Daniel Ottini Music

Intermezzo

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Beeps Are Not Squeaks

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted -- recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question -- in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived.... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

Halfmoon

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. 

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . 

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Cloud Chamber

“He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatsoever.” 

This is a fascinating article (referenced in a post on Tim Prebble’s blog, “The Music of Sound” (http://www.musicofsound.co.nz/blog/).

The original blog post is on a different topic (”Knowing What You Don’t Know”), which is very much relevant, but I took a different meaning from this article: namely that NO ONE IN HELL CAN SAY WHAT ART IS OR ISN’T!

Pure Data

“We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified...”

This sculpture (Water Velocity by the contemporary art collective BGL), located at the main entrance of the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre, is notable for its kinetic attributes – but what often gets overlooked in the discussion is its use of sonic elements.

The representation of swimming lanes is designed with metal flaps that flicker in the wind (to add to the dynamism of the sculpture). This motion creates a large surface of white noise which reminds the viewer of the sound of the sea or rushing water, further reinforcing its association with aquatics.

It's unfortunate that the sculpture is in a rather high traffic area (close to a major road) so that traffic sounds intrude on the tranquility of the white noise – but the sound of the flickering metallic flaps can be clearly heard in the video above, despite the traffic noises in the background.