjoyed watch­ing passers­by touch­ing and pho­tograph­ing the repli­ca Arch:

There are guys in Carn­a­by Street suits mixed with young peo­ple in hip-hop clothes and Syr­i­ans in tra­di­tion­al dress. It’s the cross­roads of human­i­ty, and that was what Palym­ra was.

Michel is also striv­ing to con­vince the British Muse­um that all will not be lost, should it choose to repa­tri­ate the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Mar­bles to Greece, much as the Smith­son­ian returned 29 Benin bronzes tak­en dur­ing an 1897 British raid to the Nation­al Com­mis­sion for Muse­ums and Mon­u­ments in Nige­ria.

Michel made his case with a robot­i­cal­ly carved fac­sim­i­le of the head of the Horse of Selene, above, which is all the more remark­able when one learns that he was work­ing from pho­tos tak­en on an iPhone and iPad while vis­it­ing the gallery in which it is dis­played, after the muse­um refused his request for an offi­cial scan.

The item descrip­tion on the museum’s collection’s por­tal notes that the Horse of Selene was pur­chased from Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, who took pos­ses­sion of it while serv­ing as Britain’s ambas­sador to Ottoman Turkey from 1799–1803.

(The descrip­tion neglects to men­tion that rather than allow him to adorn his home with this and oth­er ill-got­ten antiq­ui­ties, a par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tee ordered Lord Elgin to sell his vast col­lec­tion to the British gov­ern­ment for £35,000, which is how they wound up in the muse­um.)

Orig­i­nal­ly a part of the Parthenon’s east ped­i­ment, the Horse of Selene is such a fan favorite that the muse­um shop sells an “exquis­ite” hand-cast resin repli­ca for £1,650, promis­ing that it will make “a show-stop­ping point of focus in any home.”

Perhaps…though we’re will­ing to bet it can’t match the verisimil­i­tude of the tiny chips and chis­el marks painstak­ing­ly cap­tured by the robot carv­er, which took about about 8 days to cre­ate a rough mod­el once it received the scans, fol­lowed by some 3 weeks of refin­ing. The robot got an assist at the very end from human arti­sans, whose hand­i­work Michel calls “the cru­cial 3 to 5 per­cent.”

Gia­co­mo Mas­sari, founder of Robot­or, who part­nered with Michel on this recre­ation, vaunts the pre­ci­sion tech­nol­o­gy makes pos­si­ble:

You can rec­og­nize every scratch. You can see the flaws of the stone and you can see the chal­lenges our col­leagues from 2,000 years ago were fac­ing. It’s like going back in time — you can feel the strug­gles of the artist.

The muse­um brass appears unmoved by the prospect of swap­ping repli­cas, no mat­ter how excel­lent, for the frieze pan­els, sculp­tures, archi­tec­tur­al frag­ments and oth­er trea­sures of antiq­ui­ty Elgin shipped home from the Acrop­o­lis in the ear­ly 1800s, though the New York Times report­ed last week that secret talks with Greece’s prime min­is­ter may indi­cate the two par­ties are edg­ing clos­er to res­o­lu­tion.

This col­lec­tion has been a cul­tur­al hot pota­to since Lord Byron, tour­ing the Parthenon short­ly after Elgin made off with so many its trea­sures, denounced his avarice in a poem titled The Curse of Min­er­va:

Lo! here, despite of war and wast­ing fire,

I saw suc­ces­sive Tyran­nies expire;

‘Scaped from the rav­age of the Turk and Goth,

Thy coun­try sends a spoil­er worse than both.

Sur­vey this vacant, vio­lat­ed fane;

Recount the relics torn that yet remain:

‘These’ Cecrops placed, ‘this’ Per­i­cles adorned,

‘That’ Adri­an reared when droop­ing Sci­ence mourned.

What more I owe let Grat­i­tude attest—

Know, Alar­ic and Elgin did the rest.

That all may learn from whence the plun­der­er came,

The insult­ed wall sus­tains his hat­ed name:

For Elgin’s fame thus grate­ful Pal­las pleads,

Below, his name—above, behold his deeds!

The New York Times quot­ed a mid­dle-aged Lon­don bus dri­ver who voiced the opin­ion, as did the vast major­i­ty of respon­dents to a British sur­vey, that the Parthenon sculp­tures should be returned to their land of ori­gin, remark­ing, “It’s like the Crown Jew­els. If some­one took those, you’d want them back, wouldn’t you?”

