Category: ideas

A new breed of architect is looking at buildings that respond to their environment and adapt. They’re called “responsive structures that observe their internal and external environment and change form to suit any situation. A building that mimics a living system would be able to sense and respond appropriately to exterior conditions like varying winds, temperature swings or changing sunlight. Inside, the building might change to accommodate crowd flow or better circulate warm air.”

A study at New Jersey’s Morristown Memorial Hospital, where a harpist strolls the recovery room, is looking into the effectiveness of harp music as a healing aid for heart-surgery patients. Researchers believe “the gentle arpeggios of the harpist might have helped regulate … heart rate, blood pressure and breathing…. Results will be collected as part of a four-week study, one of several around the country trying to measure the health benefits of music in hospitals. One research project by a doctor at the Carle Heart Center in Urbana, Ill., has suggested that harp music in particular helped stabilize irregular heartbeats.”

“Though the music industry has seen drastic changes in recent years, what has remained constant is the fact that most listeners still find their music with the assistance of a filter: a reliable source that sifts through millions of tracks to help them choose what they do (and don’t) want to hear. The filters we traditionally depended on – music magazines, radio stations, music video channels, even the recommendations of a trusted record store clerk – have diminished in influence enough to give a player like Pitchfork room to operate.”

“Where the old-media system was one-way, today’s new media technologies allow consumers to talk back — and tune out. On Internet message boards and blogs, people can slam products they don’t like, celebrate certain brands over others, and help shoppers find the cheapest prices. New technologies do give consumers unprecedented leverage over the marketplace. It’s crucial, however, to realize that marketers are using these same technologies to undermine that leverage, making it harder than ever for audiences to escape, and resist, their advances.”

“I think we’ve debunked the myth of talent. It doesn’t appear that there’s anything like a music gene or center in the brain that Stevie Wonder has that nobody else has. There’s no evidence that (talented people) have a different brain structure or different wiring than the rest of us initially, although we do know that becoming an expert in anything — like chess or race-car driving or journalism — does change the brain and creates circuitry that’s more efficient at doing what you’re an expert at.”

“For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.”

What makes a good conductor? For that matter, what exactly does a conductor do to influence the course of a musical performance? Justin Davidson explores the dark art of leading an orchestra

“These parallel dogmas — free speech and intellectual-property rights — through corporate intervention and governmental abdication, are now on a collision course, and may in fact collide next month with the theatrical release of Kirby Dick’s incendiary This Film Is Not Yet Rated. A jihad against the Motion Picture Association of America, movie studios and the corporations that own them, Dick’s documentary plans to get around the prohibitive costs of copyright licensing by employing a “fair use” defense — a safeguard built into the Constitution but largely untested in the courts. Like the last time a foreign body slammed into the earth’s surface, disrupting gravitational orthodoxy, watch for sea changes, atmospheric gloom and toppling dinosaurs.”

“The link between ageing and intransigence is commonly put down to a combination of world-weariness, experience and impatience.” But “researchers at Harvard Medical School believe that they have found the biological mechanism that makes people become set in their ways as they get older. They have identified a protein that stops new neural connections forming in adult brains.”