Pretty Goes with Pretty

Listening in Color, Part II

So, remember a couple weeks back when I thought it was completely normal to see colors when listening to music, and all you commenters tried to convince me that I had synesthesia?

I just came across today's post at Cognitive Daily on the same subject. Being that it's a ScienceBlog, you can expect Dave Munger to have been a little more serious than my "anyone else?" question.

Last week, Munger played different audio clips and asked his readers to say what colors they saw. This week, his results. His results, while not exactly conclusive, are fascinating to think about. He investigates the relationship between which colors we associate with certain emotions, and sees if there is a correlation between which colors we see when we listen to "happy" music; but he also sees a huge difference in colors not based on emotions but on instruments (in his study, piano or drum always evoke different color palettes, regardless of emotional content).

Truly fascinating stuff. Try and take the quiz before reading about the results.

Listening in Color

I’m reading Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars right now, and the first chapter is about a painter who, after an accident, suddenly goes 100% color blind. He sees the entire world in a muddy, dingy black and white. He dreams in black and white. His memories are now in black and white. It’s a terrifying condition, all the more so for this man for whom color was an intrinsic part of his identity.

Then, this passage jumped out at me:

Music, curiously, was impaired for him too, because he had previously had an extremely intense synesthesia, so that different tones had immediately been translated into color, and he experienced all music simultaneously as a rich tumult of inner colors. With the loss of his ability to generate colors, he lost this ability as well—his internal “color-organ” was out of action, and now he heard music with no visual accompaniment; this, for him, was music with its essential chromatic counterpart missing, music now radically impoverished.

My brilliant wife was nearby when I came to the passage and I wanted to read it aloud to her. “You know how you can sometimes see colors when you listen to music?” I prefaced. But she looked at me with a curious look and said, a little baffled, “No.”

It never occurred to me that perhaps not everyone shares this experience. There are certain bands, albums, and songs that always put a color or group of colors in my mind. Low does this to me, for instance. When I hear their early albums I inevitably see a deep burgundy, silver gray, and black. When I hear their later albums (everything after The Curtain Hits the Cast), I see washed out whites and blues with sharp punctuations of black and blood red.

I happen to be listening to Iron & Wine as I write this: right, brownish gold, like a wheat field at sunset, with stripes of a dull, flat green.

My wife asked me who else. Thinking clearly about it, I found that if I tried to call a band to my mind I’d simply see the colors of their album covers. The more conscious I was of it, the more literal I was, the more influenced I was. Later that night, as I lay in bed, I tried a psychological test on myself, which was to think of the color first and see which band or song came to mind. Some colors had immediate mental associations. Yellow: Jonathan Richman. Orange, for some strange reason, makes me think of Death Cab for Cutie (I don’t even own anything by them). Sometimes I would give myself a color, then a band would spring to mind, then the color would start to change. Ash gray made me think of Sigur Ros, and then the gray slate in my mind was dappled with specks of pure white and darker shades of black, and finally a faint blue hue would radiate from the center. 

Have you ever thought about listening in these terms? Do you see colors when you listen to some songs? How conscious of it are you? Do you have to “catch” yourself seeing things when you’re listening to music? Do you see abstract images? Is it a pattern? Does it move or morph? Or does music paint actual scenes in your mind, like memories or fantasies?

[An Anthropologist on Mars was written in 1996 and draws seven portraits of people who have rare brain disorders. Sacks is also author of the recently published Musicophilia, which I posted about once before. That book is structured similarly but connects each case study directly to some relationship with music. I haven't read it, but intend to as soon as it comes out in paperback and, I hope to god, has a new cover that I can stomach having on my shelf.]

Music and the Brain: Oliver Sacks, Daniel Levitin, and David Byrne

Oliver Sacks has a new book coming out next week called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, which collects a series of case studies looking at different ways in which music has affected neurological patients, or vice versa. Thanks to a link from Conversational Reading, I read an excerpt from the book in last week’s New Yorker and it was both heartbreaking and fascinating. The article is about Clive Wearing, a former musicologist who suffers from the most extreme case of amnesia ever recorded: he can only remember a few seconds at a time; if he blinks or turns his head, it’s as if he’s just woken up all over again. Everything is on constant reset. Worse, his pre-amnesiac memories—everything prior to 1985—have been slowly deleting themselves from his mind. From the article:

His constantly repeated complaint, however, was not of a faulty memory but of being deprived, in some uncanny and terrible way, of all experience, deprived of consciousness and life itself. As Deborah wrote:

Desperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase, Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake.... 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake.... 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.

