Grateful Dead Percussionist Makes Music From Supernovas 57
At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
I presume he is spending a year dead for tax purposes.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Just in case you may not know this but "Grateful Dead" is the name of a rock band (now currently inactive due to forced retirement of most of the members) they are known for (being a 60s band) Skeletons, teddy bears and wild mixes of colors known as "tie dye".
Wikipedia know how to use it??
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The GP's presuming that the artist is spending a year dead for tax purposes was a great reference to a very funny piece of literature. Now, you might know that or you might not; in any case, your prefixing your post with "Just in case" does not absolve you from presuming the GP didn't know who the Grateful Dead are.
All the available data do indicate that you haven't read the H2G2 series while in the same time they *do not* indicate that the GP didn't know GD.
"dead for tax purposes". Google know how to use i
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, RobertLTux's reply was directed at the AC parent that read "How is this drummer so grateful if he's deceased?" and not zmollusc's post. Also, in a lot of places the Grateful Dead really are practically unknown (here in Sweden the most common reactions to any mention of the dead tend to be either "The what?" or "Oh, I think I heard one of their songs, they're one of those bands that sound like credence (clearwater revival), right?" and any attempts to actually explain further what the Grateful Dead
Re:Old Joke (Score:1)
"The Dead."
"The who?"
"No, not the Who, the Dead!"
Re:Even Older Dead Joke (Score:1)
A. "These guys SUCK!"
Drums Space (Score:5, Funny)
Gives a new meaning to "Drums > Space".
Music (Score:1)
Music that is inspired by real events and phenomena slightly outside the grasp of a layman is always awesome. :D
Cool! (Score:5, Insightful)
In a way, what he's doing isn't all that much different from when scientists take pictures of celestial phenomena in the non-visible spectra (X-Ray, IR, etc.) and then "project" them into the visual spectrum so we can actually see what they've photographed. To some extent it's a distortion of reality, but interesting.
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, RIIA has just announced that they will be collecting a fee from every astronomer looking at a nova.
Actually, the robot did it. (Score:4, Funny)
The drummer was nowhere to be found. Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.
The band's manager was profoundly relieved. It meant that for the seventeenth time on this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that therefore the timing of the cymballistics would be right.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Score:2)
Grin, you immediately thought of it as well. I forgot the name of the rock group, though..
Disaster Area, of course! (n/t) (Score:2)
lorem ipsum Slashdot's minimum-length filter is a silly ...
Re:Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Score:4, Informative)
Disaster Area, with the lead signer Hotblack Desiato spending a year dead for tax purposes.
Damn, that was funny stuff.
There are people in the U.K. willing to face the wrath of the power that be and ship over the CDs of all the radio dramas that the BBC did. Well worth the few extra $$.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
2 important questions:
I wonder if the album follows the traditional formula of boy-being meets girl-being under a beautiful astronomical body... which then explodes for no apparent reason?
and
Will Jerry be coming out of his tax shelter for the live tour?
Re: (Score:2)
You beat me to it, curse you!
There's some sort of export embargo?
Didn't know that.
Use the link to my SlashDot account (somewhere above this text, probably) and we can enter into a deep and meaningful relationship, which I hope will end up in both of us having to take a "year out" for tax purposes. (I'm not in the UK at the moment
Re: (Score:2)
Because of arcane copyright law and a few other things, the BBC won't ship their productions outside the U.K. You have to find a willing third party to buy it local and ship it for you. I know there were a couple people with a small side-business doing just that operating off of E-bay.
Oddly enough, I could listen live via BBC 4 internet from Stateside.
Not a new idea (Score:4, Informative)
Symphony of the Planets (Score:3, Informative)
DRM (Score:2, Funny)
Big whoop (Score:3, Insightful)
Armageddon music (Score:3, Funny)
"Well, it IS sort of a downer that all these civilizations were just wiped out when their sun went nova and consumed their planets, and we feel for our extraterrestrial brethren. But on the bright side, check out this wicked drum solo I got out of it!"
Yet Another Frequency Shift (Score:4, Informative)
There's no difference in this application than most of the others ever produced. They're all simply frequency shifted time series. Any pseudo-regular simple or complex wave can be sifted to any frequency. Radio-astronomy has been the biggest source so far, though brain recordings have been done. At this point about the only novel application would be taking recorded sound and shifting it up to visual light.
The application I've found that uses amplitude modulation (notes from data points rather than time series wave forms) is Moonbell http://wms.selene.jaxa.jp/selene_sok/about_en.html [selene.jaxa.jp] Musical notes are created from lunar altitude measurements done by Selene.
Sounds Like Lustmord (Score:2)
Lustmord's Ambient album "The Place Where The Black Stars Hang" sounds like this, only done without the sound inputs from data samples.
Re: (Score:2)
I've only heard the [OTHER] album. How does this compare to his other albums?
DMCA (Score:3, Funny)
Oh great, now the universe is going to sue the pants off our planet.
you know (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Or if you didn't know about the Grateful Dead it would still be cooler and trippier as is.
Re: (Score:1)
But then it would be too close to accurate to be a /. headline. (The Grateful Dead dissolved in '95; Mickey Hart and other former members of the band play collectively under the name "The Dead".)
Re: (Score:2)
Knew about this (Score:1)
This was nothing new.The History Channel's show 'The Universe" episode on pulsars & quasars featured this,using the beat from the Vela pulsar.The cool thing was the way Hart integrated the pulsar signal into his composition.
Nothing but Geeky cool!!!
Mickey @ Work (Score:3, Interesting)
Check out his cool drumset [gankmore.com].
Re: (Score:1)
If anyone cares, in this photo, Hart's the one on the right.
Robot Band (Score:2)
Yeah,but does he have a robot band [wired.com]????
Dark Star? (Score:3, Funny)
How about a brown dwarf. I wonder how closely they would match.
I think it would be funny though, if they did a red dwarf.
Fiorella Terenzi (Score:2)
Didn't that chica Fiorella Terenzi already do this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiorella_Terenzi [wikipedia.org]
She's also much better to look at.
Re: (Score:1)
Also, she's smokin' hot (well, she was when I met her) http://blackmadonna2009.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/fiorella.jpeg [wordpress.com]
An insider's perspective. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've spent the last three years taking data for the "Nearby Supernova Factory" the article mentions, with little understanding of what it was all about.
Finally, it all makes sense. :)
Far out maaaaaaaan... (Score:2)