One day I came up with the idea of hacking a Kinect Camera and mounting it to a pair of glasses. The 3D camera could read the hand gestures in front of your face. Combine that with the ability to superimpose information through augmented reality and you have yourself a 3D interface that appears to be floating in front of your face. Back, when I came up with this idea, I found these glasses and wanted to attach the kinect camera to them. http://www.vuzix.com/consumer/products_wrap920.html
An example of hacking a kinect to read your hand gestures to run the interface on your phone.
This is what it would look like if you could walk around and see augmented information.
Yes, I know that google and Apple are working on a pair of glasses, but I don't think they utilize the kinect camera for a way to interface. Google glasses video:
Thursday, July 5, 2012
3D hologram projector using Intersecting Lasers
Back in 3rd grade in my G.A.T.E. class we were challenged to write our own books. I decided to make mine about time travel. I had always wondered how 3D hologram projectors like the ones in star wars would actually work. What I came up with was a way to intersect lasers. I was explaining this to a friend last night on the 4th of July and began wondering if someone had actually built it yet. I googled it today and found out some company built one: http://hackaday.com/2010/01/09/ces-3d-laser-projection-system/
Yep, I was in 3rd grade and I wrote a sci-fi book about time travel and invented a way to make holographic projectors that actually became a real invention. So because I've been coming up with concepts, ideas, and inventions that consistently come to fruition by other people, I decided to quit sitting on them and start publishing them on my blog. This is exactly what I was explaining to my friend last night.
How it works is that the luminance value of the point where two beams intersect would be brighter than their individual luminance.
Take a laser and have it draw a line. The beam would like a triangle-like surface as seen in a lazer light show. Take another laser and put it at a perpendicular position below the projected beam. Have it draw a circle. It would look like a cone of light. Where the two lasers intersect you would see a circle with a brighter luminance than the cone or the triangle.
Now if you were to take 3 lazers from positions resembling an equilateral triangle sitting on a floor pointing up. The lasers would draw any 3D object by drawing the outline of that object one vertical slice at a time. It would be similar to the way that a 3D printer prints a plastic 3D object by making one slice at a time.
Now when lasers draw complex shapes you start to see a refresh rate depending on the distance the laser has to travel. So, in order to reduce the refresh rate and to also reduce the amount of haze created by the stray beams of light, you would build an array of lasers in the shape of a ring pointing up. The lasers would be able to draw both from the top down and bottom up at the same time as well as you would have more than 3 lasers intersecting at a time so that their luminance could be less visible except for the intersection points that they are drawing. For example if you have a beam of a luminance of 50percent intersecting with another beam of 50percent you get a point of light with a luminance of 100percent lets say. Having an array of lasers means you could have 10 beams at a value of 10percent creating the same intersection point of light with a luminance of 100percent. What this does is it reduces the visibility of the stray laser beam light since the beams are only 10% instead of %50.
In the video, the prototype has a glass cylinder around it. I imagine they did this to stop the stray beams from flying all over the room because they could cause retina damage. Instead the beams are reflected by the cylinder so that they only go up instead of all over the room.
Now have the beams alternate their colors as they draw and you have the ability to draw a color object.
What I came up with last night was using this technology combined with the kinect camera's ability to record 3D data and map 2D video onto the 3D information. Put 2 kinect cameras at 180degree opposite positions or use an array of them and you have just created a 3D recording device. You would then be able to teleconference in 3D or record your 3D projection.
Boom!
Let There Be (laser)Light!
-MM
***Update***
I saw in a different video that the japanese company uses excited ions suspended in a gas.
Thats prob why they have the glass case.
Yep, I was in 3rd grade and I wrote a sci-fi book about time travel and invented a way to make holographic projectors that actually became a real invention. So because I've been coming up with concepts, ideas, and inventions that consistently come to fruition by other people, I decided to quit sitting on them and start publishing them on my blog. This is exactly what I was explaining to my friend last night.
How it works is that the luminance value of the point where two beams intersect would be brighter than their individual luminance.
Take a laser and have it draw a line. The beam would like a triangle-like surface as seen in a lazer light show. Take another laser and put it at a perpendicular position below the projected beam. Have it draw a circle. It would look like a cone of light. Where the two lasers intersect you would see a circle with a brighter luminance than the cone or the triangle.
Let There Be (laser)Light!
-MM
***Update***
I saw in a different video that the japanese company uses excited ions suspended in a gas.
Thats prob why they have the glass case.
Friday, March 2, 2012
I Think, therefore I Drink
So I had a rough night.
I ended up drinking myself into a punch-drunk stupor that made me want to post-night tweet/post all the "WTF" "FML" acrimonious acronyms that my post-stuporous thumbs could posthaste-ily muster. Yet it struck me so brazenly odd that anyone consumes alcohol at all.
