This article on BBC News describes a “micro-ear” technology developed to listen to microscopic organisms. By using tiny (like two microns across) beads and lasers, the scientists can measure very small vibrations and amplify them.

(via @bldgblog)

David Benqué’s work in progress, “Acoustic Botany,” is a set of hypothetical plants that have been genetically engineered to make sounds. So far, they’re pretty broadly conceptual, like a nut whose insides are “eaten away by bugs engineered to chew in rhythm.” The image above is “Popping Pod Fruit,” which would be engineered to contain small seed capsules that slowly fill with air over the lifetime of the plant, eventually popping in aleatoric rhythm with its neighbors.

Primarily, this seems like a very interesting way to create an opposing form of acoustic ecology. Most work in acoustic ecology is about reducing human sonic influence in nature, and protecting “natural” soundscapes. Genetic engineering (or at least the implausibly specific and sonic version Benqué describes) offers another way to get into nature’s sounds and alter the soundscape.

(via we make money not art)

A Healthy Complexity

This quotation comes from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, in an article about biological complexity:

When Dr. Ary Goldberger looks at an EKG, he doesn’t just see the signal of a beating heart, he also sees a musical score, with its diversions and sudden shifts in tempo. Or at least that’s what he’d like to see. Because, according to Goldberger, an EKG that lacks such variations reveals a sick heart, which can’t respond to the body’s demands.

It’s an interesting choice to use music as your metaphor for “statistically chaotic,” given how often music (especially popular music) is denigrated for its repetition. If Dr. Goldberger is really interested in some aleatory music, I’ve got a few suggestions for him…

(via Oscillator)

Denaturing Cultural DNA

When I saw the title of the new post over at Ethan Hein’s blog, “Samples and DNA,” I knew there was going to be some good food for thought. If you haven’t read it, go ahead and do that now, since my thoughts will probably make more sense in the context of his. (and apologies for the wordiness here, I promise more fun embedded videos as penance.)

Done? Okay. So I am very much interested in evolutionary mechanisms—that whole memey idea of variation, selection and retention that inevitably results in evolutionary change. (It might help that my cohabitor is a hot-shot biologist, too.) But, when I see the word “DNA” used in a non-biological context, it gives me a squicky feeling. I know that no one actually means literal DNA when they say things like “the DNA of culture” or what have you, and I’m not enough of a pedant to care about that; however, I feel like stopping at “DNA” prevents all sorts of potentially wonderful analysis. DNA in the biological context is interesting because of the whole machinery of replication it participates in, via its shape, its chemical makeup, its location in the cell, etc. When we port “DNA” over to the cultural world, we lose all of that specificity and are left with just a vague sense of evolution. “DNA” as a term just doesn’t do a whole lot of work for us when talking about culture.

Now, all that is not so much a critique of Ethan’s post; he doesn’t dwell on the memetics side of things for too long, and instead moves on to talk about sampling as another form of influence and cultural bond-forming. This I like a lot. It may be because of my lit crit training and fondness for folks like Roland Barthes, who claims for the “text” a line spoken by a demon-possessed man in the Bible: “My name is Legion; for we are many.” Barthes and others suggest that authorship is basically overrated; all the words you write are quotations anyway (both in the sense that you are using already-made words, and in the sense that your ideas don’t come from you, but from your influences). This jibes pretty well with a vaguely memetic idea—you don’t make your own DNA, you just inherit it, so your DNA is still “yours,” but in a relationship-forming, communal, mushy, shared, whatever sense.

Now all that stuff in the parenthesis up there suggest that being “quotations anyway” is actually complicated business. Your sentences may be made up of borrowed words or phrases, or your ideas (however you want to quantize those) are made up of borrowed mini-ideas (what?) or combined into larger thoughts. This muck, while left intentionally mucky here, is absolutely worth going into in specific depth; how can we trace out the authorial “stuff” in a particular work?, for example.

So, just like authorship is mucky stuff, the differences between sampling and influence are mucky stuff. They are clearly related in many of the ways Ethan lays out in his post (you read it, right?), but they are also clearly different in certain ways. So, while I am a fellow traveler seeking acceptance for the idea that sampling is another form of influence, I also want to see how it is different (although Ethan’s music often does an excellent job of blurring these distinctions together). If I write a song that riffs on a bit of a melody quoted from a Beatles song, I am declaring a different kind of influence than if I write a song that uses a sampled bit of a Beatles song. I am relating differently to technology, changing the shape of my allusions, integrating the Beatles (or not) into different areas of music-making. It is not easy to get at this kind of specificity in a general argument (c.f. the present blog post, or Ethan’s), but I think it is a critical step in furthering this kind of argument. What are the mechanisms of our (musical) cultural replication?