Month: March 2015

The Five Types of Moon Viewers, According to Zhang Dai

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I’m reading Jonathan Spence’s book about Zhang Dai at the moment, and Spence certainly succeeds early on in making Zhang seem like the guy of person you would want to hang out with… at least for a while. He was swept up by random, sweeping passions, and a powerful drive to write and write and write about everything that interested him. Manifestoes were kind of a thing with him, and those passions were constantly renewing, eclectic but thoughtful, if a bit over the top… or that’s how it seems thirty pages into the book, anyway. So far, among many other things, Spence …

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The Perfect Pitch Karaoke Paradox… and its Probable Resolution

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I’m still working my way through the book I mentioned in my last post, Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, and I seem to have come upon a paradox. The paradox has to do with the geographical distribution of perfect pitch and relative pitch ability in adult humans, as it relates to the invention of karaoke.

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Verbal Grooming, Social Media Tribalism, and Opiates

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So, a follow-up to my earlier post on Social Networks and how we behave on them: Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body is a fascinating book, even if sometimes I feel like the short chapters jolt me out of the experience, and even if his use of the word “ape” as non-inclusive of humans (who actually are members of the ape family) is distracting. The text mostly addresses the question of how deeply linked, evolutionarily and neurologically speaking, are the human capacities for music and for language, as well as exploring various theories about the musicality of speech and the the …

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