What a strange creature is the homosapien that the gift of sapience grants us the desire to forfeit such granted gifts. What cultured such un-cultured behavior? These questions lead me to the amusing conclusion that the cruelty of sentience is that we are compelled for the comfort of interactive socialization yet are easily uncomforted by each other's sentences.
Don't give me your politics or assertions about the world because your advantageous vantage point offends the singularity of my point of view. We respond by lubricating the penetration of each other's points with poisonous liquid that numbs the very wits that allowed us to bear witness to the unbearability of co-existence. We disconnect and alter our otherwise united states as a means to connect. Sharing perspective is best kept trivial.
It is best if we talk sports or fashion. If not, i'm going to need a drink. Something for you to think about is how unthinkable it is for us to think about what each other thinks.
bar tender may I have another,
-MM
I ended up drinking myself into a punch-drunk stupor that made me want to post-night tweet/post all the "WTF" "FML" acrimonious acronyms that my post-stuporous thumbs could posthaste-ily muster. Yet it struck me so brazenly odd that anyone consumes alcohol at all.
What a strange creature is the homosapien that the gift of sapience grants us the desire to forfeit such granted gifts. What cultured such un-cultured behavior? These questions lead me to the amusing conclusion that the cruelty of sentience is that we are compelled for the comfort of interactive socialization yet are easily uncomforted by each other's sentences.
Don't give me your politics or assertions about the world because your advantageous vantage point offends the singularity of my point of view. We respond by lubricating the penetration of each other's points with poisonous liquid that numbs the very wits that allowed us to bear witness to the unbearability of co-existence. We disconnect and alter our otherwise united states as a means to connect. Sharing perspective is best kept trivial.
It is best if we talk sports or fashion. If not, i'm going to need a drink. Something for you to think about is how unthinkable it is for us to think about what each other thinks.
bar tender may I have another,
-MM
Thursday, December 22, 2011
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: A Review
The Girl with the Dragon tattoo is a story about a girl self segregated from mainstream society both outwardly with counter cultural hair, piercings, and tattoos and internally, avoiding substantial long term relationships as a victim of misogyny and rape. She's ultra intelligent, boasting a photographic memory, hacking mastery, and investigatory skills that not only rival the seeming protagonist but surpass him. On the surface, the films protagonist appears to be a neo-noir detective story about investigatie reporter Mikael blomkvist played by Daniel Craig that unfolds like a modern day game of "Clue" where the potential "who dunnit"'s are the members of a beyond dysfunctional wealthy Swedish family of industrialist Nazis. However, in the hands of David Fincher, it is a follow up to the social network and another tale of alienated genius driven by the desire to connect with the one person that provides a sense of normalcy. Played by Rooney Mara, Lisbeth Salander outwardly mutilates her skin with piercings and tattoos to cope and withdraw from her internal scars.
The film is a US studio remake of the 2 year old Swedish Indie adaptation of the novel by Stieg Larsson. Larsson himself witnessed a brutal rape at a young age, and most likely developed the intriguing character Lisbeth from an obsessive insight into how such brutallity could effect a woman. Despite critics who find the characterization of the books antagonists to be superficial and lacking depth, he is successful at inventing a unique ultra feminist revenge heroine and story rich with unpredictable plot twists and detail. Those are the successes that probably garnered Fincher's interest which he cultivated for his stripped down American version.
This is evidently an ideal playground for Fincher who's most significant contributions to Film have been heavy handed studies of the sociopathic such as Seven, Zodiac, Fight Club, and even the Social Network.
According to wikipedia: "Antisocial personality disorder is described by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV-TR), as an Axis II personality disorder characterized by "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.""
Psychopathology as in Seven, Zodiac, and Fight club would be a subset of sociopathology. (Anti-Social Personality Disorder)
In the Social network, Zuckerberg's character whether in real life or not is portrayed as at least antisocial, obsessive-compulsive, and passive aggressive. The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo not only share similar non-psychopathic potentially borderline sociopathic misunderstood geniuses, but they also share most of the same talented ensemble crew.
Here I have listed the shared cast and Crew members along with selected previous works:
Screenplay- Steven Zaillian
Moneyball
American gangster
Gangs of new York
Hannibal
A Civil Action
Clear and present Danger
Schindler's List
Cinamatography- Jeff Cronenweth
Social Network
Fight Club
Music- Trent Reznor
Social network
And Atticus Ross also music
Social network
Book of eli
Editing- Kirk Baxter
Social Network
Curious Case of benjamin button
Zodiac
And Angus Wall also editing
Social network
Curious case of benjamin button
Zodiac
Panic room
Actress- Rooney Mara
That list alone should provide enough supportive assurance of the quality of this film. In each of those areas, this film is a master example. And even though i have yet to see the swedish version, i would wager that a Film class could devote a portion of its curriculum to comparing the swedish version to Fincher's as a comparitive study of narrative technique and mastery. For example Fincher and Cronenweth demonstrate a thorough mastery of cinamatorphic language in every frame from the shot to shot continuity of motion to the Choices of framing its characters. Whether they are coming or going, standing afar, obscured by objects, or the Camera is moving from low to high while rotating so that Mara's character becomes upside down and tinted red, they provide intense psychological narrative that tells us how to feel about the characters and how they might feel at each given moment. My initial favorite probably being the sequence introducing Mara's character.
