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Tuesday, November 12th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | An MRI Shows How a Singer Sings Two Tones at Once (With the Music of Mozart and Brian Eno)
When people hear Anna-Maria Hefele sing, they wonder how she does it, and not just because of her impressive traditional chops. "While most of us struggle to voice one clear, distinct note," writes the Independent's Christopher Hooton, the polyphonic overtone singer Hefele "can sing two at once, and move them around in separate scales." Also known as "throat singing," this technique "allows her to establish a fundamental note and then move the overtone above it through different notes, creating an astounding, ethereal effect." With nothing more than what nature gave her, in other words, Hefele manages to achieve a vocal effect more striking than most anything heard as a result of even today's most complicated digital processes.
But what, exactly, is going on when she sings? These two videos, recorded with Hefele performing inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine at the Institute for Musician's Medicine at the University Medical Center Freiburg, shed light on the mechanics of polyphonic overdone singing. "What you see in this dynamic MRI-recording is the tongue movement in the vocal tract while doing overtone singing and normal singing," says the description. "The positions of the tongue forms the resonance cavities which delete all not-wanted overtones in the sound of the voice at a certain point in time, and then amplify a single overtone that is left, which can be heard as a separate note above the fundamental." It has, in other words, as much to do with suppressing all the tones you don't want to sing as with emphasizing the ones you do. Hardly the easiest musical trick to pull off, much less inside an environment as unforgivingly noisy as an MRI machine.
But you can still learn the basic techniques, and from Hefele herself at that: previously here on Open Culture we've featured Hefele's own demonstration of and how-to lessons on overtone singing. No matter how well we ourselves learn to sing two notes at once, though, we'd nevertheless have little idea what's going on to let us make such sounds without these revealing MRI videos. (Others have similarly exposed the inner workings of beatboxing and opera singing.) The footage also underscores the respectable musical taste of Hefele herself or her collaborators in this research project, selecting as they have the musical examples of "Sehnsucht nach dem Frühlinge" by Hefele's countryman Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and "By This River" from singing advocate Brian Eno's classic LP Before and After Science — though you might call this an example of music made during science. Related Content: Musician Shows How to Sing Two Notes at Once in Mesmerizing Video What Beatboxing and Opera Singing Look Like Inside an MRI Machine Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or Facebook.
An MRI Shows How a Singer Sings Two Tones at Once (With the Music of Mozart and Brian Eno) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 3:00p | Watch Nirvana Go Through Rehearsals for Their Famous MTV Unplugged Sessions: “Polly,” “The Man Who Sold the World” & More (1993)
“Fame is a prison,” tweeted Lady Gaga, and many Twitter wars ensued. She was only echoing an old sentiment passed down through the entertainment ages, from Greta Garbo (“I detest crowds”) to Don Johnson. The emotional toll of celebrity is so well-known as to have become a standard, almost cliché, theme in storytelling, and no recent artist has exemplified the tortured, reluctant celebrity more prominently than Kurt Cobain. Cobain may have wanted to be famous when Nirvana broke out of Washington State and signed with major label Geffen, but he did not want the kind of thing he got. At the end 1993, when the band recorded their MTV Unplugged in New York special, he seemed positively suffocated by stardom. “We knew Cobain didn't seem all that happy being a rock star,” recalls music journalist David Browne, who sat in the audience for that legendary performance, “and that Nirvana was essentially acquiescing to industry dictates by taping one of these shows.” Cobain’s rare talent was to take his bitterness, despair, and rage and turn them back into deftly arranged melodic songs, stripped down in “one of the greatest live albums ever,” writes Andrew Wallace Chamings at The Atlantic. “An unforgettable document of raw tension and artistic genius. While intimacy was an intended part of the [Unplugged] concept… parts of the Nirvana set at Sony’s Hells Kitchen studio feel so personal it’s awkward.”
