Pink Air

Interesting Amsterdam

Most of you are probably familiar with INTERESTING, the anti-conference conference as debuted by Russell and Emily in London and Sydney last year. We figure it's time to give it a go here in lovely Amsterdam.

The thing will take place on June 14th at De Balie, from 10 to 6. Tickets are available from Eventbrite for 20 euros. Same minimal rules as always: presentations of 3 or 20 minutes on something interesting. (If you'd like a bit more of a steer, you can watch the videos from London and Sydney on their respective sites.)

We don't know exactly who will be speaking yet, but so far we've lined up the world's leading expert on quicksand (who also happens to be my neighbor). If you're interested in joining him on stage (at a safe distance) or suggesting someone else to speak, you can write to me here or at speakers@interestingamsterdam.com.

And, I'm very happy to say, you can also write to co-organizer André Bouwman (andre@60layersofcake.com) a delightful copywriter/designer/entrepreneur who is Dutch but plays real (i.e. American) football.

There are 175 seats available, so order early, order often. See you here.

Everybody Talk About

...pop music, but not everyone agree. And while there are plenty of sources for song facts (interviews, production details, ratings, criticism), facts aren't what's really interesting about pop music. Even what the artist says is just another fact. What's interesting is the meaning of the song to you. You may be the only person who thinks that "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is actually about Jesus (or maybe that's me), but that's what makes pop music so emotional and fascinating. The lack of a single, incontrovertible meaning is what makes it interesting.

Our favorite songs release a flood of addictive brain chemicals, but it can be difficult to identify the exact trigger. On paper, the lyrics are often pretty vague given how meaningful they feel when the song is playing. The meaning seems to waft up from a soup of musical and lyrical elements--that chord change, middle eight, drum pattern, intake of breath--combined with our own, often idiosyncratic, knowledge and experience. We may obsess about what strings Jimi used or dissect the symbolism of the English hedgerow, but those are more symptoms of our devotion than explanations. It's that complex, cloudy, personal recipe that we really want to condense into language and share when we're talking about our favorite songs.

I love pop* music. I love talking about it and listening to other people talk about it and what it means to them. Those conversations are almost always more interesting than published music criticism where the opinions have be justified and dressed up as facts. I'd rather just hear people talk about what their favorite songs mean to them. So I made a site for people to do that and I hope that you will.
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*I mean "pop" in the broadest possible sense to include pretty much anything not written by Mozart.

Irony Will Eat Itself

Philippe sent this link to a viral video from Qualcomm. ("Viral" only in the sense that the makers apparently want it to become viral.) It's a fake ad for a wireless handset that's implanted in your hand. Get it? (Okay, the name is funny.)

What's strange is that this site links to, and is meant to publicize, a Qualcomm campaign called "Wireless Life" which is also about non-existent stuff from the future. But for some reason, we're supposed to take this stuff more seriously. Seriously? After making fun of futuristic tech-puffery vaporware, they lead you into their own futuristic tech-puffery vaporware.

I think that in the age of Colbert, people are so soaked in irony they've forgotten what irony is besides a way to show that you don't take yourself too seriously and that you "get it" (whatever "it" is.)

The Curious Emotion

One benefit of my stuttering career path is that I have smart friends in a number of different fields, one of whom kindly sent me a paper a few weeks ago called, Interest: The Curious Emotion by Paul Silvia, psych professor at UNC Greensboro. It turned out to be just one of Silvia's publications on the subject of interest and interestingness.

I was relieved to see that some of my guesses about interestingness are supported by actual research:

• Interest is the result of two appraisals: novelty/complexity and comprehensibility. (I think depth or range of application is also involved.)
• Interest and pleasantness are unrelated

I wrote to Prof. Silvia and he wrote back that advertising and educational psychology could have a fruitful conversation about what generates memory, engagement and interest. I think that's true.

Your URL is showing

I was buying a domain name at Network Solutions last week and between the choosing and the paying, there's a screen where they try to sell you a number of options. This is, of course, known as "upselling." It makes sense and it's not a problem if the options are relevant and the approach isn't pushy. And as long as you don't use the word "upsell" when you're talking to me. And the URL, whether they know it or not, is talking to me.

Marketing magic

There was a lovely article in the March 17th New Yorker by Adam Gopnik called "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life". (It's not online but there's an ancillary podcast here.) A number of bloggers have written that Gopnik's thoughts on how magic works apply to their own fields, especially the idea that their real product is a state of mind co-produced with the viewer; the result of an open-ended, semi-competitive engagement with the willing, active minds of an audience:

What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of the effect but the magician's ability to suggest any number of possible explanations, none of them conclusive, and none of them quite obvious...magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world.

