Entries tagged with "psychology"
Tuesday 1 December 2009
A 3-D fractal rears its head
Back in high school, I played around with fractals, after finding a writeup about the Mandelbrot set in a back issue of Scientific American. The article had loads of dazzling colour renderings, the likes of which would grace psychedelic CD covers a few short years later: spidery frost patterns, seahorse-like whorls, lighting licking around tiny replicas of the snowman-shaped set.
All that colour and infinite detail came from a mind-bendingly simple equation, calculated over and over: zn+1 = zn2 + c. The article provided a snippet of pseudocode, which I compiled in C and ran for days on end on the family PC/AT, pumping the raw results through DeluxePaint to colour them. (Later on I added a pause function so my mum and dad could use the computer again.)
It was a window into a mysterious mathematical world: look at the latest image and pick out an interesting looking bit, work out its co-ordinates, and start up the calculations again, and a day or two later, enjoy the results. There was no end to its detail no matter how much you zoomed in on it, and always with those circles upon circles. Similar but never the same: a fractal.
I hadn’t thought much about the Mandelbrot set until a few days ago, when I happened on a link to the Mandelbulb, a recently-discovered 3-D analogue to the old-school set.
It’s… a little creepy.
Read more...
Friday 30 May 2008
Authenticity in pop music, primitivism, and Zen aesthetics
Just finished reading Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker. It’s an examination of the history of ideas about musical and personal authenticity, from the dawn of blues and country to the rise of disco, punk and sampling. I’m finding the topic completely fascinating - which is perhaps amusing given the name of this site…
I first heard about the book via an interview with Taylor on a public radio show from the States called The Sound of Young America. Since the book came out Taylor and Barker have continued to explore the topic on their blog, also called Faking It.
Some questions that occur to me: how has the idea of authenticity played out in other cultures? Only one chapter really gets beyond North America and the British Isles, and it restricts itself to the intersection of Western music with world music (Buena Vista Social Club, Graceland).
How universal, for example, is the celebration of primitivism - as in punk and other “back to basics” movements in rock - as more “authentic”? I’m thinking especially of an early chapter in Caetano Veloso’s Tropical Truth where he writes:
[B]ossa nova’s revival of samba evolved from a refinement of musical tastes that was influenced by high-quality American songs of the thirties and by the cool jazz of the fifties; by contrast, rock in its essence was a rejection of all sophistication, and continually proves to be so whenever it seeks its own reaffirmation… While rock was simplistic, repudiating the elegance and elaboration of a Porter or a Gershwin, with their symphonic orchestrations, Miles Davis, or Bill Evans, in João Gilberto one was witnessing an almost antithetical impulse, a continuation, rather than a suppression, of musical history… [p. 23]
On the other hand, this sort of elevation of the primitive, the artless, the naïve, is present from at least the Romantics onward - you can see it in the Fauvist painters, and in Picasso’s fascination with African tribal art. All of them yearned for a connection with something primal and natural, and saw evidence of it in art from less “sophisticated” cultures.
There’s also a parallel in the development of Zen aesthetics (I’ve also been reading Andrew Juniper’s book Wabi Sabi recently - see the Wikipedia entry for Wabi sabi for a quick intro to the topic). In a similar reaction to the ultra-refined craft that accompanied the spread of Buddhism from China, Japanese monks strove to cut away all the fussy, meaningless trappings and strike directly to the essence. The arts they cultivated, from calligraphy to pottery to the tea ceremony, were pared down to their essence, and aspired to the artlessness of nature.
Where these parallel lines diverge, perhaps, is in the realm of personality and ego. Where most authenticity-seeking artists in the West seem to strive foremost for self-expression, the Zen practitioners would seek to abandon the self, to focus on nothing but the creation.
In their discussion of Kurt Cobain, Taylor and Barker suggest that the inevitable gap between ideals and real life was what killed him in the end. They don’t offer any way out of this trap, but if there is one, it’s probably close to the Zen approach of abandoning self, ego, and all expectations - both your own and those of the audience.
Lots more thoughts to organize on this topic, but that’s enough for now. I’m off to play Rock Band with my housemates.
Tags for this entry:
aesthetics,
art,
authenticity,
craft,
japan,
music,
pop music,
psychology,
sociology,
wabi sabi,
zen
Thursday 18 October 2007
Every once in a while, one of those music memes sweep through the blogs I read: put your music-player software on shuffle mode and list the first 20 tracks that come up, that sort of thing. Here’s a twist: keep track of the songs that are in your head at the moment you wake up, and post a list. Here’s mine over the past few weeks. Make of them what you will.
