Category: Music

As many Sciencebase readers will know Telstar was a generic name given to a range of communications satellites (the idea for which was first posited by author Arthur C Clarke). The first two Telstar satellites were experimental. Telstar 1 was launched atop a Thor-Delta rocket on 10th July 10 1962 and successfully relayed the first television pictures, telephone calls, and fax images through space. Telstar 2 was launched May 7, 1963. Telstar 1 and 2, though no longer functional, are still in orbit as of August 2012.

Having just got back from a day at The London 2012 Olympic Games (we saw two men’s hockey matches, preliminary rounds, photos here, prog rock band Muse were in my mind when LilyThePurr mentioned the record label Telstar. Muse, of course, wrote and performed the London 2012 anthem. Intriguingly though, frontman Matt Bellamy‘s father was none other than Sunderland-born George Bellamy, rhythm guitarist with The Tornados (Billy Fury’s backing band). who had a hit with a space-age novelty track called…you guessed it, Telstar. The song recorded by infamous and ingenious record producer Joe Meek in his upstairs flat recording studio in the Holloway Road, London, featured an early electronic keyboard known as a clavioline. The upbeat and electronic sounds evoked the positive space-age and pro-science spirit of the 1950s and early 1960s.

The instrument was invented by Constant Martin in 1947 and comprised a keyboard and separate amplifier and speaker unit. It covered three octaves and tone controls to add vibrato and other effects. The instrument used by Meek was the Univox Clavioline, a successor to earlier models used on recordings since the early 1950s. Meek’s somewhat tragic story is told in the 2008 biopic Telstar. The sound of the much later Stylophone was rather reminiscent of the Clavioline and their limited but weird sounds have featured prominently in various recordings that grasp the retro cache tightly.

Meanwhile, I was hoping to unearth a comment from Lord Coe that connected him to Matt Bellamy, Bob Dylan and the whole Telstar legacy. Maybe I could ask my friend Clare, who is Matt B’s cousin instead…

Watch where you put that microphone, Seb, interviewed by Abi Griffiths.

When you’re feeling blue, put on a sad song. Getting in the party spirit? Turn up the dance music. We are all well aware that music can fit our mood and even reinforce certain emotions. Now, researchers at Philips Research in The Netherlands have demonstrated that background music can affect our mood even while we are directly focused on another task. Their work, described in the International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics might have implications for those investigating the benefits of music therapy, music in the workplace, commercial environments or even in healthcare.

Music is almost ubiquitous for many people, they listen wherever and whenever and with modern portable electronic gadgets it is almost impossible to be without one’s music collection even when on the move; at least until the batteries are expended. Music is often the primary activity at any given time, listening for pleasure and relaxation. It is well known that music can strongly influence a person’s mood under such circumstances. However, what was not entirely clear from previous scientific research was whether music can influence mood so significantly if it is being played in the background, secondary to a person involved in another activity.

Marjolein van der Zwaag and Joyce Westerink specialists in human perception and interaction with technology have now observed participants in sequential experiments in which people were first asked to listen to happy or sad music while doing nothing or solving a Sudoku puzzle. They also did the Sudoku with no music as a control. Later, they were asked to listen to the other type of music under the same conditions. The team measured changes in the participants’ skin electrical conductance and tension in facial muscles during the experiments as indicators of changing mood. They also interviewed the participants to obtain a more subjective but personal view of each individual’s mood.

The team found that participants’ mood responded to the different kinds of mood music – happy or sad – in approximately the same way regardless of whether listening to the music was the person’s focus or simply background sound to their solving the puzzle. The team suggests that mood music might thus be useful in calming or energising a user even when they are involved in an independent task, at work, in school or in other situations, such as driving, for instance.

Zwaag, M.D.V.D. & Westerink, J.H.D.M. (2012). Inducing moods with background music, International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 1 (2) DOI: 10.1504/IJHFE.2012.048035

An odd mix of books on my desk for review right now including: The Haynes Fender Stratocaster Manual by Paul Palmer and A Year in the Garden by “Mr Digwell”.

Haynes are well known for their practice car maintenance manuals and their motor history museum, but in recent years they have extended the brand to other iconic technologies from bicycles to the space shuttle. This year, it’s the turn of perhaps one of the most famous of guitars, the Fender “Strat”, favoured by everyone from Hank Marvin, to Eric Clapton to Mark Knopfler and a million others in between and after. Balmer offers expert advice on choosing and buying a Strat, whether that’s brand new or a vintage model, on setting it up for your particular style of playing and on keeping your six-string electric in prime working order for those jazz licks, rock riffs and high-speed shreds.

Mr Digwell is a cartoon gardener in British tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror. This manual, authored by Paul Peacock, takes you through the four seasons from sowing seeds, cultivating crops to harvesting and over wintering and all the dibbling and raking in between.

