The Best Music to Accompany Noisy Internet Ads

I accidentally clicked on an ad that played a human voice (an exclamation of sorts). I also happened to be listening to the third movement of Berio’s Sinfonia (excerpt — changed to correct one — 31/3/07) at that time. For a few moments, I thought that the voice from the ad was a part of the piece that I’d never noticed before — it was certainly incoherent enough to fit in with the actual words on the score. Could easily have been mistaken for one of those existentially anguished “where now?”s.

And just ten seconds before I began typing this sentence, the music reached that cluster near the end (just before “can’t stop the wars” etc.), and I accidentally encountered another sound ad on YouTube. Which blended in well with the cluster.

There is something about the ending of that third movement that reminds me of the ending of the Tractatus. Definitely a similarity in mood. A feeling that something monumental has happened, yet that it’s all self-defeating, in a way. The “throwing away the ladder” gesture.

Or it could just be the mysticism.

Large Happy Golden Retrievers

A Google search of “where fun goes to die” turns up, amongst other things, articles in student newspapers at other universities telling their students that they have it much better than we do. This letter to the editor of The Stanford, in response to an article complaining that Stanford students were ugly, I found particularly amusing:

Stanford kids are not that ugly

I read Lashnits’ and Stone’s expose (“Stanford kids are ugly,” Jan. 14) on the ugliness of Stanford students with a sense of growing disbelief. As a grad student with some experience with other institutions, I would urge them to lower their standards, posthaste.

Let me explain. I went to the University of Chicago as an undergrad, the dean for which proclaims that, while it is not where fun goes to die, it is where fun goes to rationalize. We are not conventionally attractive people. It is cold and gray and we spend a great deal of our time in the library. For much of the year we are so heavily bundled up that determining gender is largely guesswork. We have odd hair and bad skin. Many of my friends regularly wore capes. It was, in fact, wonderful. That said, none of us are likely to be featured in Abercrombie catalogues anytime soon.

So, as I wander around your green, summer-camp-like campus, watching undergrads bounding around like large happy golden retrievers, I am somehow unimpressed by protestations of social woes. I have seen people with frosted hair here. I have seen people biking while wearing high heels. There are rumors that your frats serve alcohol on a regular basis. You do not wear T-shirts depicting your university as a dinosaur stomping on your souls.* So stop worrying. Be happy. For heaven’s sake.

Craig Segall

First year, School of Law

*I could not find an image of the dinosaur stomping t-shirt, and (sadly) I do not own one. The image is one of a brontosaurus stomping on a stick figure. The brontosaurus is labelled “The University of Chicago” and the stick figure is labelled “My Soul”.

Paradigms Defined by Paradigms

One of the paradoxes of an artistic style is that it is defined by its paradigm examples, not by the inferior works which outnumber them. Thus we define the Classical style of music by paradigm works by its three greatest exponents, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Lesser figures like Hummel and Dittersdorf, and the crowd of still lesser figures and still lesser works, do not concern us, even though their “classical” works far outnumber those of the Big Three. Charles Rosen, in The Classical Style, articulates this paradox far better than I can:

What makes the history of music, or of any art, particularly troublesome is that what is most exceptional, not what is most usual, has often the greatest claim on our interest. Even within the work of one artist, it is not his usual procedure that characterizes his personal ‘style’, but his greatest and most individual success. This, however, seems to deny even the possibility of the history of art: there are only individual works, each self-sufficient, each setting its own standards.

Walking back in today’s unseasonable chill, it struck me that prior to Kuhn, science seemed to be defined this way as well — in terms of its greatest figures and greatest discoveries. There was no concept of what Kuhn calls “normal science“. Instead, science was seen as consisting mainly of the linear progress of important discoveries. No mopping up, no barking up the wrong trees. In short, science was thought to consist of purely the “revolutionary” part of science. Most people will probably intuitively think of this “great events” concept of science whenever science is mentioned. Even though I have been exposed to more of the process of normal science than the average person, and I have read Kuhn, mention the world “science” to me, and my first thoughts still concern seminal discoveries made by seminal people. Science as a grand, coherent structure with its revolutionary nodes outshining everything else.

