Musical eras are often defined by their dominant modes of production — analog, electronic, digital — each bringing about new styles and ways of listening. This era is marked by the release of the first AI-human collaborated album, Hello World, by the music collaborative Skygge. Skygge, led by composer and producer Benoît Carré and musician and tech researcher François Pachet, translates to “shadow” in Danish and was inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story of the same name.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Why Do We Equate Innovation With Wealth?
We remember innovators for their ideas, not their wealth. Why then has innovation been co-opted largely by business interests? When most people think of innovation, they tend to think of people making money from executing novel ideas. They think of today’s successful capitalists like Elon Musk, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.
Some Fields Seem More Difficult Than Others. But Maybe…
Perhaps there is no such thing as an easy or hard discipline. Maybe there are only easy and hard questions. Biology only seems so hard because it has been defined by a set of very hard questions. Physics only seems easy because centuries of effort by deeply insightful thinkers have produced a set of answerable questions.
Academic Journal Publishing Is An Outrageous Scam. Why Do Academics Put Up With It?
As things currently stand, it’s hard to deny that journal publishing appears little better than a scam. It’s perhaps not an irrelevant fact that the great fraudster Robert Maxwell began his business career in academic publishing.
What’s Killing Classical Music? Music-As-Church
“As a person whose primary beat is writing about religion, I can’t help but notice the parallels between classical music and religion in America today. As an aging Christian population watches its congregations shrink, younger seekers who don’t feel welcomed give up on church. Americans still discover classical music in their youth, but even those who play enthusiastically in school often can’t afford to go to the symphony, or if they do, they’re asked to treat it like a religious space, which it isn’t. Classical music isn’t dying, but our ways of experiencing it are becoming ossified.”
Why Are Some People Terrible Dancers?
Dancing, moving your body around, and trying to be sexy are all fairly vulnerable acts. Because if you do a bad job, people think you look stupid, you get rejected, and you wind up embarrassed. This fear of embarrassment often makes people stiff and uncomfortable on the dance floor.
A Spirited Case For Translators
Literature in translation has never been a priority in the Anglo-Saxon world. While, in a country like Italy, more than half of fiction titles published will be translated, in the US the share of the market is much smaller, somewhere around three percent. Translators are poorly paid and, for the most part, unsung. How encouraging, then, to see a growing advocacy for translated literature and a spirited defense of those who practice this art.
How Do You Close Down A Non-Profit Arts Organization? Turns Out It’s Not Easy
Six months earlier, faced with the reality of closing Patrick’s Cabaret within the year, I had a great deal of difficulty finding resources to help me do it well. Even discussing a closure is taboo, so there is little documentation of best practices. This is the account of an organization at the end of its lifecycle, and how we embraced its final act and staged a beautiful end to its story.
Apple CEO Tim Cook: Our Personal Data Is Being Weaponized Against Us
Referring to the misuse of “deeply personal” data, he said it was being “weaponised against us with military efficiency. We shouldn’t sugar-coat the consequences,” he added. “This is surveillance.” The strongly-worded speech presented a striking defence of user privacy rights from a tech firm’s chief executive.
Orange County Arts Center Remakes Plaza Open To Community. One Year Later: Is It Working?
The Julianne and George Argyros Plaza opened on Oct. 28, 2017, with 11 hours of pomp, partying, speeches, music and a dance company that defied gravity on a wall high above the crowd. Helped in part by a gift from the Argyros family, the Segerstrom Center’s rather drab and empty public plaza was transformed into an attractive and inviting outdoor space with an imposing stage, plenty of seating, a dramatic fountain and many other amenities, all planned to send a message: “linger here for a while.”