Scientific Musician

19/11/2017

Is there a science to creating a cartoon? It could perhaps be argued. At least in this case a very Scientific Musician is at the helm of the project; Carl King has conceptualized a cartoon wherein the world's last operating AM radio station is broadcasting from a dilapidated space station! This Adult Swim-style cartoon will feature voice acting by Dweezil Zappa, Mike Keneally, Joanie Brosas, Clarke Wolfe, Ebony Amber and Jon Schnepp! If you don't know who these people are, you can Google that for you.
There are only a few days left on the kickstarter campaign to fund the pilot episode which is already being worked on by some very funny writers and Lead Animator Lance Myers (A Scanner Darkly)!
Do take a moment to take a look and show some support for unorthodox entertainment with nods to much of your favorite high-information musics.

We will figure out the science of it all, later.

‪SEVEN DAYS LEFT to help us make our animated Adult Swim-style show on Kickstarter. http://www.oracleofouterspace.com Sketches by our animator Lance Myers, of the character Arcana Thrice — to be voiced by Joanie Brosas! ‬

23/05/2017

This page originated from the mind of Carl King, as a way to promote ambitious music by accomplished musicians, and to explore the different methodologies and philosophies of music. As things progressed, the page fell under the control of a few well-meaning entities who have not kept up with the original mission, but we have seen that some activity has continued, regardless. We will be attempting to add more content as we find it, and what better content to begin with than some from the original conceptual creator, himself? This is a sampler of the long-awaited return of Mr. King to music. It features some the best musicians in the world. There is a heavy science-fiction theme to the album, as if there is a movie waiting to be made to an existing soundtrack.
We would like to see this shared about, as it is increasingly difficult to promote and propagate music that isn't e repetitive mess about butts and money.

BUY ALBUM HERE: https://shop.carlkingdom.com/collections/frontpage/products/carl-king-grand-architects-of-the-universe-digital-download Here it is! Carl King's first album in nearly a decade -- a fre

09/08/2016

To what extent does exposure to popular music color our preferences? A significant extent, it would seem.

Scientists have claimed that humans have an innate, universal preference for some chords over others—but a study of remote villagers suggests otherwise.

17/07/2016

This video has already been making the rounds in the social media sphere, but it certainly belongs here.
Perfect pitch is a trait that we've been told we either have or do not. This may not be entirely the case. This youngster has had the benefit of honing his skill from a very early age, thanks to his father. The results are pretty stunning. Is this something anyone could learn? Can your ears develop "muscle memory" in a sense? There are several videos from this YouTube channel that are worth your time.

I'm still trying to stump Dylan. I think I need to try a little harder! Watch what happens when I play a double polychord at 0:51. Follow me on: YouTube - ht...

22/10/2015

From our friend, Zak Hannan:
"I've been working on the idea of using a 1-D cellular automaton to generate music. Like everything post-Google, I discovered I'm not the first to think of using automata to make music: "

Our ECE 5760 project was aimed at combining Conway's Game of Life with music. The idea was to display the evolving states of the Game of Life and meaningfully map these states to an audio signal in real time. The motivation originally came from tone-matrix synthesizers, which allows users to dynamic…

15/10/2015

This feels at home on the page.

Mark Applebaum writes music that breaks the rules in fantastic ways, composing a concerto for a florist and crafting a musical instrument from junk and found...

30/08/2015

This is very interesting. Sorry for the missing videos, but this is worth sharing, regardless.
Sent to us by our friend, SuzieQ Sharky.

In the 1950s progressive composers broke from the 5 line music staff to experiment with new, more expressive forms of graphic music notation

22/08/2015

A scientifically created musician! "Live" entertainment for your new self-driving cars.

A Yale computer scientist has developed a program that creates music close enough to Bach's that people have trouble telling the two apart.

13/08/2015

And another find by Reinier Loopik!

It's hard not to be blown away by the surprising power of neural networks these days. With enough training, so called "deep neural networks", with many nodes and hidden layers, can do impressively ...

13/08/2015

Here's some science we can really get behind! Submitted to us via Reinier Loopik.

An old musician’s joke goes “there are three kinds of drummers in the world—those who can count and those who can’t.” But perhaps there is an even more global divide. Perhaps there are three kinds of people in the world—those who can drum and those who can’t.

20/07/2015

By analyzing the hi-hat in a hit single, physicists demonstrate a uniquely human way of keeping a beat.

16/05/2015

The octobasse (or octobass) is an enormous string instrument built in 1850 by French instrument maker Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume that is capable of creating sound at a frequency of 16 Hz, which is low...

09/05/2015

Computer scientists have found that the music of the 1980's had the lowest stylistic diversity of any decade since 1960 or later. Does anyone care to dispute this?

Computer analysis says new wavers like Duran Duran (pictured here), arena rockers like Van Halen and dance pop stars like Madonna marked a period of low di

17/04/2015

It's official: Folk music causes cancer.

