Radio “hits” deliver long term brain damage

CHICAGO

Fri Nov 12, 2010 8:09am EDT

(Reuters)

HEALTH

Researchers at the University of Nijmegen report today that sustained exposure to certain musical structures through headphones may, in as few as five years, shrink soft cartilaginous tissues of the outer ear and weaken craniofacial nerves. For 3% of test subjects, the effect is accompanied by slight deformation of the sinus cavity and neurasthenia within the prefrontal cortex.

Scientists believe the condition correlates significantly to a documented rise in musical homogeneity since 1985, an effect sociologists have attributed to the inability of audiences to dislodge aesthetic taste from narrow and repetitive conventions of popular music. The study has been funded as part of renewed efforts to investigate the role of socio-economic, cultural, and even aesthetic factors in human epigenetics. The multidisciplinary research team at the University of Nijmegen includes political scientists, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. In their report, the team describes lax enforcement against payola radio; a statistical analysis of radio playlists reveal that a handful of songs on heaviest rotation have not changed in more than forty years.

The tendency to cling to outdated artistic forms as evidenced by the persistence of “hit music” in popular culture since 1965 is what led the Nijmegen researchers to investigate the possibility of attendant physical effects. “We found a significant neurasthenic effect. Apparently, listening to Hotel California three thousand times doesn’t just suck, it can actually cave-in the head and debilitate the prefrontal cortex.” Martin Ledwick, head nurse on the research team, said in a statement. “Think of it as an injury, a kind of plantar fasciitis, the equivalent of shin splints caused by traipsing endlessly over one musical terrain.”

Dr. Emil DeMaris, professor of Psychoacoustics, presented the group’s findings at a conference in Rotterdam. “Our species is perhaps poorly described as Homo Sapiens. We are in many ways a herd species, led astray by a willingness to conform to social stability so long as basic needs of food, shelter and clothing have been met. This social behavioral fact makes human beings particularly susceptible to the numbing effects of cultural homogeneity. The danger to humans is no different than domesticating other species; a herd of wild caribou survives in the shifting environment of arctic tundra, but slowly perishes in the stultifying terrarium environment, a Habi-trail, either for caribou or humans is a tool of genocide. We have been dangerously slow to detect the equivalent tools wielded in corporate advertising culture today.”

By focusing on contemporary art and popular music, DeMaris said his team sought to improve on “the myopia of the microscope” which passes for scientific method today. “The assumption that humans are ruled by logic, long discredited in economics and political science, persists today as the facile foundation of too many scientific disciplines.” The report, to be published in the Journal of Psychoacoustics, concludes that human faculties of reason and perception are engaged most fully by experiences that are unnerving, confounding, and even terrifying.

Pressed by reporters to explain whether and how science should arbitrate aesthetic and cultural tastes, DeMaris explained that his team took an “anything but Top 40” approach and had found many contemporary artists actively developing radically new aesthetics. Study participants introduced to recordings from a new musical group called Nerfbau showed high brain function in the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight responses which are known to heighten acuity of perception. The researchers also cite facial expressions of anguish, horror, surprise, and amazement as responsible for the attendant strengthening of craniofacial nerves rooted to the outer ear. Such phenomena were present in fewer than .01% of control subjects who were more likely to exhibit slack facial expressions when exposed to music from the VH1 Classics playlist. Members of the band Nerfbau were contacted for comment via their record label, Resipiscent. Responding by phone and only through voice masking software, one band member was quoted as saying, “Blood builds your smiles from loose screams.”

© Thomson Reuters 2010 All rights reversed

Resipiscent Q&A

[Heule] Resipiscent focuses on Bay Area musicians, but has also released albums by artists from around the nation. There seems to be a unifying element of playfulness, looseness, humor, invention, and experimentation in the Resipiscent catalog that seems particularly strong on the West Coast, if not in the Bay Area itself. Do you see the Bay Area as a special place for this sort of music, or is it thriving in obscurity everywhere?

[decker] We’ve released internationalists in Masonic Youth, and talking with Freeka Peeka and Company Fuck among others but hard to jumpstart from afar.

There does seem to be a connection between playfulness and obscurity, the kind of play that experiments and discovers doesn’t have time or energy for popularity or acceptance. Often, it’s those who gave up on social acceptance (not hindsight claims of being maverick, but actually gave up) who came to dwell in experimentation as play. Contrast that to retro and pop bands that want to entertain and be super uncool, they forms tons of new bands that quickly dissipate into clothes fashion, that long popular recess of irrelevance on the “upper playground.” Artists of obscure music would love to be cool, but they aren’t. Obscure music attracts audiences with terrible social skills, awkward human beings paralyzed by the high stakes of starting a conversation. That kind of community draws artists whose own ideas are a real threat to themselves, they may produce horrible results which fascinate audiences but also may both audience and artist alike by catching a current of totally unique potential. Either way, you can’t afford to miss it.

The artists we put out have to be heard live since experimentation is so much about time, accident and the manifold rifts between thought and action; but recordings are an important secondary point of reference, an idealized space where you get to hear what musicians achieve in an environment of artificial time. Recordings are also essential for audiences to acclimate to unorthodox sounds and non-repeating compositions. Once people do acclimate, few can go back to repetitive conventional self aggrandizing music, so caveat emptor.

[Heule] Modular synthesis is all over the Resipiscent catalog, notably on the new Serge compilation, and Loachfillet's new album. Of course Don Buchla invented this instrument here in the early 60s, in collaboration with Morton Subotnick and the SF Tape Music Center. Serge itself was eventually based in the Bay Area. And Mills College has for years been training an army of modular synthesists. Do you see the Bay Area's rich history and leadership in experimental electronic music as a direct influence on the musicians released by Resipiscent?

[decker] Absolutely! Unlike so many bay area cultural institutions helicoptered in as the requisite establishments of a big city (e.g. SFMOMA, ACT, sfOpera, etc), the street-level advent of electronic music in San Francisco proved beyond doubt what a willingness to shed conventional methods, materials and aesthetics can yield. Maybe not the great shopping mall of Haight & Ashbury, but when the SF Tape Music Center found a home at Mills it established music as the most vital art of experimentation in the bay area, challenging composers, musicians and audiences alike to forge new sensibilities. That in and of itself is distinct from entertainment that measures success by prestige whether top40 or fetishist classical anachronisms (both of which substitute formal repetition for composition.)

When Buchla, Subotnick , Oliveros, et al. disabused us of the idea that there are rules or limits to what materials, modes and aesthetic norms are possible, they accomplish something tantamount to inventing the cello, or drum! Yet monied patrons insist on dressing up as Nelson Rockefeller for yet another rendition of Mahler and refuse to even hear local contemporaries, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick much less Hans Grusel, sfSound, or Anti-Ear. SF Symphony’s American Mavericks effort was apparently a one-time-only nod. MTT knows where his bread gets buttered and he’s keeping that Barry Manilow golden retriever look well-honed for the long haul.

Rather than assail 18th century music fans, better to praise the SF Tape Music Center and Buchla who fundamentally changed how audiences worldwide hear sound and conceive of music. Along with a new texture, pitch, and tempo (not to mention the stacks of circuitry with patch cables pouring out that forged new visual associations for sound) musicians on older instruments gained license to play extended technique, microtonal, harmolodic, disassembled and bent instruments, though certainly Partch and others didnt wait on that license.

Many of the artists on Resipiscent came out of Mills’ world-class program, but it’s the ability of those composers and musicians to collaborate with and be influenced by emerging self-taught artists (who spent those same years outside any academy) that’s most unique. That collision is what makes bay area experimental music as unpredictable and rich as it is. That sensibility seems to arise from the street-level origins of the SF Tape Music Center, invention and performance joined there to forge a playfulness that proved resistant to dissipation as clothes fashion.

A curriculum for abstract reasoning

Could abstract thinking become a subject in early and secondary education? Osmosis via myth/religion/fiction is the usual way, attempts to make it explicit are typically horrendous, conflating idiom with metaphor and so on. The tyranny of literal thought. My nephew brought home a worksheet that asked him to create similes, remove "like" and call them metaphors! As for grown ups, it's either lumped into "creativity" or, with Wikipedia's definition of inductive reasoning as one example, confined to...

1. Generalization and syllogism
2. Analogy
3. Simple induction
4. Causal inference
5. Guessing

...paying no attention to when or how metaphor is useful, unique, and essential. As Will Durant notes, Aristotle mis-characterized the human psyche as deductive rather than inductive. Yet, secular discourse keeps itself to the Logic=Reason fallacy. Even as machines perform logic, the least of our reasoning faculties, more reliably and efficiently than humans can, we continue to undervalue every quality other than quantity.

In education, the ability to apply something learning in one context to a new and unfamiliar context is termed "bridging". That an important idea, but I'm talking about the deep roots of bridging, the ability to forge an insight, not "creativity" as scrap-booking Aristotelian "nothing's new, only recombined" sense but in the Entelechy, Hegelian negativity, sense. The difference is huge. Shakespeare and Chaucer weren't coming up with catchy ad phrases and they're metaphors became idioms only after they were absorbed and subsumed by the usefulness of their function in communication and expression.