Unlike most psychological mystery thrillers, this is not a game of cat and mouse, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a stripping away of layers until the characters nude wounds are left bare like artful tattoos.
As an entertaining movie I would not recommend this film if your IQ is not at least in the 100 and up range or else you might not keep up with the dizzying amount of information Fincher forces you to follow quickly. If you have read the book or seen the swedish version then the twists and turns probably won't surprise you and if you haven't studied film than you probably won't appreciate the amount of technique that bubbles below the surface of the complicated plot. If you are squeamish about graphic violence, then you probably wont enjoy the punches Fincher doesn't hold back from throwing. If you don't fit any of those requirements then you might at least appreciate the compelling performaces of its cast.
Particularly Rooney Mara. The product of New York Giants football royalty, she demonstrates an impressive amount of acting talent and social intelligence. If you don't remember her from the Social Network, she plays Erica Albright the girlfriend of Mark Zuckerberg played by Jessie Eisenberg and I will briefly tangent about the opening scene.
Written by Aaron Sorkin who won an Oscar for it, the Opening Scene of The Social Network introduces us to Mark Zuckerberg. The scene itself concisely conveys so much about character but requires so much subtlety that I consider it one of the better written singular scenes for two actors to exercise acute skill.
Personally I often tire of actors that claim to know more about acting because of whatever training or experience they possess but fail to recognize how difficult to achieve the degree of success that scene possesses. During the Renaissance period, an Italian painter by the name of Giotto di Bondone was commisioned by Pope Benedict to demonstrate his worthiness by painting a single drawing. He drew a single perfect circle with a pen dipped in red ink by fixing his arm firmly against his side to make a compass and turning the sheet of paper. Despite the courier thinking he was made a fool of, Giotto was chosen as his skill was recognized to greatly surpass the other painters (Giotto's Circle). I personally regard the opening scene of the Social network as Rooney Mara's Giotto circle.
Simple and subtle her character arcs from Jovial banter, to on her heels apologetic defense, to being offended, disgusted, angry, and then she breaks up with him in a snap decision while remaining cordial, until she finally loses control and aggressively puts him in his place. From her feigned attention to the tic of a single left eye lid to the pursing of lips that surpress her steaming lid about to blow, the subtle execution displays more skill than any screaming argument one might obviously point to. In a film where Eisenberg's protagonist intellectually steamrolls every character while barely allocating a portion of his genius selective attention, Mara's Erica Albright is the only one who can keep up with him. While he jumps around from one complex statement or witty insult to the next, she quickly processes and fences back with an equally witty response, ultimately defeating him. It is the most crucial scene of the film because it defines the broken connection that drives the character to create a multi-billion dollar social networking site. We have to believe that this girl is the one person he wants to be friends with. Not his business partner. This girl. (The Social Network's Opening Scene 1st half Written)
And if that is Mara's Giotto's circle, Her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander is her roman chapel. She's just as quick witted, her responses are short and sharp. She speaks with a decent scandinavian accent that is believable enough if not purposefully strange. She hides depths of emotion, is capable of ruthlessness, physical and emotional strength, while being completely fragile when she opens her walls. She performs a wide range of unimaginable feats of human action while winning over an audience to care about her. The result is an iconic performance and an unforgettable protagonist that Strengthens Fincher's vision of a wounded genius. I predict great things for Rooney Mara.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is an excellent film and will no doubt recieve several oscar nods. It's not necessarily the best film of 2011 but it was worth writing about. Also, I cant say that everyone will enjoy this film but hopefully some will appreciate it as much as I did.
A small window into Fincher's team through a behind the scenes about the post from The Social Network:
The Social Network Post part 1
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
The film is a US studio remake of the 2 year old Swedish Indie adaptation of the novel by Stieg Larsson. Larsson himself witnessed a brutal rape at a young age, and most likely developed the intriguing character Lisbeth from an obsessive insight into how such brutallity could effect a woman. Despite critics who find the characterization of the books antagonists to be superficial and lacking depth, he is successful at inventing a unique ultra feminist revenge heroine and story rich with unpredictable plot twists and detail. Those are the successes that probably garnered Fincher's interest which he cultivated for his stripped down American version.
This is evidently an ideal playground for Fincher who's most significant contributions to Film have been heavy handed studies of the sociopathic such as Seven, Zodiac, Fight Club, and even the Social Network.
According to wikipedia: "Antisocial personality disorder is described by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV-TR), as an Axis II personality disorder characterized by "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.""