His argu­ment is a hard one to refute in an age when the inno­v­a­tive tech­ni­cal solu­tions pro­mot­ed by Michel and the Insti­tute for Dig­i­tal Archae­ol­o­gy cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties that Lord Elgin and muse­um vis­i­tors of yore could nev­er have envi­sioned.

The pub­lic invi­ta­tion to the Novem­ber 2022 unveil­ing of the Selene Horse repli­ca stat­ed that “Britain’s stew­ard­ship of the Elgin mar­bles embod­ies a psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­plex sto­ry of obses­sion, pos­ses­sion, and assim­i­la­tion — so far with­out res­o­lu­tion”, ask­ing:

Might per­fect copies, ren­dered in sacred Pen­tel­ic mar­ble, sug­gest a pos­si­ble path for­ward?

Read­ers, what say you?

Relat­ed Con­tent

John Oliver’s Show on World-Class Art Muse­ums & Their Loot­ed Art: Watch It Free Online

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Only Footage of Mark Twain: The Original & Digitally Restored Films Shot by Thomas Edison

in History, Literature | January 23rd, 2023

We know what Mark Twain looked like, and we think we know what he sound­ed like. Just above see what he looked like in motion, strolling around Storm­field, his house in Red­ding, Connecticut—signature white suit draped loose­ly around his frame, sig­na­ture cig­ar puff­ing white smoke between his fin­gers. After Twain’s leisure­ly walk along the house’s façade, we see him with his daugh­ters, Clara and Jean, seat­ed indoors. Below you can see the orig­i­nal murky ver­sion, fea­tured on our site way back in 2010. A dig­i­tal restora­tion (top) does won­ders for the watch­a­bil­i­ty of this price­less silent arti­fact, so vivid­ly cap­tur­ing the writer/contrarian/raconteur’s essence that you’ll find your­self reach­ing to turn the vol­ume up, expect­ing to hear that famil­iar cur­mud­geon­ly drawl.

Shot by Thomas Edi­son in 1909, the short film is most like­ly the only mov­ing image of Twain in exis­tence. We might assume that Edi­son also record­ed Twain’s voice, since we seem to know it so well, from por­tray­als of the great Amer­i­can humorist in pop cul­tur­al touch­stones like Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion and par­o­dies by Alec Bald­win and Val Kilmer.

Kilmer’s sur­pris­ing­ly fun­ny in the role, but he doesn’t come near the pitch per­fect imper­son­ation Hal Hol­brook had giv­en us for the bet­ter part of six­ty years in his mas­ter­ful Mark Twain Tonight. Holbrook’s vocal man­ner­isms have become a defin­i­tive mod­el for actors play­ing Twain on stage and screen.

Giv­en the num­ber of Twain vocal imper­son­ations out there, and Edis­on’s inter­est in doc­u­ment­ing the author, we might be sur­prised to learn that no orig­i­nal record­ings of his voice exist. Twain, we find out in the short film below, exper­i­ment­ed with audio record­ing tech­nol­o­gy, but aban­doned his efforts. It seems that none of the wax cylin­ders he worked with have survived—perhaps he destroyed them him­self.

As nar­ra­tor Rod Rawlings—himself a Twain imper­son­ator and afi­ciona­do—informs us, what we do have is a record­ing made in 1934 by actor and play­wright William Gillette,  an able mim­ic of Twain, his patron and long­time neigh­bor. Like Hol­brook, Gillette spent a good part of his career trav­el­ing from town to town play­ing Mark Twain. Below, you’ll hear Gillette address a class of stu­dents at Har­vard, first in his own voice, then in the voice of the author, read­ing from “The Cel­e­brat­ed Jump­ing Frog of Calav­eras Coun­ty.” Gillet­te’s per­for­mance is like­ly the clos­est we’ll ever come to hear­ing the voice of the real Twain, whose major works appear in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

Mark Twain’s Vicious­ly Fun­ny Mar­gin­a­lia Took Aim at Some Lit­er­ary Greats

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

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Watch Classic Performances by Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Japanese Band That Became One of the Most Innovative Electronic Music Acts of All Time

in Music | January 23rd, 2023


Music changes when tech­nol­o­gy changes. Few musi­cians have demon­strat­ed as keen an aware­ness of that fact as Haruo­mi Hosono, Yuk­i­hi­ro Taka­hashi, and Ryuichi Sakamo­to, who togeth­er as Yel­low Mag­ic Orches­tra (YMO) burst onto the scene mak­ing sounds that most lis­ten­ers of the late nine­teen-sev­en­ties had nev­er heard before — nev­er heard in a musi­cal con­text, at least. They’d nev­er seen a band employ a com­put­er pro­gram­mer, nor bring onstage a device like Roland’s MC‑8 Micro­com­pos­er, an ear­ly musi­cal sequencer designed strict­ly for stu­dio use. That YMO did­n’t hes­i­tate to make these uncon­ven­tion­al choic­es, and many oth­ers besides, won them years as the most pop­u­lar band in their native Japan.

It would be unimag­in­able for YMO to have emerged in any oth­er place or time. “Japan had long since remade itself as a post­war eco­nom­ic engine, but by the late 1970s it was becom­ing some­thing else: a glob­al emblem of tech­no-utopi­anism and futur­is­tic cool,” writes the New York Times’ Clay Risen. “Sony released the Walk­man in 1979, just as Ken­zo Taka­da and Issey Miyake were tak­ing over Paris fash­ion run­ways with their play­ful, vision­ary designs.”

Japan had become eco­nom­i­cal­ly, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, and cul­tur­al­ly for­mi­da­ble on a glob­al scale, and YMO were placed to become its ide­al rep­re­sen­ta­tives: they had the askew hip­ness and the cut­ting-edge sounds, but it was their sense of humor, evi­dent in the play­ful­ness of their music, that took the rest of the world by sur­prise.


You’ll find no bet­ter intro­duc­tion to YMO’s work than the hour-long YMO con­cert at the Nip­pon Budokan at the top of the post. It took place in 1983, not long before Hosono, Taka­hashi, and Sakamo­to packed the band up and returned to their already well-estab­lished solo careers. As a unit they’d achieved glob­al star­dom, play­ing for­eign venues like Los Ange­les’ Greek The­atre in 1979 and, unbe­liev­ably, going on Soul Train in 1980. Their ear­ly hit “Behind the Mask” even caught the atten­tion of Michael Jack­son, who record­ed his own ver­sion of the song for Thriller but left it unre­leased until 2010 — by which time YMO had reunit­ed to per­form in Japan, Europe, and Amer­i­ca, play­ing for new gen­er­a­tions of lis­ten­ers who had grown up immersed in their music, direct­ly or indi­rect­ly.


Influ­ences on YMO includ­ed the work of Bri­an Wil­son and Gior­gio Moroder, as well as music from India, Chi­na, the Caribbean, the late-fifties-ear­ly-six­ties “exot­i­ca” fad, and even arcade games. But their own influ­ence has spread out far­ther still, shap­ing not just var­i­ous sub­gen­res of elec­tron­ic music but also cer­tain for­ma­tive works of hip hop. If you lis­ten to YMO’s albums today — near­ly 45 years after their com­mer­cial debut, and just a few weeks after the death of co-founder Taka­hashi — their music still, some­how, sounds thor­ough­ly Japan­ese. Like Isao Tomi­ta (whose assis­tant became their com­put­er pro­gram­mer), YMO under­stood not just that music changes with tech­nol­o­gy, but also that it emerges from a spe­cif­ic cul­ture, and in their discog­ra­phy we hear those prin­ci­ples pushed to their thrilling lim­its.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Infi­nite Esch­er: A High-Tech Trib­ute to M.C. Esch­er, Fea­tur­ing Sean Lennon, Nam June Paik & Ryuichi Sakamo­to (1990)

How Youtube’s Algo­rithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japan­ese Song Into an Enor­mous­ly Pop­u­lar Hit: Dis­cov­er Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love”

Hear the Great­est Hits of Isao Tomi­ta (RIP), the Father of Japan­ese Elec­tron­ic Music

Pink Lady and Jeff: Japan’s Biggest Pop Musi­cians Star in One of America’s Worst-Reviewed TV Shows (1980)