This dreadful journal, almost void of any other content but these passionate assertions and denials, intending to affirm existence and continuity but forever contradicting them, was filled anew each day, and soon mounted to hundreds of almost identical pages.

What’s interesting, though, is that he can still play the piano, can still read music, and can still remember that he loves his wife. He can’t really describe any of it, but he can experience it. The article is stunning and I definitely plan to pick up the book when it comes out next week. Wired (via bldgblog) also has a Q&A with Sacks (and a look at his metaphorical iPod). There are also videos of Sacks at Amazon.

Finally, I picked up the latest issue of Seed last week and it too had an interview with Sacks. The article gives a good sense of how Sacks brought science writing to a new level. It’s not online, but when I went to Seed’s website to see if it was, I found this instead: a conversation between David Byrne and Daniel Levitin, another scientist who has also studied music’s relationship with the brain. I’ve heard great things about his book This is Your Brain on Music, and I might just make it a twofer when I hit the bookstore next week. From their conversation:

David Byrne: When somebody tells us what this song is about, or what this painting is about, we're kind of stuck because talking about the art, and the art itself, are almost separate areas. The music seems to have straight access to the so-called "reptile brain," and we feel it immediately. But often it's also touching all kinds of other parts of the brain. If it has lyrics, there's language in it. If it has a strong rhythmic element it's touching what you would call the motor parts of the brain and muscle. All kinds of stuff is involved. How do you think this all happens?

Daniel Levitin: My guess is it starts with trying to unite rationality with irrationality.

DB: I'll bet you get resistance too from people who say you can't analyze this.

DL: Well, I remember a quote from Allan Watts, the philosopher. He wrote a number of books on Eastern philosophy in the 70s. He said that the problem with science is that when it wants to study the river, the scientist will go to the river with a bucket, take a bucket of water out, bring it to the shore, sit there, and study the bucket of water. But of course that's not the river.

And you know a lot of people have tried to study music by getting rid of everything except pitch or everything except rhythm. Or by using very strange, computer-generated sounds, to see what the brain does in response to them.

There's always this tension in science that you want to control your variables and you want to know what it is you're studying. And yet you want to have what we call ecological validity, which is just a fancy way to say it has to be like the real world. There's a tension between these two, and I've erred on the side of having ecological validity in my own experiments because I want to see the real phenomena.

You can read the edited conversation here, or you can watch the hour-long video here.

Previously on pgwp: Noise Solution—researchers in London are using MRI scanners to measure "positive soundscapes" within the urban environment: what could this mean for urban design and/or public sound art?

Sundown on Mars

One more Mars post, thanks to Centripetal Notion. This is the sunset on Mars, as recorded by the Spirit rover. According to NASA:

On May 19th, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view of the Sun sinking below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th Martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol’s data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset.... The terrain in the foreground is the rock outcrop “Jibsheet”, a feature that Spirit has been investigating for several weeks. The floor of Gusev crater is visible in the distance, and the Sun is setting behind the wall of Gusev some 80 kilometers (50 miles) in the distance.

Red Planet is a Little Wet

Have I been living under a rock all my life, or did science just become really fascinating this year? (Probably the latter, but the results are not yet in.) From today's LA Times:

NASA scientists announced Wednesday that they have found evidence that water still flows on the surface of Mars in the form of sporadic gushers that increase the possibility that the Red Planet harbors some form of life.

While the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been roaming the ground and looking at rocks, finding evidence that water may have covered large expanses of the planet billions of years ago, it was the Mars Global Surveryor spacecraft, originally launched ten years ago, that found evidence of water on the planet now, when it photographed a crater that it had also observed in 2001. Comparing the two photographs, you can see that something in the topography has changed, and scientists believe that it is consistent with the effect of water flowing over the area. Poetically, the Surveyor, which was only expected to function for two years, not ten, went silent not long after making this discovery.

So, if there's water, there could be life. That makes two possible locations of life in our solar system discovered this year—one of Saturn's moons may, too. The rovers are at least a few hundred miles away from the area in question, so it will be a while before we can investigate further.

Scientists Find Proof of Dark Matter

X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.; Lensing Map: NASA/STScI; ESO WFI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.

NASA scientists have discovered proof of dark matter:

Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter.

"This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

This is significant because dark matter has been a concept that held the universe together but, since it was invisible, many scientists have doubted its existence at all. Dark matter has been used as an explanation for why Einstein's theory of relativity breaks down when blown up to  cosmic distances, beyond just our solar system. That is, in certain places within the universe, gravity becomes stronger where Einstein's theory says it should be weaker. "Dark matter" is one explanation for why this happens. Cosmic Variance has a great explanation of what it's all about, and how this picture illustrates dark matter's existence.

