Tuesday, September 02, 2008

David Byrne and Daniel Levitin on music


This is a fascinating discussion between former Talking Heads singer and all round musical pioneer David Byrne (who we mentioned a few months ago) and Daniel Levitin a former musician, music neurologist and author of 'This is your Brain on Music', a fantastic book on music and the mind which acts as a great companion to Oliver Sacks 'Musicophilia' released around the same time last year.

Particularly interesting is the chat about 'mirror neurons' about how we experience a musical performance by neurologically mimicking the musician on stage. In other words - we are all air guitar enthusiasts !!.

Check out the video interview at Seed Magazine

Hidden Radio


I like the look of this. Designed by San Francisco based John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen it's basically a nicely design radio. The coolest thing is the volume control: to increase the volume you lift the top part to reveal more of the speaker allowing it to emit more sound - i.e. revealing more 'hidden' sound.

check it out at John's site