How would we go about teaching Induction, Abstraction, and Metaphorical Reasoning?

In addition to clear acknowledgment limits (namely, the ease of its abuse and the enormity of its persuasive power as evident in fundamentalism), teaching inductive, abstract, metaphorical reasoning would require two things:

• Defining the power of induction as a result of its being unbound from the usual (western) goals of consensus-building or objectivity. Weak forces.
• Identifying contexts where only abstraction will do (i.e. broad theoretical concepts, edges of understanding, the places where art thrives and most science throws up its hands)

As one example:

Parallel universes are like integers, each having its own particular infinite range of fractions. But in physics, the fractions would be temporal (Whatever time may be. Flux.)

Abstractly conceiving of space as an integer enables us to reverse the idea. If entanglement is a property of split spatiotemporal dimensions we can think of fractions as dimensional entanglements as well. Pi, prime numbers, etc.

So, parallel universes would not be the same idea as Bohr's or Schroedingers who seem (not having read either) to contemplate change of state (potential to kinetic) rather than a blossoming of temporal (maybe not even spatial!) dimensions.

In either the case of integers or photons, running fwd and back along a causal spatial temporal line would be the direction/mode that's most precisely un-entangled, interdimensional, and most interesting. That was always my hunch as a kid: that 2+2 just equals more 2. Prigogene's indeterminacy when I learned about it, felt like "ha, I knew it."

I've had some thoughts about global education curriculum too. Standards grounded/organized around principles that tip from one disciplinary domain into others. They'll read like platitudes but "getting" cliches is what a lot of novice learning is actually about. Laying traps, so they're proud when they catch their own ankles. Good training indeed for a life of "grab yer ankles"

Let's try to jot down some spastic truisms or hell, have a kid and they'll probly start to pour out. The notion is to articulate some milestone concepts for a global curriculum that needs to cross boundaries such as faith/reason but also form/content, subjective/objective, and space/time (aka here/now). That's where abstraction outperforms literal thinking.

"To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both‹a philosopher."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

What was religion to the Greek philosophers?

• Aristotle- born of wonder, it finds xpression in myth
• Epicureans- born of fear and ignorance, it seeks protection
• Euhemerists- born of heroism, it is cultural memory
• Stoics- born of some universal, transcultural spermatikos logos

But Xtians see these replies as pagan (or even jewish) ritualism and narcissism. Protestants see the "whore of babylon" perpetuating these pagan tendencies.

..external link..

Except that it focuses exclusively on money motives and business management, Edward de Bono's "thinking hats" is an interesting example of a curriculum for modes of reasoning..

http://blog.iqmatrix.com/mind-map/edward-de-bono-6-thinking-hats-mind-map

resipiscent recording artists on the Free Music Archive

Five years since resipiscent hoisted our trowels to exhume the most criminally overlooked artists in music. Behold... they is risen!

This is part one, subsequent parts will dig deeplier.

http://freemusicarchive.org/label/Resipiscent/

Pokemones Sex Rebellion

Dancing was interrupted for a “slapping” contest onstage in which a boy, pulled randomly from the crowd, was blindfolded and had his arms held behind his back. A lineup of girls and boys took turns slapping him, with the final blow delivered by a heavyset D.J. that sent the slender boy flying across the stage. As he rubbed his reddened face, the boy got his reward: the chance to make out with the girl of his choice in public to the screams of other teenagers.

The place is a tangle of lips and tongues and hands, all groping and exploring. About 800 teenagers sway and bounce to lyrics imploring them to “Poncea! Poncea!”: make out with as many people as they can.

And make out they do — with stranger after stranger, vying for the honor of being known as the “ponceo,” the one who pairs up the most.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/world/americas/13chile.html

Chile's disaffected 'Pokemones' don't care much about politics. They're too busy having sex

http://www.newsweek.com/id/124098

Anyone remember how to make sutures out of beef jerky?

Careful what you wish for, kids!

Now that conspiracy theories (once so cool!) are the new suburban self-righteousness, anyone planning to rethink good vs evil, or is taking up arms with libertarians just what you've been waiting for all along? Smash the state right? Welcome to a glimpse of what that will look like, not as RPG, but fur real.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/politics/16teaparty.html

And what a coinkydink that these ideas should align so perfectly with racism and xenophobia. Screw social institutions, it's lawn vs lawn from here on out. So, end all healthcare!! Anyone remember how to make sutures out of beef jerky?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/politics/16teaparty.html

"Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages. Nor is it unusual to hear calls to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A remarkable number say this despite having recently lost jobs or health coverage. Some of the prescriptions they are debating — secession, tax boycotts, states “nullifying” federal laws, forming citizen militias — are outside the mainstream, too."

"Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn to a new reality. Some have gone so far as to stock up on ammunition, gold and survival food in anticipation of the worst. For others, though, transformation seems to amount to trying on a new ideological outfit — embracing the rhetoric and buying the books."

Ideas this friction-free can only mean trouble, these are fear-loving survivalists happy to excuse themselves for having elected Bush TWICE. The Republicans set this fire and seem content to sift through ashes looking for their next move.

Bigger than the Marshall Plan, Moon Landing, LA Purchase, S&L bailout, Korean War, and NASA budget combined

The federal government's financial bailouts bill could easily top $4.6 trillion.

How much money is that, anyway? Brace yourself. That number, Mr. Lanchester writes, paraphrasing one expert, is bigger than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Apollo moon landings, the 1980s savings and loan crisis, the Korean War and the total cost of NASA s space flights, all added together repeat, added together (and yes, the old figures are adjusted upward for inflation).

That excerpt appears in the NYTimes review of "I.O.U.: How Everyone Owes Everyone But No One Can Pay" by John Lanchester, a novelist rather than an economist.

For once I'm in agreement with Bush who remarked

: "This sucker could go down."

With the U.S. legislative branch in total catalepsy (as threat of filibuster now requires supermajority for passage of any legislation) no federal regulation will successfully address the current, much less reign in the next, hyper-bubble.

Schwarzenegger is proposing to end Calworks completely (if the Fed doesn’t cough up $7B) That would trigger thousands of homeless families who would become dependent on county services… the funds for which do not exist.

All this because Reagan taught us taxes are evil, even when disparity of wealth rockets out of sight? Apparently the wealthy need to actually see the streets littered with working class families before they’ll consent to new taxes. Will we also need Hugo, Dickens, and Steinbeck to rise from the dustbin and explain famine to us in storybook form?

I keep wanting to doubt that the world's vanguard of representative government has become a morally decrepit society of hoarders and war mongers.

What will it take: earthquake? Depression era failures of social services? Right/Libertarian propaganda about "self reliance" must be exposed as empty idealism. Crippling of the legislative branch through filibuster has defeated representative government. As American democracy subsides to oligarchy, class riots become an ever increasing possibility. How will the markets “factor” that in?

Cough up a buck! Every hospital is either abandoned or in ruins in Haiti's capital.

"Every third building is in ruins" in the capital of Haiti including the UN building and the presidential palace. Every hospital is either abandoned or in ruins.

Thousands of bodies are stacked in the streets.

Give a few bucks for rescue efforts in the single porest nation of the western hemisphere. It's tough not to give something, especially after the US government deposed their elected leader, and far worse:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200106/grann

But we'll save arguments for another disaster... this one happened last night.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/01/earthquake_in_haiti.html

Hilltop video looking across the entire city.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8456393.stm?ls

.<|KICK IN A FEW BUCKS|>.

But, BEWARE...

• Some cell phone carriers deduct a 50 percent from SMS donations.
• Without a presence already on-the-ground, a non-profit can't delivering post-quake aid

The most effective NGOs working in Haiti appear below with links to their Haiti-specific donations:

• Partners in Health is the NGO founded in Haiti in 1987 by Dr. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician and anthropologist who focuses on international social justice. The group’s emergency response focuses on delivering medical supplies and staff. Louise Ivers, PIH’s clinical director in the country, sent the message, “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS.” Donate here http://bit.ly/5ZA7Zm

• MADRE, the international women’s rights NGO, partners with the Zanmi Lasante Clinic on the ground in Haiti. “The most urgent needs right now are bandages, broad-spectrum antibiotics and other medical supplies, as well as water tablets to prevent cholera outbreaks,” MADRE reports. Donate here: http://bit.ly/6eKeDd

• Action Against Hunger has had a team in Haiti since 1985, and is ready to fly planeloads of emergency supplies from Paris to Port-au-Prince. Food is one necessity, but so is sanitation; in some Haitian towns, 70 percent of homes do not have plumbing. Donate here: http://bit.ly/7Gndqt

• UNICEF, the United Nations Fund focusing on children, has worked on the ground in Haiti since 1949, so has the expertise to make a difference. You can donate here. Donate here: http://bit.ly/8RT4CQ

• Doctors Without Borders is also present in-country. One senior staff member reports, “The situation is chaotic. I visited five medical centers, including a major hospital, and most of them were not functioning.” Donate here:http://bit.ly/7CQtMC