Friday, May 28th, 2021

Time	Event
8:00a	Bass Sounds: One Song Highlights the Many Different Sounds Made by Different Bass Guitars If you’re a seasoned bass player, the diversity of bass sounds in the “Bass Sounds” videos here will hardly surprise you. Most other people — including many musicians — have little understanding of the range of the bass, an instrument thought to just hold down the low end. Yes, it does do that, but it doesn’t always do it with bass frequencies. Bass tones and overtones fall anywhere in the range of 40hz — a low rumble more felt than heard — to a snappy 4000hz, the high-midrange frequency of snare drums and guitars. That’s a lot of sonic territory for an instrument to explore. It includes the sound of Paul McCartney’s Hofner Violin Bass on “Penny Lane,” a “bass-heavy tone with almost no mids or treble,” Joel McIver writes at MusicRader; the smooth top end of Jaco Pastorious’ homemade fretless Fender Jazz bass; and the buzzsaw power chords of Lemmy Kilmister’s Rickenbacker 4001, which he played with midrange turned to 11 and bass controls completely off. Of course, amplifiers and effects make all the difference in famous bassists’ tones, but it starts at the fingers, the body, the pickups, and the frets, as bass player Bart Soeters demonstrates with a series of classic, modern, and obscure bass guitars, accompanied by the music of Joris Holtackers. Basses here include such recognizable shapes as the Hofner, with its chambered body and f-holes, the Fender Jazz and Precision basses, and the Gibson SG. They also include unusual or unique instruments like the NS Design Basscello and Soeters’ own Adamovic FBC signature bass. Boomy, woody, even reedy — bass guitars can rumble and they can croon. They can be imitated by an electric cello — as Soeters demonstrates in the follow-up Bass Sounds II video at the top — make lovely acoustic thumps, and generally sound as percussive or melodic as you like. Will educating others about the range of bass guitar tones change unfortunate stereotypes about bass players (demonstrated below via interpretive dance and spoken word by The Kids in the Hall’s Kevin McDonald and Bruce McCulloch)? Only time will tell. But it can certainly  sharpen the music appreciation skills of musicians and non-musicians alike. See all the different basses listed on the Bass Sounds YouTube pages here and here. via Laughing Squid Related Content:  Watch Some of the Most Powerful Bass Guitar Solos Ever: Geddy Lee, Flea, Bootsy Collins, John Deacon & More The Neuroscience of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instruments Are Fundamental to Music The Story Behind the Iconic Bass-Smashing Photo on the Clash’s London Calling Paul McCartney Offers a Short Tutorial on How to Play the Bass Guitar Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Bass Sounds: One Song Highlights the Many Different Sounds Made by Different Bass Guitars is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. (Comment on this)
11:00a	Hear the Earliest Recorded Customer Complaint Letter: From Ancient Sumeria 1750 BC Three-thousand, seven-hundred, and seventy-one years ago, in the city of Dilmun, near Ur in Mesopotamia, there was a merchant named Ea-nasir. His business was in selling metal ingots that he purchased in the Persian Gulf. Was he a good merchant? Not according to one of his customers, Nanni. If Yelp had existed back in 1750 BC, Nanni would definitely have given Ea-nasir a one-star review. We know this because Nanni’s complaint about Ea-nasir, written in Akkadian cuneiform, still exists. The tiny 4.5x2x1 inch tablet is currently on display at the British Museum, and was discovered by archaeologist Sir Leonard Wooley in his 1920s excavation of Ur. In the video above, Voices of the Past’s David Kelly brings Nanni’s complaint to life with his reading of the complaint. Ea-nasir had agreed to sell copper ingots to Nanni, who sent a servant with some money to pick them up. Not only were the ingots of low quality, but Ea-nasir was rude to the servant, giving him the ol’ “take it or leave it” treatment. And not only that, but the servant had to travel through enemy territory. And for all the things Nanni’s done for Ea-nasir! (You can just imagine Nanni picking out a fresh clay tablet and getting down to some furious cuneiformin’.) David Kelly’s reading brings out some of the haughty anger from Nanni’s complaint, but I wonder if Kelly is being too nice. Maybe Voices of the Past should hire a New York cabbie to have a go the next time they find some several-millennia-old ephemera from Ea-nasir’s former business quarters. We don’t know if Nanni ever settled his dispute, but apparently he wasn’t the only one. The room that Sir Leonard excavated contained many complaints from many customers, including several back and forths from frustrated people all over Mesopotamia. According to this Forbes article, Ea-nasir did have a legit profitable business once, but as his debt grew, the creditors came calling, and he began to stiff people. What makes Nanni’s letter stand out is that he used both the front and back of the tablet to write his withering assessment. We’ve all seen those kind of letters. The full text from Nanni reads: Now, when you had come, you spoke saying thus: ‘I will give good ingots to Gimil-Sin’; this you said to me when you had come, but you have not done it. You have offered bad ingots to my messenger, saying ‘If you will take it, take it; if you will not take it, go away.’ Who am I that you are treating me in this manner — treating me with such contempt? and that between gentlemen such as we are. I have written to you to receive my money, but you have neglected [to return] it. Repeatedly you have made them [messengers] return to me empty-handed through foreign country. Who is there amongst the Dilmun traders who has acted against me in this way? You have treated my messenger with contempt. And further with regard to the silver that you have taken with you from my house you make this discussion. And on your behalf I gave 18 talents of copper to the palace, and Sumi-abum also gave 18 talents of copper, apart from the fact that we issued the sealed document to the temple of Samas. With regard to that copper, as you have treated me, you have held back my money in a foreign territory, although you are obligated to hand it over to me intact. You will learn that here in Ur I will not accept from you copper that is not good. In my house, I will choose and take the ingots one by one. Because you have treated me with contempt, I shall exercise against you my right of selecting the copper. It’s kind of comforting in its own weird way, knowing that finding a good business you can trust has been an eternal quest, whether you’re trying to get a refund from eBay or looking at some low quality ingots and dealing with a very annoyed servant. Related Content: Cambridge University Professor Cooks 4000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Mesopotamia, and Lets You See How They Turned Out Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here. Hear the Earliest Recorded Customer Complaint Letter: From Ancient Sumeria 1750 BC is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. (Comment on this)
2:00p	Leonardo da Vinci Designs the Ideal City: See 3D Models of His Radical Design Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ray Bradbury: they and other 20th-century notables all gave serious thought to the ideal city, what it would include and what it would exclude. To that extent we could describe them, in 21st-century parlance, as urbanists. But the roots of the discipline — or area of research, or profession, or obsession — we call urbanism run all the way back to the 15th century. At that time, early in the European Renaissance, thinkers were reconsidering a host of conditions taken for granted in the medieval period, from man’s place in the universe (and indeed the universe itself) to the disposal of his garbage. Few of these figures thought as far ahead, or across as many fields as Leonardo da Vinci. In addition to his accomplishments in art, science, engineering, and architecture, the quintessential “Renaissance man” also tried his hand at urbanism. More specifically, he included in his notebooks designs for what he saw as an ideal city. “Leonardo was 30 when he moved to Milan in around 1482,” writes Engineering and Technology‘s Hilary Clarke. “The city he found was a crowded medieval warren of buildings, with no sanitation. Soon after the young painter had arrived, it was hit by an outbreak of the bubonic plague that killed 50,000 people — more than a third of the city’s population at the time.” This could well have prompted him to draw up his plan, which dates between 1487 and 1490, for a cleaner and more efficient urban environment. While it wouldn’t have been particularly hard to envision a less dirty and disordered setting than the late medieval European city, Leonardo, true to form, performed a thoroughgoing act of reimagination. “Drawing on the knowledge he had gained from studying Milan’s canals, Leonardo wanted to use water to connect the city like a circulatory system,” writes Clarke, who adds that Leonardo was also studying human anatomy at the time. “His ideal town-planning principle was to have a multi-tiered city, which also included an underground waterway to flush away effluent.” The top tier would have all the houses, squares and other public buildings; “the bottom tier was for the poor, goods and traffic — horses and carts — and ran on the same level as the canals and basins, so wagons could be easily offloaded.” Though its ambition would have seemed fantastical in the 15th century, Leonardo’s city plan everywhere marshals his considerable engineering knowledge to address practical problems. He had a real location in mind — along the Ticino River, which runs through modern-day Italy and Switzerland — and planned details right down to the spiral staircases in every building. He insisted on spirals, Clarke notes, “because they lacked corners, making it harder for men to urinate,” but they also add an elegance to his vision of the vertical city, a notion that strikes us as obvious today but was unknown then. Of course, Leonardo was a man ahead of his time, and the 3D-rendered and physical models of his ideal city in these videos from the Ideal Spaces Working Group and Italy’s Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci make one wonder if his plan wouldn’t look both alluring and impossibly radical to urbanists even today. Related Content: How Leonardo da Vinci Drew an Accurate Satellite Map of an Italian City (1502) The Medieval City Plan Generator: A Fun Way to Create Your Own Imaginary Medieval Cities Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketches of Broadacre City (1932) Denmark’s Utopian Garden City Built Entirely in Circles: See Astounding Aerial Views of Brøndby Haveby The Utopian, Socialist Designs of Soviet Cities Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 on Facebook. Leonardo da Vinci Designs the Ideal City: See 3D Models of His Radical Design is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. (Comment on this)

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