Author: Douglas McLennan

Early Departure Of The Canadian Opera Company’s General Director Is A Good Course Correction

“What Alexander Neef failed to do spectacularly is build an audience. It is a failure that one might attribute to the vagaries of the economy, the advent of livestreaming, the price of parking or any number of standard-issue excuses that have potential validity anywhere. But there is a central and specific explanation for the underperformance of the COC: a parade of supposedly innovative productions that required a manifesto from the stage director to understand and a six-pack of Red Bull to sit through.” – La Scena Musicale

What Will Happen When Our Brains Can Talk Directly To Computers?

Voice recognition, like that used by Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, is a step toward more seamless integration of human and machine. The next step, one that scientists around the world are pursuing, is technology that allows people to control computers — and everything connected to them, including cars, robotic arms and drones — merely by thinking. – The New York Times

How Choruses Are Figuring Out How To Sing Together

There are few answers about this disease. But the choral community has come together to figure out how 54 million people in America who sing in a chorus can do so safely. Choral leaders have developed software for online singing and created virtual choirs. Companies are inventing face masks that can be worn for singing. Several universities, including the University of Cincinnati, are conducting studies on the spread of aerosols while singing or playing instruments, and how it can be mitigated. – Cincinnati Business Journal

A New Shakespearean Theatre Recreation In Connecticut?

The theater in Stratford, Connecticut, modeled on Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London, burned down in January 2019 as the result of arson. The theater building had not hosted an indoor performance in decades, though the surrounding lawn has continued to be sacred ground for Shakespeare fans, with performances by a summertime Shakespeare Academy and local outdoor Shakespeare troupes as well as community festivals. – Hartford Courant

What Next After Zoom Fatigue

Zoom fatigue is the feeling of utter hopelessness after your ninth video call of the day, and experts say it’s brought on because the technology overtaxes your brain. Presented with a cropped, often blurry image of a human and a few milliseconds of lag throughout the conversation, your mind splits its attention between what people are saying and what’s happening on the screen, longing for nonverbal cues that just don’t cross over. – Vox

Discovery: US Teen Wrote 20,000 Wikipedia Entries In a Language They Don’t Speak

Alongside Gaelic, Scots is one of the indigenous languages of Scotland. The thousands of Wikipedia entries written in it make up one of the largest collections of the Scots language you can access online for free. The problem is an American teenager from North Carolina — who can’t speak the language — wrote 49 percent of all the entries.  – Engadget