Premature evaluation?

Newspapers aren’t doing as badly as you think, says Slate’s Daniel Gross. His point seems to be that the huge decline of the past year is nothing special — lots of businesses took a bath this last year. And he points to signs of recovery, including a nearly 10 percent profit at the chain that laid me off last year, Gannett. And to be sure, it’s far from a safe bet that the newspaper industry will actually die off in the next decade or so.

But he doesn’t address the longer-term decline that newspapers have been grappling with for well over a decade.

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He Cares If You Listen

“Who’s afraid of the avant-garde?” explores why people like modern paintings more than modern music, by way of reviewing a book that explores the same question, “Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen.”

I think there are a few other reasons modern art works better than modern (i.e. 12-tone) music:

1. Modern art still obeys basic psychological principles of what people like (Rouge’s Foam touches on this), while modern music is based on a mathematical abstraction that actually goes directly against what people like (e.g. an identifiable key, with some notes more important than others).

2. Modern art doesn’t command your attention — you can look away from a Rothko or a Pollock, but you can’t really walk out of a concert hall. Plus, modern art is almost always in bunches, so if you don’t like one, there are others nearby. Going to an art museum doesn’t mean you’ll be forced to spend 30 minutes (or 30 seconds) with art you don’t like — there’s no such thing as a “captive audience” for a painting or a sculpture.

3. I don’t know — has anybody got any ideas?

(pic of 12-tone matrix — no, I don’t understand it either, and I’ve got a music degree — via Acting Man)

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See Emily Compose

Classical composer “Emily Howell” (no relation to her namesake in the Pink Floyd video “See Emily Play” above) is actually a computer program (“Emily” is taken from “Experiments in Musical Intelligence”)  that can write classical music good enough (or at least classical-sounding enough) to fool some people into thinking it’s “real” music (mp3′s at the programmer’s website).

The article sort of defends the practice, noting that even if the program is basically taking snippets of classical phrases and re-arranging them, composers have been doing that for centuries. As Frank Zappa once observed, there’s only 12 notes, and they’ve all been played. But ultimately, it comes down on the side of humanity against the machines and all that.

According to the headline, “This artificially intelligent music may speak to our minds, but not our souls.” I can’t help but wondering if an audience listening to a program of “Emily” and, say, Schoenberg, would agree that the human composer touched their souls more deeply.

(An  Ars Technica article goes into some greater technical detail)

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Style Counsel

Fake AP Stylebook is brilliant. It’s enough to make me reconsider whether this Twitter fad might be worthwhile after all.

Maybe it’s not quite as funny if you don’t have familiarity with the real AP Stylebook, but I don’t think you have to be a copy editor to appreciate an entry like, “Always capitalize ‘Bible.’ You don’t want to get letters from those people.”

Or, “Change the pronunciation so that “H1″ sounds like “swine” and “N1″ is “flu.”

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All together now

“Symphony of Science – We Are All Connected,” an auto-tuned mashup of great scientists and popular science guys (and a couple who are maybe both) is nifty, if a bit mystical. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s Neil deGrasse Tyson who steals the show from the likes of Sagan and Feynmann. Mental Floss has the lyrics (and embedded video).

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Improv Everywhere strikes again

So, Improv Everywhere does it again, with a musical number staged in a Queens supermarket, “Squish Our Fruits Together.”

What’s interesting is that the crowd seems a lot more savvy than the onlookers at their earlier Food Court Musical — lots of cell-phone cameras being whipped out. Also interesting is the sponsorship by Trident gum at the end of the video. Apparently the Improv Everywhere folks have figured out how to monetize their thing.

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Fast cars and testosterone

Driving fast cars increases testosterone level in men, according to a new study. They tested the effect of driving a sports car, and also the effect of being around women, and the combination of effects.

The most unintentionally hilarious line: “Interestingly, whether there were ladies present or not, the mens’ testosterone didn’t increase at all after driving the Camry.” Yeah, that’s, um, “interesting,” if by “interesting” you mean “crashingly obvious.”

But I’m definitely going to have to think twice the next time I start to describe my supercharged Miata as “spunky.”

Update: I should have guessed Jalopnik would offer its take as well.

(graph via — of course — GraphJam)

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Web Wisdom

AskPhilosophers.org lets you pose questions to actual philosophers, rather than advice columnists, therapists, talk radio hosts or wannabe bloggers. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

Today’s question is whether there’s really any point to philosophy at all or whether it’s basically just mental masturbation (I’m paraphrasing), and philosopher Allen Stairs gives a somewhat thoughtful, but still nicely snarky, reply.

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Overthinking Jay-Z

Jay-Z Is A Genius offers some interesting insights into the rapper’s latest album art, and how it reflects his overall message of authenticity and lack of fakery (the pic appears to be Photoshopped, but it’s actually real paint covering the instruments).

The blogger calling himself The Last Psychiatrist manages to touch on the irony of representing authenticity via a real pic that creates the illusion of being an illusion, but he engages in a discussion of the message of authenticity and eschewing digital manipulation without mentioning “Death of Autotune” even once. Weird.

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Well It’s On and On and On On and On

“Rapper’s Delight” turns 30. Generally considered the first rap song (and the one that introduced “hip hop” as a phrase), the Sugarhill Gang’s breakthrough hit introduced a new era in music, even if it took a few years for “mainstream” (read, “white”) audiences to realize it.

I’m not sure when I realized hip-hop was the new thing in music, but at some point I remember pondering what the next big thing would be (e.g. after punk and new wave laid the foundation for the ’80s), and then suddenly realizing I’d been listening to it for a while already.

(pic from Old School Stylz, which also has mp3 links)

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