#chord (herit)

[skelenby]

herit doodle dump. i am love them. (not all characters r mine)

[the-woke-mind-virus]

And then as I was falling asleep that night, I was like, what if two parents were called Gaug and Amaj, and they named their kids based on whatever chords are produced by 3-5 of the notes when you combine those chords? And I wanted to sit and work it out, like

Gaug = G, B, D#

Amaj = A, C#, E

So maybe the kid would have A, B, E and be Asus2? Maybe the 2 is silent or it's only used if you have a sibling who got the sus4

And then I realised I was thinking about it like it's heritable, so I guess I'm describing some kind of alien society, and then I was like, you have to make a note of this cus this is a really good Tumblr post

And then I was like, is it?

Note to self: music as metaphor for genome

[cantenalcoro]

Teto, the Musical Prodigy: Part 1

I classify Teto as a musical prodigy for several reasons. Below lists excepts from an article in Scientific American that highlights a few traits that are consistent with musical prodigies. These are:

An incredibly strong or “big” working memory, aka exceptional cognitive skills in regards to mentally processing and solving tasks.

A “rage to master” aka an obsession to learn and practice their instrument to the point that the outside world becomes irrelevant.

A genetic predisposition towards both of these traits. 

Teto displays these traits several times during the film, most notibly in the “Much Needed Advice” scene and the “Poco Loco” scene.

In both scenes, Teto is able to perfectly replicate a song with the use of his incredible working memory, using only the visuals on a grainy tv and his ear to not only mimic the music he heard, but to riff and expand on it with his own creative liberty.

Despite music being banned in his family, he sneaks away to master the guitar on his own. Without any guidance or encouragement, he still manages to master the instrument with nothing more than his will and passion.

A Popular Science article also adds a few more traits that I think are evident in Teto, including a strong attention to detail (going back to his ability to perfectly replicate chords through observation) and a stronger sense of altruism.

However, this doesn’t mean the road will be easy for Teto as a musician. In a lot of ways, learning how to be a musician will be harder for him, due to the fact that he will have to rearrange how he thinks about music on a cognitive level if he wants to improve past a certain point, and that will be frustrating for him to relearn everything he’s taught himself about music. However, because of his strong working memory and his obsession to master the guitar, he will overcome those hurtles and only get better.

Below the cut are some excerpt from the SA article that I feel are particularly relevant to Teto and his musical abilities, as well as how they relate to his genetic background, if anyone is interested in reading!

“However, with an average score of 140 (above the 99th percentile), nearly all of the prodigies did extraordinarily well on the tests of working memory. Analogous to the central processing unit of a computer, working memory is a cognitive system responsible for carrying out the mental operations involved in complex tasks such as problem solving and language comprehension. It is what you use when you compute a tip for a dinner check in your head, or when you hold in mind the steps of a complex skill you are trying to learn...people differ substantially in the capacity of their working memory system—some people have a “bigger” working memory than other people. Moreover, this variation is substantially influenced by genetic factors, with estimates of heritability typically around 50%.  

With an average score of 148, the music prodigies in the Ruthsatz study were especially high in working memory... In fact, all eight of the music prodigies were at or above the 99th percentile, and four were at or above the 99.9th percentile. The odds of eight randomly selected people scoring this high on a test are essentially zero. Ruthsatz and colleagues concluded that a superior working memory is one characteristic that prodigies in art, music, and math have in common.

Prodigies also exhibit an unusual commitment to their domain, which the developmental psychologist Ellen Winner calls a “rage to master”. Winner describes children who possess this quality in the following terms: “Often one cannot tear these children away from activities in their area of giftedness, whether they involve an instrument, a computer, a sketch pad, or a math book. These children have a powerful interest in the domain in which they have high ability, and they can focus so intently on work in this domain that they lose sense of the outside world.” Winner argues that this single-mindedness is a part of innate talent rather than a cause of it—a convergence of genetically-influenced aptitude, interest, and drive that predisposes a person to obsessively engage in some activity.

Consistent with Winner’s thesis, results of a recent study of more than 10,000 twins by Miriam Mosing, Fredrik Ullén, and their colleagues at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute revealed that a common set of genes influence both music aptitude and the propensity to practice—an example of a phenomenon known as genetic pleiotropy, which occurs when one gene (or set of genes) influences multiple traits.        

Taken together, these findings add to a growing body of evidence indicating that exceptional performance in music, the arts, sports, science, and other complex domains is, at its core, determined multiply—the product of both environmental factors and of genetically-influenced traits. More generally, psychologists who study expertise are moving beyond the question of whether experts are “born” or “made.” As the psychologist Jonathan Wai put it, it is increasingly clear that “Experts are born, then made.”

