Sunday, July 28, 2013

Today in Umlauts: Björk and Sir David Attenborough Team Up in a New Documentary About Music and Technology

Or are those rock-dots actually a diaresis?
We have many many links to stories on Iceland including one of my favs,  the WSJ's Environmental Capital post on Alcoa's plant in Iceland, the Fjardaal smelter at Reydarfjordur which sent the Journal's online markets editor (and metalhead) into paroxysms of thrasher ecstasy.
(great band name: Fjardaal Smelter — ed.)

From Open Culture:
There’s a long and companionable history between music and mathematics. While it is often said that every culture has its own form of music, it’s also nearly just as true that most ancient cultures explored the mathematical principles of sound. Leave it to the Pythagoreans of Ancient Greece to notice the relationship between musical scales and mathematical ratios.

How music and science intersect is a more modern inquiry. Fields like neuroscience and modern medicine and technology make both the roots of music and cognition, as well as how science can inspire music, a crackling frontier.

Channel 4 in England will broadcast a new documentary When Björk Met Attenborough tomorrow (Saturday) with—who better?—naturalist David Attenborough as host. Attenborough, who was famously granted privileged access to film Dian Fossey’s research on mountain gorillas, teams up with a less elusive but fascinating figure this time around. Attenborough actually co-hosts the program with Björk....MORE


By the way, the Open Culture post I was going for before coming upon Sir David And Björk was:
The History of Philosophy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visualized in Two Massive, 44-Foot High Diagrams