The performance reveals “a singer uncomfortable in his own skin, through addiction and depression” and the continued demands that he make nice for the crowds. The clipped interactions between Cobain and his bandmates, especially Dave Grohl, have become as much a part of the Nirvana Unplugged mythology as that frumpy green thrift-store cardigan (which recently sold at auction for $137,500). Kurt’s disheveled crankiness may have been part of Nirvana’s act, but he also never seemed more authentically himself than in these performances, and it’s riveting, if painful, to see and hear. Five months later, he was dead, and. Unplugged would become Nirvana’s first posthumous release in November 1994. In the quarter century since, “accounts have emerged,” writes Browne, that show exactly “what was taking place in the days leading up to that taping.”
“The rehearsals were tense,” Browne continues, “MTV brass weren’t thrilled when the promised guests turned out to be the Meat Puppets and not, say, anyone from Pearl Jam. Cobain was going through withdrawal that morning.” And yet every song came together in one take—only one of three Unplugged specials in which that had ever happened. “The entire performance made you feel as if Cobain would perhaps survive…. The quiet seemed to be his salvation, until it wasn’t.” Marking the album’s 25th anniversary this month, Geffen has rereleased Unplugged in New York both digitally and as a 2 LP set, announcing the event with more behind-the-scenes glimpses in the rehearsal footage here, previously only available on DVD. At the top, see the band practice “Polly,” and see a frustrated Grohl, whom Cobain considered leaving out of the show entirely, smoke and joke behind the scowling singer. Further up, see Cobain strain at the vocals in “Come as You Are,” while Grohl shows off his newfound restraint and the band makes the song sound as watery and wobbly as it does fully electrified. Above, Cobain and guitarist Pat Smear work out their dynamic on Bowie’s “The Man Whole Sold the World,” while cellist Lori Goldston helps them create “the prettiest noise the band has ever made,” writes Chamings. Even 25 years on, “there is no way of listening to Unplugged in New York without invoking death; it’s in every note.” Somehow, this grim intensity made these performances the most vital of Nirvana’s career. Related Content: Animated Video: Kurt Cobain on Teenage Angst, Sexuality & Finding Salvation in Punk Music How Kurt Cobain Confronted Violence Against Women in His “Darkest Song”: Nevermind‘s “Polly” Watch Nirvana Perform “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Just Days After the Release of Nevermind (1991) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch Nirvana Go Through Rehearsals for Their Famous MTV Unplugged Sessions: “Polly,” “The Man Who Sold the World” & More (1993) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 7:16p | A Schoolhouse Rock-Inspired Guide to Impeachment
How does a bill become a law? You can’t hear the question and not hum a few bars from Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill.” The groovy cartoon civics lesson was for millions the first they learned about the legislative process. Ask another question, however, like “how does impeachment work,” and you may hear more crickets than 70’s educational TV jingles. Surely we took something from Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial besides cigars, stained blue dresses, and the spectacle of morally compromised politicians wagging their fingers at a morally compromised politician? Surely we’ve all read the Watergate transcripts, and can quote more from that history than Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” (muttered before he resigned instead of facing the charges)? Maybe not. Despite the talk of closed-door hearings and conflicted jurors, many of us have not paid close attention to the particulars of the process, given that impeachment trials can make for such compellingly broad political theater. And we never got our Schoolhouse Rock impeachment episode. Until now. Seeing as how the president faces public, televised impeachment hearings next week, there may be no more opportune time to get caught up on some details with Jonathan Coulton’s Schoolhouse Rock-inspired “The Good Fight.” Its animation style and catchy tune recalls the 70s educational series, but Coulton doesn’t address the kids at home as his primary audience. “Your tiny hands may scratch and claw,” sings Coulton, “but nobody’s above the law.” You won’t win any prizes for guessing who this means—a person in need of a childlike explainer on basic government, it seems. More verbal jabs are thrown, and the alleged crimes enumerated, ending with treason (and a misplaced, anachronistic hammer and sickle by animators Head Gear Animation). The video finally gets into the impeachment process over a minute in, past the halfway mark. Viewers might find the first half emotionally