Psychopathology as in Seven, Zodiac, and Fight club would be a subset of sociopathology. (Anti-Social Personality Disorder)
In the Social network, Zuckerberg's character whether in real life or not is portrayed as at least antisocial, obsessive-compulsive, and passive aggressive. The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo not only share similar non-psychopathic potentially borderline sociopathic misunderstood geniuses, but they also share most of the same talented ensemble crew.
Here I have listed the shared cast and Crew members along with selected previous works:
Screenplay- Steven Zaillian
Moneyball
American gangster
Gangs of new York
Hannibal
A Civil Action
Clear and present Danger
Schindler's List
Cinamatography- Jeff Cronenweth
Social Network
Fight Club
Music- Trent Reznor
Social network
And Atticus Ross also music
Social network
Book of eli
Editing- Kirk Baxter
Social Network
Curious Case of benjamin button
Zodiac
And Angus Wall also editing
Social network
Curious case of benjamin button
Zodiac
Panic room
Actress- Rooney Mara
That list alone should provide enough supportive assurance of the quality of this film. In each of those areas, this film is a master example. And even though i have yet to see the swedish version, i would wager that a Film class could devote a portion of its curriculum to comparing the swedish version to Fincher's as a comparitive study of narrative technique and mastery. For example Fincher and Cronenweth demonstrate a thorough mastery of cinamatorphic language in every frame from the shot to shot continuity of motion to the Choices of framing its characters. Whether they are coming or going, standing afar, obscured by objects, or the Camera is moving from low to high while rotating so that Mara's character becomes upside down and tinted red, they provide intense psychological narrative that tells us how to feel about the characters and how they might feel at each given moment. My initial favorite probably being the sequence introducing Mara's character.
Unlike most psychological mystery thrillers, this is not a game of cat and mouse, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a stripping away of layers until the characters nude wounds are left bare like artful tattoos.
As an entertaining movie I would not recommend this film if your IQ is not at least in the 100 and up range or else you might not keep up with the dizzying amount of information Fincher forces you to follow quickly. If you have read the book or seen the swedish version then the twists and turns probably won't surprise you and if you haven't studied film than you probably won't appreciate the amount of technique that bubbles below the surface of the complicated plot. If you are squeamish about graphic violence, then you probably wont enjoy the punches Fincher doesn't hold back from throwing. If you don't fit any of those requirements then you might at least appreciate the compelling performaces of its cast.
Particularly Rooney Mara. The product of New York Giants football royalty, she demonstrates an impressive amount of acting talent and social intelligence. If you don't remember her from the Social Network, she plays Erica Albright the girlfriend of Mark Zuckerberg played by Jessie Eisenberg and I will briefly tangent about the opening scene.
Written by Aaron Sorkin who won an Oscar for it, the Opening Scene of The Social Network introduces us to Mark Zuckerberg. The scene itself concisely conveys so much about character but requires so much subtlety that I consider it one of the better written singular scenes for two actors to exercise acute skill.
Personally I often tire of actors that claim to know more about acting because of whatever training or experience they possess but fail to recognize how difficult to achieve the degree of success that scene possesses. During the Renaissance period, an Italian painter by the name of Giotto di Bondone was commisioned by Pope Benedict to demonstrate his worthiness by painting a single drawing. He drew a single perfect circle with a pen dipped in red ink by fixing his arm firmly against his side to make a compass and turning the sheet of paper. Despite the courier thinking he was made a fool of, Giotto was chosen as his skill was recognized to greatly surpass the other painters (Giotto's Circle). I personally regard the opening scene of the Social network as Rooney Mara's Giotto circle.
Simple and subtle her character arcs from Jovial banter, to on her heels apologetic defense, to being offended, disgusted, angry, and then she breaks up with him in a snap decision while remaining cordial, until she finally loses control and aggressively puts him in his place. From her feigned attention to the tic of a single left eye lid to the pursing of lips that surpress her steaming lid about to blow, the subtle execution displays more skill than any screaming argument one might obviously point to. In a film where Eisenberg's protagonist intellectually steamrolls every character while barely allocating a portion of his genius selective attention, Mara's Erica Albright is the only one who can keep up with him. While he jumps around from one complex statement or witty insult to the next, she quickly processes and fences back with an equally witty response, ultimately defeating him. It is the most crucial scene of the film because it defines the broken connection that drives the character to create a multi-billion dollar social networking site. We have to believe that this girl is the one person he wants to be friends with. Not his business partner. This girl. (The Social Network's Opening Scene 1st half Written)
And if that is Mara's Giotto's circle, Her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander is her roman chapel. She's just as quick witted, her responses are short and sharp. She speaks with a decent scandinavian accent that is believable enough if not purposefully strange. She hides depths of emotion, is capable of ruthlessness, physical and emotional strength, while being completely fragile when she opens her walls. She performs a wide range of unimaginable feats of human action while winning over an audience to care about her. The result is an iconic performance and an unforgettable protagonist that Strengthens Fincher's vision of a wounded genius. I predict great things for Rooney Mara.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is an excellent film and will no doubt recieve several oscar nods. It's not necessarily the best film of 2011 but it was worth writing about. Also, I cant say that everyone will enjoy this film but hopefully some will appreciate it as much as I did.