I don’t quite know where I’m going with this parallel between the naive conception of scientific progress and stylistic paradigms* in art. Perhaps Kuhn’s recharacterization of science could be applied to an artistic style. Perhaps it is a mistake to view art/music history with an eye only on the paradigm works. Kuhn takes great pains to emphasise that despite the apparently disparaging label he had endowed it with, normal science is the meat of science. It is not in any way less imporant or “anomalous” compared to revolutionary science — quite the opposite, in fact. Could this be true for art/music history as well? Are there analogues of paradigm shifts in art? Clearly we can make analogies between scientific revolutionaries and artistic revolutionaries. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven would count as artistic revolutionaries. But what of an analogue to “normal science”? For Kuhn, normal science is necessary for revolutions to occur, because revolutions occur only when the previously established paradigm conflicts with observations and theories produced in the process of normal science. The robust paradigm that normal science creates constitutes the firm fulcrum and long lever that revolutionary science uses to shift the earth, like Archimedes did. Can we argue in the same way that Dittersdorf-type figures provided a similar established basis against which the revolutionaries could rebel? Does an artistic style demand a horde of imitators, or could Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart on their own have defined the Classical style?

This is where my non-existent knowledge of music history fails me. By non-existent, I mean that although I know a great deal about the seminal figures, I know nothing about the others. This, however, is no different from science students who learn all their science from textbooks and standard lectures without dabbling in research themselves, or without being contaminated by their corrupt colleagues in the history/philosophy of science department. Only the seminal discoveries appear in the textbooks. They never learn anything of what normal science was like, until they get involved in normal science themselves. Similarly, even though musicologists may concentrate their analyses almost entirely on the great works, the lesser works might still have a philosophical and historical significance that has been overlooked.

*This is confusing. When I say stylistic paradigms in art, I of course do not mean paradigm in Kuhn’s “worldview” sense, but paradigm in the sense of an ideal model.

Another Philosophical Eatery

The Wiener’s Circle is a hot dog joint in Chicago. Unlike Adorno’s Pizza, I think the reference might be deliberate in this one.

A Delta Function Centred Around Queen Elizabeth

A serious problem in anthropic reasoning is in deciding which characteristics of the universe it can be used to explain.

Tommaso Dorigo has a photo (the bottommost one) of Lawrence Krauss’s amusing graphic articulating this problem in his talk at an alternative cosmology conference.

Chalkboards vs Powerpoint

You can always tell when you’re in in a humanities class here as opposed to a science class by how much chalk there is. One can typically expect no more than pathetic stubs in the humanities classrooms, while science classrooms are well-stocked with multiple boxes, in multiple colours, of long unused sticks of chalk. While searching for chalk in class today, W. W. attributed the lack of chalk to the increasing use of Powerpoint by teachers. It is true that I have not had a single mathematics or physics class that used Powerpoint instead of the blackboard, and that those classes always have more than enough chalk. But then all biology classes seem to use Powerpoint, and they always have chalk too. The obvious reason for the difference, naturally, is that science departments are much richer than humanities/social sciences departments.

Turning to the non-sciences, the only classes I’ve had where Powerpoint was used were social science (not humanities) classes. Pure philosophy classes tend to involve plenty of drawing and writing things on the blackboard that would be quite incomprehensible outside the context of the class. A certain J. H. delighted in writing single words on the board in order to let everyone in the class using the same room after us know that a philosophy class had been conducted. I do not think it a coincidence that the only social science classes I’ve had where Powerpoint was not used were the ones covering mainly the history of astronomy, which necessitated plenty of drawing of diagrams not that much different from, say, a high school geometry class. Though, given that the professor concerned could not draw a circle that did not look like a “6″ or a “9″ and had illegible handwriting, even a blackboard aficionado like me would have preferred the neatness of Powerpoint for his courses.

I suspect the choice of medium for presenting information reflects something fundamental about the disciplines concerned. To recap, social sciences + biology –> Powerpoint. Physics/mathematics + humanities (specifically philosophy and music, really) –> blackboard. The former disciplines have more of an emphasis on knowledge of facts as opposed to acquisition of skills — on knowing that rather than knowing how. Powerpoint suits them because it is tiring to write facts out on the board. They have to teach skills as well, of course, but they certainly demand more presentation of facts, even in the process of teaching those skills, than do the latter disciplines, and Powerpoint is the most efficient medium for doing that. The latter disciplines have more of an emphasis on learning how to apply certain ways of thinking. Thus explanation is the main role of teachers of those disciplines, and I firmly believe that it is much easier to explain something starting with the blank but diagrammatically flexible blackboard rather than with the restricted arena of Powerpoint. Sure, animations can be done with Powerpoint, but unless one is a control maniac, it is unlikely that the specific animations one plans beforehand will necessarily be the ones that turn out, in real time, to be those most germane to the specific concerns raised in class. Blackboards are just much more flexible when one has to modify an explanation, and since there is little information to be presented in those disciplines, having to write things out in real time is not a burden at all — if anything, students like having time to take notes while the instructor is writing. It is perhaps unsurprising that my central interests lie with the latter disciplines, and any of my interests in the former disciplines concern their conceptual, mathematical or philosophical aspects — my interest in biology is concentrated almost entirely in population genetics and general evolutionary theory, and the little interest I have in the social sciences is philosophical (psychology interests me primarily because of its implications for philosophy of mind and ethics, for instance).

Intuitive Quantum Mechanics

There is a probably interesting article by Singh, Belloni, and Christian in Physics Today about major conceptual deficiencies in students’ understanding of quantum mechanics. Sadly, our library has no online access to the last 12 months of Physics Today, so until I shift my arse to Crerar to look up the hard copy, I can’t make very specific comments. From reading the letters responding to the article, though, I have a general idea of the claims it was making — namely, that physics students are competent at “doing” quantum mechanics by using formulas they were taught to use, but lack an understanding of the physical signficances of those formulae. For example, consider the formula 〈A〉=〈ψ|A|ψ〉giving the expectation value of an observable A. In the words of Robert Griffiths, students fail to realise that “A is the quantum counterpart of a random variable in ordinary probability theory, and its average can be obtained from its probability distribution in exactly the same way.”

I particularly liked Travis Norsen’s response to the article:

But isn’t the main barrier to such intuitive, qualitative understanding the nature of quantum mechanics itself—at least, the version of the theory advocated by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and virtually every textbook writer since? Why should we expect students to invest the time and energy necessary to, say, visualize the time-dependence of |ψ|2 when we also preach the ambiguous and contradictory Copenhagen dogma that ψ does not represent anything physically real, yet still provides a complete description of physical reality? Why are we surprised that students are confused about, and don’t take seriously, something that we assure them is, at best, some kind of algorithmic fantasy? Is there really any difference between “shut up and calculate” and “plug and chug”?

The authors reply:

However, intuition and foundational issues are not exactly the same things. Although a deep understanding of foundational issues may improve intuition, we can help our students develop qualitative, conceptual understanding of many aspects of quantum theory without first having to clarify every foundational issue.

I was tempted to think that good intuition of a subject must be supported by an understanding of the subject to its bones. Then I realised that most physicists get by with good intuitions about QM without knowing very much about foundations. People who work on foundations are a small subset of all the physicists who intuitively grasp QM. So I think Singh and co. are right about this.

There is a common argument that we should not teach foundations because it is still too much of a “live” research topic with no settled consensus. Hence we should teach one particular interpretation. But why is it always the Copenhagen interpretation that is chosen? Singh and co. recognise that there is no good pedagogical or physical reason for that, and suggest the following:

Physics education research is well-established now, and a controlled study involving two quantum mechanics classes taught by the same instructor might be worthwhile. One class could use the standard Copenhagen interpretation while the other uses the consistent histories approach. An important question, then, is this: If both classes cover approximately the same amount of material and students in both classes are given the surveys we have developed, do students in one class significantly outperform those in the other?

I would be very interested in seeing the results of such a study. If I had to, I would bet on consistent histories beating Copenhagen. To me, the Copenhagen interpretation is just about the most unintuitive of all the most commonly favoured candidates.

The best explanation I’ve seen of why Van Gogh cut off his left ear.

Adorno’s Pizza

Apparently it is/was an actual pizza joint in Chicago.

Stumbled upon via a link in Alex Ross’s explanation of why classical music isn’t dead (a post which also happens to contain a fabulous photo of Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo standing by a gramophone with one of his classic psychotic expressions).

Schubert’s Fantasy in F Minor

Ten thumbs up to Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu’s recording of Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor. My favourite aspects of their interpretation:

1. Near the beginning, when the upper part repeats the first theme with both hands after it has been played once through with just one hand. Lupu and Perahia seem to breathe as one as they launch into the richer texture of the repeat, and the moment where the melody sinks into the high F (after slowing down a little) is like a painful sigh. As though the doubled melody has doubled the suffering it represents.

2. My favourite section of the Fantasy is the F major section (upper part excerpted below) where a completely new theme is presented for the first and only time in the entire piece, and a powerful theme it is too. Spot of calm in between storms, but a calm dripping with regret. Never heard any theme that expressed hopelessness so poignantly, in typical Schubert style too: in a major key, with a hint of optimism, but such that it is obviously optimism that is in vain. No one, I maintain, depicts that kind of mood as well as Schubert does. Perahia’s oscillating octaves leading to that section sound especially empty (yes, octaves are supposed to sound empty, especially in Schubert, but he adds an extra tinge of emptiness to them).

3. The final few bars, where the first theme returns but is terminated prematurely. Their rubato creates a convincing impression of a wounded animal staggering about before collapsing dramatically for good. Other versions I’ve heard tend to play this more straightforwardly. True, the final few chords are wrenching enough by virtue of their harmonies, but Perahia and Lupu, I believe, capture the significance of this final return of the original theme best. No point playing it exactly like how it was played in its earlier appearances. In marking this last repetition out as especially angsty, Perahia and Lupu best capture the intensification of suffering that characterises the whole piece.

I have been obsessed with this piece for a while. Other recordings I have are Badura-Skoda/Demus’s and Britten/Richter’s. The latter has bad sound, although I recall it as musically more than acceptable (since acquiring Perahia and Lupu’s recording I’ve not bothered to return to listen to Britten/Richter’s). The former has a strange sound quality that I think of as “yellow”. Yes, Badura-Skoda and Demus’s tone sounds jaundiced throughout. Pale and flat. I suspect it’s more a sound engineering issue than an instrumental issue, unless the pair were using one of those Viennese pianos that were the instruments Schubert intended his piano pieces to be played on. I’ve never heard a Viennese piano, so I can’t tell.

It is somewhat ironic that iTunes counts a piece as having been played only if it’s been played to the end of its track. Since the last few seconds of a track are usually silence, if I am listening intensely to a piece of music on iTunes, I will stop the track before it gets to the end. On the other hand, if I am not listening properly but merely letting the music pass through my ears while doing something else, there is a greater chance that I will not notice when the music ends, and merely let it go on to the next track. Also, last movements of multi-movement pieces tend not to get played right to the end, while other movements tend to be even if I’m listening closely, since I would just let the player move on naturally to the next movement, silence in between and all. Therefore iTunes’ record of the number of times a track is played says very little about my musical preferences.