• There is a really good biography of Philip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: The Strange Life and Times of Philip K. Dick
• Fascinating talk on biophony from Bernie Krause at Wild Sanctuary -- the sounds that non-human creatures make. Frogs chorus together because their predators can't find them if they're all singing at once. Anthrophony is the sounds that humans make. Spadefoot toads are becoming extinct because of anthrophony (cars, planes, logging, etc.) because they can no longer chorus together. He played the sounds of animals in a forest (birds, bugs, woodpeckers) before and after logging, and showed spectrograms of the sounds. After "light" logging, that people, visually, would see as virtually indistinguishable from the pre-logged forest, had a profound impact on how much sound the animals make.
• Ants can sing. Sea anemones make this sort of grunting sound. Snapping Shrimp puts out a 200 decibel signal out of their claw -- like shooting a gun right next to your ear -- and the sound is used to stun fish. He also played sounds the Cottonwood trees make. Check out their site for their audio archive.
• The scene in the Lord of the Rings where the Orcs are invading Minas Tirith -- the Orcs were beating their drums in 5/4 time for maximum disturbingness. British phones ring in 5/4 rhythm.
• Rapid prototyping. zero.algds.org/ http://www.algds.org and The Immersion Composition Society: buncho people get together for 24 hours and make as much music as they can, with the philosophy that if it has a track number, it is a song. You must create something, it doesn't matter how bad it is, locking yourself in a room for an hour. Benefits & Things Learned through this process: speed, adaptation, agility, better at scheduling and execution. The game designers at ALGDS had a post-mortem every month on what went right and what went wrong and posted it on their collaborative web site. They learned to balance speed vs. quality, and found this process was great for proof of concept. Apollo project. Handel's Messiah, Boeing 747 were all created under severe time constraints.

LINK | 10:36 AM | TB

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