Category Archives: Music

The Fourth World music of Jon Hassell

“Jon Hassell is more than a superb musician, and more even than a gifted composer. He is an inventor of new forms of music — of new ideas of what music could be, and how it might be made. His work is drawn from his whole being, and, by implication, from his whole cultural experience without fear or prejudice. It is an optimistic, global vision that suggests not only possible musics but possible futures.” — Brian Eno

The creator of “Fourth World” music described his ambition in this way: “My aim was to make a music that was vertically integrated in such a way that at any cross-sectional moment you were not able to pick a single element out as being from a particular country or genre of music.”

The following pieces, “Last Night the Moon Came”, and “Blue Period/Light on Water”, performed live in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2009, come from his most recent album, “Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street” (a line from Rumi).

On Public Radio International, Hassell describes the process, the allusions, and the musical theory that underpins his Fourth World music.

To learn more, visit Jon Hassell’s web site.

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Avian mathematicians and musicians

Discovery News reports: Pigeons may be ubiquitous, but they’re also brainy, according to a new study that found these birds are on par with primates when it comes to numerical competence.

The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, discovered that pigeons can discriminate against different amounts of number-like objects, order pairs, and learn abstract mathematical rules. Aside from humans, only rhesus monkeys have exhibited equivalent skills.

“It would be fair to say that, even among birds, pigeons are not thought to be the sharpest crayon in the box,” lead author Damian Scarf told Discovery News. “I think that this ability may be widespread among birds. There is already clear evidence that it is widespread among primates.”

The neural pathways that allow pigeons to do math might be connected to the ones that enable the cockatoos below to dance. Both skills hinge on the ability to conceptualize uniform units — the most abstract representations of space and time.

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The Sound of Freedom — Moustafa Fahmy, Mohamed Khalifa, and Mohamed Shaker

Lyrics: “I went down and I said I am not coming back, and I wrote on every street wall that I am not coming back.

“All barriers have been broken down, our weapon was our dream, and the future is crystal clear to us, we have been waiting for a long time, we are still searching for our place, we keep searching for a place we belong too, in every corner in our country.

“The sound of freedom is calling, in every street corner in our country, the sound of freedom is calling..

“We will re-write history, if you are one of us, join us and don’t stop us from fulfilling our dream.”

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