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MIT Professor Michael Hawley
cyranoVR writes "Today's CBS This Morning ran an interesting profile on MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Aside from recently publishing a super-jumbo-sized book about the Kingdom of Bhutan, he has invented (among other things) an interactive kitchen counter, designed a heart monitor embedded in jewelry, contributed to the MIT Toys of Tomorrow project and has written several classical compositions for piano. What really struck me was Hawley's observation that 'today's computers aren't musical enough.' For him, there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard.' I think it's a good thing that the mainstream media is starting to show how 'computer nerds' (as the correspondent identified Hawley) can be rich individuals with much more to their lives than hardware upgrades, programming languages and pocket protectors."
For what it's worth, I'm a computer nerd and I could not care less how the mass media portrays me. Why should I? Why do you?
I've always considered coding to be an artistic pursuit - the perfect form, in coding's case, is the elegant form IMHO - the creation of the simplest tool to do the job well (and fulfill the requirements spec, of course :-). In music, the art is the whole expression: the rise and fall in volume, the tempo changes, the different instruments, the silences, the mood-creation. Music is the pursuit of immersion. Coding is the pursuit of elegance. At least for me.
:-)
:-)
On the other hand, I can't really see "Spreadsheet in D minor" becoming too popular... entering incrementing data by performing a crescendo on the keyboard will take a while to catch on
So whereas there are similarities, I think there are differences too, and I think the two input mechanisms reflect that. There is the other point that not all of us are maestro's with a musical instrument... the user-interface of the ivories might be slightly less user-friendly than the traditional QWERTY (or AZERTY, or whatever is your poison
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Most nerds are men, and men change their priorities and attitudes over time. My rule of thumb is that the jocks mature early, the nerds mature late.
A nerd invests hugely in a technical subject and should, with time, be able to leverage that into a high value career. So it's quite normal that many men who were totally nerdy in their teens and twenties become relaxed, charming, social, and wealthy as they get older and more succesful.
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Both people have some extra money to do something to impress their friends. Hawley has more money.
BTW, why did the guy who mentioned big book/small country get modded troll?
OK, OK, so the giant book is an exercise in making some kind of maximum display technology like a middle ages style plasma TV. The big story here is enlarging the images to an appropriate resolution.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
People who want to do music ... and I'm IT staff, who is getting a statistics degree, yet writes classical music as a hobby for fun ... find that they are stymied by antiquated and just plain dumb music software.
... oh, never heard of Banyan? Think on it.
The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is twenty+plus years old. Imagine if you were trying to do your networking using Banyan
Yet MIDI is what someone who WRITES music must use to export notes over into a program that will PLAY the music they write (i.e. a sequencer) with any degree of real sound. By itself, MIDI just does not support the nuances and articulations of music desk-top publishing, the environments known as notation programs. And also, notation programs can't adequately play back the notes (the sound is cheesey at best).
So people, myself included, resort to composing in one or the other, or perhaps in both a sequencer and a notation program simultaneously, each program running on a separate machine! Is that stone-age or what!!! Imagine if that was what was required to do word processing!
With the current state of MIDI, the computer isn't even able to write what you play into it from a keyboard (without hours and hours of tweaking and guesstimation). We haven't even come that far, people!
Oh, did I mention that the special cables and splitters required to network MIDI devices together are about 2000% more expensive than any other cable connections you are likely to buy! $600.00 all told to hook up three PCs with a MIDI keyboard!!! This is true of Macs as well as PCs.
No, computers AREN'T music friendly and it is a needless shame. Something must be done about it.
Isn't that the way the MIT media lab works? Get press or die.
Again why should I care about a *ANY* girl (pretty or not) which get her idea from the media, and is completly close-minded to recognize that *I* am different than how the media portray me ? Why should I care about about any girl which judge on the outside apparence and media portraying and do not bother revisionning it when she meets me ? Is such girl even worth bothering, if she can't make her own opinion different than what the media sprout ?
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Not to say the detractors are right or wrong, but the problem, IMHO, really comes from a basic process:
- the media is rarely willing or able to portray scientific problems in their true complexity, leading to:
- any scientist who does speak to the media is often misquoted or portrayed as a hero, in order to "simplify" or "clarify", thus:
- the popular scientist quickly earns equal marks of disdain ("the damned fool said WHAT?!") and envy ("yeah, I coulda done that.").