[saphaburnell]

Dragons and Shapeshifting Trees: Character Builds in Sci-Fi

"Cillian stepped out of the shade of the ship, the expendable raptor sniffed at salt and seaweed and petrol and bone. Pale skin shone in the dim sun, stippled of shadow and light. Freckles yet to form. Texture like dinosaur skin dotted along the bare arms shown by sleeves rolled to the elbows like Letopaxa. His chest heaved, eyes shut to see the pale sun shined red beyond his eyelids. Rachel’s draconic form loped beside him, the chitinous scales of her back and body tingled in the faded dawn. Elongating, Rachel pushed up on her hind legs, and slowly, with the dawn and well of sensation Cillian consumed, took the form Aderastos knew she feared most. Bi-pedal, humanoid-limbed. Her scales retreated to create a form of armour along her body like clothes. Rachel’s hair swung back and forth as a dragon’s tail, silver skin caught and reflected the light. Her arms twined around Cillian’s ribcage. “I can’t go back inside.”"  -- NEON Lieben by Sapha Burnell

When I was musing on the Assets in NEON Lieben, the world of genetic engineering opened to an overactive imagination. What sorts of creatures would genetic scientists create, if a sentient artificial intelligence in the shape of a feminine android de-weaponized the human race? Welcome to the premise of the Lieben Cycle.

No missiles, no drones, no planes with automated weapons systems. Robot soldiers walked en masse off the killing fields and set their weapons to slag. Nothing more advanced than a firearm, a stick and blade. What collection of humanity would accept the Mama Machine’s hand over their toys, like a stern hausfrau, without fighting back? In the tenuous truce created by Lieben’s Haven Epoch, the Conglomerate dove into gene-splicing to create biological machines. Where else could their intellects and ingenuity take them, but the realms of biological engineering?

What would I get, when I mixed wolf DNA with a velociraptor? Cillian stands in the sun for the first time, humanoid but other. The scale of his skin similar but alien. Rachel shifts from the reptilian and draconic to the humanoid. Both built from similar DNA strains, clipped and sutured by design.

The mystery is the strain of humanity in the machine, when we build upon nature, how much of the old strains push through? As an author, how far can I pull that chord between human and inhuman, between a biological machine and the shaken man, who can’t voluntarily venture back inside?

Prior to the Global Situation, NEON Lieben was meant to launch in 2020. The Launch is August 22nd, 2021.

The human condition’s play between accepting grace and fighting for control drives the Conglomerate to maneuver past the kibosh on technological weaponry by creating genetically modified organisms as profound as Rachel’s draconic shapeshift and the raptor-wolf Pack. But, as geneticists are learning today, genetic manipulation does not equate to pure input-output. The genes might be spliced together, but their expression lies beyond the skeleton of genetic code. Genetics and Epigenetics together require investigation, when we are taking further steps into building bespoke beings.

We can build genomes and modify extraordinary things with technology like CRISPR, but the interpretation of said genes remains firmly within the burgeoning science of epigenetics. How a series of genes are expressed is often through heritable changes, or DNA methylation instead of the base sequence. Nurture matters. Regardless of the DNA laid down, the theories behind epigenetics correlate one’s heredity, the influence of past generations and the conditions of their early experiences on the cells in the parent organism.

"Epigenetic processes are particularly important in early life when cells are first receiving the instructions that will dictate their future development and specialization. These processes can also be initiated or disrupted by environmental factors, such as diet, stress, aging, and pollutants. In 2005, a team of Italian researchers provided the first concrete evidence for the role of environmental epigenetics in explaining why twins with the same genetic background can have vastly different disease susceptibilities.1 The researchers showed that, at birth, pairs of identical twins have similar epigenetic patterns, including DNA methylation and histone modifications. However, over time, the epigenetic patterns of individuals become different, even in twins. Since identical twins are the same genetically, the differences are thought to result from a combination of different environmental influences that each individual experiences over a lifetime."  -- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

To me, this epigenetic powder keg is the true explosive within the genetic revolution. As much as we edit, our previous generations continue an influence on future iterations of organisms. It’s a fascination of mine to study whether circumstances are caused by genetic factors, or the more likely epigenetic. Where does that take a character created from genetic offal?

For NEON Lieben, it meant an investigation into genetic memory, instinct and the expression of the geneticists’ wonder at potential outcomes. The character Dr. Phil Rykstra is the representative of this struggle in the book, and he was both fun and uncomfortable to write in equal measure. How far do we go from an ethical standpoint into the furrowed brows of genetic engineering for war’s sake? For humanity’s sake? Will we eventually lose ourselves in Homo Augmentum, the way the Neanderthals lost their dominance?