Of course, it could be argued that gardening and guitar maintenance are sciences in themselves, but I make no excuse for including books on my hobbies on my site! The origin of creativity has also been puzzling me increasingly this week as I awake early with new ideas for my own book – Deceived Wisdom, Elliott and Thompson, out November.

It’s 1st April 2012, precisely 36 years since the 1976 release of the classic progressive heavy rock album 2112 by Canadian power trio Rush. More importantly, today is the “precentenary” of the eponymous date of Side 1 of the album. It’s the simple story of rebellion, the tale of an ordinary citizen of some pseudo-utopian world where music is controlled by the “Priests” and their “great computers”. He discovers in a cave an “ancient miracle”, a guitar, tunes it to EADGBE using harmonics and then sets off to reveal this “new wonder” to those all-powerful “Priests”. They face him with their scorn and ridicule and our hero is driven to suicide…or so it seems.

The futuristic “space age” theme hooked into a burgeoning excitement about science fantasy and was probably somewhat carried higher on the wave of the movie Star Wars (the first one, the proper one, now known as Episode IV), which was released in May 1977.

Anyway, what’s any of this got to do with the science beat…well, it being the precentenary of the album’s date, I was wondering about ageing and life extension. Common sense would suggest that no one born on 1st April 1976 will be around to celebrate 2112 when it comes of age. But, there are suggestions that medical advances mean that there is a growing likelihood that those people born in the millennial year (2001, or 2000 depending on whether you are numerate or not) might very well live to see that day.

Certainly, average life expectancy has risen significantly since 1912, 1812 (I take it you spotted Rush’s musical reference in the “Overture” section) and so on. But, people like Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey (born 20 April 1963), an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology, suggest that in theory lifespans might be stretched way beyond our nominal three-score years and ten. He has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes that are the primary causes of aging. If we can fix that damage, who knows…we might even have people born today who live not just to see 2112 but perhaps even 2212…

I have a Sciencebase blog post scheduled for 24th May 2112, it will post at 12 minutes past nine in the evening of that day assuming my heirs keep paying the server bills…

Movember (as in moustache November) grows annually, it’s a month-long event started in 1999 in Adelaide, Australia. Since 2004, the Movember Foundation charity has run Movember events to raise awareness and funds for men’s health issues, such as prostate cancer and depression, in Australia and New Zealand. In 2007, events were launched in Ireland, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom, Israel, South Africa, Taiwan and the United States. In 2010, Movember merged with the testicular cancer event Tacheback.

The rules

1. Each mo bro must begin the 1st of Movember clean shaven – check
2. For the entire month each mo bro must grow and groom a moustache – check
3. There is to be no joining of the mo to your side burns – check
4. There is to be no joining of the handlebars to your chin – check
5. Each mo bro must conduct himself like a true country gentleman. – Not shot any game yet, but there’s plenty of time!

I made a start and saw very little upper-lip growth for many days, despite my chin getting heavily stubbled. I wrote a lyrical lament – The Mo’vember Blues – to draw attention to my plight. Thankfully, with just 9 days of growth to go, my lip is bristling with…well…bristles…it’s a somewhat unruly mess and would be laughed out of court if Lech Walesa were the protagonist, but it’s mine, I tell you, mine! May I stop singing The Mo’vember Blues? Is it finally worthy of a donation to the Movember cause?

The SoundCloud upload has had 48 listens, the Youtube clip has been watched 207 times, so not exactly viral…please give it a click and check out my Mo Bro page to make a donation…even if it is in pity.

In his latest book, Harnessed, cognitive scientist Mark Changizi, reveals how and why language, speech and music exist, and why they are apparently uniquely human attributes that separate us, as a species, from the rest of life on Earth.

According to Changizi, the ‘lower’ parts of the brain, the bits that recognise the sounds of nature, the scuffs, cracks and bangs, were hijacked by the ‘upper’ parts of our brain and give us speech as we evolved from our ape-like hominid ancestors. Music emerged from our need to understand the sounds of other people moving around and how our brains are tuned to the beats of footsteps, the Doppler effect and the concept of banging ganglies…and why joggers wearing headphones are “blind” to the people around them…

Read on in my latest Pivot Points column in The Euroscientist, out today.

What if the whole of the Periodic Table were all rocks and metal? And what if it were created in 1987 by Jesus, he of the Roadside as a tribute to Guns ‘n Roses?

It is obviously a concept whose time has come, because there are several others around that attempt to knock out the non-metals and the non-rock:

Periodic Metal
Classic Rock Periods
Periodic Table of Rock Music
Chinese Periodic Table of Rock
Metal Chart