Unfortunately, "research merit" is decided when Joe Sixpack watches CBS and tells his congressman that he thinks that there scientist is cool. Your "research merit" is driven at least as much by Congress as by your personal belief in the quality of the work.... grumble, grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter, Millenium... Hand... Shrimp, I tol' 'em, I tol' 'em.
You're correct. I met him on a couple of occasions. He really does rely on faddish research, and has made some pretty wild claims about rather trivial technology, or inventions that were already well known. I don't see any real science or invention here at all - mostly he's into the attention.
Perhaps that's why he didn't get tenure...
Musical computing is what I do now, at this place, and it's definitely true that computers are not musical enough.
First, the computer is theoretically a completely general tool, but the ones we use come packaged as an office tool. Using them for other purposes generally requires alot of work against this, even in our favorite operating systems. (though FAR less so)
The next problem is computer hardware. It's quite a daunting task in most cases to connect a keyboard or other controller to a computer. It has to be easy for non-geeks. (USB makes this much better than it has been.) In addition, the vast majority of low-end keyboards are awful. They usually have undersize keys, and almost never have velocity, which both become a problem once you move beyond 'mary had a little lamb'.
Creative makes a keyboard that is integrated into the qwerty keyboard. I think this is a fantastic idea. However, the same problems apply, undersize keys (they can be shorter, but they must be wide enough) proprietary, or at least nonstandard drivers, and very cheap construction. It is basically unusable, if they're wondering why it's not selling. Great idea though.
It is a travesty that all 'toy' musical instruments for children are really unplayable. What are we doing to our kids! Even the adult ones under $300 all lack velocity, and often have cheap keys that 'bounce.'
Using the qwerty keyboard as an instrument is not a bad idea. It is fundamentally different from typing. As an adult student of piano I thought my keyboard use as a geek would help. Maybe a little, but one key difference is that key hits when typing are INTERLEAVED, hence we get letters in order. Musical key hits are SYNCRONIZED, you often hit several keys at once. Learning the difference can be tough at first.
It does allow monoponic (one sound at a time) playing, and for that it's pretty neat. Many synth packages already do this, but the feature's not intended to be useful outside of testing. The PC keyboard sends key down and key up messages, so it may be possible to have polyphony (multiple sounds at once and chords) on keyboards whose internal multiplexing doesn't prevent it. Libraries intended for text keyboard use won't work for this.
Learning the piano I also realize that all those hours mastering Bruce Lee on the c64 when I was 13 were exactly the time when my brain could have been mastering music. The idea that you can't learn later is a myth. You learn differently. But the willingness, and the ability, to sit there for 6 to 8 hours a day trying to master something happens when you're young. (Luckily I did this with electronics and computers, so I'm now employed!)
Computers make GREAT musical instruments, and allow music to be made in most of the old ways and many completely new ways. Of course it's up to the musician to use them to make GOOD music.
The computer and toy industries have to start making products that are really useful to normally skilled people in normal situations, which are neither too technical or so stripped down as to be useless. Also, there need to be more musical games, which teach fundamentals, and are also fun. The only reason why the techological revolution isn't also a musical one is that we just haven't bothered. There's an instrument in every home and classroom now, and if we aren't cheap and lazy about it, they would be useful.
God himself is well known for playing the pipe organ. RMS has (unfortunately) been known to sing (I can't find a link to this gem, it used to be somewhere on Jamie Zawinski's website.) Eric Raymond advises hacker wannabes to master a musical instrument to enrich their personality.
It's old news...hackers like music. Why? Music is a cleverly woven chain of simple notes and chords, and if you do it right it sounds amazing and gives much of the same gratification as programming.
That said, this guy's pretty damn cool.
The typical image of a nerd (bifocals pocket protector, awkward, etc.) isn't outdated. People with high intelligence would be more "normal" if they weren't ignored socially. Mainstrem society values everything BUT intelligence. Scientists and similar professions are certainly important, but are viewed by some people as a means to an end.