“Musical systems around the world and across historical eras have been diverse, but octaves are commonly a feature of them. The acoustic structure of octaves is always the same: The frequency of a note in one octave is half the frequency of the same note in the octave above,” and that fact of physics has led to the general assumption that “octave equivalence” is universal. But research with an indigenous Bolivian ethnic group that has limited outside contact indicates otherwise. – Quanta Magazine
Tag: 10.30.19
Why Such A Glut Of Movies About Christmas?
It’s probably no surprise that Hallmark channels have increased their annual Christmas movie count by 20 percent since 2017, but Lifetime has more than quadrupled its output in the last two years and Netflix has doubled its in that same time. – The New York Times
We’re In A Golden Age Of Invented Languages, And We’re Learning A Lot From Them
“Conlangs” (constructed languages) are hardly new: Esperanto and Volapük were created in the 19th century; Tolkien claimed he wrote his Middle Earth books so that someone would speak the Elvish tongues he invented; Klingon was completed in the 1980s. But over the past 30 years, conlangs have exploded (aided greatly by the Internet connecting the nerds who do the constructing). Some of these languages are being used in neurolinguistic research, and one has been developed as a useful lingua franca for Slavs. – Slate
Lara St. John: I’m Disappointed With Curtis Institute’s Response To My Abuse Charges
St. John writes a letter to Roberto Diaz, president of the school: “You and the Board have failed both this venerable institution and the Curtis community.” – Lara St. John
Why We Need To Rethink The Nonprofit Model
The nonprofit sector started out as a vehicle for voluntary civic engagement. Nonprofit organizations are organized to advance the public, rather than private, good. But as the sector grew and professionalized, the focus quickly shifted from the people, or civil society, to the organizations themselves as the key constituents of the sector. So, when we talk about infrastructure for the sector, is the infrastructure there to support civic engagement, or nonprofit and philanthropic organizations? This tension has been there from the beginning. – NonProfit Quarterly
Better Than The Golden Rule
The Golden Rule begins with imagining oneself as selfish, but try Mengzi instead. “Mengzian extension starts from the assumption that you are already concerned about nearby others, and takes the challenge to be extending that concern beyond a narrow circle.” – Aeon
‘The Game’: The Game — In Which The Dangers You Dodge Are Pick-Up Artists
Artist Angela Washko spent four years studying Neil Strauss’s notorious womanizing instruction manual The Game, along with other materials of its kind, to develop The Game: The Game, a video pastime in which the player is a young woman in a dive bar being hit on by a series of men on the hunt. Each line of dialogue and “seduction technique” is taken directly from PUA (pick-up artist) books and how-to videos. – The Nation
This 19th-Century French Poet Was The Ancestor Of Today’s Goth Kids
Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) wore black, dyed his hair green, broke with his family, refused to get a regular job, did absinthe and opium, had too much illicit sex, and, of course, died young. Better, “his first collections of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), was prosecuted for offending public morals, challenging its audiences with its startling treatments of sex, Satanism, vampirism and decay. No wonder his words would one day be set to music by The Cure.” – The Conversation
How King Tut Exhibitions Grew To Become A Multimillion-Dollar International Industry
“The first major touring exhibition of artifacts from King Tut’s tomb was a product of financial necessity. In 1961, archaeological sites in Egypt were in danger of flooding and the country needed funds to protect them. Over the next 5 years, more than 30 objects from Tut’s tomb toured 18 cities across the United States and Canada. A slightly enlarged show opened in Japan in 1965. Through 1981, Tut artifacts were nearly always on the road, touring from Moscow to London, from Paris to Berlin.” – Artsy
Dead Musicians Are Touring As Holograms (Really)
“Was it really okay, I wondered, to let holograms stand in for once-vital, important artists and carry out new performances? Was this an inevitable development in the interweaving of high tech and art — or did it possibly speak to something darker about our 21st-century morals and our endless quest to be entertained? What did this phenomenon say about, well, us?” – Washington Post