A small window into Fincher's team through a behind the scenes about the post from The Social Network:
The Social Network Post part 1
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Music and the subconcsious: a scientific qualitative meditation
I've spent the last several months in a deep study of music. I'm not only filming a documentary project that aims to dive into the how's and why's of the cultural movement of electronic music but I've been learning to compose in Logic and Ableton Live. Despite being a music fanatic all my life, the process has made me feel re-freshed as though I am a foreigner and the ways and customs of the musical world are alien. It's lead me into deep personal meditations that ask why? Why do we listen to music. How does it effect us? What is the point of dancing? Is there a biological explanation? What is the nature of emotion and why is it so closely entwined with the consumption of music?
I'm at work. I was bored. I opened spotify. Typed in M83 and started zoning out. M83 is named after a spiral galaxy, Messier 83 spearheaded by french musician Anthony Gonzalez. Often compared to Shoegaze or goth pop, I prefer to categorize it with the likes of Empire of the sun as Indie dream pop. Its epic out of this world sound is full of spacious reverb, passionate vocals, piercing high synths, and urgent low basslines were complex and freshly interesting enough to transport my mind to a distant mental state. While the new album "Hurry Up We're Dreaming's" unrelenting desire to be "epic" could be considered wearying, I personally found the pace pleasantly escapist. Hopefully the play Coachella in 2012, because if they do they could quite possibly be next year's "Empire of the Sun" experience for me. Or atleast they could have been if I don't over expose myself by then.
I am however not writing this blog because I'm in love with M83. I'm writing it because they happened to be the catalyst to a meditational epiphany.
The power of music to liberate the spirit is as universally understood as the enjoyable experience of warm sunlight or a cool breeze. Yet, the familiarity seems to leave us content with barely landing on the surface how music effects us. I propose a hypothesis. Music taps into our emotional centers because it requires sub-concsious aspects of the brain to process it. It is primal.
Visual information as in written language and visual art is uniquely human. Think about pictures and silent movies. Their full of detail and they instantly correspond to memories and ideas about what we are looking at. Instant isomorphic correspondence is unavoidable and takes place in the neo-cortex, the more evolved uniquely human part of the brain. So does language. Abstract ideas, image processing and language, live in the conscious mind and our memories.
Audio processing on the other hand is older. Back when we were mammals trudging through the darkness on the alert for danger, back when our ears could swivel, and we couldn't speak, we depended on the ability to process sounds. Our survival depended on determining the difference between a snapping twig or the harmless chirping of mating crickets.
In the case of music, we get hit in both places. Lyrics, especially poetic ones require higher abstract processes and they tell us about memories and experience that our conscious neocortex later tells us how to feel about. The instrumental sounds of music excites a more primal and subconscious sense of how we feel. The scale volume and pitch of a sound tells us about it's size and weight as in whether it is large and ominous or light and playful. The rhythm of the sounds tell us about its urgency and give us a sense of change over time, like a steady comforting heartbeat in the womb, the banging at a door, or the speeding build up of a house track. The pitch variation in music requires highly mathematical processes. But unless you're a composer or a dancer, you're never consciously counting, dividing, and adding 1/8ths and quarter notes into timescale mathematics. It is our subconscious that recognizes the dance steps of an instruments notes. The image of A person wearing a costume isn't silly or scary unless we have a preconceived notion about what they are wearing whereas we develop an emotional reaction to a series of notes regardless. You don't have to have heard a melody before for it to make you feel happy or sad, the mathematical configuration of the notes gives us that information instantly. That's why they say playing classical music for babies makes them smarter. It's like building muscles in a aerobics class for audio pattern recognition software of the mind. Classical music has a greater level of complexity and learning to recognize the motion paths of the notes upon the musical scale teaches the mind to process like a kid reading War and Peace versus reading twilight. The subconsious mind is much more closely wired to the emotional parts, the parts that are behind the guy behind the guy in our decision making.
Think of it like this. The sound of a heartbeat needs no intellectual context. A heart beat is calm or slow, excited and quick, angry and intense, or it flutters with amorous infatuation. But in a greater sense, the human spirit is behind those rhythms. Whether we long for love or we run in fear, the human spirit and the human heart share the same sense of rhythmic variation. One being physical, the other being metaphysical. Music just more directly interfaces with the parts of the brain that process and communicate this information. Images and language must go upstairs to the management team in the neocortex, but music goes straight to the people without management decisions and mental bureaucracy. It tells us how to feel, whether to fear, aspire, or love, it makes us feel strong or vulnerable or amorous. Its rhythms speak directly to the places that make us feel
Play that Funky Music,
-MM
I just thought of a counter argument to prove this entire entry to be pseudo intellectual drivel. If music is so primal and originates in primitive subconcious parts of the brain,f then why aren't more animals musical? Why aren't other animals effected by our music? There must be a lot more going on that is human specific.