In the Bullet Cluster, more formally known as 1E 0657-56, we actually find two clusters of galaxies that have (relatively) recently passed right through each other. It turns out that the large majority (about 90%) of ordinary matter in a cluster is not in the galaxies themselves, but in hot X-ray emitting intergalactic gas. As the two clusters passed through each other, the hot gas in each smacked into the gas in the other, while the individual galaxies and the dark matter (presumed to be collisionless) passed right through.

This is just a brief excerpt, but the rest of CR's post is worth reading, so you can sound smart when you tell other people about this.

[via Pharyngula]

ScienceBlogs goes Gargantuan

ScienceBlogs, the online counterpart to Seed magazine, has had a little work done. Over the weekend they ballooned from twenty blogs to forty-four! The main page has also gotten a redesign to help navigate the deepening waters. This has pretty much made ScienceBlogs the place on the net for any science news (and intelligent commentary)—much in the same way ArtsJournal is my one-stop for arts headlines and ArchNewsNow is my daily architecture destination. (Now if only someone would do the same for music—it used to be Pitchfork but I've gotten sick of them—I'd be set.)

I'd barely been able to wade through the original twenty blogs, so I can't quite yet direct you to the best of the bunch, but the good news is the front page now splits things up by category, so you don't have to waste your precious internet time—an oxymoron, I know—reading about dinosaurs if all you care about are aliens (though they're all slimy lizard-things, so I don't know why you're being so persnickety.)

Animated Math Music

This is pretty neat, courtesy Jim Bumgardner:

This weekend I’ve been playing, once again, with the ideas of experimental film pioneer John Whitney, using both graphics and audio. While Whitney was interested in turning musical ideas into motion graphics, I’m doing the inverse — turning one of his key animation ideas back into music.

…

In this movie, each of the 48 dots is moving in a circle. Each of the dots is on a 3 minute cycle. At the end of 3 minutes, the outermost dot will have moved around the circle once (this dot represents the first harmonic or fundamental). The next dot will have moved around the circle twice (representing the second harmonic). The next dot three times, and so on. The innermost dot moves around the circle 48 times.

Now, imagine these dots are raised bumps on a disc which is controlling a music box, with each bump triggering a note when it passes the zero degree line (a line extending from the center to the east).

Open this page in a new window and listen and watch. Meanwhile, follow this link to read all about just what is going on. It's a trip to watch the notes line up and splash down as a chord. Check the many variations as well. I get a kick out of nos. 11 and 12.

[found this via a post at Last Plane to Jakarta forums.]

NASA to Bowie: "Life on Mars? Maybe."

NASA scientists studying Mars announced this week that life was very likely possible in the planet’s infancy, according to this article:

The first era began with the planet's formation about 4.6 billion years ago and lasted for about 600 million years. Rock from this period lies exposed on the planet's surface due to meteorite strikes, erosion and underground shifts that formed cracks or faults in the planet's crust.

This ancient Mars terrain contains clay minerals, such as chamosite and nontronite, which form when water is abundant, temperatures are moderate and acidity is low, conditions that may have been suitable for life.

However, Mars underwent significant changes somewhere between 4 billion and 3.6 billion years ago—right about when life on our own planet was beginning to form. So, did Mars have a head start on us, and was there any life during that small window? For now, who knows.

Meanwhile, some other NASA scientists are looking forward rather than back. The Cassini space craft, which has been studying Saturn for the last couple of years, has found some intriguing data surrounding the small moon Enceladus, which contains “simple organic molecules, water and heat, the ingredients for life,” according to Dr. Rob Brown, a member of the Cassini team. Cassini did a flyby of Enceladus in July of 2005, and the results are astounding:

From this flyby came confirmation that the moon has an atmosphere, and strong evidence that the gases which make up the atmosphere are coming from cracks in the surface, nick-named "tiger stripes", near the south pole.

It appears that the gases are being forced through the surface, as they emerge in jets which shoot upwards for hundreds of kilometres before dispersing, eventually forming Saturn's E-ring.

Most of the gas is water vapour, suggesting strongly that liquid water lies under the moon's icy surface.

...

Its tiger stripes amount to a "water volcano", the only one seen in the solar system other than on Earth.

Among our neighbours, it is the only known geophysically active world other than Jupiter's moon Io.