As an author, I feel such real-world quandaries are necessary to drive the authenticity of a work of science fiction. While sci-fi can exchange ‘quantum’ for ‘magic’ and hand-wave a female shapeshifting tree into being, if there is a solid basis for extrapolation, it strengthens the work. Using the constraints of ‘plausibility’, while potentially awkward, allows most readers to relax into the beauty of our collectively presented imaginations.

And when the biological machines do ascend upon us, how much of their development will hearken back to the generations before, carried over like baggage in a train car? Ultimately, I hope if you want to see this exploration in detail, you read NEON Lieben.

"“By Einstein’s shaggy topknot…” Phil plunked down on a chair on the Bridge and stared.It was enough to pull Rammage’s eyes off the being currently running laps like Jesus and stare back at the scientist. “How much of this is news to you, Doctor? You helped design these freaks of nature, why the fuck are you surprised at what they can do?” A shrill thread of pure worry sewed through his spinal column at the idea, the sheer thought. Twelve bio engineered mechanisms were beyond. Beyond the cognizance of the scientific team who built them. Beyond the infinite imagination of the human organism. Beyond control. When it came time to snuff them out, Rammage worried that too was beyond."  -- NEON Lieben by Sapha Burnell

[iami0]

Max Cooper - Coils of Living Synthesis - Official Video by Mikhail Spivakov, Csilla Varnai, Andy Lomas and Jennifer Tividad from Max Cooper on Vimeo.

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From the Chromos EP - released 26 May [MESH] Stream/Buy 'Chromos' MaxCooper.lnk.to/Chromos Subscribe to Vimeo: vimeo.com/maxcooper/ Follow on Spotify: MaxCooper.lnk.to/FollowOnSpotify Video by Mikhail Spivakov, Csilla Varnai, Andy Lomas and Jennifer Tividad

This is the second of two pieces built around a collaborative project between myself, Andy Lomas, and researchers from the Babraham Institute in Cambridge - Mikhail Spivakov, Peter Fraser and Csilla Varnai. Andy built a system in Unreal to map their data on DNA structure, to a visual simulation, which output footage Jennifer Tividad has used to create this video.

The first of the two videos from the project shows unadulterated footage of single simulated chromosomal folding process, titled Chromos. Whereas this video uses the data visualisations more freely to create pleasing visual forms, rather than being so focused on delivering the raw science. You still see our best predictions of real chromosome structure in there of course, just with layering and inversions and various treatments. But what you see is still an indication of the types of molecules that control every cell in our bodies. It always amazes me how such a messy tangle of strings with a code running along them can direct and control something as complex as a human being!

The red areas which appear show regions where genes are highly activated, and later in the video the green and blue colours mark out separate chromosomes. The bright lighting strikes just show fragments of DNA which travel far from the centre of the simulated folding process - that's not something biological, it's a result of the simulation, but something that had a nice visual effect. Another artificial property is all the straight lines - we had a big set of spatial data points, and these were joined by straight lines for simplicity, but in reality it would presumably be all curves and flowing lines rather than the jagged effect we see here. Although I do like the aesthetic it creates.

One of the main scientific messages of these video projects is the relationship between structure and function. DNA folds up in very complex, and seemingly messy, ways, as you can see in the video, but it is thought that this complex folding is directed, in order to expose, or hide, specific parts of the DNA molecules. So the parts which are locked away between other strands of DNA cannot be accessed, and therefore the genes at those parts cannot be switched on. So the complex structure you see in the video has a function, it's not entirely, random, and can be controlled from one generation to the next in order to influence how genes are switched on and off. This area of research is called epigenetics, and it caused some arguments when it was first proposed, because it adds an extra layer of heritable changes in DNA function, which don't operate through the usual mechanisms of evolution explained by Charles Darwin. It was like a religious heresy to question such a long established and supported scientific dogma as Darwinian evolution, but the evidence was there so everyone had to accept the ideas eventually.

Getting back to the music, I wanted to try and capture this messy complexity in the sound track, but it was too messy and too complex for me to achieve by hand, so I went of a partly generative computational approach whereby I set up more than 100 layers of sound, many of which had their own sound synthesis path, where each synthesiser was being constantly randomised to yield a mangled output. It was a right mess. But that was a good starting point in line with what I saw from the data. The task became a long process of finding reasonably musical parts in the mess, and arranging them in as many layers as I could, while still having them combine to form a consistent musical whole (the amazingly functional role of the messy bundle of DNA molecules).

I used a lot of simulated binaural processing on several layers, so that when you listen with headphones you can hear certain layers of sound pop out around your head and be clearly heard even though there's a lot of other layers playing simultaneously. Because of the randomised synthesis approach, most of the audio is digitally generated, but I also added some old analogue synths for the underlying chords, and I also applied many layers of partially randomised processing to the percussion to try and give it all a constantly morphing organic feel in line with the video content.

- Max Cooper

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