I'm at work. I was bored. I opened spotify. Typed in M83 and started zoning out. M83 is named after a spiral galaxy, Messier 83 spearheaded by french musician Anthony Gonzalez. Often compared to Shoegaze or goth pop, I prefer to categorize it with the likes of Empire of the sun as Indie dream pop. Its epic out of this world sound is full of spacious reverb, passionate vocals, piercing high synths, and urgent low basslines were complex and freshly interesting enough to transport my mind to a distant mental state. While the new album "Hurry Up We're Dreaming's" unrelenting desire to be "epic" could be considered wearying, I personally found the pace pleasantly escapist. Hopefully the play Coachella in 2012, because if they do they could quite possibly be next year's "Empire of the Sun" experience for me. Or atleast they could have been if I don't over expose myself by then.
I am however not writing this blog because I'm in love with M83. I'm writing it because they happened to be the catalyst to a meditational epiphany.
The power of music to liberate the spirit is as universally understood as the enjoyable experience of warm sunlight or a cool breeze. Yet, the familiarity seems to leave us content with barely landing on the surface how music effects us. I propose a hypothesis. Music taps into our emotional centers because it requires sub-concsious aspects of the brain to process it. It is primal.
Visual information as in written language and visual art is uniquely human. Think about pictures and silent movies. Their full of detail and they instantly correspond to memories and ideas about what we are looking at. Instant isomorphic correspondence is unavoidable and takes place in the neo-cortex, the more evolved uniquely human part of the brain. So does language. Abstract ideas, image processing and language, live in the conscious mind and our memories.
Audio processing on the other hand is older. Back when we were mammals trudging through the darkness on the alert for danger, back when our ears could swivel, and we couldn't speak, we depended on the ability to process sounds. Our survival depended on determining the difference between a snapping twig or the harmless chirping of mating crickets.
In the case of music, we get hit in both places. Lyrics, especially poetic ones require higher abstract processes and they tell us about memories and experience that our conscious neocortex later tells us how to feel about. The instrumental sounds of music excites a more primal and subconscious sense of how we feel. The scale volume and pitch of a sound tells us about it's size and weight as in whether it is large and ominous or light and playful. The rhythm of the sounds tell us about its urgency and give us a sense of change over time, like a steady comforting heartbeat in the womb, the banging at a door, or the speeding build up of a house track. The pitch variation in music requires highly mathematical processes. But unless you're a composer or a dancer, you're never consciously counting, dividing, and adding 1/8ths and quarter notes into timescale mathematics. It is our subconscious that recognizes the dance steps of an instruments notes. The image of A person wearing a costume isn't silly or scary unless we have a preconceived notion about what they are wearing whereas we develop an emotional reaction to a series of notes regardless. You don't have to have heard a melody before for it to make you feel happy or sad, the mathematical configuration of the notes gives us that information instantly. That's why they say playing classical music for babies makes them smarter. It's like building muscles in a aerobics class for audio pattern recognition software of the mind. Classical music has a greater level of complexity and learning to recognize the motion paths of the notes upon the musical scale teaches the mind to process like a kid reading War and Peace versus reading twilight. The subconsious mind is much more closely wired to the emotional parts, the parts that are behind the guy behind the guy in our decision making.
Think of it like this. The sound of a heartbeat needs no intellectual context. A heart beat is calm or slow, excited and quick, angry and intense, or it flutters with amorous infatuation. But in a greater sense, the human spirit is behind those rhythms. Whether we long for love or we run in fear, the human spirit and the human heart share the same sense of rhythmic variation. One being physical, the other being metaphysical. Music just more directly interfaces with the parts of the brain that process and communicate this information. Images and language must go upstairs to the management team in the neocortex, but music goes straight to the people without management decisions and mental bureaucracy. It tells us how to feel, whether to fear, aspire, or love, it makes us feel strong or vulnerable or amorous. Its rhythms speak directly to the places that make us feel
Play that Funky Music,
-MM
I just thought of a counter argument to prove this entire entry to be pseudo intellectual drivel. If music is so primal and originates in primitive subconcious parts of the brain,f then why aren't more animals musical? Why aren't other animals effected by our music? There must be a lot more going on that is human specific.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Steve Jobs and the Legacy of a Visionary
It is almost Midnight. It is the end of a rainy day in LA. The day that Steve Jobs passed away from a world he shaped with his ideas about technology, business, and how to live life moving forward. I've spent the last several hours since I got home from work reading up on a man who's ideas permeate every facet of my life. I learned that thinking of Jobs as an inventor who brought us the iPhone was wrong. He wasn't the inventor turned engineer. He wasn't "like Bill Gates but the Mac version". He was never the Engineer. That was Steve Wozniak. His co-founder of apple who actually designed the first Apple I computer. He wasn't the inventor who developed object oriented programming and the mouse-cursor interface. That was the engineers at Xerox PARC. He wasn't the Animator who revolutionized animation technology. That credit belongs to the John Lasseter and the creators of Pixar. He wasn't the one who invented PostScript. And from what I understand, he wasn't even running apple when they were selling macintosh computers to College students headed for their dorms, it was being run by John Sculley the man who had pushed him out. Steve Jobs was a visionary. He was the one who saw the potential in Steve Wozniak's little box of chips and circuits and convinced him to start a computer company. He was the one who while taking a tour of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center saw "a strange device called a mouse, that you could use to move a cursor around the screen. You could open files and folders, copy and paste content inside them. It was simply a breakthrough." Steve said "Within ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday." He was the one that saw the potential in Pixar that George Lucas didn't. It was he who encouraged the founders of Adobe, Warnock and Geschke to make PostScript into a standard computer language. And even though he wasn't the head of apple computers when it was selling the Macintosh computer to college students around the country, he was the one who spearheaded that division of apple and gave it direction. A friend rightfully called him a champion and facilitator of innovation. He developed a better computer because he saw that there was a need for one. He developed the iPod because he saw a use for one and unlike anyone else, he saw how it could change the way we consume music and how it could make his company flourish. He was the visionary.