satisfying, with its characterization of impeached presidents as wayward children in need of correction by a swaggering Constitution and a sassy band of founders. It’s cute but leaves precious little time for learning how this accountability process is supposed to work. Coulton rushes through the explanation, and you may find yourself skipping back to hear it several times. Never fear: Google—or the search engine of your choice—is here to ferry you to thousands of guides to the impeachment process. “The Good Fight” isn’t, after all, actually a Schoolhouse Rock ad, but a fun civic-minded reminder to everyone that the president is not above the law, and that Congress is entitled by the Constitution to hold the holder of that office, whomever they may be, accountable. An explainer by Vox appears below:
Related Content: Schoolhouse Rock: Revisit a Collection of Nostalgia-Inducing Educational Videos I’m Just a Pill: A Schoolhouse Rock Classic Gets Reimagined to Defend Reproductive Rights in 2017 Conspiracy Theory Rock: The Schoolhouse Rock Parody Saturday Night Live May Have Censored Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness A Schoolhouse Rock-Inspired Guide to Impeachment is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 8:00p | Watch the Buddhism-Inspired Video for Leonard Cohen’s Newly-Released Song, “Happens to the Heart”
Leonard Cohen had an intimate relationship with despair. “I’ve seen the future,” he deadpanned, "Brother, it is murder.” But for many people, there is no one from whom we’d rather hear the news. In her harrowing essay “Facing Extinction,” meditation teacher and former climate journalist Catherine Ingram frames the catastrophe of climate change with Cohen’s lyrics and the many conversations she had with him before his death in 2016. Cohen “understood human nature and assumed we would do ourselves in,” Ingram writes. Yet, with his razor-sharp gallows wit, he delivered his grim prophecies with deep love and concern. Confronting her own despair, Ingram asked the ailing poet for advice on how to wake up people who’d rather tune it all out. “There are things,” he said, “we don’t tell the children.” Coming from someone else, this might sound supremely patronizing. From Cohen, it reminds me of what Japanese Zen master Dogen called “grandmother mind”—protective, unconditional compassion for others who may not, and may never, be ready to take in the facts. It also speaks of someone living with clinical depression, carrying the weight of the world. Cohen once called the condition a lifelong “background of anguish and anxiety.” He met his suffering with meditation, practicing Rinzai Zen for decades and living as a monk for five years at the Mount Baldy monastery in Los Angeles. This period provides the inspiration for the new video above, directed by Daniel Askill, that dramatizes Cohen’s transformation from grief to "ordinary silence," the meaning of his Japanese ordination name, Jikan.
Askill calls the video a "quiet, symbolic narrative that charts the letting go of ego and the trappings of fame.” The interpretation is “straightforward—almost pious,” says Matthew Gindin at Tricycle, and also “an intelligent update and homage” to imagery from Cohen’s first album. The song, "Happens to the Heart" is the first on “an unexpected harvest of new songs” released on the posthumous album Thanks for the Dance, coming November 22. “Happens to the Heart,” is a distillation of classic Cohen themes: the weariness of pleasure, cosmic absurdity, compassion, and despair.
Its title refrain turns each stanza into a case for how and why to care, investigating the mind’s lifetime of turnings from “the heart”—the constant splitting in two that Zen sees as the source of suffering. "I fought for something final," Cohen intones at the song's end, "not the right to disagree."
Cohen talks about his journey into the monastery in the interview further up. “Maybe this whole activity,” the formal practice of Zen, “is a response to a sense of despair that I’ve always had.... By and large, I didn’t have what it took to really enjoy my success, or my celebrity. I was never able to locate it. I was never able to use it.” He learned how to disassociate and quarantine himself.
In the austerities of the monastery, Cohen discovered “a voluptuous sense of economy that you can’t find anywhere else,” a daily practice “necessary to open the heart to the fact that you’re not alone,” even if, as he says wryly in “The Goal,” above—the first release from Thanks for the Dance—you “can’t stop the rain, can’t stop the snow.” Related Content: Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Interview: Recorded by David Remnick of The New Yorker How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch the Buddhism-Inspired Video for Leonard Cohen’s Newly-Released Song, “Happens to the Heart” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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