Dancing About I-Beams And Wall Hangings

petronia (The last of the questionnaires):

I've always thought dancing about architecture would be a particularly interesting exercise, because whatever you could effectively demonstrate about architectural structures using choreographed human bodies would probably be immensely complex to convey in any other guise. So complex that it would be dismissed as truism, perhaps...

This reminded me that I'd once answered a question in regard to dancing about architecture when Scott Butki interviewed me by email in 2006 for Blogcritics Magazine. He ended up not using the dancing-about-architecture bit, so here it is:

( Kogan dances about I-Beams and wall hangings )

Vowels mimic music

Ed Yong (Why music sounds right - the hidden tones in our own speech):

When people say the 'o' sound in rod, the ratio between the first two formants corresponds to a major sixth - the interval between C and A. When they say the 'oo' sound in booed, the ratio matches a major third - the gap between C and E. [Deborah] Ross found that every two in three vowel sounds contain a hidden musical interval.

Her results didn't just apply to English either. Ross repeated her experiments with people who spoke Mandarin, a vastly different language where speakers use four different tones to change the meaning of each word.

( continues )

Mark, am I representing you correctly?

Tom's been posting on both his Tumblrs about "opinion leaders," his questions seeming to be: to what extent are there such creatures; do those outfits who claim to have the special ability to identify opinion leaders actually know what they're doing; and where these creatures have apparently been identified, is there any special value in trying to influence them in particular (influencing the influential, as it were)? I've been posting on the comment threads, and Dave chimed in on his own Tumblr.

I may or may not swoop into the subject from my own angle, but first I have a question for dubdobdee:

Tom entitles one of his posts "Now I know why Mark S hated the word so much." I replied with this:

Except "influence" as you've been using it here and in Blackbeard is exactly how Mark thinks it should be used, to reference actual power in the world. What Mark was objecting to was the unearned authority of "The [New Band] cite a range of influences from the Velvet Underground to the Fall," or "[Supposedly Valuable Rock Critic] has influenced everybody from Chuck Eddy to Tom Ewing." So what you guys are (and Mark is) trying to understand is who has power and what actual influence/resistance it engenders etc., whereas what Mark is objecting to is the attempt to borrow power by invocation and proxy.

So Mark, is this a good representation of your ideas?

( links )