In hind sight, its easy to call Jobs a visionary. Yesterday they announced the iPhone 4s and I blogged about it on my Macbook Pro while editing video in Final Cut Pro and listening to music I downloaded on iTunes. I can't go a single day without having my hands on an apple product. How can you not give him credit for being a visionary when we spend every day surrounded by tangible reminders of his impact on the world. Yet some of his greatest contributions are things that we don't touch. Steve Jobs changed the way companies develop market positioning because he saw that you could change the market and move everyone else's position around you. For instance, in 2003, Benioff and a few members of his executive team at salesforce.com went to talk to Jobs. Jobs told them they needed to build an ecosystem around their software. They did just that, by designing an ecosystem that it initially called the "app store," which basically let people buy apps and run them in Salesforce software. Steve later did it himself with iTunes and the App Store for the iPod and iPhone. Steve Jobs changed the way advertisers develop brand strategies. His iMac, iPod, iPhone, iLife, iEverything naming strategy proved that product iDentity is something that involves every aspect of how a consumer interacts with it, including the spelling. He changed the way we approach design and saw the aesthetics of design as the visual manifest of designs true function; re-inventing the way things work. His ideas were so far ahead of the curve that everyone to this day is still making sense of how revolutionary and important his ideas actually were. He taught the world how to envision realities that didn't exist and how to manifest them into being. When you think about it, foresight is the basis and function of intelligence; to more accurately predict and initiate future outcomes. In that way, you can definitely call him a genious. Looking at the length and breadth of Jobs' reach and the degree of impact he had on our world and its future, It becomes pretty evident that in the end his greatest legacy was showing us how to be a visionary. The world is all the more dim and blind without him in it to see and light the way.
RIP
-MM
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. "
- Steve Jobs (Stanford Commencment Speech)
"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts"
-Albert Einstein
This is the first apple computer. Where people saw a wooden box with chips and circuits inside, Steve Jobs saw a company. He talked Steve Wozniak into starting a company and sold his VW van to pay for building the first boards.
Steve had a good argument. We were in his car and he said — and I can remember him saying this like it was yesterday: “Well, even if we lose money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.” That convinced me. And I was excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company.
- Steve Wozniak (Co-Founder Apple Computers)
"...Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way."
-Steven Paul Jobs
"We’re going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years. This is the start of an industry. It happens once a decade."
- Mike Markkula
"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
-Steven Paul Jobs (Recruiting PepsiCo executive John Sculley)
In hind sight, its easy to call Jobs a visionary. Yesterday they announced the iPhone 4s and I blogged about it on my Macbook Pro while editing video in Final Cut Pro and listening to music I downloaded on iTunes. I can't go a single day without having my hands on an apple product. How can you not give him credit for being a visionary when we spend every day surrounded by tangible reminders of his impact on the world. Yet some of his greatest contributions are things that we don't touch. Steve Jobs changed the way companies develop market positioning because he saw that you could change the market and move everyone else's position around you. For instance, in 2003, Benioff and a few members of his executive team at salesforce.com went to talk to Jobs. Jobs told them they needed to build an ecosystem around their software. They did just that, by designing an ecosystem that it initially called the "app store," which basically let people buy apps and run them in Salesforce software. Steve later did it himself with iTunes and the App Store for the iPod and iPhone. Steve Jobs changed the way advertisers develop brand strategies. His iMac, iPod, iPhone, iLife, iEverything naming strategy proved that product iDentity is something that involves every aspect of how a consumer interacts with it, including the spelling. He changed the way we approach design and saw the aesthetics of design as the visual manifest of designs true function; re-inventing the way things work. His ideas were so far ahead of the curve that everyone to this day is still making sense of how revolutionary and important his ideas actually were. He taught the world how to envision realities that didn't exist and how to manifest them into being. When you think about it, foresight is the basis and function of intelligence; to more accurately predict and initiate future outcomes. In that way, you can definitely call him a genious. Looking at the length and breadth of Jobs' reach and the degree of impact he had on our world and its future, It becomes pretty evident that in the end his greatest legacy was showing us how to be a visionary. The world is all the more dim and blind without him in it to see and light the way.
