Food for Thought on a Summer Sunday Morning (and Music, too!)

You all know how much music gets played on this blog. Likewise, I also write about music and today I would like to bring your attention to this short, but very interesting, article on the future of music. Reproduced here without any permission, I hope you enjoy this piece. Thanks, I'm still on holidays.

Evolutionary music doesn't mean the death of the creator - by Victor Keegan



Is this the end for music as we know it?

We know that internet technology has disrupted the music industry, but could it disrupt music itself, or painting, or literature? Armand Leroi, professor of evolutionary development biology at Imperial College, London, believes music is already in the frame. He told Radio 4's Today programme today: "What we are trying to find out is whether you need a composer to make music … and we don't think you do."

The idea is that music can evolve: a computer programme randomly churns out two short loops of noise which, if judged pleasant by a human participant, are allowed to "breed" and recombine, mixing up the material to create four new loops, and so on. The surviving, thriving loops end up exhibiting some of our favourite musical traits: major chords, rhythms and so on.

Whether similar techniques could produce paintings or poems remains to be seen but art, especially non-representational art, is already facing an identity crisis. For some time it has been difficult to tell the difference between paintings created by apes and those made by humans, as websites which allow you to compare them – such as An Artist or an Ape (http://bit.ly/dwOgP) confirm. Now that computers are generating random shapes and colours it is becoming impossible to distinguish between human and machine-generated work.

This doesn't matter if you merely want something pleasant to look at, but it does raise the perennial problem "What is art?" in a more challenging form. Does it matter if art can't pass some kind of Turing test, in which human endeavour can be separated from chance? And who gets the credit – the creator of the software, the person who presses the button to produce myriad random patterns or the person who chooses one of those patterns as their art?

With some photo applications such as Instagram, which applies filters to pictures prior to them being shared on a social network, it can be difficult to know whether you are looking at a photo or a painting. Maybe it doesn't matter. The digital revolution enables almost anyone with an idea to become a creator of art. Who knows, in the future, people may decide they would prefer to have their own randomised art at home rather than the work of an established painter.

Sculptors are already using computer-generated three-dimensional photos to create their artwork and then getting someone else, maybe far away, to print them out on the new breed of 3D printers. If you think this is all pie in the sky – there is now an app for the iPhone, Sculpteo, enabling anyone to design their own sculptures from photographs on their mobile and have them printed out as fully formed objects on remote 3D printers. Being computer generated, it will be easy to create randomly shaped sculptures, thereby blurring traditional demarcation lines in sculpture.

Words have so far been immune to digital disruption despite there being only 26 letters of the alphabet to play around with compared with billions of colour combinations in a digital picture. This is because the output of language (words and sentences) is much more formalised than in other art forms and the maths of random generation is against you. More than 12 years ago I set up a website, www.shakespearesmonkey.co.uk, (it doesn't work well on all browsers) to see if a computer would randomly replicate two lines of poetry. A coder colleague at the Guardian, Noll Scott, predicted it would soon reach 12 or 13 correct letters (out of 48) and then take many years to progress. He was right. The programme is still running, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but it hasn't improved on 13 correct letters at one go for over eight years.

There have been lots of randomly produced poems but few are remembered. As for a computer-written novel, that is strictly for the birds unless it just extracts material from existing texts – or if the Imperial College experiments in Darwinian music can be applied to sentences.Meanwhile, in judging what is art, we would do well to remember Julian Huxley's observation – paintings by apes are pleasing to look at, and the point is they don't pretend to symbolise anything.

Next Post: "Food for Thought on a Summer Sunday Morning (and Music, too!)", to be published on Sunday 1st September at 10am (GMT)

Humour and Music on a Summer Sunday Morning

From The Economist magazine (they actually call themselves a newspaper, mind), comes this rather comical contribution. I hope you enjoy it. No permission was sought to print this article.

I'm still on holidays and having a fabulous time off blogging.