- Dexys Midnight Runners - “Come On Eileen”
- Franz Ferdinand - “What You Meant”
- Massive Attack - “Risingson”
- Peter Gabriel - “Steam”
- XTC - “Limelight”
- Little Eva - “The Loco-Motion”
- Bruce Springsteen - “Dancing In The Dark”
- Steelye Span - “Bachelor’s Hall”
- King Crimson - “Dinosaur”
- Rowlf the Dog - “Cottleston Pie”
- Komeda - “Elvira Madigan”
- The Shins - “Phantom Limb”
- David Bowie - “Life On Mars?”
- Mashup: Depeche Mode - “Get The Balance Right” vs Franz Ferdinand - “Jacqueline”
- Jazzanova - “Mwela”
About half of these are things I was listening a day or a few days previous… but the more interesting ones are the ones that seemed to come out of nowhere, like “Dancing in the Dark”, or “Cottleston Pie”, which I hadn’t heard since I was a kid. (And by the way, here it is on YouTube. A lot faster than I remember - my mental recording seemed to be more wistful.) “Loco-Motion” and “Bachelor’s Hall” are in there too, certainly.
Try it! It’s a cross between “what you’ve been listening to” and “where’s your head at”.
Sunday 13 May 2007
When Adobe unveiled their newly designed array of “two letter” application icons, I was among the skeptics. All programs are now represented by a coloured box reminiscent of an element in the periodic table. Many argue that this makes them indistinguishable from one another - even more so for anyone with a degree of colour-blindness (doubtless this is less common among the design pros that make up Adobe’s core audience, but still).
After some consideration, though, I don’t think it’ll be any worse than before. I mostly use Photoshop and Illustrator, and I’ve confused the two on occasion because, no matter how different the imagery, they’ve been designed to look like they’re part of an integrated brand identity, which means they feel similar. I think part of my brain saw the “PS7 eye” and “AI10 Venus” and lumped them together under the heading “face”; ditto the “pretty pastel nature imagery” from CS2 (actually tinted x-ray photos). Maybe “Ai” and “Ps” will be a better compromise.
Of course, I’ll have to get used to the colours. I’m not much of a kinaesthete, but “Ai” is clearly bright red as far as I’m concerned… unfortunately, red is the traditional brand colour for Flash. And by rights “ID” (InDesign) ought to be gold or brown. At least they were sensible enough to make “Ps” blue!
But we’ll see, won’t we… It may well be that CS3-style icons work well for some people, and pictorial icons for others. I’d like to see some hard evidence one way or another.
Anyway. A few weeks ago, I was shopping and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw a display of colour-coded two-letter packages for, of all things, organic pasta. Red/K for kamut, green/S for spelt, beige/G for durum (grano duro), brown/I for whole wheat (integrale). I can’t find any other images of their new packaging on the web - not even on Felicetti’s site - and I presume it’s a very recent redesign. Was idea-stealin’ involved, or is it just coincidence?
Saturday 21 January 2006
From WorldChanging: a neat article by Nicole-Anne Boyer that starts with a discussion of global conflicts and segues into an examination of optimism and pessimism.
The word “optimism” or phrase “positive thinking” is problematic with too much baggage… I prefer how the Chinese have defined optimism with two related but different words. The first word is more akin to the English definition; it’s a naive hope for a better future regardless of the reality of the situation. The second word means looking at the reality of a situation as clearly as possible, and even if it is grim, and still be hopeful and open to possibilities. It’s this that we need more of.
Studies on what makes individuals “resilient” confirms the merit of the second Chinese definition of optimism. Resilient people tend to have three things in common: they have a strong value system and ability to make meaning out of life; they are excellent improvisors and adaptors given life’s events; and they are good are perceiving the reality accurately, for better or worse, in any given situation.
Sunday 25 January 2004
These are the colours I associate with various notes. Not the actual notes, actually, but just their names in the Western system. Some of the colour-associations are stronger than others (purple for G, for example, is pretty weak, but A is definitely red). I’m not sure where they come from - there’s a definite spectrum-order to them, which might have come from a toy instrument, for example, or a piece of software.
Peggy asked: Hm. Is this synaesthesia (mild or strong), or just… an association?
The gradients on D#/Eb and F are interesting, too. Peeling paint or stickers? I can easily see a little toy piano of two or three octaves, with bright plastic keys, or partially-worn stickers in rainbow colors, a few missing by the time it ends up in your young hands…
I don’t think these are really synaesthesia in a classical sense… there’s no connection to sound at all, just to the note names. However, letters in general do tend to have colours for me (or feelings, at least, though they’re too subtle and transient to be called tactile). They feel(?) similar to the visuals(?) I get when thinking about different eras (see earlier entry).
I had an interesting conversation about learning with an acquaintance whose daughter was having trouble in math - she was an ace at reading and writing, but numbers meant nothing to her. They had no feelings associated with them, whereas the stuff she was reading in English had all sorts of feelings.
By contrast, I think it’s because I do have these subtle sensations connected to numbers that I took to math so easily. (Even numbers feel squarish, like Lego; compound numbers stack in rows according to their factors, and often share some traits with their factors. 65 is kind of dark reddish, like 13, and also round in the same way all multiples of 5 are.)
The gradients are mostly to reflect ambivalence or a weak association. F and F#, although I understand them well, don’t have strong colours.
Sunday 21 September 2003
Read in the Star the other day: there’s a hidden river flowing through a good stretch of southern Ontario, way below the surface. Not too long ago, they found out where it comes out, somewhere under High Park (very roughly, our equivalent of Central Park). I love stories like that - the idea that there’s all sorts of stuff we still don’t know about, like buried rivers and tiny 500-year-old cedar trees and squid the size of houses.
I’ve noticed that in any animated film, one sure way to get me crying is to show a bleak landscape suddenly suffused by some elemental Power and come bursting to life: happens in Yellow Submarine, Princess Mononoke, the Firebird piece from Fantasia 2000, even that silly Lemonjelly video. There’s something about that symbolism that really nails me deep down: the idea of rebirth, of the world healing itself, of the power of Nature to regenerate.
I’ve seen pictures of the bleak, rocky landscape where I grew up (near the mining town of Sudbury, where according to Canadian urban legend the Apollo astronauts trained because of its similarity to the moon) turning into pine forest again, and it brought a smile to my face. So did word that parts of the Ukraine and Belarus, uninhabited by humans since the Chernobyl accident, have become refuges for wildlife. And I’m realizing that principle - that life keeps coming back, if only we quit messing with it and let it happen - is essentially how I conceive of God or the divine. It was that force that some in Hiroshima and Nagasaki feared was dead after the atom bombs fell. It says - even if we screw up utterly, there is hope; something new and wonderful will arise in time.
Thursday 1 November 2001
It’s finally sunk in.
Back on the first of January 2000, even with the rollover of the Great Year Odometer, the world didn’t seem any different.
“It’s a funny feeling,” I wrote then, “knowing that I and the rest of my relatives will bear a year starting with ‘2’ on their tombstones. You don’t usually think of your grandma being part of the 21st century - but she is, as much as you are…
“And it’s funny to think of that state of mind we had - I’m not sure when it’ll fully leave… the feeling that on the stroke of midnight, 31 Dec 1999, all the brick buildings in the world would turn to glass, all the cars would turn into airships, all the planes to rockets and the subways to maglevs…”
And again in 2001, it still didn’t feel like a new century.
Last night, we were at my grandmother’s place having dinner, and watched the first couple of innings of Game 3 of the World Series in New York City. And finally, it felt like The Future: George W. Bush throwing the first pitch - probably the longest minute in the entire lives of most of the security people there, the patriotic messages and memorials, the ads for United Airlines and gene-research firms, the jet flyovers…
I always used to mentally picture the decades as a series of impressions of colour and tone and shape, running from left to right, the synthesis of many visual memories of images and styles. For the 20th century, the years up to about 1930 were sepiatoned, then black and white and pale blue. The Thirties were deep wine red, the Forties black and white and deeper blue. The Fifties were sunny yellow and pink and white, the Sixties bright primary red and white, shading into psychedelic paisley purples and dark reds. The Seventies were pale yellow and off-white, then darkened to the sleek boxy black of consumer electronics in the early Eighties. Pastels and silvers and rough, chaotic textures followed in the Nineties.
In 2000 I wrote: “The 2000s were a blank slate, a great unknown. But I do remember it was white, shiny, gleaming, green, hopeful.
“Now I’d like it to be vast, multicoloured, joyous, rooted, honest, bright, rich.”
We’ll see…
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