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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Science My Idea of a Great Science Show

Posted by Charles Mudede on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 9:22 AM

It would look and feel like this...

Now, let's take a quick look at a passage in Kodwo Eshun's groundbreaking book More Brilliant than the Sun:

Traditionally, the music of the future is always beatless. To be futuristic is to jettison rhythm. The beat is the ballast which prevents escape velocity, which stops music breaking beyond the event horizon. The music of the future is weightless, transcendent, neatly converging with online disembodiment. Holst’s Planet Suite as used in Kubrick’s 2001, Eno’s Apollo soundtrack, Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack: all these are good records – but sonically speaking, they’re as futuristic as the Titanic, nothing but updated examples of an 18th C sublime.

Like science fiction films, science programs sometimes suffer from beatlessness or weak beats. The video of the strange octopus (it's taken from the documentary Learning to Sea) is full of great and lusty beats. The beats make the science less metaphysical and airy. We see the octopus living to the rhythm.

Comments (9) RSS

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We see the octopus living to the rhythm? How is that? The octopus can't hear the rhythm. The octopus is more strange than you can possibly imagine, and anything that makes it seem more familiar, like adding ridiculous beats, or any music for that matter, takes you further from reality, not closer to it. You're not seeing the octopus at all; you're seeing the inside of your own head.

Posted by Fnarf

on January 19, 2012 at 9:33 AM

That was beautiful. I have to find that movie.

Posted by displayname on January 19, 2012 at 9:45 AM

I tend to agree with #1; ya gotta be careful not to anthropomorphize animals and give all due vigilance as wild, feral creatures. And the music? Sounds like anything I'd hear at a drum circle.

Anyone wonder if the chromataphores of color-changing creatures could be excited and cooked while remaining that color? Who wouldn't want a plate of blue calamari? :D

Posted by Drew2u on January 19, 2012 at 9:57 AM

I really like the percussion. It brings the experience of seeing the octopus into the human world, which is a really nice change of perspective. The creature comes across as voluptuous, desiring, secretive... instead of some weird, otherworldly monster. What's surprising is that we so rarely look at sea creatures this way, as part of our world (a strange part, but ours).

@1, "We see the octopus living to the rhythm". That's what we see. Has nothing to do with what is.

Posted by Irena on January 19, 2012 at 10:22 AM

I would also add that humans are more strange than we could possibly imagine. We are as strange to ourselves as the octopus's colours are to its black-and-white-seeing self.

Posted by Irena on January 19, 2012 at 10:32 AM

Not to be pedantic, but Holst's Planet suite isn't used on the soundtrack to Kubrick's 2001. Instead, he used Ligeti's Requiem and Atmospheres, which are much more beatless and ethereal than anything Holst ever dreamed of.

Posted by DavidG

on January 19, 2012 at 11:12 AM

"The octopus is more strange than you can possibly imagine"

Whew, thanks! I had lost track of the limits of my imagination, and was in serious danger of running off the rails of my life as a consequence. I'll be back more regularly for what will undoubtedly be much-needed future corrections.

Posted by Mike on January 19, 2012 at 11:20 AM

@6: and the iconic music over the thrown-bone/spinning space station cut in the opening of the movie is Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra. I know this only because it came up over Thanksgiving and my guess was Holst, and the guy who was not ashamed to pull his smartphone out at dinner looked it up and it turned out to be one of the Strausses.

Posted by Mike on January 19, 2012 at 11:22 AM

While octopus and other cephalopods don't have full color vision they have very sophisticated eyes which have polarization vision, are incredibly sensitive to luminance and other visual cues that make up for their lack of color perception. There is even research suggesting that their eyes aren't their only source of visual information, they have light sensitive cells in their skin. They are stranger than most can imagine but we're further along understanding them than the narrator suggests.

Posted by Noadi