A very rough guide to Hell

Hell is steadily losing adherents. The Infernal Tourist Board (chief field-researchers Dante Alighieri and John Milton) has therefore produced a promotional flyer.

 

Wish you were here?

Why visit?
Hell’s landscape is unrivalled. Its bottomless ravines, towering mountains and fiery floods have inspired artists for centuries. Pandemonium, the capital (formerly black Dis) has a strikingly cosmopolitan buzz and, as a bonus, is crime-free.

An exclusive resort for centuries, Hell is a place where kings tend to wear their crowns and popes their tiaras. Everywhere you look, you will see famous faces. Spot the celebrity! Overweight and out of form? Hell offers the ultimate workout. Shed those extra pounds, and keep on shedding them! If you like to travel light ’n’ easy, Hell is for you. Get all your jabs on site, and don’t bother to pack the sun cream. Only hypocrites wear clothes; fiery serpents and fat maggots are often the only attire. In a charming tradition, each visitor is presented on arrival with hot metal chains as a lasting memento of their stay. Get yours personally engraved at no extra charge.

Time stands still here, as the ocean boils and the great abyss yawns before you. Feel the hot sand under your feet, watch the chimeras and gorgons frolic, take a trip on a demon’s back, smell the brimstone on the breeze! You know how you always hope holidays will never end? This one never will.

Getting there

The quickest route is to sin big and persistently, and refuse to show remorse. The sin against the Holy Ghost gets you there in one, though no one knows exactly what it is.

The way to Muslim and Jewish Hell lies over a high bridge as thin as a hair. Primrose paths of dalliance (Shakespeare, “Hamlet”) offer a slower but more relaxing approach.

Currency

Money may well be the reason you are here; especially if you come from Cahors, the city of usurers, or worked for Lehman Brothers. But don’t bring cash or cards, unless you want them melted down and poured into your mouth through a funnel.

Top sights

Hell Gate. In fact nine layers of gates, three of brass, three of iron and three of burning adamant. Don’t miss the famous inscription on the first: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. Satan’s paramour, Sin (aka “the Snakie Sorceress”), keeps the key and will make a scene, even though—since Christ harrowed the place in 33AD—the gate no longer shuts. Beware belching fire and three-headed dogs.

Satan’s palace. The architectural marvel of Pandemonium, made of pure gold (Hell’s major export, and the world’s bane). Its council chamber can accommodate “a thousand Demi-Gods on golden seats”, with 26 standing. Raised above it is Satan’s throne, far outshining “the wealth of Ormus and of Ind”. Photography is not allowed.

Satan himself. Frozen in ice at Hell’s core, gnawing on several sinners at a time, and with his three horned heads weeping gigantic tears of frustration, this extraordinary sight amazes everyone. Staggered entry at peak times, or when sated. Not suitable for vegetarians.

Dining

Chez Tantalus: See your dinner hover over you, but never quite get close enough to eat!

Bar Lethe: A popular, even crowded, establishment, despite the slow and surly service of barmaid Medusa. You’ll soon forget everything, including why you came.

Fresh ‘n’ Fruity: Hell has several branches of this surprising chain, where you can experience the fresh-picked fruit of your choice turning to ashes in your mouth. Fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil in season.

Accommodation

Holes of the Simoniacs: Dive head-first into these funnels of fun, and let a devil set the soles of your feet on fire!

The Sacks@Malebolge: Ten delightful mini-ditches in the trendy 8th Circle, specially designed for liars and flatterers. Enjoy an in-room massage from attentive demons.

Angel Rocks: A cheap and charming perch from which to brood on your circumstances.

Spas

The Third Circle Spa (M. Cerberus, prop.): Wallow in perfumed mud for as long as you like, and longer!

Il Sanguineo (7th Circle): Watch your body turn as red as this river of blood, in an exceptional toning experience!

Gay and LGBT scene

Much improved in recent years. Continual cruising is the norm in the 7th Circle, where anyone who stops encounters an intriguing rain of fire.

