04 July 2012

New news, Old news, and quotes...

Some news stories old and recent that I've forgotten to post:

Two responses to DarwinTunes (more coming):
Discover Magazine
Michael Scott Cuthbert, who works on computer-aided musical analysis at MIT, is sceptical that the approach tells us anything about the evolution of music. “They have shown that people can sense a glimmer of the things they like about music even when most of it consists of sounds they hate,” he says.  “But it doesn’t give any information about why music sounded differently in the past, why people like different things today, or how music might evolve in the future.”
 
“Suppose you randomly threw car parts into piles and asked people to rate those they’d most like to buy,” he says. “Then you took parts from the highest-rated heaps, and rearranged them into new heaps.  People might hate all of them at first, but they’d probably rate the ones with four tires or a trunk in the back or a steering wheel in the drivers’ seat higher than the rest. Do that long enough and I wouldn’t be surprised that you’d eventually get something that looked like a 2011 Honda Civic.  But that doesn’t mean that that’s how a car is made.”
 
L.A. Times
The study shows that people "can discern the little things they like about music even in the context of a lot of extraneous sounds," said MIT computational musicologist Michael Scott Cuthbert, who wasn't involved in the research. "But what they don't prove is why music today has changed from the popular music of the past. It doesn't show how changing tastes result in changing music and it doesn't give us a hint of what the future holds for music."

Five things from MIT:
MIT News Office on the ELVIS grant
MIT Tech interview on the ELVIS grant (posted previously)
MIT SHASS Magazine article (Spring 2010) on my research
A little blurb about my work (might change to someone else's in the future)
A little piece on a completion of a piece by Zachara da Teramo

Many new papers posted at Academia.edu.

No comments: