Friday Miscellanea

I seem to recall seeing something like this before: Scientists Played Music to Cheese as It Aged. Hip-Hop Produced the Funkiest Flavor.

Last September, Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler and a team of researchers from the Bern University of Arts placed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese in individual wooden crates in Wampfler’s cheese cellar. Then, for the next six months each cheese was exposed to an endless, 24-hour loop of one song using a mini-transducer, which directed the soundwaves directly into the cheese wheels.

The “classical” cheese mellowed to the sounds of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The “rock” cheese listened to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” An ambient cheese listened to Yello’s “Monolith,” the hip-hop cheese was exposed to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Jazz (We’ve Got)” and the techno fromage raved to Vril’s “UV.” A control cheese aged in silence, while three other wheels were exposed to simple high, medium and low frequency tones.

Well, I'm glad that they had some control tests as well. But since what we are talking about here is the simple physical effect of air compression waves on bacteria there should have been a lot of other tests. What about a number of cheeses exposed to different rhythmic patterns and tempi? Obviously there is no aesthetic component of significance here even though the headline tries to create one.

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Over at On An Overgrown Path is a post recommending some CD collections. The Rameau looks particularly interesting.

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Alex Ross has an article on two new piano concertos by John Adams and Thomas Adès at the New Yorker. It opens with a characteristic blast of purple prose:

Glamorous, gladiatorial, faintly disreputable, the concerto is an essential feature of modern concert life. Few symphony orchestras venture far into a season without summoning a soloist to execute the majestic opening arpeggios of Beethoven’s “Emperor,” the throat-clearing double-stops of the Dvořák Cello Concerto, or some other familiar bold gesture. Orchestral economics would presumably collapse without a supply of celebrity soloists playing celebrity works. The disreputability of the genre has to do with its slightly seedy showmanship, its carnival trappings. The virtuoso violinist is a devilish hypnotist, descended from Paganini. The pianist is a Lisztian magician, conjuring wonders from a long black box.

Here is a comment on the Adès concerto:

Adès’s fractal orchestration and atomizing interplay of intervals keep the Jazz Age ambience at a distance: nothing stays fixed. In the recapitulation, the Bette Davis theme assumes grander proportions, with solemn, unmuted horns in attendance. The first theme returns in the coda, amid delirious orchestral commentary. A pell-mell duet of piccolo and xylophone had me on the brink of laughing out loud.

Fractal orchestration? Whazzat?About the Adams he says:

The piece begins in trickster style, with the soloist playing a funky ostinato modelled on Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme and a detuned honky-tonk piano adding offbeat accents. As this jollity grinds on, though, it takes on a machinelike brutality. A composer who has long used popular material to poke at the solemnity of the classical tradition here seems to be exposing the dominating urge behind much pop music.

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We haven't grumbled about scientism lately, defined as the clumsy, lumbering attempts by "researchers" to stuff the arts and aesthetics into a test tube so they can discern the 'real facts'. Here is a good one for you, and no, it is not satire: What Makes Music Special to Us? Clarifying the differences between what animals and humans hear.

What we know for sure is that humans, songbirds, pigeons, rats, and some fish (such as goldfish and carp) can easily distinguish between different melodies. It remains highly questionable, though, whether they do so in the same way as humans do, that is, by listening to the structural features of the music.

The article is actually interesting, though without a lot more detail as to how the research was done, it is hard to decide how reliable the findings are.

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Here would be a useful project for "researchers": just how worthwhile are the wide, sweeping comments by artists or scientists when they wander out of their specialized areas? For example, how useful were Stephen Hawking's comments on the existence of god? Or how valuable are Yo Yo Ma's comments on music "as a force for social justice"? Thanks to Slipped Disc we found this article: Yo-Yo Ma and Philharmonic director Borda discuss music as a force for social justice.

Ma said embracing the issues of the world was natural for a musician, and dismissed the idea of “art for art’s sake.”

“We have a bigger purpose,” he said. “It’s never art for art’s sake, because even if I do it for myself in my head, I have an ideal. I’m actually trying to take something — a construct, a concept, a theory — and then I want to make it visible, I want to make it audible, I want to make it tactile. I want to make it felt.”

It is very hard to actually pull anything like an actual position out of that string of platitudes so the obvious conclusion is that this is pretty much just marketing.

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I don't use Google so I missed their tribute to Bach on Thursday: Today’s Google Doodle proves that a bot can’t top Bach.

You, too, can compose like Bach. Or rather, artificial intelligence can compose like Bach. Or at least, that’s the premise of Thursday’s delightful Google Doodle, which promises to take any two-bar melody you type in and turn it into a Bach, or Bachlike, chorale in four parts, played by charming little music-box figures of bewigged 18th-century musicians.

It may only add to the doodle’s charm that what it actually proves is the opposite of what it sets out to do. Nobody can compose like Bach. Especially not a machine. You already knew that. But you can have a lot of fun along the way to finding it out.

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For our envoi today, let's have some non-AI, gluten-free, non-GMO Bach. This is the St. Matthew Passion conducted by Philipp Herreweghe. Further credits onscreen: