"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.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
September 1996, Trevor’s shoulder length sandy blond hair is tied back in a neat ponytail. The Carothers Hall common room has a grand piano. With fury and focus, Trevor performs a piece he composed at 14, and then at 16. I am 17, Trevor is 20. We are students in the Plan II Honors program at University of Texas in Austin. Gato negro, The Rite of Spring, Les Amis, Nate’s blue hair and green tea, Bela Bartok, Gaulois, clavichords and trees.
We lose touch when Trevor graduates and travels to Italy the same year I travel to study Biochimie at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. The next year, I am at a Starbucks with my boyfriend Andy from study abroad. We are discouraged from a fruitless week of job hunting so that he can move to the states. We are killing time before a film starts. Trevor is at the same Starbucks, and happens to be hiring computer programmers for the Silicon Hills start up he is running. Andy makes a good approximation of how many petrol stations are in Australia among other Plan II math inspired interview questions and Trevor hires him.
Fast forward Lucinda’s wedding, New York City. Empire-Fulton State park, on a perfectly sunny day in the shadow of the Brooklyn bridge. Trevor is composing again.
May 2008, back in Austin. I have just defended and completed my PhD thesis at Cornell University’s Medical College, a painful 6 month separation from the world beyond the mammalian ooctye. Trevor nurses me back to social and intellectual health with Pinot Gris, Thai curry soup, mint gelato, cats, and dolphin linguistics. Apparently, they have syntax too. We agree to a trans-Atlantic musico-biological collaboration. Back in New York, having just brainstormed over brunch on Madison Avenue about the seemingly perpetual motion of biological machines, I am listening to the Rach 3 and reading Lewis Lapham’s thoughts on money.
It strikes me that though we possess 5 human senses, we present biological data as 2D, sometimes 3D, images embedded in the pages of journals. Alternatively, if we could hear enzymes as they work, perhaps we would have a more intuitive way of understanding molecular motions. It also occurs to me that extracting frequency information from these motions, through data such as those produced by the application of single molecule FRET methods to studying enzyme dynamics, would be an ideal point of departure for a musical collaboration with Trevor.
I text message Trevor, and thus moto perpetuo è nato.
The Story of Piraye and Trevor (as told by Piraye)
September 1996, Trevor’s shoulder length sandy blond hair is tied back in a neat ponytail. The Carothers Hall common room has a grand piano. With fury and focus, Trevor performs a piece he composed at 14, and then at 16. I am 17, Trevor is 20. We are students in the Plan II Honors program at University of Texas in Austin. Gato negro, The Rite of Spring, Les Amis, Nate’s blue hair and green tea, Bela Bartok, Gaulois, clavichords and trees.
We lose touch when Trevor graduates and travels to Italy the same year I travel to study Biochimie at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. The next year, I am at a Starbucks with my boyfriend Andy from study abroad. We are discouraged from a fruitless week of job hunting so that he can move to the states. We are killing time before a film starts. Trevor is at the same Starbucks, and happens to be hiring computer programmers for the Silicon Hills start up he is running. Andy makes a good approximation of how many petrol stations are in Australia among other Plan II math inspired interview questions and Trevor hires him.
Fast forward Lucinda’s wedding, New York City. Empire-Fulton State park, on a perfectly sunny day in the shadow of the Brooklyn bridge. Trevor is composing again.
May 2008, back in Austin. I have just defended and completed my PhD thesis at Cornell University’s Medical College, a painful 6 month separation from the world beyond the mammalian ooctye. Trevor nurses me back to social and intellectual health with Pinot Gris, Thai curry soup, mint gelato, cats, and dolphin linguistics. Apparently, they have syntax too. We agree to a trans-Atlantic musico-biological collaboration. Back in New York, having just brainstormed over brunch on Madison Avenue about the seemingly perpetual motion of biological machines, I am listening to the Rach 3 and reading Lewis Lapham’s thoughts on money.
It strikes me that though we possess 5 human senses, we present biological data as 2D, sometimes 3D, images embedded in the pages of journals. Alternatively, if we could hear enzymes as they work, perhaps we would have a more intuitive way of understanding molecular motions. It also occurs to me that extracting frequency information from these motions, through data such as those produced by the application of single molecule FRET methods to studying enzyme dynamics, would be an ideal point of departure for a musical collaboration with Trevor.
I text message Trevor, and thus moto perpetuo è nato.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment