Consonance
Notes that sound good together when played at the same time are called consonant. Chords built only of consonances sound pleasant and “stable”; you can listen to one for a long time without feeling that the music needs to change to a different chord
Dissonance
Notes that are dissonant can sound harsh or unpleasant when played at the same time. Or they may simply feel “unstable”; if you hear a chord with a dissonance in it, you may feel that the music is pulling you towards the chord that resolves the dissonance.
“An unstable tone combination is a dissonance; its tension demands an onward motion to a stable chord. Thus dissonant chords are ‘active’; traditionally they have been considered harsh and have expressed pain, grief, and conflict.” —Roger Kamien (2008)
Archive for October, 2008
Consonance – Dissonance
In Music on October 15, 2008 at 6:22 pmInside the right brain.. a first hand experience
In Music on October 9, 2008 at 9:11 amYesterday marked the fourth Theory W course held at Pakalane in Hout Bay. A video was shown of Dr Jill Bolte Taylor and her astounding story of the stroke she suffered in her left brain.One of the most interesting aspects of her report was that as a brain scientist she was intensely curious about what was happening to her, and tried to recall and document the entire experience. Because her left brain almost completely shut down she was in the position to experience herself and the world from an almost purely right brain perspective.
Click here to see this amazing video.
iPhone arrives in South Africa – first impressions
In Creativity, Music on October 4, 2008 at 5:34 pm
The iPhone arrived in South Africa, well in Cape Town anyway and being the sucker I am, made the inevitable purchase. Inevitable, yes because it seemed like a step up in technology. At first i wasn’t convinced but I have to admit that its in another league from other cell phones and PDA’s. Actually its unfair to classify the iPhone as a cell phone. I think after using it for 2 days that its more like a laptop minimised !
What”s there to like about it? Well firstly it makes Twitter come alive. (See previous post.) Secondly its’ 3G connection to Gmail is awesome and thirdly it synchs with the iTunes program; no,not just music, but photos, podcasts,contacts,calendar,videos…. and more.
So you get an iPod, a phone,internet that is highly readable and oh yes… a host of apps (applications) that you can download and makes the engine purr. Like WordPress (lets you blog from the iphone with ease), Twittelator (lets you manage Twitter), and an emulation of the 12C HP calculator. Thats all I have had time for so far. But it made me wonder about the philosophy of Apple, who have for so many years have demonstrated not only creativity, but its’ application – innovation - in their range of products. I think in further posts it may be worth exploring the mind of Steve Jobs. Stay tuned…
Tweet Tweet: Follow Charles Bryant (and Creating Possibilities) on Twitter
In Creativity, Life on October 3, 2008 at 11:31 amAll aboard the bandwagon: Charles Bryant and Creating Possibilities is now on Twitter.
If you know what that means, you can sign up to follow the blog and other occasional “tweets” at http://twitter.com/blackwhitelemon.
If you’re a Twitter newbie like myself let me explain.
Twitter is a quick means of disseminating small bites of information (“tweets”) via computer, cell phone or some other device to a group of “followers” who receive updates on their Blackberry, iPhone, laptop or some other techno device.
In my case, I’ll send tweets when new blog entries are posted or when something else interesting strikes me.
Let me know what you think.
Thinking like a student – creatively
In Creativity, Life on October 2, 2008 at 8:49 pm
CONSIDER, in these economically difficult times, that inspiring model of creative home design, the college student.
Yes, we understand that you already know how to throw all your clothes in a pile on the floor.
But there is still much that can be learned from students who’ve managed to put together great looking places on what a grown-up might pay for a one-way ticket to Paris.
First and foremost is fearlessness. You’d be embarrassed if your friends knew you’d gotten a piece of furniture off the street. College kids call up their friends to get their help carrying furniture home from the street, and brag about it. Many are genuinely concerned about recycling and the environment, and delighted when they can turn construction cast-offs into the trappings of home.
Where others see garbage, students see potential: a wooden futon frame, less the futon, becomes a towel rack. An old-fashioned school desk and bench that might well have come out of a one-room schoolhouse upstate? Use it as a bedside table.
Nor do they have a fear of strong color or pattern: They’ll paint a dorm room a dark green, or stencil blue and white polka dots on the wall beside a 19th-century fireplace. They’ll find somebody’s tired old bedside stand that faintly recalls Versailles, paint it a pale robin’s-egg blue, shellac it, top it with a bare branch in a found glass vase, and put it in the living room, where it will look smart and playful.
Sure, you can argue, it’s easy for them to paint a bedroom green; they don’t own the place.
But that’s not giving their creativity its due. Their thinking can be so far outside the box that the box is forgotten. Kayt Brumder, a fifth-year architecture student at the Cooper Union, was strolling along New York’s Bowery four years ago with her boyfriend, Jorge Pereira, then an architecture student at Columbia and now an architect, when they saw a stack of dresser drawers on the sidewalk. It was not a perfect find; the dresser itself was missing. But that made it kind of interesting. The couple threw the drawers into a taxi, took them up to their apartment in East Harlem and turned them into wall-mounted storage.
Craigslist is a basic resource for students, as are the low-cost, big box stores. But these sources are often merely starting points. Tyler Velten, a student at the Yale School of Architecture, transformed his $35 Billy bookcases from Ikea into artful cabinets with the addition of plywood doors he made and a few $3 hinges.
You don’t have a woodworking studio? Do as Mr. Velten did: Set up the equipment on the street and plug it into a 50-foot extension cord tossed out the window. And when you find a knot in the plywood, don’t panic; make it part of the design.
Phil Mansfield for The New York Times
By JOYCE WADLER
A computer chip to match the brain’s creativity?
In Creativity, Life on October 2, 2008 at 9:50 amA tower design competition was held for the 1889 Paris World Exhibition. The winner was Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. No less than 68 designs were submitted. The designs all bore some similarity to the Eiffel Tower but were still different, since every designer has a unique design style.
This leads me to the subject of creativity. Creativity can lead to a diversity of solutions for a narrowly defined problem.
Understand the ‘how’
In thermodynamics, when a person creates something that wasn’t there before, it is called “noise”; there is an “output signal” that we cannot infer from the input.
This is a playful comparison that does not do justice to creative people, but it means that if we want computers to be creative, they must have a method to be creative.
They need a smart program for smart, non-trivial solutions. For that to happen, people must understand the “how” of their own creativity.
One of the first “computers” was an 18th century weaving machine that was programmed by punched holes in a card. This punched-card idea was adapted by IBM founder Herman Hollerith for the 1890 U.S. census. The rest is history.
Racing the brain
The brain has some 100 billion neurons. That leads to a number of possible interconnection patterns. Assuming each neuron can fire 10 to 20 times a second, the brain’s information processing capacity is in the order of 1023bit/s.
When can we make a chip with that capacity?
Applying Moore’s Law and assuming a continued increase in processing capacity by a factor of 10 every five years or so, we cannot expect to have the required capacity before 2070.
Be pragmatic
The creative computer may not become a reality anytime soon. But the principles of creative behavior and learning are already being applied in clever ways in our browsers, our communications, our planning tools and our user interfaces.
Being creative requires us to be pragmatic at the same time: While we strive for perfection, let’s not try to reach it immediately.
- Cees Jan Koomen
Entrepreneur and Founder, Point-One Innovation Fund
Motorcycle Diaries – You Tube – Tango Dance
In Creativity, Motorcycle Diaries, Music, Tango on October 1, 2008 at 9:13 amFollowing the story from the previous post the following You Tube video shows the dance on 3.11 of the 5 min 33 sec insert.
Tango Music in Motorcycle Diaries…… creating possibilities
In Motorcycle Diaries, Music, Tango on October 1, 2008 at 7:02 amEver hear music too beautiful for words, only to find there’s no trace of it on iTunes, Amazon or anywhere on the web ??
The movie Motorcycle Diaries has a short Tango, (probably a Milonga) where Alberto Granado (Roberto De la Serna) dances with Mia Maestro to a hauntingly stunning piece of piano music. Its not on the soundtrack for some reason and countless Google searches failed to uncover the music, its score or tabs. While watching the movie with a friend I made the remark that I was sufficiently passionate over the piece of music, that if I could track it down, it would move me to teach myself the piano, and naturally it would be the first thing I would play. Tipper, who is always up for a challenge decided she would find it to test my declaration of intent.
Well its a long story from there but last night Tipper presented me with the score of the Tango music from Motorcycle Diaries and here it is.
motorcycle diaries tango – the sheet music
How did she find it?
Well she made me wait a long time before she revealed the answer to that. First she sent me six bars from the score. I think she was testing me ! naturally in my excitement I rushed out, bought a keyboard, and painfully taught myself to play the first 6 bars not knowing how to read music. Then last night she presented me with the rest of the score.
What she had done after realising it was imposible to find, was to find a composer (Matthijs van Dijk) who, off the DVD, and note by note transcribed the music to paper and this is a copy of the score. Not satisfied with the score alone, Tipper then recruited a colleague to play the piece, and record it.
Its a story of creating possibilities, of someone being determined to find a piece of music to the extent she created it by having it transcribed. Its a pure example of an “I can” approach to life. Incidentally the composer said it took him 6 hours to transcribe the first 40 seconds of the music !
In a later post I will post the music played by Tipper’s colleague and I will also find the video of the dance.. and post that. Watch this space…..
