Thems Flyting Words
Dubious newsflash: Rap Invented by 16th Century Scotsmen. I want to believe.
Summary: Medieval Scotsmen competitively dissed each other in verse, in a manner similar to the freestyle battles of today. This was called flyting. One of the earliest examples of this is The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie (full text here), which is over 600 lines of foul Scottish pentameter. Examples: “Ignorant fule! in to thy mowis and mokis/It may be verifyit that thy wit is thin”, “Cuntbittin crawdoun Kennedy, coward of kynd”, etc.
This professor is claiming that flyting was imported to America by Scottish slave owners, and then was picked up and extended by the slaves. Hmmm. It’s plausible, but the concept of “insulting each other in rhyme” seems like the kind of thing which could easily be independently invented every other fortnight. It seems like the inevitable lovechild of “being drunk and singing” and “being drunk and insulting people”.
Anyway, I don’t actually care that much if it’s true or not. What I do care about is seeing some modern day Scottish flyting throwdowns, in a thick highland accent. With subtitles. C’mon Scotland, do it for me.
Ready for xmas?
Here’s a gift for your favorite music snob (if that isn’t in fact you):
Favorite comments:
I used to wear that shirt, but it totally sold out.
How do you piss off an indie rocker?
(via boingboing)
Novelties
I hate the word “novel”. Scientists are obsessed with it. Not in the bookish sense, in the “like wow, that’s totally crazy” sense (which is how scientists talk). To give you an idea of how often it’s used, there are over 380,000 papers containing that word on PubMed (an index of US life-sciences papers) ALONE. That doesn’t include papers from physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. Novel this, novel that. Everything is freakin’ novel. It’s not an “unusual” enzyme, or a “creative” technique, they are “novel”. Eugh. I can’t stand it.
This rant (I think, I’ve completely sidetracked myself now) came from that being the first word which got all up in my grill when trying to discuss the following two… atypical… ways of interacting with sounds.
This is Visible Sound from the design group (whatever that is) with the appropriately pretentious name SOUNDS.BUTTER. It sews sounds. Well, their waveform anyway.
And then we have….
Which uses a handheld scanner to play notes which seem to (loosely) correspond to squiggles scribbled on a piece of illuminated paper.
Any more of this kinda thing out there? If I find about seven of them I can do one of those link-whoring list posts.
Connection Errors
Ben is in a bad mood. Perhaps this is because my supervisor is back from jaunts to places which are not lab, and is “looking forward” to “catching up” with us tomorrow. Or maybe it is due to the innumerable scraps of fabric, sequins, tufts of feather and other Halloween detritus littering my floor in indoor imitation of the fallen fall leaves. It might also be because of my 4am trot to the North campus bus station, and subsequent failure to fall back asleep for an hour or two.
I am trying to inspire pity. Is it working?
When I listen to music in a bad mood — as I have been while cleaning up the crafting scraps — it sounds like a recording. It is a bunch of notes, not music. Normally music patches itself into somewhere a bit behind my ears, it doesn’t have to go through all the run-of-the-mill channels that regular sounds do. It connects a little deeper, down by that reflex that makes you kick when your knee is hit with a hammer. But that connection can get broken when the rest of you isn’t feeling cheerful.
It’s a bit like when you have insomnia, and are horribly aware that you are lying around with your eyes shut. Normally, closing your eyes is a bit mysterious. It magically moves you somewhere which you aren’t in when your eyes are open. But when you can’t sleep it doesn’t work, instead of sticking you into limbo, all shutting your eyes does is make you are stare at the inside of your eyelids.
Fortunately, the days when you lose it are usually the unusual ones.
The Lancaster Musical Road is No More
Have you ever heard of the musical road in Lancaster, CA?
Well that roadspeed-dependent rendition of William Tell is sadly no more. It was disturbing the local residents with it’s repetitive and unbearably out-of-tune musical emissions, according to an article in the local paper. According to our youtube comments on the above video from locals sources:
So the city council meeting was this evening, and demolition of the road started this morning at around 7am. I spoke at the meeting about the road, expressing my concern about how quickly they were to get rid of it, and was told that reason they moved so quickly was because of safety concerns regarding all of the u-turns. When I asked how many car accidents had actually occured on the road as a result of u-turns, i was told by Mayor Paris, “Well, none”
Oh well. There goes another neat — but perhaps poorly executed — piece of creativity. At least we can still drop by the one in Japan…
Enjoy music.