“If you heard a pair of melodies that differ by just one note, could you tell the difference? If you heard three musical notes, one of which was a tad sharper than the other two, could you pick out the odd one? These are precisely the sorts of tasks that trained classical musicians are very good at. And it turns out that speakers of Cantonese, a language with a built-in series of musical-like tones, are pretty darn good at it, too – better it seems than speakers of English.”
Tag: 07.15.13
Alina Cojocaru Heads Straight Over From Royal Ballet To ENB
“One of the Royal Ballet’s biggest stars is to join a rival company run by her close friend Tamara Rojo. In a shock move, Alina Cojocaru, 32, is to become a lead principal with English National Ballet – starting just three months after her unexpected resignation from Covent Garden.”
Europe’s Ballet Stars Are Rebelling Against Their Companies
It’s not just Rojo and now Cojocaru leaving Covent Garden for ENB. Osipova and Vasiliev left the Bolshoi for the upstart Mikhailovsky. Mathilde Froustey left the Paris Opera Ballet (!) for San Francisco. And let’s not even start on Sergei Polunin …
After 15 Years, Dissident Iranian Filmmaker Sees Her Movies Get Released
“Film-maker Mania Akbari fled her native Tehran last summer. She is determined to examine marriage, abortion, infidelity and lesbianism at home in Iran. She has explored what it’s like to lose your breasts to cancer. She has made films that have upset and shocked the religious establishment. Now, after 15 years of censorship, ‘of living in fear and frustration’, Akbari is finally seeing her films screened commercially for the first time.”
Michel Houellebecq To Star As Himself In Film About His ‘Kidnapping’
“He is French literature’s perpetual enfant terrible, with a reputation for bolshy rebelliousness and causing offence. So when Michel Houellebecq, hailed as France’s greatest living novelist, failed to turn up for part of a promotional book tour in the Netherlands and Belgium in 2011, it might have been brushed aside as a mere quirk or oversight.”
Berlin Artists Wanted By Icelandic Police For ‘Nature Terrorism’
“Giant words were found spray-painted on the landscape in the Myvatn region of north-east Iceland in April. It is unclear who was behind the spray-painting, which the Environment Agency of Iceland described at the time as ‘nature terrorism’.” Then Julius von Bismarck and Julian Charrière had a photo exhibition of the spray-painting at a Berlin gallery. Hm.
Why A Playwright Took His Name Off The Play
“Alienation opened at Perth’s State Theatre Centre on July 2 in controversial circumstances when Philpott, who did not attend, arranged to have notes placed on audience seats that read: ‘This production does not reflect my original, scripted or communicated intentions as the playwright’.”
How Software Exposed JK Rowling’s Fiction
“I was testing things like word length, sentence length, paragraph length, frequency of particular words and the pattern of punctuation.”