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Grateful Dead Percussionist Makes Music From Supernovas
At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"
I presume he is spending a year dead for tax purposes.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Gives a new meaning to "Drums > Space".
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Just in case you may not know this but "Grateful Dead" is the name of a rock band (now currently inactive due to forced retirement of most of the members) they are known for (being a 60s band) Skeletons, teddy bears and wild mixes of colors known as "tie dye".
Wikipedia know how to use it??
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Music that is inspired by real events and phenomena slightly outside the grasp of a layman is always awesome. :D
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Humor know how to find it??
In a way, what he's doing isn't all that much different from when scientists take pictures of celestial phenomena in the non-visible spectra (X-Ray, IR, etc.) and then "project" them into the visual spectrum so we can actually see what they've photographed. To some extent it's a distortion of reality, but interesting.
The drummer was nowhere to be found. Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.
The band's manager was profoundly relieved. It meant that for the seventeenth time on this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that therefore the timing of the cymballistics would be right.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They aren't inspired by supernovas. They create supernovas.
Really highlights the difference between real rock and these jam bands.
Good for Mickey, but this idea isn't new. Isao Tomita (sort of) did the same thing in 1984 on "Dawn Chorus": http://www.isaotomita.net/recordings/dawn.html
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Conceptually, this has been done before, with the planets of our solar system. I can only hope Mickey's turns out as well.
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So have they modified it enough to be an original work, or is the FSM getting ready to sue over copyright infringement.....
Grin, you immediately thought of it as well. I forgot the name of the rock group, though..
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"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I don't find these "make music from supernovae/network traffic/monkey population" projects to be too impressive. You could fit just about any input to the appropriate scale and it would come out listenable, if boring.
If you listened to his music, you'd be pretty freakin grateful to be dead as soon as possible.
"Well, it IS sort of a downer that all these civilizations were just wiped out when their sun went nova and consumed their planets, and we feel for our extraterrestrial brethren. But on the bright side, check out this wicked drum solo I got out of it!"
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Supernovae
dude... what are you getting at, man?
Anything you say will be held against you.
There's no difference in this application than most of the others ever produced. They're all simply frequency shifted time series. Any pseudo-regular simple or complex wave can be sifted to any frequency. Radio-astronomy has been the biggest source so far, though brain recordings have been done. At this point about the only novel application would be taking recorded sound and shifting it up to visual light.
The application I've found that uses amplitude modulation (notes from data points rather than time series wave forms) is Moonbell http://wms.selene.jaxa.jp/selene_sok/about_en.html Musical notes are created from lunar altitude measurements done by Selene.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Lustmord's Ambient album "The Place Where The Black Stars Hang" sounds like this, only done without the sound inputs from data samples.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
Oh great, now the universe is going to sue the pants off our planet.
Far out man...
If you take out the "Grateful" from the title, the story sounds a lot cooler and trippier.
This was nothing new.The History Channel's show 'The Universe" episode on pulsars & quasars featured this,using the beat from the Vela pulsar.The cool thing was the way Hart integrated the pulsar signal into his composition.
Nothing but Geeky cool!!!
Geek Hillbilly
Check out his cool drumset.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Yeah,but does he have a robot band????
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
The GP's presuming that the artist is spending a year dead for tax purposes was a great reference to a very funny piece of literature. Now, you might know that or you might not; in any case, your prefixing your post with "Just in case" does not absolve you from presuming the GP didn't know who the Grateful Dead are.
All the available data do indicate that you haven't read the H2G2 series while in the same time they *do not* indicate that the GP didn't know GD.
"dead for tax purposes". Google know how to use it?
I speak England very best
Actually, RobertLTux's reply was directed at the AC parent that read "How is this drummer so grateful if he's deceased?" and not zmollusc's post. Also, in a lot of places the Grateful Dead really are practically unknown (here in Sweden the most common reactions to any mention of the dead tend to be either "The what?" or "Oh, I think I heard one of their songs, they're one of those bands that sound like credence (clearwater revival), right?" and any attempts to actually explain further what the Grateful Dead were tends to end up with people assuming they sound like either The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix).
/Mikael
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How about a brown dwarf. I wonder how closely they would match.
I think it would be funny though, if they did a red dwarf.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Well done, sir!
Didn't that chica Fiorella Terenzi already do this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiorella_Terenzi
She's also much better to look at.
I've spent the last three years taking data for the "Nearby Supernova Factory" the article mentions, with little understanding of what it was all about.
Finally, it all makes sense. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I've known Mickey Hart for over 40 years and he has always been one of my favorite percussionists. His work has been innovative, fluid, open. Just pick up his CD "Planet Drum" for a really good example of his post-mortem (sic) work. Anyway, thanks for the posting. I'll have to check it out.
Says that this is how the andromedians create their music, by listening to the noise that the universe gives off.
"What are you listening to?"
"The Dead."
"The who?"
"No, not the Who, the Dead!"
Just in case you may not know this but "Grateful Dead" is the name of a rock band (now currently inactive due to forced retirement of most of the members) they are known for (being a 60s band) Skeletons, teddy bears and wild mixes of colors known as "tie dye".
Wikipedia know how to use it??
Actually, the two percussionists (Hart and Kreutzman), the bass player, Phil Lesh, and the rythyme guitarist Bob Weir just recently in the Summer of '09 finished a tour as "The Dead", rather than "the Grateful Dead," sans lead guitaris Jerry Garcia. In Garcia's stead, as it were, was guitarist Warren Haynes. So "inactive" is not a correct description of the remaining member's current musical lives.
Gives a new meaning to that old tired hippy phrase...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Very funny, and braver than I am for coming forward as a Dead fan first. Admitting that makes me feel like a target for ridicule. That's pretty sad, I'm actually afraid of being treated like a nerd on /.
Q. What did Jerry Garcia say when he finally kicked all drugs and booze?
A. "These guys SUCK!"