It's sort of amazing that one of the most popular living classical composers - Arvo Pärt, who runs neck and neck with John Williams in how often his music gets played live - uses a mathematical system to create his music. Here's a great video on how it works.

Briefly, he likes to compose with two voices, which he calls the M-voice and the T-voice. The M-voice plays melodies in a diatonic scale, which are often mathematically patterned. The T-voice is restricted to playing notes in a particular triad, following a precise rule. For example, it might play the lowest note in the triad that's above the M-voice.

This produces a unique effect. The restrictions, and Pärt's use of religious texts, give the music a vaguely medieval sound. But it's not really like that old music at all. Since the M-voice stays in a diatonic scale, and T-voice stays in one triad, the music sounds very 'pure'. But the rules sometimes put the T-voice just a tone or semitone away from the M-voice, hence dissonant. The result sounds both ancient and futuristic.

Here I haven't even gotten to the symmetries in Pärt's music! For that, watch the video. You'll be able to see the patterns while hearing them.

(1/n)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u903Z0_Zzc

How MIT copes without Elsevier

MIT leaders describe their experience of not renewing the largest journal contract as "overwhelmingly positive". Read what happened after they cancelled.

http://druedin.com/2024/08/16/how-mit-copes-without-elsevier/

#FAIR #OpenScience #OpenAccess

When we talk about welfare we usually focus on the vulnerable & the poor... however as Prem Sikka argues here (implicitly following earlier work by Kevin Farnsworth), one of the real major recipients of government welfare is the corporate sector.

[Farnsworth neatly called this 'Corporate Welfare']

The normalisation of this help to corporations, while welfare cuts hit the recipients of what we usually see as 'welfare' is the story of C20th/21st capitalism.

#capitalism

https://leftfootforward.org/2024/08/the-state-needs-reconstructing-so-it-delivers-on-welfare-for-people-not-corporations/

> (…) split the index, which is to say the part of Google Search that scrapes the web and makes that content searchable, from the search user interface, and manage that index as a public utility that different search services could rely on and pay for, an idea that was suggested in a recent paper.

That would be incredible. I wish regulators would make Commons Enforcement a regular part of their playbook.

Commonify the monopolizers’ complements!

https://gwern.net/complement

https://mastodon.social/@robin/112933151964297678

Nullsoft_DOSAmp.wsz

https://skins.webamp.org/skin/06123b33e01ec7b79a68a7489853a522

124 years ago today, Gaetano Bresci, an Italian anarchist who had already risked his life to save Errico Malatesta from an assassination attempt, sacrificed his life to impose consequences on the king of Italy for the deaths of hundreds of poor working people.

Under interrogation, he insisted that he acted alone, and said:

“I’m sure I was not wrong to do what I did. I do not even intend to appeal. I appeal only to the next proletarian revolution.”

In his honor, we produced our first singing zine (sound on!). This particular zine performs “Alla stazion di monza,” one of several traditional Italian songs about Bresci’s courageous act of self-sacrifice.

You can read our biography of Bresci here:

https://crimethinc.com/bresci

🏴🏴🏴

🆕 blog! “Shakespeare Serif - an experimental font based on the First Folio”

Disclaimer! Work In Progress! See source code. I recently read this wonderful blog post about using 17th Century Dutch fonts on the web. And, because I'm an idiot, I decided to try and build something similar using Shakespeare's first folio as a template. Now, before setting off …

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/shakespeare-serif-a-new-font-based-on-the-first-folio/
⸻
#font #python #shakespeare