The Roland TR-808, the Drum Machine That Changed Music For­ev­er, Is Back! And It’s Now Afford­able & Com­pact

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

 

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The Mystery Finally Solved: Why Has Roman Concrete Been So Durable?

in Architecture, History | January 20th, 2023

Image by Ben­jaminec, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Rome may not have been built in a day, but it was built to last — or at least its con­crete was, giv­en that the pieces of the Roman Empire that have stood to our time, in one form or anoth­er, tend to have been built with it. That mate­r­i­al has proven not just durable but endur­ing­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, hold­ing a great deal of not just his­tor­i­cal inter­est but tech­ni­cal inter­est as well. For ancient Roman con­crete appears to out­last its much more tech­ni­cal­ly advanced mod­ern descen­dants, and the com­plex ques­tion of why is one we’ve fea­tured more than once here on Open Cul­ture. Just this year, researchers at MIT, Har­vard, and lab­o­ra­to­ries in Italy and Switzer­land have found what seems to be the final piece of the puz­zle.

“For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s dura­bil­i­ty was based on one ingre­di­ent: poz­zolan­ic mate­r­i­al such as vol­canic ash from the area of Poz­zuoli, on the Bay of Naples,” writes MIT News’ David L. Chan­dler. “Under clos­er exam­i­na­tion, these ancient sam­ples also con­tain small, dis­tinc­tive, mil­lime­ter-scale bright white min­er­al fea­tures.”

Pre­vi­ous­ly assumed to be noth­ing but imper­fec­tions in the process or the mate­ri­als, these “lime clasts,” in light of this most recent research, con­sti­tute evi­dence of “hot mix­ing,” which involves heat­ing to a high tem­per­a­ture ingre­di­ents includ­ing quick­lime (or cal­ci­um oxide), a pur­er and more reac­tive form of lime.

Under­go­ing hot mix­ing, “the lime clasts devel­op a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly brit­tle nanopar­tic­u­late archi­tec­ture, cre­at­ing an eas­i­ly frac­tured and reac­tive cal­ci­um source” that “could pro­vide a crit­i­cal self-heal­ing func­tion­al­i­ty.” In prac­tice, this means that “as soon as tiny cracks start to form with­in the con­crete, they can pref­er­en­tial­ly trav­el through the high-sur­face-area lime clasts. This mate­r­i­al can then react with water, cre­at­ing a cal­ci­um-sat­u­rat­ed solu­tion, which can recrys­tal­lize as cal­ci­um car­bon­ate and quick­ly fill the crack, or react with poz­zolan­ic mate­ri­als to fur­ther strength­en the com­pos­ite mate­r­i­al.” Here we have a con­vinc­ing expla­na­tion of the reac­tions that, in ancient Roman con­crete, “auto­mat­i­cal­ly heal the cracks before they spread.”

No such self-heal­ing hap­pens in mod­ern con­crete, the pro­duc­tion of which has not involved quick­lime for a very long time indeed — but per­haps it could once more. Dur­ing their research process, writes Dezeen’s Rima Sabi­na Aouf, the team “pro­duced sam­ples of hot-mixed con­crete using both ancient and mod­ern for­mu­la­tions, cracked them, and ran water through the cracks. With­in two weeks, the cracks had healed and water could no longer flow through, while iden­ti­cal con­crete blocks made with­out quick­lime nev­er healed.” Such find­ings “could help increase the lifes­pan of mod­ern con­crete and there­fore mit­i­gate the noto­ri­ous envi­ron­men­tal impact of the mate­r­i­al,” and the researchers “are now work­ing to com­mer­cial­ize their more durable con­crete for­mu­la.” Even in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, the build­ing indus­try could well ben­e­fit by doing as the Romans did.

via MIT News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

How to Make Roman Con­crete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Last­ing Build­ing Mate­ri­als

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

How the Ancient Romans Built Their Roads, the Life­lines of Their Vast Empire

The Beau­ty & Inge­nu­ity of the Pan­theon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Pre­served Mon­u­ment: An Intro­duc­tion

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Course from Yale

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

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Contribute a Song to WNYC’s Public Song Project & Use Your Creativity to Explore the Public Domain

in Books, Film, Literature, Music | January 20th, 2023

We rec­og­nize that Open Cul­ture read­ers are a cre­ative bunch.