[W]hatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic," unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information...Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

Which is what an interesting marketing idea does. Brands like Nike and Apple don't have simple, static value statements or brand identities that require "mastering" our natural indifference through repetition and spectacle. Instead, they represent a tantalizing, permanent maze of possibilities.

Give the drum machine some!

Digital electronics are now commonly used to replace humans or other pieces of analog equipment in the process of music making. And from many points of view (cost, reliability, compression, stability) digital has been a great improvement. But from an aesthetic point of view, many people find the results disappointing, off-putting or worse. Analog vs. digital is one of those endless techno-religious wars in which values get confused with specs.

I think this is because for a long time, digital computers (broadly speaking) were not being used in the area of their creative competitive advantage, which is remembering and recombining, quickly creating interesting options for us to choose from and refine. (Which, now that I think of it, is probably something many analog fans would object to in the first place.) But now developers are focusing on this area and for some reason, the most interesting results all seem to be coming from Germany.

The latest example is Melodyne from Celemony in Munich. Melodyne 1.0 took an audio sound file and broke it into its constituent notes with a high degree of success if the audio was relatively clear and distinct. The notes then appeared as sound "blobs" which could be changed in length, pitch and tone and triggered individually:

Like a sampler, it allowed you to treat existing audio as if it were just another sound coming from your keyboard. But because it analyzed and represented the sound as individual notes in a performance, you could create variations on existing performances with an ease no sampler could match.

Last month, Celemony introduced Melodyne 2.0. What makes this version even more interesting is that, in theory, it can do the same thing for a multi-part performance, breaking it apart instrument by instrument, note by note, spreading the arrangement out in front of you for detailed manipulation. You can change a single note in a recorded guitar chord. Try out alternate versions of your favorite songs using the original audio. 1.0 allowed variations on a performance. 2.0 allows variation in a performance.

But I'm most excited about what happens when Melodyne doesn't work properly. When, instead of cleanly picking out the bassline from "Hit Me One More Time", it mistakenly combines some of the bass sound with some of the vocal and a bit of the drums to create some unimaginable Frankenstein of virtual "instrument" and melody that never existed in the original. What happens when you play that? Do you hear something that was latent in the original song? A molecular recombinant form with faintly recognizable DNA, like a distant relative of the original? Remixing will gain a whole new set of dimensions. That will be interesting.

(Celemony's video introduction of Melodyne 2.0 is interesting in itself. Strangely Kubrickian in tone. You almost expect to see a Hanso Foundation logo at the end.)

I refute it thus

After years of looking at the very interesting cover, I finally started reading John Gray's argument against the humanist notion of progress, Straw Dogs. So far, my impression is that he's just a curmudgeon.

But I'm also kicking a Samuel Johnson style rock to refute his refutation, thus: the DS-10, a Nintendo DS-based virtual recreation of the classic Korg MS-10.  I had an MS-10 about 25 years ago, but I sold it, to my everlasting shame and regret. Now its available to run on a handheld game machine (as played by the Electroplankton Quartet) complete with sequencer and dangly virtual cables. That is very kickable progress.

So interested we're bored already

A new Dutch sport newspaper is introducing itself with ads based on the idea that general newspapers are full of subjects you're already bored with. One of those subjects is "Hillary vs. Obama."

Which is now my answer when people from the US ask: "Are people over there interested in the US presidential primaries?" Yes. Very interested. So interested that they're already bored with it.

Big Brother 1660

Are you like me: fascinated by the idea of reality tv but bored by the shabby, false, poorly acted melodrama it's turned out to be? When I first heard about Big Brother, I thought it was an interesting idea. It's just that it's not worth watching.

Now I get my daily dose of "No he did-n't!" from Phil Gyford's wonderful realtime minus 343 years posting of Samuel Pepys' diary. Each entry is heavily annotated, not just with historical explanations but with the same kind of personally invested commentary on "Sam's" daily life that you'd normally find in the letters section of People magazine:

Sure, Pepys was doing some  impression management. But the sheer amount of trivial, unselfconscious detail he presents, the historical setting and the knowledgeable, emotional annotations of what you'd have to call his "fans" create a dense network of story much more interesting and real, even 343 years later, than anything John De Mol has come up with.