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.
You’ll feel as though you’ve taken a few tabs after watching this strangely edited/remixed clip of Captain K on a voyage to the great beyond.
[via Nerdcore]
Eric Wareheim forgoes the crackheads this time for a go-around at Depeche Mode’s Hole To Fill — complete with the signature style and material you’d expect from the man who did the Major Lazer vid.
Sure, we may be at 14mins 30seconds mark for anything auto-tuned but the underlying song + the inter-cut footage really make this. video.
Though some thoughts kept resurfacing during my second viewing –
-Did he not know there was a camera there?
-What’s a double tapered shit?
-George Brett should really look into his dietary habits if he shits his pants about twice a year.
Video for my track ‘Bangarang’. This piece is composed of sounds from the Spielberg classic film ‘Hook’, a sine wave bass, and a few cymbals for extra spice. Enjoy!
If you enjoyed the Alice video poster earlier, here’s another great one from Pogo. Firmly standing by my previous assertion that he sounds like The Avalanches if they’d snorted massive lines of pixie dust.
The Monome, a popular minimalist controller made famous via various artists and in its use during live performances by the likes of Daedalus and Flying Lotus — has just gotten modded with video-manipulation via a tweak to 64-fingers. Watch the vid to see some of the image and sound sampling possibilities.
StSanders, made famous about a year and a half ago when he unleashed upon Youtube, “shreds” — live performance footage of guitar gods, perfectly overdubbed with utter garbage playing. Words do no justice to describe the hilarity of watching the likes of Slash, Van Halen, and Joe Satriani getting down to these sonic masterpieces. Well he has returned, this time giving the Stones the StSanders-treatment.
‘Alice’, an electronic piece composed using sounds recorded from the Disney film ‘Alice In Wonderland’.
More delightful mash-ups of sound + video on his youtube page. It’s like hearing The Avalanches if they all decided to snort lines of fairy dust.
[Pogo]
