As if she needed to leave a greater legacy, a tape recovered from her attic 7 years ago after she passed away resets the “baseline” of what electronic music was in the 1960s.

Most unexpected of all, however, is a piece of music that sounds like a contemporary dance track which was recorded, it is believed, in the late sixties.

Paul Hartnoll, formerly of the dance group Orbital and a great admirer of Ms Derbyshire’s work, said the … “That could be coming out next week on [left-field dance label] Warp Records,”

“http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7512072.stm

That’s where studying in maths and music gets you…

Interesting2008 lived up to its name today. I gave a rather rapid (7 minute!) summary of Acoustic Cosmology. As a few people mentioned afterwards that they would be interested to know more, here’s a few links;

Acoustic Cosmology (Interesting2008 presentation PDF)

Acoustic Cosmology: Summary essay

My own music

Billboard says

“CBS Radio and Last.fm, both owned by CBS Corp, have teamed up for closer collaboration on their respective radio initiatives. Under the agreement, CBS Radio will stream all its stations to Last.fm’s U.S. users. This includes KROQ in Los Angeles, WCBS in New York, WXRT in Chicago and WVEE in Atlanta.

The UK Last.fm service already does the same for BBC stations in London.

Listeners on Last.fm can then flip from the radio stream to playing individual songs, and add songs heard via the radio stream to their Last.fm playlist to play later on-demand.”

What does this mean?

If you look at the BBC presence I see no evidence of any “radio streaming”. BBC Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3 and Radio 4 all have pages, but there’s no live radio simulcast. They all say,

“BBC Radio X isn’t yet available to play on Last.fm.”

Does “stream stations to users” mean putting a hyperlink on a web page? Embedding a streaming URL in a web page? Exchanging metadata about what’s playing so you can play the same thing? Last.fm providing a relayed streaming feed whereby Last.fm pay for the delivery infrastructure?

I suspect it’s the exchange of metadata, in which case we have a complete mess of jargon being used in the media and really odd expectations being set.

… and if radio stations have an API on their playlists, then this kind of mashup requires no commercial intervention, let alone a press release. It certainly isn’t “radio”.

CI (of which I’m a Director) has been shortlisted for the Music Week Award “Distributor of the Year”.

It’s a giant shift in perception that we’re even being considered, and certainly the fact we delivered ~20% of Amazon’s US download store is a catalyst.

CI’s digital distribution service model /has set/continues to set/ standards in how with digital products and web services can work together. CI takes no fees from retailers, and no % of sales (think “DHL for digital products”).

It’s mission is “enable access to markets” by providing easy routes for any rights-owner to distribute to any retailer (160 at last count, including iTunes, mobile operators, China, Korea, etc…). CI’s clients are all in the independent sector, and represent over 2 million tracks. We also have a rather good jukebox in our office.

To be listed up against Universal and EMI (and Pinnacle is one of CI’s clients) is indicative of the shift in the balance of “power” in the music industry.

Fingers crossed!

This year is the 50th anniversary of Jodrell Bank.

Today is also a landmark day for Jodrell Bank - the whole science team are moving from on-site, to Manchester University. While this is probably very practical, I can’t help feeling sad that this unique and historic research establishment is dramatically shifting its identity.

I worked at Jodrell from 1994-1995 and thoroughly enjoyed it: 120 scientists in the middle of a field in deepest Cheshire. Remarkably “British” Science - on my first day I was shown around to one of the “workshops” (very slightly more advanced than a garden shed) where someone was building an amplifier for the main dish and cooling it to about 10 degrees Kelvin, making it one of the quietest amplifiers on Earth. In another room, someone was building their own data router, to carry data at 30 Gigabits per second,

since the best commercial ones of the time couldn’t come anywhere close

…today MERLIN’s seven telescopes ship 30Gbps, each, to a huge computer cluster at the main facility that processes 150-200Gbps of data in real time - making it one of the most powerful computers on Earth.

The history of Jodrell Bank and the Lovell Telescope is vast: it’s first official task was to identify and track Sputnik - it was the only instrument the West had (at the time) that could do so.

Pulsars and Quasars are amongst the discoveries in which Jodrell was the catalyst. The Cosmic Microwave Background, Masers, Gravitational Lenses, and myriad others are part of the rich mixture of Radio Astronomy research.

Jodrell gets very little mention compared to other facilities, unlike its US counterpart the VLA, or the Hubble Space Telescope. The latter is particularly relevant - Jodrell has had equal or better resolution than the HST since before HST launched - and the only reason you don’t know that is because NASA have a $20m “marketing budget” to tell the world. That’s about the same as Jodrell had to upgrade the entire facility.