A chart shows what pop, rap, punk and folk musicians are most likely to die from

28/03/2015

There was a time when the drumming community was truly concerned with the idea of machines replacing real drummers, but more often than not these days, drum machines are more of a different "flavor" than real drummers. It is arguable that drum machines will never truly replace drummers based solely on the fact that it is much more fun to interact and respond to a living, breathing player, as opposed to a program, but if you really need scientific authority in this argument, apparently someone has sought to provide just that.

And that's good news for humans everywhere.

27/03/2015

We love new takes on old instruments.

Mark Brown talks to Geoff Smith, whose reinvention of the piano allows players to alter the tuning of notes either before or during a performance

17/02/2015

A song made with only the sounds that were left out when compressing Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" to mp3.

16/02/2015

This science from 2011 is still true today.

What's your favorite tidbit about radio waves?

28/01/2015

The debate continues:

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14/01/2015

The association between science and music is tenuous, for sure, but we find the similarities between the two in their proclivities for experimentation and measured observations. Here is a nice blog about listening and the concept of time as it pertains to the "feel" of a musician. (Drummers count as musicians, people.)

This week, I want to explore musical time with particular focus on what musicians call feel. The following is a revised version of a piece I wrote for the English magazine Drummer. As this concerns listening more than playing, non-drummers may find it of interest. When non-musicians ask me who my f…

10/01/2015

Deep in the Congolese rain forest, a group of Pygmies lives in near isolation from Western music. When a team of scientists played them music from Star Wars and Psycho, the results were surprising.

07/01/2015

"Eye movement in music reading is an extremely complex phenomenon that involves a number of unresolved issues in psychology, and which requires intricate experimental conditions to produce meaningful data. Despite some 30 studies in this area over the past 70 years, little is known about the underlying patterns of eye movement in music reading."

Eye movement in music reading is the scanning of a musical score by a musician's eyes. This usually occurs as the music is read during performance, although musicians sometimes scan music silently to study it, and sometimes perform from memory without score. The phenomenon has been studied by resear…

02/01/2015

Who would like to offer their opinions on these matters?

Or What I Wish I’d Known Before Ever Setting Foot in a Hi-fi Store… Skepticism is elegantly explained by Carl Sagan’s scientific maxim, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This s...

28/12/2014

"Chorus repetition is a winning formula because repetitive songs are processed by the brain more quickly, according to Professor Andrea Ordanini, of Bocconi University, Milan, but the chances of a song becoming a hit decline for each additional year in the age of the singer."

Apparently, humans prefer their hits young and dumb.

For each repetition of the chorus, a song’s likelihood of making it to number one increases significantly, according to researchers who analysed more than 2,400 songs released over 50 years

09/12/2014

Could Cymatics be the key to making music that is more globally harmonious?

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” – Nikola Tesla “What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” – Albert Einstein Tesla said it. Einstein Agreed. S…

21/11/2014

Record companies are tracking download and search data to predict which new songs will be hits. This has been good for business—but is it bad for music?

17/11/2014

Courtesy of Rob Jones, who found for us this delightful demonstration of the effects sound has upon matter. Enjoy!

http://NigelStanford.com/Solar_Echoes From the album 'Solar Echoes'. http://NigelStanford.com/Cymatics Download the video in 4k. All of the science experimen...

17/11/2014

This is a continued controversy, but is science putting an end to the argument?

Even the man who invented the iPod believed this.

15/11/2014

Technology affords us the luxury of anthropomorphic interpretation of patterns in nature. We are seeing increasing instances of this, and while most seem to be merely novel, they can certainly be fun and interesting. What other natural patterns might you like to see translated to music?

This is an excerpt from the record Years, created by Bartholomäus Traubeck, which features seven recordings from different Austrian trees…

10/11/2014

Our friend, Dixie, found this for us. Music is math, to begin with, so this seems only natural, yes?

As you might recall from math class, pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. This irrational number—approximately 3.14159—shows up quite frequently in many mathematical applications, including geometry and trigonometry.

06/11/2014

Don’t forget to like/share!

05/11/2014

This is certainly interesting.

The flutelike song of the hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus), a common North American bird renowned for its musicality, shares several characteristics with human music. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, is the first evidence of a bird song that makes u…

04/05/2014

From Zak Hannan: This after digging a bit on the biological origin of pitch perception. I've always been interested in *why* there is so much mathematical order to pitches that sound "good" together. Octave circularity is a start . . . it's not found in many species!

It had earlier been known from the cat and the rabbit that the ventral division of the medial geniculate nucleus (MGN) of the thalamus is the only part in the auditory brain of mammals that has an octave architecture. Here, stacked neuron layers show a frequency mapping that progresses in jumps of o…

14/04/2014

From our friend, Zak Hannan:

April 2, 2014Science-themed music videos boost scientific literacy, study showsDoree ArmstrongNews and InformationPosted under: Education, News Releases, Research, Social ScienceAs the United States puts ever-greater emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics education to keep comp...

18/03/2014

Our friend, Mike C Lovett, found this interesting article:

Musical repetition has become a repeating theme of this blog. Seems appropriate, right? This post looks at a wonderful article by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, investigating the reasons why we love ...