As proof, we point to your Get­ty Muse­um Chal­lenge entries and the fact that one of your num­ber won Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press’s Kaf­ka Cap­tion Con­test.

We’ve iden­ti­fied anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to show off your cre­ative streak, com­pli­ments of All Of It with Ali­son Stew­art, a dai­ly live cul­ture pro­gram on WNYC, New York City’s pub­lic radio sta­tion.

You have until Feb­ru­ary 13 to write and record an orig­i­nal song inspired by a work in the pub­lic domain, and sub­mit it to The All Of It Pub­lic Song Project.

Ama­teurs are wel­come to take a crack at it and any genre is crick­et, includ­ing rap, spo­ken word, and instru­men­tals.

Even if you lim­it your­self to the works that entered the pub­lic domain on Jan­u­ary 1 of this year, the pos­si­bil­i­ties are almost end­less.

Should you be inclined toward a faith­ful cov­er, we encour­age you to con­sid­er one of 1927’s deep cuts, like Fats Waller’s “Sooth­in’ Syrup Stomp” or Jel­ly Roll Mor­ton’s “Hye­na Stomp,” though we under­stand the attrac­tion of Irv­ing Berlin’s endur­ing­ly pop­u­lar “Puttin’ on the Ritz”.

Apolo­gies to Emi­ly Joy, the accom­plished young clas­si­cal pianist, above — par­tic­i­pa­tion is lim­it­ed to entrants aged 18 or old­er.

The rest of us are free to invent new lyrics for an exist­ing com­po­si­tion, or a brand new tune for exist­ing lyrics.

You might musi­cal­ize a poem or speech, some dia­logue from a film, or a page from a book.

A blue­grass spin on Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, per­haps?

A death met­al re-envi­sion­ing of But­ter­cup Days from A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six?

How about a sis­sy bounce take on these lines from “The Adven­ture of the Mazarin Stone,” the first short sto­ry in Arthur Conan Doyle’s col­lec­tion, The Case-Book of Sher­lock Holmes:

“Bil­ly, you will see a large and ugly gen­tle­man out­side the front door. Ask him to come up.”

“If he won’t come, sir?”

“No vio­lence, Bil­ly. Don’t be rough with him. If you tell him that Count Sylvius wants him he will cer­tain­ly come.”

“What are you going to do now?” asked the Count as Bil­ly dis­ap­peared.

“My friend Wat­son was with me just now. I told him that I had a shark and a gud­geon in my net; now I am draw­ing the net and up they come togeth­er.”

The Count had risen from his chair, and his hand was behind his back. Holmes held some­thing half pro­trud­ing from the pock­et of his dress­ing-gown.

“You won’t die in your bed, Holmes.”

Okay, we’re being sil­ly, but only because we don’t want to put ideas in your head!

You could even con­coct some­thing entire­ly new — per­haps a bal­lad from the POV of To the Light­house’s young James Ram­say, or a dit­ty apol­o­giz­ing to Vir­ginia Woolf for read­ing the Cliffs Notes instead of the actu­al nov­el when it was assigned in your col­lege Women’s Lit­er­a­ture class.

…we’re doing it again, aren’t we?

All right, we’ll leave you to it, with a reminder that any­thing out­side of your pub­lic domain source mate­r­i­al must be whol­ly orig­i­nal — no bor­row­ing a catchy tune from Lennon and McCart­ney, capis­ci?

Win­ners will get a chance to dis­cuss their works on WNYC and all qual­i­fy­ing entries will be post­ed at contest’s end for the public’s lis­ten­ing plea­sure.

Con­test rules and infor­ma­tion on how to sub­mit to The All Of It Pub­lic Song Project can be found here.

Good luck! We can’t wait to hear what you come up with.

Relat­ed Con­tent

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2023: Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, Vir­ginia Woolf’s To the Light­house, Franz Kafka’s Ameri­ka & More

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

400,000+ Sound Record­ings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Virtual Tour of Ancient Athens: Fly Over Classical Greek Civilization in All Its Glory

in Architecture, History | January 19th, 2023

If we seek to under­stand West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, we must look back not just to Rome, but also to Athens. And today, thanks to com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed imagery informed by his­tor­i­cal research, we can look not just to those cities, but at them — or at least at con­vinc­ing dig­i­tal recon­struc­tions, but from angles their actu­al inhab­i­tants could scarce­ly have imag­ined. A few years ago, we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture the Youtube chan­nel Ancient Athens 3D for its recon­struc­tions of indi­vid­ual struc­tures like the Tem­ples of Ilis­sos and Hep­haes­tus. Its more recent video above offers a twelve-minute vir­tu­al tour of all clas­si­cal Athens in the fifth cen­tu­ry BC, the height of ancient Greek civ­i­liza­tion.