To sum up: “Hell: Your first resort, and your last!”

Next Post: "Food for Thought for a Summer Sunday Morning (and Music, too!)", to be published on Sunday 25th August at 10am (GMT)

Food for Thoughts on a Summer Sunday Morning (and Music, too!)

Holidays are a time for relaxation. That goes mainly for the body, though, not so much for the mind. I believe that the mind must always be stimulated and today's contribution is evidence of that.



"A Day Without Immigrants": would you be able to get through it?

One of my favourite columnists in the UK is the current political director of the Huffington Post UK, Mehdi Hasan (left). Even when I disagree with some of his views, I can still appreciate the thinking behind his argument. The piece below appeared first in the New Statesman, a publication of which Mehdi is a contributing writer. For obvious reasons Hasan's article speaks volumes to me, an immigrant who has worked for ten years now in local regeneration, art, community and education projects. It's ironic that this post, which I copied and pasted here from The New Statesman's website weeks ago, will appear at a time when the current Cameron-led government is in the middle of a backlash on account of its recent controversial and (frankly!) racist propaganda against immigrants (if you live in the UK, you've probably heard of the "Go Home" vans).

I have not  sought permission for publication of this article and all credit goes to Mehdi and the New Statesman. I will, however, take credit for selecting the music. It is absolutely beautiful. Enjoy.

I have a modest proposal for the likes of Ukip, MigrationWatch, the Home Secretary, David Goodhart, Paul Dacre and, of course, the BNP. Why not call for “A Day Without Immigrants?” Wouldn’t that demonstrate, once and for all, that neither our economy nor our society needs migrants? That they are a burden, rather than a blessing?

“A Day Without Immigrants” was the name given to a rather innovative series of protests in the US in 2006, which brought more than a million Latinos on to the streets of 50 cities, from New York to Los Angeles. They boycotted shops, schools and their places of work to try to highlight the plight of undocumented migrant workers.

But here’s how I’d implement a similar boycott here: anyone in the UK born abroad or with a parent born abroad would stay at home for 24 hours. Any business or organisation founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant would close for the day.

Britain would be transformed – but, regrettably for the immigration-bashers, in a wholly negative way. In fact, I suspect it would be a pretty awful 24 hours for most Britons, dark and dystopian, even. Think Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later – but without migrants, rather than with zombies.

Let’s start with the trivial stuff. Who would serve you in restaurants or coffee shops? Who would make your sandwiches and wraps at lunchtime? What would be the point of going out to eat in the evening if there were no longer any Chinese, Thai, Malaysian, Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Lebanese, Persian, Italian, Spanish and, yes, French restaurants open?

How about your health? Who’d patch you up and prescribe your medicines? Ministers and their outriders in the right-wing press like to scaremonger about the spiralling costs of so-called health tourism (which amounts to a shocking 0.01 per cent of the £109bn NHS budget) and exaggerate the numbers of migrant families that turn up expecting free treatment in our overstretched A&E departments. The reality, as the chair of the council of the Royal College of GPs, Dr Clare Gerada, has pointed out, is that “you are much more likely to have an immigrant caring for you than sitting up in front of the emergency department”. About 30 per cent of the doctors and 40 per cent of the nurses working in the health service were born abroad. Put simply, the NHS could not survive 24 hours without its migrant workforce.

The same applies to the social-care sector. If you have a sick parent living in a care home, you might have to take the day off to look after them. In 2009 a fifth of all care assistants and home carers – 135,000 people in total – were foreign-born; in London, 60 per cent of care workers were migrants. Speaking of taking the day off, neither the Deputy Prime Minister nor the leader of the opposition would have to turn up to Westminster for PMQs – Nick Clegg is the son of a Dutch mother and half-Russian father; Ed Miliband is the child of Polish refugees.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor would have to go to the Commons to warn that “A Day Without Immigrants” would, if extended over a year, force him to introduce a further £7bn of spending cuts and/or tax rises. Why? Migrants boost the British economy by £7bn a year, according to an OECD study published in June. That’s the equivalent of an extra 2p on the basic rate of income tax.

Sticking with the economy, we’d have to board up iconic British stores such as Marks & Spencer (co-founder: Michael Marks of Belarus), Selfridges (founder: the American Harry Gordon Selfridge) and Tesco (founder: Jacob Kohen, son of Avram, a Polish migrant). UK holidaymakers would have to cancel their cheap flights on easyJet (founder: the Greekborn Stelios Haji-Ioannou).

Our universities, a multibillion-pound export industry, would take a hit, too, if foreign students stayed away. One in ten students in British universities comes from outside the EU and the fees that students from other countries pay are a bigger source of income for most universities than research grants.

What about sport? Imagine going to watch a Premier League game midweek as a Liverpool fan. Luis Suárez wouldn’t be playing. If you’re a Man United fan, you’d miss out on the ball skills of Robin van Persie; if you’re a Man City fan, it’d be Yaya Touré on strike. Chelsea fans? Say goodbye to Juan Mata and Eden Hazard.

Incidentally, if you were planning on using the Tube to go to watch Chelsea play, you’d find it in a pretty filthy state, the train platforms tagged with graffiti and strewn with rubbish: 95 per cent of London Underground cleaning staff are foreign-born. It wouldn’t just be the District Line that was dirty, it would also be your place of work: 89 per cent of office cleaners in the capital are migrants.

But the countryside would be fine, right? Wrong. Imagine all those unpicked crops and the effect: the rise in food prices, supermarkets opting for (cheaper) foreign over domestic produce, fruit farmers on their knees. The truth is that “native” Brits have not been interested in fruit-picking for years and, as the Home Office’s own Migration Advisory Committee warned in May, many of the UK’s fruit-picking businesses could close without new migrant workers from outside the EU.

On immigration, we hear constantly that voters don’t trust the official statistics or studies (a recent Ipsos MORI poll found that the public thinks that immigrants make up 31 per cent of the population –when the official figure is 13 per cent). So this may be the only way to win hearts and minds. A great boycott. A one-day strike by immigrants and their children across the UK, coupled with a ban on the use of immigrant-founded businesses by the “indigenous” population.

For a mere 24 hours. Let’s do it. And if it doesn’t transform public opinion, well, at least I’ll have had the day off work.

Next Post: "Humour and Music on a Summer Sunday Morning", to be published on Sunday 18th August at 10am (GMT)

Food for Thought on a Summer Sunday Morning (and Music, too!)

A critic's view on critics

I'm still on cyber-holidays but as I mentioned a few weeks ago my blog is not inactive.

There's the Nicholas Lezard who reviews books for The Guardian and the Nicholas Lezard who writes the regular Down and Out in London column for the New Statesman. I love the former but don't think much of the latter.  No particular reason, though, other than at The Staggers, Nicholas can come across as a little self-indulgent sometimes. As a book reviewer for The Grauniad, however, he usually delivers critiques full of wit and humour. I hope you will enjoy his musings on his own profession. This article first appeared in The Guardian's Saturday Review and it is reproduced here without any permission.

It happened a couple of years ago, during the chitchat that sometimes takes place among backgammon players in a tournament, that my opponent, who had learned that I was a book reviewer, asked a follow-up question: what was it about my opinion that made it more worthwhile than his?

At the immediate moment of its delivery, all I could register was the insolence. Had my opponent been a carpenter, or a physicist, or a hedge-fund manager, no one would have asked him what made his decisions in his line of work any more worthwhile than anyone else's. (Although I gather that once you know how to cheat, being a hedge-fund manager is in fact a doddle.)

But the question rankles, especially when you look below the line these days and see the invective that can boil beneath what you might have thought was a well-considered or graceful piece of writing. "Everyone's a critic," ran the old line the world-weary author could deliver when faced with some obtuse criticism; now it is, for all practical purposes, true. And it does leave the professional critic wondering, during those long, dark nights when sleep eludes her or him: what is the point of me?

