Thanks to Kottke for finding this gem from the past. A Philip Glass composed piece that aired on Sesame Street to stimulate learning in children. My aunt just had a baby and it’s only now I realize just how wonderfully deranged the world of children learning videos are.
If you’ve been to a summer house party within the last two years, there’s a high chance you’ve probably heard a Girl Talk track at some point — infectious multi-snippetted jams that blend and recontextualize samples into an almost elevated form of the mash-up. Jonah Lehrer breaks down Girl Talk’s work from a neurological perspective, proposing that the mash-up song is an apt metaphor for the production of new ideas in working memory.
Let’s say you’re listening to that catchy Wu-Tang song, with the chorus “And let’s start it like this, son, rollin’ with this one / And that one, pullin’ out gats for fun”. Once the acoustic snippet enters working memory, individual neurons in the prefrontal cortex will fire in response to the stimulus – they are the neural representation of the song. Here’s where things get interesting: even when the stimulus disappears – you’ve now started listening to a different song, perhaps that Boston song “Foreplay/Long Time” – those working memory cells continue to fire. They’re still holding on to the Wu-Tang clip, which is why working memory is a type of memory. This echo of activity only lasts for a few seconds, but it’s long enough so that our thoughts get blended together, as seemingly unrelated sensations overlap. (Scientists refer to this as RAM-like activity, since these brain cells are acting just like random access memory in a computer, which is rewritable temporary storage that allows multitasking.) The end result is that prefrontal neurons start to form connections that have never existed before. We can imagine how Wu-Tang and Boston might sound as a mash-up, if only because working memory allows the samples to intersect in the frontal cortex. From the perspective of the brain, such new ideas are merely old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
Dublab the prolific collective for audio/visual programming in Los Angeles turns 10 this October. In celebration, they’ll be throwing 10 events from the 1st to the 10th, including everything from screenings, exhibitions, and retrospectives as eclectic as you’d expect. Come to enjoy and support.
This is more a beautiful visualization than music video, but it’s enchanting to the eyes nonetheless. Whispy colorful plumes of smoke moving to the melodies of this song.
Brilliant wall-animation done by Sam3 during his exhibition in San Jose, CA. Love the music in conjunction with the watercolor-esque imagery, reminds me of something that should’ve come out of the 60s.
Words can’t properly describe the enjoyment I get out of seeing these highly-stylized videos for the Beatles Rock Band. Great use of digital motion graphics in conjunction with what looks like hand-drawn animation to create something wholly befitting as a modern day take on the seminal band. Somehow I imagine these minute-long videos will still trounce the crap out of the completely unncessary remake of Yellow Submarine.
