Tag: music

Top 10 Science Pop Songs

Love, of course, is what makes the pop song sing, as Thomas Dolby’s She Blinded Me With Science (and thrilled me with technology) makes clear. But on a more neuroscientific level: Does the body rule the mind/or does the mind rule the body?/I dunno, conclude The Smiths. Entering the nature v nurture debate, Girls Aloud proclaim: You can’t mistake my Biology/The way that we talk/The way that we walk/it’s there in our thoughts. Jarvis Cocker sang about parallel dimensions in Quantum Theory, basically a love song, which has been movingly added to Dr Who footage here, and topped only by Air’s Biological. Among the best and strangest science songs are surely the Beastie Boys’ Sounds Of Science, Kool Keith’s version of Ego Trippin’, MC Hawking’s What We Need More Of Is Science, Sweet’s Alexander Graham Bell, Einstein A Go-Go by Landscape and E=MC2 from Big Audio Dynamite. Oh and of course, Monkey vs Robot. But there’s also Kraftwerk’s Computer Love, Big Science by Laurie Anderson, pharmaceutical trial procedure described in Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Placebo Effect, Blur’s Chemical World, Electricity courtesy of Suede (also OMD), Atomic by bombshell Blondie, Genetic Engineering by OMD (and X-Ray Spex), and what list would be complete without Diana Ross’s Chain Reaction (less ably repeated by Steps)?

Music OCR

Zenph is creating building blocks for the musical equivalent of software you know from text and graphics. Our first offering is a service that’s something like “OCR (optical character recognition) for piano recordings.” We take piano recordings and convert them back into the precise, nuanced keystrokes and pedal motions that would have been used to create them. This is done in a new format which can be played back with phenomenal reality on corresponding computer-controlled grand pianos. Horowitz, Glenn Gould, and Art Tatum can literally play “live” again. Consider the potential for extracting “artistic DNA.” What distinctive things did Horowitz do that made him unique as a performer?