Of course, it'll be another two years before Cassini attempts another flyby of Enceladus. Hopefully NASA is at work on getting further research done, as the article hints.

The California Archipelago

[North America, 310 million years ago; map by Ron Blakey.]

While in Santa Barabara this weekend, my wife read somewhere that the Santa Ynez mountains run east-west, unlike nearly every other mountain range in North America, which run north-south. I thought it might have something to do with the fact that California sits atop a point where two or three tectonic plates meet. We all know about the San Andreas fault line, of course, but if I remember correctly from my reading of Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything earlier this year, it's more complex than just San Andreas.

Lo and behold bldgblog was pondering the same thing while vacationing in Death Valley last week. Lucky for me, he went and found all kinds of information, including some gorgeous maps depicting the formation of North America (and more specifically, California) over the last 550 million years.

The Sound of Silence

This weekend I toured a number of galleries around Los Angeles. Over at the Mary Goldman Gallery were photos by Miranda Lichtenstien. All of the photos were somehow about meditation—a woman in a bathtub, a man with his eyes closed at a desk, and so on. Fine photographs, sure, but the one that grabbed me the most was the above, Anechoic Chamber. It’s a great photo, but I think that’s due in large part to the space itself. I’ve never heard of an anechoic chamber before, so home to google I went.

Anechoic means “without echo.” These chambers exist all over the country, many used as chambers in which to test antennae or electronic systems, as they have no ambient sound whatsoever. Hence they make powerful meditation rooms as well, as the only thing you can hear is the sound of your own body—and absolutely nothing else. According to wikipdia, one of these chambers inspired John Cage's 4'33", after he spent some time in one and listened to his own blood flowing through his body. More chambers below, though to Lichtenstein’s credit, none as beautiful as hers.

Math My Grandma Can Do

This blog has covered a range of topics—science, music, architecture, art, and more—since I began it all these month ago. Despite such a democratic take on things,  I never thought I'd be posting about crafting. But my wife has pointed me to two projects that are just bizarre enough to intrigue me.

First, some lunatic Belgian mathematician-crafters have taken the Lorenz equations—three-dimensional equations that describe the nature of chaotic systems—and turned them into crochet patterns. Crocheted chaos.

Try to follow along. These three equations—

—somehow create something that looks like this:

Follow? Me neither. But the lunatic Belgians do, and they've also got mad skills with the crochet sticks.

If you would like dabble in your own crochet lunacy, you can download the pattern [pdf].

"Piece of cake," I can hear my grandma crowing. Well, granny, how about quilts based on topographical maps? That's what I thought!

These are done by Ian Hundley, who had a little blurb with photos in the latest issue of Vogue. (Actually, the ones in the magazine are better, and more maplike, than this one; but this is all I can find online.) You can see his quilts at Earnest Cut & Sew in New York throughout March.

Black Coffee Blues

I woke up this morning feeling anti-corporate. A strange way to wake up, surely. Groggy, grumpy, chipper, hungover—all seem more reasonable. But no, my first thought upon opening my eyes this morning was damn it, fuck the Man! This, due to two experiences yesterday evening, both of which must have burrowed into my subconcsious right before beddy-bye . First, reading a short article in the newest issue of Seed about corporate lobbyists trying to own time.  No, not the magazine, but time itself. Here is what Joshua Roebke wrote:

The earth's rotation is slowing—thanks, moon—and each day grows longer. So every year or two, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, a little-known cabal of geophysicists, tells the world to add a leap second to civic time so it can catch up. But the Sevice has some competition: A consortium of corporate interests wants to end our clocks's connection with the natural world by 2007—mostly because their global positioning satellites weren't programmed to deal with leap seconds. If they have their way, the earth will spin gradually out of phase with watches, until night becomes day (well, in 5,200 years sunrise will be just an hour later, but still.) More immediately, astronomers and other scientists who rely on the coordination of times for experiments are outraged that corporate interests might hijack time for their own purposes.

Okay, there's a lot missing here—who and what is this "consortium of corporate interests"—and Roebke makes the point that the change would be all but imperceptible to us. But I can't help but be with him on that but still—the audacity, the balls of business to want to change the way we record time because they can't wind the clocks on their satellites!