RIP
-MM
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. "
- Steve Jobs (Stanford Commencment Speech)
"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts"
-Albert Einstein
This is the first apple computer. Where people saw a wooden box with chips and circuits inside, Steve Jobs saw a company. He talked Steve Wozniak into starting a company and sold his VW van to pay for building the first boards.
Steve had a good argument. We were in his car and he said — and I can remember him saying this like it was yesterday: “Well, even if we lose money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.” That convinced me. And I was excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company.
- Steve Wozniak (Co-Founder Apple Computers)
"...Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way."
-Steven Paul Jobs
"We’re going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years. This is the start of an industry. It happens once a decade."
- Mike Markkula
"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
-Steven Paul Jobs (Recruiting PepsiCo executive John Sculley)
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Drive A MovieReview: A Real Humanbeing A Real Hero
"You ever hear the story about the scorpion and the frog? Well, your friend didn't make it across the river." Those are the subtley brilliant and confident words of the Driver; the otherwise nameless character played by Ryan Gosling in the film Drive. The film is exactly that, subtley brilliant and confident. It is no wonder that director Nicolas Winding Refn was awarded Best-Director at Cannes for this independant arthouse Thriller. Masterfully crafted, Drive feels more like a 1970's classic than the action movie the trailers portray. Like so many films of the 70's, Drive is an unforgettable and lasting contribution to film canon with a distinct sense of panache and originality that sets it apart from its predecessors and will forever provide a benchmark of comparison for films to follow as Gosling's invincible and laconic portrayal of the story's protagonist is as iconic and memorable as javier bardem's chigurh in no country for old men, al pacino's scarface, or robert deniro's raging bull.
Drive really does stand alone and its difficult to categorize or compare it to something else. Its kind of a drama, romance, thriller, gangster movie, action flick. But even those elements that would make you want to place it into a genre are so unique that trying to call it a car chase action flick because there's car chases in it, would fall really short of describing it. This film isn't fast and the furious or the transporter, it would be most accurate to say it is nihilistic-neo-noir at its best; the story of a crime from the perspective of the criminals rather than that of the police in an urban setting with elements of corruption, double-crosses, and devious plot twists with a femme fatale and a distinctive hard-boiled protagonist who lives by his own rules with themes of alienation, nihilism, existentialism and fatalism. It's Neo Noir where the hero says, "I don't carry a gun, I drive."
Like the protagonist, Nicolas Winding Refn's directing is patient, minimal, cool and calculating with explosive moments boiling below the surface. In the hands of a lesser director, this film wouldnt work. The pace begins slow and audiences hoping to see a vin diesel nicholas cage stunt movie will find themselves uncomfortably watching gosling emote affection for Carrey Mulligan's character in silence. This serves to purposes. The first is a contrast to the violence. The second is because the mystery behind "the Driver" that unfolds tells us that this is a character who doesn't really have anything to say because he doesn't relate. For the film afficianado, the tension building is thrilling because when we get the payoff, its explosive and relentless. From opening to close, Nicolas Winding Refn's choices are masterful. The first film of his that i had seen was Bronson and some of the same brilliant DNA codes Drive's sequences.
The frames are beautifully composed with care and attention to narrative context. For example when the Driver meets Carey Mulligan's character and asks about her husband's photo, we see her, and the photo of the boy and father on a mirror that is reflecting Gossling's image. Placing her and her whole family with Gosling superimposed in the background. Utterly brilliant.
The soundtrack blasts retro 80's synthesizers with lyrics so dead on that they seem as though they could have been written perfectly for the scenes they are chosen. The film begins with Kavinsky's Nightcall as the Driver is driving through the city of los Angeles and we hear the lyrics
"I want to drive you through the night, down the hills
I'm gonna tell you something you don't want to hear
I'm gonna show you where it's dark, but have no fear"
Wow. When you see the film you will understand how haunting these retro 80's sounds are. In a self referrential line Albert Brooks character says, I used to produce movies in the 80's they were action films that some critic described as European". When choosing the soundtrack it is as though Nicolas Winding Refn had this in mind. Using A real hero by college will forever be burned into my brain.
And as the song says, the Driver is a real hero. This summer has been jam packed with hero movies from Thor and Captain America, to Xmen first class, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Carribean, Cowboys and Aliens and Transformers 3. And given the fact that I cant tell you how many times i saw the world saved this summer, it was incredibly refreshing to see a film with a Real Hero that felt like a real human being.
I recommend going for a Drive
-MM
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