beau's blog

Just read the free executive summary of a report entitled “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies” prepared by the National Research Council for the Department of Defense. Mostly predictable, but a couple of things stuck out. First is the burgeoning military interest in “culture studies”. It’s a relief to see, even in this roundabout way, the US military’s failure to communicate across cultures acknowledged or addressed. I hope the motive for cross-cultural research isn’t merely tactical, but strategic, foundational and systematic. If the military sees understanding of cross-cultural unversality and difference as simply means to the end of, say, more effective mind-reading, that would miss the point. A glimmer of light: “Conventional social science models based primarily on Western ideas may be challenged by invisible biases.”

Second, the report seems pretty naïve about AI. It jumps from a paragraph about expert systems directly to speculation about “an intelligent machine that uses the Internet to train itself”. The internet, of course, is “by far the closest we have come to a total database of knowledge”. Whoa there, guys.

More coverage at Wired and MetaFilter.

I wanted to write about Lachenmann, but none of the articles I’ve been reading are available freely on the internet. That huge bummer led me to search for open-access, peer-reviewed music writing on the web. I found some neat stuff.

• “What I Call a Sound”: Anthony Braxton’s Synaesthetic Ideal and Notations for Improvisers, by Graham Lock
• Form-Building Transformations: An Approach to the Aural Analysis of Emergent Musical Forms, by Lasse Thoresen, who is really interesting and deserves more attention than this single link. Maybe after the term ends.
• Composing the Pacific: Interviews with Lou Harrison, by Maria Cizmic.
• Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Paranoia and the Technological Sublime in Drum and Bass Music, by Dale Chapman. Takes as its starting points the soundtrack to the film π and Photek’s Two Swords Technique, both of which are classics dear to my heart. I learned to play Two Swords Technique on drum set with Steve Wilkes at Berklee, this makes me want to bust it out and start practicing.

Long week; didn’t get a chance to post anything. As penance, I’m going to write something every day until the sloth is washed away.

Melissa Saenz and Christof Koch at Caltech offer up the first lab-tested reports of visual-audio synesthesia. They’ve found four people who hear sound when they see motion or flashes of light. The sounds they hear are “simple” (I’m not sure what that means) beeps, taps, and whirrs. No sound is perceived due to eye movement, so it really does seem to be triggered by the perception of stuff-tagged-as-motion, and not something lower-level, right off the retina.

To validate the claims of synesthesia, pairs of short rhythms were played to subjects, either as visual flashes or auditory beeps. Subjects reported whether they thought the rhythms in each pair were the same or different. Typically people are quite good at identifying auditory rhythms and bad with visual ones. As expected, everybody did well on the auditory task, but only the synesthetes could accurately compare the visual rhythms, presumably because they could hear them. Interestingly, over the course of the experiment, the synesthetes reported that the synesthetic sounds they heard along with the visuals changed to match the real sounds played during the auditory tests.

A neat direction to go with this would be to play various visual stimuli for the synesthetes and collect phenomenological descriptions of the sounds heard, with the aim of mapping the visual-audio mapping. Are the sounds similar in dynamic profile to the visuals which trigger them? What causes the sounds to change even as the visuals stay the same, as they did during the experiment? What are the intersubjective differences in the synesthetic sounds?

References:

• Saenz, M.; Koch, C. The sound of change: visually-induced auditory synesthesia. Current Biology (2008) vol. 18 (15) pp. R650-R651