Second: last night I was at a bookstore and watched a celebrity drop $800 on books without batting an eye. Meanwhile I was standing in the aisles, pawing at the twenty in my pocket, wondering if I should buy the new book by Willam Vollmann or that darned copy of Seed. I had to weigh my immediate future: tomorrow I'm going to need coffee, and I really need a haircut. So I went for the $4.95 purchase. Then I stood in line for ten full minutes watching this woman buy about eight photography books, a mess of British tabloids, and smattering of nonfiction. I watched the total come to about $650, and then she sneezed out two more gargantuan art books that piled on another $150. Literally gargantuan, as in so big the store didn't have a bag that either book would fit. Eight Hundred Dollars later, I purchased my meager magazine as I watched her and her companion stumble and giggle their way out of the store. Nothing wrong with being wealthy, but I've never actually wacthed someone crap a grand out their ass and then giggle like they made a pooter. And—if I may extend this crass analogy—like your own stinky farts, it was a little awesome and a little gross.

And now here I am, the next morning, my disgust with wealth and corporate interest still lingering. I left my self-righteous Punk Rock anti-corporate snobbery behind long ago, but this morning it's there, underlying my typical pre-coffee curmudgeonliness. So what can I do but protest? No Starbucks today, no Coffee Bean, no Peet's. I'm going to the Delocator and I'm finding me a mom-and-pop coffee. It's that little, unrelated protest for protest's sake that will make me feel better (also, the caffeine). It won't make me richer and it won't take power away from corporate lobbyists; but it will give me a chance to savor the morning—something that will be harder to do in 5,200 years!—and it might give me stinky farts. Sometimes that's all the little guy can do.

Be Patient; it's Going to be Neat

The New Horizons spacecraft is slated to launch today, just after lunch if you’re on the east coast, and some time after you show up for work if you’re on the west. (NASA, I think, has a more specific timeline.) The craft is going to head for Pluto—the first up close study of the planet we’ve ever done. Stay tuned in 2015 for more info there. Equally fascinating is that New Horizons won’t be done once it’s waved to Pluto. Next on its agenda is the rest of the Kuiper Belt, that ring of icy rocks floating around the edge of our solar system, of which Pluto was the biggest icy rock—that is, until they discovered our tenth planet about a year ago. Yeah, I didn’t get the memo either, but apparently we’ve grown to an even ten. It’s not official yet (hence the planet’s current nom de plume, 2003 UB313), but there is a rock out there—three times further from the sun than Pluto—that is so far the largest object in the Kuiper Belt (about three times larger than Pluto). The exciting news is that, as our observations of the Kuiper Belt gets more sophisticated, there is a good chance that we will find more objects that might also constitute planetary status. (Suddenly I have the lyrics to "Splish Splash" in my head—how was I to know there was a party goin' on?)

You can find more information on the story behind New Horizons over at Space.com. Meanwhile, there's a committee out there currently weighing potential names for our new addition. According to the show Passport to Pluto, which is airing all the time on the Discovery Science channel this month, the man who discovered the planet has been referring to it as Xena. I'm willing to bet this is why his bosses decided maybe a committee was a good idea.

My Head was in the Ground, and I Wasn't Even Looking at the Rocks

I’m new to science. Like many people I was made allergic to science sometime in high school. But a couple of months ago I picked up Bill Bryson’s wildly popular A Short History of Nearly Everything, and it’s jumpstarted me. What a truly fascinating re-introduction to science that book is. It’s the perfect starting point for anyone wondering just how the universe formed, how the Earth came to be, and how life began and evolved. Bryson—usually a travel writer—is an animated writer who seems so awed by what he’s talking about it’s as if he too is hearing it for the first time. In other words, he knows about your allergies and he does well in not stirring up the dust. He let’s you breathe it in without much concern. By the time I finished the book, I wanted to find more, more, more. I’m on to Simon Singh’s The Big Bang. It’s a little scarier for this amateur—lots of equations and diagrams sprinkled throughout—but I’m hanging on.

Meanwhile I’ve also just discovered Seed magazine, which I may just have to subscribe to. It fits the spirit of this blog—sure, it’s a science magazine, but the latest issue profiles three or four artists, has a satire by Neal Pollak, and even has a conversation between an MIT cell biologist and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister (apparently not online). A strong directive of Seed seems to be not only in covering hot issues in science (evolution, avian flu, stem cell, etc.), but also in how science and culture collide, perhaps more than we often notice. And if you can’t make it to a newsstand or a bookstore anytime soon, Seed has a lot of content online, including many articles from the print edition, a forum and a newly launched stable of bloggers, a la ArtsJournal's corral of the best of the best, called ScienceBlogs. The image of the Orion Nebula above, by the way, comes from one of the ScienceBlogs, Afarensis.  I’ve only just barely scratched the surface of any of this, but it all looks worth further investigation.