In that peri­od, accord­ing to the video, Athens “was the cen­ter of the arts, the­ater, phi­los­o­phy, and democ­ra­cy.” In the city “great mon­u­ments of archi­tec­ture were built and were large­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the Athen­ian gen­er­al Per­i­cles.”

It was Per­i­cles who led the city-state dur­ing the first two years of the Pelo­pon­nesian War, the con­flict in which Athens would even­tu­al­ly fall to Spar­ta in 404 BC — a defeat that had almost, but not quite come to the city at the moment Ancient Athens 3D cre­ator Dim­itris Tsalka­nis brings it back to life. He includes every­thing from the Acrop­o­lis and the Ago­ra to the Olympieion and the Sacred Gate, all look­ing as if they’ll stand for­ev­er.

Nor does Tsalka­nis ignore even bet­ter-known clas­si­cal Greek build­ings like the Parthenon, whose detailed recon­struc­tion, inside and out, also appears in its own video just above. Com­mis­sioned by Per­i­cles, built on the Acrop­o­lis, and ded­i­cat­ed to the god­dess Athena, “patroness of the city of Athens,” the build­ing remains “a sym­bol of ancient Greece, democ­ra­cy, and West­ern civ­i­liza­tion” near­ly two and half mil­len­nia after its con­struc­tion, and more than two cen­turies after the Earl of Elgin had its mythol­o­gy-depict­ing mar­bles sent off to Eng­land. You can still see them at the British Muse­um (at least for now), and for that mat­ter you can still vis­it the Parthenon itself in Athens — or at least the ruins there­of, whol­ly untouched by dig­i­tal mag­ic.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Explore Ancient Athens 3D, a Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tion of the Greek City-State at the Height of Its Influ­ence

What Ancient Greece Real­ly Looked Like: See Recon­struc­tions of the Tem­ple of Hadri­an, Curetes Street & the Foun­tain of Tra­jan

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vas­es Come to Life with 21st Cen­tu­ry Ani­ma­tion

What Did Ancient Greek Music Sound Like?: Lis­ten to a Recon­struc­tion That’s ‘100% Accu­rate’

An 8‑Minute Ani­mat­ed Flight Over Ancient Rome

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

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Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writers

in Writing | January 19th, 2023

Image by the USO, via Flickr Com­mons

In one of my favorite Stephen King inter­views, for The Atlantic, he talks at length about the vital impor­tance of a good open­ing line. “There are all sorts of the­o­ries,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.” “But there’s one thing” he’s sure about: “An open­ing line should invite the read­er to begin the sto­ry. It should say: Lis­ten. Come in here. You want to know about this.” King’s dis­cus­sion of open­ing lines is com­pelling because of his dual focus as an avid read­er and a prodi­gious writer of fiction—he doesn’t lose sight of either per­spec­tive:

We’ve talked so much about the read­er, but you can’t for­get that the open­ing line is impor­tant to the writer, too. To the per­son who’s actu­al­ly boots-on-the-ground. Because it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a door­way that fits us both.

This is excel­lent advice. As you ori­ent your read­er, so you ori­ent your­self, point­ing your work in the direc­tion it needs to go. Now King admits that he doesn’t think much about the open­ing line as he writes, in a first draft, at least. That per­fect­ly craft­ed and invit­ing open­ing sen­tence is some­thing that emerges in revi­sion, which can be where the bulk of a writer’s work hap­pens.

Revi­sion in the sec­ond draft, “one of them, any­way,” may “neces­si­tate some big changes” says King in his 2000 mem­oir slash writ­ing guide On Writ­ing. And yet, it is an essen­tial process, and one that “hard­ly ever fails.” Below, we bring you King’s top twen­ty rules from On Writ­ing. About half of these relate direct­ly to revi­sion. The oth­er half cov­er the intangibles—attitude, dis­ci­pline, work habits. A num­ber of these sug­ges­tions reli­ably pop up in every writer’s guide. But quite a few of them were born of Stephen King’s many decades of tri­al and error and—writes the Barnes & Noble book blog—“over 350 mil­lion copies” sold, “like them or loathe them.”

1. First write for your­self, and then wor­ry about the audi­ence. “When you write a sto­ry, you’re telling your­self the sto­ry. When you rewrite, your main job is tak­ing out all the things that are not the sto­ry.”

2. Don’t use pas­sive voice. “Timid writ­ers like pas­sive verbs for the same rea­son that timid lovers like pas­sive part­ners. The pas­sive voice is safe.”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend.”

4. Avoid adverbs, espe­cial­ly after “he said” and “she said.”

5. But don’t obsess over per­fect gram­mar. “The object of fic­tion isn’t gram­mat­i­cal cor­rect­ness but to make the read­er wel­come and then tell a sto­ry.”

6. The mag­ic is in you. “I’m con­vinced that fear is at the root of most bad writ­ing.”

7. Read, read, read. ”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t wor­ry about mak­ing oth­er peo­ple hap­py. “If you intend to write as truth­ful­ly as you can, your days as a mem­ber of polite soci­ety are num­bered, any­way.”

9. Turn off the TV. “TV—while work­ing out or any­where else—really is about the last thing an aspir­ing writer needs.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a sea­son.”

11. There are two secrets to suc­cess. “I stayed phys­i­cal­ly healthy, and I stayed mar­ried.”

12. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a sin­gle page or an epic tril­o­gy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accom­plished one word at a time.”

13. Elim­i­nate dis­trac­tion. “There should be no tele­phone in your writ­ing room, cer­tain­ly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One can­not imi­tate a writer’s approach to a par­tic­u­lar genre, no mat­ter how sim­ple what that writer is doing may seem.”

15. Dig. “Sto­ries are relics, part of an undis­cov­ered pre-exist­ing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her tool­box to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as pos­si­ble.”

16. Take a break. “You’ll find read­ing your book over after a six-week lay­off to be a strange, often exhil­a­rat­ing expe­ri­ence.”

17. Leave out the bor­ing parts and kill your dar­lings. “(kill your dar­lings, kill your dar­lings, even when it breaks your ego­cen­tric lit­tle scribbler’s heart, kill your dar­lings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t over­shad­ow the sto­ry. “Remem­ber that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the back­ground and the back sto­ry as you can get it.”

19. You become a writer sim­ply by read­ing and writ­ing. “You learn best by read­ing a lot and writ­ing a lot, and the most valu­able lessons of all are the ones you teach your­self.”

20. Writ­ing is about get­ting hap­py. “Writ­ing isn’t about mak­ing mon­ey, get­ting famous, get­ting dates, get­ting laid or mak­ing friends. Writ­ing is mag­ic, as much as the water of life as any oth­er cre­ative art. The water is free. So drink.”

See a fuller expo­si­tion of King’s writ­ing wis­dom at Barnes & Noble’s blog.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 69 Pages of Writ­ing Advice Denis John­son Col­lect­ed from Flan­nery O’Connor, Jack Ker­ouac, Stephen King, Hunter Thomp­son, Wern­er Her­zog & Many Oth­ers

7 Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books

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

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ChatGPT Writes a Song in the Style of Nick Cave–and Nick Cave Calls it “a Grotesque Mockery of What It Is to Be Human”

in Music, Technology | January 18th, 2023

Pho­to by Bled­dyn Butch­er via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Last year, not long before Christ­mas, every­one on the inter­net received a shiny new toy in the form of Chat­G­PT, which by the pow­er of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can near-instan­ta­neous­ly gen­er­ate most any text one asks it to. And after a bit of exper­i­men­ta­tion, one is inclined, nat­u­ral­ly, to turn such an impres­sive tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ment to the most ridicu­lous pos­si­ble uses. Over the past few months, pas­tiche has proven an espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar use of Chat­G­PT: my own inter­est was first piqued, as I recall, by its gen­er­a­tion of instruc­tions for “how to remove a peanut-but­ter sand­wich from a VCR” in the style of the King James Bible.

