October 31, 2005
Wired article on Boléro
Today I got a email from Michael Chorost's mailing list;
Which read below like this...
My Wired article on Boléro
Dear friends,
My article on Ravel's Boléro heard through new software that gives me 121 channels of auditory information has been published in the November 2005 issue of Wired, on page 144. It's also available online here.
Here's how the article starts.
He's been haunted by Ravel's masterpiece since he lost his hearing. A deaf man's pursuit of the perfect audio upgrade.
WITH ONE LISTEN, I WAS HOOKED. I was a 15- year-old suburban New Jersey nerd, racked with teenage lust but too timid to ask for a date. When I came across Boléro among the LPs in my parents' record collection, I put it on the turntable. It hit me like a neural thunderstorm, titanic and glorious, each cycle building to a climax and waiting but a beat before launching into the next. I had no idea back then of Boléro's reputation as one of the most famous orchestral recordings in the world. When it was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1928, the 15-minute composition stunned the audience. Of the French composer, Maurice Ravel, a woman in attendance reportedly cried out, "He's mad...he's mad!" One critic wrote that Boléro "departs from a thousand years of tradition."
I sat in my living room alone, listening. Boléro starts simply enough, a single flute accompanied by a snare drum: da-da-da-dum, da-da-da- dum, dum-dum, da-da-da-dum. The same musical clause repeats 17 more times, each cycle adding instruments, growing louder and more insistent, until the entire orchestra roars in an overpowering finale of rhythm and sound. Musically, it was perfect for my ear. It had a structure that I could easily grasp and enough variation to hold my interest.
It took a lot to hold my interest; I was nearly deaf at the time...Read on.
For more information about me and my recently published book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, see my Web site at http://www.michaelchorost.com.
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Sound Interesting? Yeah! I read that article few days ago and I am sort of like him which I am still tweaking so that the song "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor will become more clear to read the song. Now that the new CI software which sports 121 channels that Advanced Bionics is working on will be coming out. That got me excited and thrilled. I look forward to that.
If you go to his website, you can download one of his chapter. I plan to buy his book "Rebuilt" whenever I can unless someone get me a copy before I do.
Enjoy reading the article!
[composed and posted with ecto]
October 20, 2005
Check out my niece's works!
My sister sent me a email to let me know about my niece's new setup
and that she's a photographer and that she has been to Rwanda taking pictures and helping orphanages...
upper left corner: http://ecolonews.info/
and her flickr site
http://www.flickr.com/photos/camera_rwanda/
Comments broken
The comments feature of my blog is broken. I will attempt to fix it someday. I can't promise when but soon though..
