The first of Poulenc's three mouvements perpetuels.
Unaccompanied piano.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Constructive : Synthesis
It’s interesting you mention Finnish because it is in the Ural-Altaic language group along with my first language, Turkish. I say first, and should probably also say last.
Tuesday, on a balcony overlooking the Golden Horn, I was told the story of a Parisian philosopher, who wrote most of his works in French, was also fluent in German, and who eventually could only communicate in French, then German, and then finally in Romanian (the language of his childhood) as he progressed through the stages of Alzheimer’s. This makes sense given the fMRI studies showing that the cluster of neurons associated with one’s native language is spatially distinct from that of languages learned later in life.
And right there a question arises — do you guys feel yourselves visualizing the abstract or the concrete?
The short answer is the concrete. Which is why I chose noumena over phenomena.
The longer answer is that we like to think we are studying the actual object (in this case the ribosome) however, it is true that in fact we are studying the phenomenon, the appearance of this object to our senses (which in the case of smFRET is our sight). The phenomenon we are observing may directly report on the ribosome, or may be an artifact of the system. This is a question that Scott fields a lot during lectures on his work. Perhaps he will have more to say.
More so, sounds like in plenty of cases we're only going to be able to visualize the (indirect) effects these structures generate on their immediate environment and on other local structures with which they interact ... rather than, say, (direct) observation of the structures themselves.
Yes, our senses evolved to directly observe food and predators and mates. Objects typically (except perhaps if you consider a virus to be a predator) larger than the cell. Therefore, all observation on a subcellular scale is indirect in the sense that we require tools to mediate the observation.
So, yes, we are model guided from beginning to end. And that is one of the goals of this project: to push the boundaries of biological observation. To add a new sense to the toolbox. We have well-established indirect methods of seeing things smaller than light. I’m hoping through this collaboration we can also start to hear things smaller than light.
So that's where the friction — the constructive friction — will lie. In the language of research (and questions about research) rubbing up against the language of composition (and questions about composition) as the work progresses.
Yes, and before friction comes contact. The earliest enzymology lesson I learned was that in order to react, two objects first must bind. Corpora non agunt nisi ligata. In fact, one of the principle functions of an enzyme is to accelerate the process of bringing objects together. Thus by extension, it is not surprising that it is an enzyme, the ribosome, that is bringing us together for (I would argue rather than friction) a constructive reaction, a synthesis.
Tuesday, on a balcony overlooking the Golden Horn, I was told the story of a Parisian philosopher, who wrote most of his works in French, was also fluent in German, and who eventually could only communicate in French, then German, and then finally in Romanian (the language of his childhood) as he progressed through the stages of Alzheimer’s. This makes sense given the fMRI studies showing that the cluster of neurons associated with one’s native language is spatially distinct from that of languages learned later in life.
And right there a question arises — do you guys feel yourselves visualizing the abstract or the concrete?
The short answer is the concrete. Which is why I chose noumena over phenomena.
The longer answer is that we like to think we are studying the actual object (in this case the ribosome) however, it is true that in fact we are studying the phenomenon, the appearance of this object to our senses (which in the case of smFRET is our sight). The phenomenon we are observing may directly report on the ribosome, or may be an artifact of the system. This is a question that Scott fields a lot during lectures on his work. Perhaps he will have more to say.
More so, sounds like in plenty of cases we're only going to be able to visualize the (indirect) effects these structures generate on their immediate environment and on other local structures with which they interact ... rather than, say, (direct) observation of the structures themselves.
Yes, our senses evolved to directly observe food and predators and mates. Objects typically (except perhaps if you consider a virus to be a predator) larger than the cell. Therefore, all observation on a subcellular scale is indirect in the sense that we require tools to mediate the observation.
So, yes, we are model guided from beginning to end. And that is one of the goals of this project: to push the boundaries of biological observation. To add a new sense to the toolbox. We have well-established indirect methods of seeing things smaller than light. I’m hoping through this collaboration we can also start to hear things smaller than light.
So that's where the friction — the constructive friction — will lie. In the language of research (and questions about research) rubbing up against the language of composition (and questions about composition) as the work progresses.
Yes, and before friction comes contact. The earliest enzymology lesson I learned was that in order to react, two objects first must bind. Corpora non agunt nisi ligata. In fact, one of the principle functions of an enzyme is to accelerate the process of bringing objects together. Thus by extension, it is not surprising that it is an enzyme, the ribosome, that is bringing us together for (I would argue rather than friction) a constructive reaction, a synthesis.
Five senses
Five senses, indeed. We only see and hear according to some model. And seeing things in the existence of which we're not yet prepared to accept is a feat. Maybe a reason that moving things in and out of different media can open things we didn't know we're there ...
Been working the last couple of weeks to get music engraved on glass ... something happens when indications for performance jump the page set themselves up to be looked through ...
That's a part of the flute, violin & piano trio from February. The glass guy brought the proof by this morning ... glass on black becomes a mirror ... with embedded code. The real work is running as a series of eight engravings and will show at the Chelsea Gallery in New York in October ... so everyone else can see notation hovering somewhere it usually doesn't ...
Been working the last couple of weeks to get music engraved on glass ... something happens when indications for performance jump the page set themselves up to be looked through ...
That's a part of the flute, violin & piano trio from February. The glass guy brought the proof by this morning ... glass on black becomes a mirror ... with embedded code. The real work is running as a series of eight engravings and will show at the Chelsea Gallery in New York in October ... so everyone else can see notation hovering somewhere it usually doesn't ...
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Dinner reflections
"Per" as a prefix is great, btw. I think the people who study these things label one of the profusion of noun cases in Finnish the "perlative" for things set on some path through a place, a time, or some other thing.
I was in San Diego last week and this weekend working with friends. I'm back now, and I'm thinking about your voicemail. So how'd it go? How was dinner?
Some stuff and some hopes come to mind. We're smashing molecular biology & music together and so we can expect what we might call fruitful model friction, right? You guys have different practices devoted entirely to aspects of visualizing stuff at levels much much smaller than the cell. And right there a question arises — do you guys feel yourselves visualizing the abstract or the concrete? The abstract / concrete thing is probably a false dichotomy under any circumstances ... and it seems especially problematized by the whole premise of molecular visualization ... especially at the level that Scott is pushing it ... and at the level you're pushing at Cambridge, right? Whatever these ribosomal (sub)structures turn out to actually "be" the visualization is always going to be some type of superabstraction. More so, sounds like in plenty of cases we're only going to be able to visualize the (indirect) effects these structures generate on their immediate environment and on other local structures with which they interact ... rather than, say, (direct) observation of the structures themselves. So, fine. One of the implications of proceeding that way is that the visualization is model-governed from beginning to end. Which means that whatever model(s) we can invoke from the way that we think about music — the development and dissolution of musical structures, the perception or reception of those structures by people, or how structure vanishes when we think musically in different ways — carry at least the possibility of friction with whatever models it is that drive the work of visualization in the lab. Which is what we can point to by 'model friction'.
Related thought: language matters in this work. We've got the blog, some trips and possibilities to meet for a reason, and we're opening up times and places to exchange language in the process. So posit for a minute that language use for each of us depends on some graph of whole, fractured or composite concepts that interconnect all over the place in our thinking, and also when we write to each other, and talk. Stuff connects in different ways and the words and syntactic patterns we pick out and avoid when we look at each other's work — sketches, result sets, pics, soundfiles, whatever — probably trigger things for us even before they mean things for us. Which probably comes out to mean that we can sure as hell expect something to tremor or to shake in our thinking when you let a molecular biologist in to critique to the construction and development of the sounds in music as the piece progresses and when you let a composer feed back and react to data of actual results as research progresses.
We carry whatever models it is we have with us as our most powerful tools in the form of learned connections — neural, numeric, sonic, maybe literary. And we communicate whatever it that we carry through our language ... and also the sound and image we embed in and around that language.
So that's where the friction — the constructive friction — will lie. In the language of research (and questions about research) rubbing up against the language of composition (and questions about composition) as the work progresses.
So tell me about dinner ... and whether 'visualization' became a keyword at the table. And then I'll tell you what's frictive in the sketches I'm working on now.
I was in San Diego last week and this weekend working with friends. I'm back now, and I'm thinking about your voicemail. So how'd it go? How was dinner?
Some stuff and some hopes come to mind. We're smashing molecular biology & music together and so we can expect what we might call fruitful model friction, right? You guys have different practices devoted entirely to aspects of visualizing stuff at levels much much smaller than the cell. And right there a question arises — do you guys feel yourselves visualizing the abstract or the concrete? The abstract / concrete thing is probably a false dichotomy under any circumstances ... and it seems especially problematized by the whole premise of molecular visualization ... especially at the level that Scott is pushing it ... and at the level you're pushing at Cambridge, right? Whatever these ribosomal (sub)structures turn out to actually "be" the visualization is always going to be some type of superabstraction. More so, sounds like in plenty of cases we're only going to be able to visualize the (indirect) effects these structures generate on their immediate environment and on other local structures with which they interact ... rather than, say, (direct) observation of the structures themselves. So, fine. One of the implications of proceeding that way is that the visualization is model-governed from beginning to end. Which means that whatever model(s) we can invoke from the way that we think about music — the development and dissolution of musical structures, the perception or reception of those structures by people, or how structure vanishes when we think musically in different ways — carry at least the possibility of friction with whatever models it is that drive the work of visualization in the lab. Which is what we can point to by 'model friction'.
Related thought: language matters in this work. We've got the blog, some trips and possibilities to meet for a reason, and we're opening up times and places to exchange language in the process. So posit for a minute that language use for each of us depends on some graph of whole, fractured or composite concepts that interconnect all over the place in our thinking, and also when we write to each other, and talk. Stuff connects in different ways and the words and syntactic patterns we pick out and avoid when we look at each other's work — sketches, result sets, pics, soundfiles, whatever — probably trigger things for us even before they mean things for us. Which probably comes out to mean that we can sure as hell expect something to tremor or to shake in our thinking when you let a molecular biologist in to critique to the construction and development of the sounds in music as the piece progresses and when you let a composer feed back and react to data of actual results as research progresses.
We carry whatever models it is we have with us as our most powerful tools in the form of learned connections — neural, numeric, sonic, maybe literary. And we communicate whatever it that we carry through our language ... and also the sound and image we embed in and around that language.
So that's where the friction — the constructive friction — will lie. In the language of research (and questions about research) rubbing up against the language of composition (and questions about composition) as the work progresses.
So tell me about dinner ... and whether 'visualization' became a keyword at the table. And then I'll tell you what's frictive in the sketches I'm working on now.
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