It’s unknow­able what the author or authors of the Bible (depend­ing on how you hap­pen to con­ceive of its author­ship) would think of the results. But we do know just what Nick Cave thinks of Chat­G­P­T’s attempt to write a song in his style. You can read its lyrics at The Red Hand Files, the site of Cave’s ques­tion-and-answer newslet­ter (in which he has opined on these mat­ters before). Con­sist­ing of two vers­es, a cho­rus, and an out­ro filled with lines about “a siren’s song,” “the blood of angels,” and “the fire of hell,” the song was sent in by a fan named Mark in New Zealand, to whom Cave writes a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly thought­ful reply — or at least he does after deliv­er­ing his ver­dict: “This song sucks.”

“What Chat­G­PT is, in this instance, is repli­ca­tion as trav­es­ty,” Cave writes. “It could per­haps in time cre­ate a song that is, on the sur­face, indis­tin­guish­able from an orig­i­nal, but it will always be a repli­ca­tion, a kind of bur­lesque.” Gen­uine songs, he explains, “arise out of suf­fer­ing, by which I mean they are pred­i­cat­ed upon the com­plex, inter­nal human strug­gle of cre­ation.” But “Chat­G­PT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured noth­ing, it has not had the audac­i­ty to reach beyond its lim­i­ta­tions, and hence it doesn’t have the capac­i­ty for a shared tran­scen­dent expe­ri­ence, as it has no lim­i­ta­tions from which to tran­scend.”

“What makes a great song great is not its close resem­blance to a rec­og­niz­able work,” he con­tin­ues. “Writ­ing a good song is not mim­ic­ry, or repli­ca­tion, or pas­tiche, it is the oppo­site. It is an act of self-mur­der that destroys all one has strived to pro­duce in the past.” This is the act that Cave him­self has com­mit­ted to over and over again through­out his half-cen­tu­ry-long musi­cal career. But even if that act will lie for­ev­er beyond the grasp of an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem, no mat­ter how robust, it also lies beyond the grasp of the many human musi­cians con­tent to crank out the same old songs for decades on end. Per­haps it is they, not the Nick Caves of the world, who should wor­ry about the likes of Chat­G­PT putting them out of work.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

Lis­ten to Nick Cave’s Lec­ture on the Art of Writ­ing Sub­lime Love Songs (1999)

Demys­ti­fy­ing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand,” and How It Was Inspired by Milton’s Par­adise Lost

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Nick Cave’s Beau­ti­ful Let­ter About Grief

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

Hayao Miyaza­ki Tells Video Game Mak­ers What He Thinks of Their Char­ac­ters Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: “I’m Utter­ly Dis­gust­ed. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

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Behold Colorful Geologic Maps of Mars Released by The United States Geological Survey

in Astronomy, Maps | January 18th, 2023

The USGS Astro­ge­ol­o­gy Sci­ence Cen­ter has recent­ly released a series of col­or­ful and intri­cate­ly-detailed maps of Mars. These col­or­ful maps, notes USGS, “pro­vide high­ly detailed views of the [plantet’s] sur­face and allow sci­en­tists to inves­ti­gate com­plex geo­log­ic rela­tion­ships both on and beneath the sur­face. These types of maps are use­ful for both plan­ning for and then con­duct­ing land­ed mis­sions.”

The map above lets you see Olym­pus Mons, the tallest vol­cano in the solar sys­tem, which stands more than twice the height of Mount Ever­est. The USGS goes on to add: “Map read­ers can visu­al­ize the caldera com­plex more eas­i­ly due to the detail that is avail­able at the 1:200,000 scale and the addi­tion of con­tour lines to the map. The map cov­ers a region that is rough­ly the size of the Dal­las-Ft. Worth met­ro­pol­i­tan area and is a detailed look at the volcano’s sum­mit that we have not seen before. This new view of the Olym­pus Mons caldera com­plex allows sci­en­tists to more eas­i­ly com­pare it to sim­i­lar fea­tures on Earth (known as ter­res­tri­al analogs) such as Hawaii’s Mau­na Loa.”

You can find more Mar­t­ian maps here.

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

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Sur­face of Mars Shown in Stun­ning 4K Res­o­lu­tion

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

Vin­tage Geo­log­i­cal Maps Get Turned Into 3D Topo­graph­i­cal Won­ders

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