It's a pretty sharp question for me, if I may speak personally. I've been writing about books professionally for 28 years, and it's been my main source of income for 23. There have been periods of my life when it's been my only source of income. (And they will not, should I ever write an autobiography, be recorded in a chapter with the title "The Years of Plenty".)

But now it appears that I am wasting my time and that of other readers, for who needs the opinion of a professional critic when all one has to do is read the opinion of the pseudonymous commenter or Amazon reviewer? "Dull, grim and inpenitrable. [sic] To me it came across a heartless tale [sic], I did not find myself empathising strongly with any of the characters or caring if they succeeded of [sic] failed," said one customer review of Ulysses. Well hats off to her for at least trying; and indeed, as she says later on, the book is not for everyone.

That was a cheap shot, I know, and one could delve into history and find plenty of contemporary professional critics making far more obtuse and malicious judgments about the same book; and there are other, more thoughtful reader reviews of the same book on Amazon I could have picked to suit my purposes, only not as vividly.

It's a question of perceived authority. The whole point of leaving a comment below the line is to advertise the fact that you are not above it, or above yourself, so to speak; a cat may look at a king, and any reader with an internet connection can say what she likes in the space provided. But horses for courses, please. When I look on Tripadvisor to see whether I am going to be staying at Fawlty Towers or not, I consider most people are capable of spotting rats in the serving dishes. But I do not feel the same way about reactions to artistic endeavour. What I want when I read a book review is to find out what someone cleverer than me and better read than me thinks about whatever's being reviewed. There are plenty of such people about: it's why I read the literary pages of the daily and Sunday papers whenever I can. Except, of course, for the Sunday Times, because they gave my book a rotten review. Let it not be said that we critics are incapable of pettiness once we turn gamekeepers and find ourselves on the wrong end of an unfavourable opinion. For, as Martin Amis has pointed out many a time, and all critics have known instinctively from the moment they started out properly, the literary critic has to respond to the work in the same medium as the work being examined: language. You don't paint a review of a painting or express your opinion of a ballet in the international language of dance. But if you're going to say what's wrong with Amis's new novel then you're going to have to use the same tools he uses, and if yours are rusty or cheap or poorly made then you're not going to be in a fair fight.

Not that mine are necessarily the shiniest and sharpest in the box; but they're good enough to keep me in work, touch wood, for all that critics these days feel they're the canaries in the cultural coal-mine (although I think the first canaries started littering the floors of their cages when it became common practice to award stars out of five; the words beneath this little row became reduced to little more than the justification for the number given. Publications that resist this trend should be given some kind of award, really). The best critics are the ones who spot or coin the telling phrase, who have done enough research to know when writers are plagiarising either themselves or someone else (and what the difference is between a rip-off and a knowing reference), or who have reading and frame of vision wide enough to compare like with like, intention with intention, across years or cultures if necessary, and who can either honourably salute or insert the stiletto as appropriate. Most importantly, they should be open to surprise or wonder in the face of the unexpected or new. Sadly, one suspects that someone who thinks "inpenitrable" is a word is not going to have these abilities in any abundance. Which is perhaps unfair, because the question of Ulysses's possible heartlessness that my mocked correspondent raises is one that is proper to raise (refutable, but still proper).

And so I attend, reluctantly, to the question of elitism, which I suspect will be a word cropping up beneath the online version of this article. (Those reading the newspaper version will have to content themselves with writing in ink after the final full stop.) It's what my backgammon opponent was basically accusing me of; but what he meant, I'm pretty sure, unless of course he was just simply being rude, was, "Why don't I get paid to review books, too?" To which the answer is: why don't you have a go? Only start like most do, by sending your stuff straight to the literary editors, instead of fighting for space beneath the line. While we still have literary editors.

Next Post: "Food for Thought on a Summer Sunday Morning (and Music, too!)" to be published on 11th August at 10am (GMT)