Author: Douglas McLennan

All Music Starts From Language

“All music exists on some kind of spectrum, from something that involves nothing you’ve ever heard before to music that sounds exactly like everything you’ve ever heard before. I think all great music exists somewhere along that. In music, you’re speaking a language of things heard already. You’re just rearranging it in a way that is unique. You use sonorities that have been heard before, like I use major chords. But even if you don’t use major chords, everything is along the lines of some kind of reference.”

What Mazes Tell Us About Ourselves

Culturally, mazes are now massively resurgent. Practically every country park has its hedge maze, mirror maze or maize maze – and so do a growing number of churches and cathedrals. In virtual reality, notably, the maze forms the basic substructure of innumerable videogames. So why do mazes draw us in? And what do they do to us while we are there?

How Virtual Reality Can Change How People Behave

“Last year at the annual computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH, they debuted a new version of the game, called I Am A Robot, that allowed groups of people to don headsets and become genderless robots at either a ballet recital, cocktail gathering, or dance party. The response from participants was surprising – men in suits who swore they wouldn’t dance became entirely different people when in the genderless VR world – but it was the experience of two volunteers that moved Daffy most: one had social anxiety and had struggled to enjoy herself at the conference until she put the headset on and, inhibitions gone, danced and laughed for the first time in days. Another said they felt comfortable being gender-free for the first time in their life.”

How A Jazz Musician Is Redefining Culture At At The Kennedy Center

Not so long ago, Moran’s eclectic, adventurous approach to jazz would have placed him well outside the aesthetic boundaries of Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts . But in the past few years, the big white box on the Potomac has opened its venues to jazz in tandem with skateboarders, stand-up comics, dancers, painters and rappers. This redefining of what it means to be the “national cultural center” is, to a large extent, the doing of Jason Moran.

This Year’s Winners Of Canada’s Governor General’s Writing Awards

“Thomas Hynes’s We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, described in a release from the Canada Council as a portrait of a man’s hilarious yet disturbing journey from St. John’s to Vancouver, is the winner of the English fiction category. Richard Harrison’s On Not Losing my Father’s Ashes in the Flood took home the top poetry prize, Hiro Kanagawa’s Indian Arm was the winner under the drama genre and The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State by Graeme Wood was the pick for non-fiction.”

Why World-In-Decline Thinking Is Not Helpful

“Our declinist age is noteworthy in one important way. It’s not just the Westerns who are in trouble; thanks to globalisation, it’s the Resterners too. In fact, we are all, as a species, in this mess; our world supply chains and climate change have ensured that we are poised before a sixth mass extinction together. We should worry less about our lifestyle and more about life itself.”

Scientists: Our Bodies Feel Music, Not Just Hear It

“The past few decades of work in the cognitive sciences of music have demonstrated with increasing persuasiveness that the human capacity for music is not cordoned off from the rest of the mind. On the contrary, music perception is deeply interwoven with other perceptual systems, making music less a matter of notes, the province of theorists and professional musicians, and more a matter of fundamental human experience.”