I'm trying to get a better sense of the emotional registers related to music, so I'm enjoying this book. I'm really trying to get a feel for how brain studies might connect with the ineffable flow that bubbles up when writing or grooving on music, but this quotation jumped out and moved my thinking more toward writing instruction and textbook composition. I guess I'll just blockquote it up here.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert— in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. (Levitin, Daniel J. This is Your Brain On Music : The Science of a Human Obsession).

First, I'm really doubting that I'm even close to the necessary 10,000 hour threshold, so that's worrysome--it's not like I've been keeping track. Second, I'm really pushing a low-bridge approach to teaching with technology lately. I'm big on the idea that people can just jump in and get started if you keep the stakes low enough. I guess for now I'll think about what might be gained by not aiming for mastery, but instead looking for engagement.

Via If:Book, this video from Alex Itin weaves original art, dead book leaves, and sound into a terrific mix. I especially like the rag-picker approach to the sound track, the search-and-find audio epistemology coupled with the very deliberate arrangement of the found materials and an even more deliberate visual expression layered over the audio mix. Gives the lie to false distinctions between collection and remixing on the one hand and original expression on the other.

Strikes some chords.

Just a short dabbling. The flow's not right but for some reason, I'm wanting to suggest reading the poem with "Wheels" by Cake as the accompaniment.

Wheels

Muses nine, line up
Like highway song
Memories,
Mashing gas
And passing cars:
Microbus
Cadillac
Corolla
Diesel Truck
After truck
After truck.

Wheels whirl
Into view as
In a movie,
Shot low
From the curb,
Gearlike in cortex,
Consciousness,
Mind’s eye,
Spinning round
Like worlds hurled
Into expansion by
That primal, eternal,
Personal big bang.

Music takes its name
From the nine,
Dancing like fire
In the eye,
Flickering
Through the
Corpuscle soul,
Oddly felt
And felt
In waves,
In muscle,
In bone,
Blasting
Open
Windows
And floating home
With throaty notes
Of exhaust.

Wheels whirl like worlds
Collapsed with words
When blowing flow rises
Over landscape, panning
Hills and lakes and trees,
Smearing past beneath
Vision field, fixated
On the passing
And becoming
Of the moment,
This invention
Of the now.

Another airplane moment composed with iPod pumping and now pressed into the blogosphere, this poem (6.6mb) was written on the ascent with about a thousand miles to go before reaching home.

I've mixed it with the song that was flowing through the earbuds at the time, "Hear Me Out," by Frou Frou. The images are random daubs from the past.

4:30 minutes (3.61 MB)

Riffing on something from Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention I spliced together some soundscapes and images (2.7mb) from a recent vacation. Lanham suggests that tourism "has lost its reality, it's genuine substance. It has become an attention structure" (2). Our three days on Captiva Island made me think of the quote. The island is small so the influx of 3,000 tourists amplifies the juxtaposition between the tourist experience and the infrastructure supporting it. The trash truck, for instance, arrives at 3:30 am--there is no way to get around on the island at any other time. Trucks haul in the goods and then haul out garbage under cover of darkness. At the tables of the restaurants water sparkles in glasses and in the alleys out back dumpster lids clang and ice machines crank. Listening to the two soundscapes brings either attention structure into focus.

From the where am I lately files comes this snap from the current road trip.

From the I've been meaning to blog about this for a while files, this link from a President's Day promotion by Audible offers up audio book playlist suggestions for some of our most famous leaders. Among those of interest, Teddy Roosevelt's audio book suggestions (including Heart of Darkness), Bill Clinton's audio book suggestions (including Fast Food Nation), and George W. Bush's audio book suggestions (including The Iraq Study Group Report).