Jodrell was mentioned a couple of times in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “… Jodrell Bank looked straight through them [Vogon spacecraft]— which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they’d been looking for all these years … someone decided it was time for a nice relaxing cup of tea” - and happens to be very true: tea at 11am and 3pm was an unmissable part of the day. Everything stopped. It was at tea that one of the longest serving members of staff was trying to recall how they’d built some of the 6-bit computers I was trying to re-interpret the data from (”now was bit 3 the weather or the telescope ID?”). I should have kept that envelope…

Last year the Lovell Telescope was nominated the UK’s greatest ‘Unsung Landmark’ in a BBC competition. This only scratches the surface. To me, Jodrell Bank is iconic of an entire country of passionate, brilliant scientists, who get little of no recognition for the spectacular work that they do. At various times, Jodrell has had to justify its existence, which is reasonable for any institution to have to do, but I believe that much of its real value is overlooked….

I am delighted that, 13 years after leaving, I will be going back to hear some of my music played at the 50th Anniversary celebrations. Amongst other things they are projecting onto the 76m Lovell dish, which should be quite spectacular - it’s at least twice the size of the largest IMAX screen. (hope the weather’s good!).

If you’d like to get involved, have a look ℵhere.

So, today is the official Global Cool launch day.

Expect a fair bit of coverage tomorrow in the UK and USA.

Here’s some coverage that’s already out there:

PR Newswire

The Sun

Yahoo UK and USA

However, one important correction - Yahoo is correct when it says “[Global Cool] is being funded by a consortium of blue-chip financial institutions, which have set a target of $250 million in support of its ten-year campaign” rather than The Sun’s “Big business have donated £120m to support the campaign”. All donations are gratefully received!

Some discussion is already on the BBC Newsnight group and BBC6 and a nice diversity cropping up from people like The Scotsman, Between Planets, Hugg (EcoRazzi), Ultimate Guitar, EarthTimes

Hope you enjoy the new site, and this is just the tip of the (proverbial) iceberg. We have a lot of work ahead.

For example, “the campaign would be sound-tracked by none other than former Doors frontman, Jim Morrison.”

“The London briefing will be followed by a reception at 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister Tony Blair and 50 of the world’s top business and climate control leaders.”

Announced late last year, but I only just noticed, “An international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, has used three years of observations of the “double pulsar”, a unique pair of natural stellar clocks which they discovered in 2003, to prove that Einstein’s theory of general relativity - the theory of gravity that displaced Newton’s - is correct to within a staggering 0.05%.” (Jodrell Bank)

Hurra.

And a great addenda to my piece based on the pair, called PSR J0737-3039B which I hope will be played on Antarctica’s first artist-run radio station (go Adam!) sometime this month if it gets there!

Listen to a clip here.

The blurb of the piece, which I wrote in 2004 is here:

“PSR J0737-3039B (ds squared - series 1) [8m56s] 2004

Inspired by the discovery of the first double-pulsar system (ranked as the 6th most important scientific discovery of 2004). Pulsars are “pulsating stars” - objects with about the same amount of matter in them as our Sun, but squashed into a 20km ball. They spin very quickly (some a thousand times a second) and emit jets - creating a lighthouse type effect. These two not only spin, but rotate around each other every 2.4 hours. One spins 45 times a second, the other every 2.8 seconds. They are very chaotic, and will collide in 85 million years, maybe turning into a black hole. By analysing them we can check many of Einstein’s theories of General Relativity, which help us understand how the Universe works.

The piece is named after the slower pulsar, PSR J0737-3039B, or alternatively ‘ds squared - series 1′, reflecting some of the 4 dimensional geometric properties used in this field. Collaborators: Andrew Newsam (Astronomer + Software), Peter Clive (Piano), Jaako Mattila (Artist), Ulya Gumeniuk (Artist), Aidan Keane (Cosmologist)

PERFORMANCES
Dorkbot, London, UK 2004
Iberne Radio Telescope, Latvia 2004.
Sprawl, London. Nov 2004
DEAF04, Rotterdam. Nov 2004
ResonanceFM, London. Nov 2004
La France, London. February 2005
Science Museum, London. April 2005
Placard, London. September 2005
Poitiers/Bourges, France. February 2006″

I’ll get on and write the second movement then…

wow. we did it. we built and launched it on time. to the minute, as they walked off stage…

It finally (soft/beta) launched with a couple of “people of fame” (Orlando Bloom and Kate Bosworth). After years of planning, we ended up getting the funding “weeks” ago and built everything online in 4 weeks from scratch.

http://www.global-cool.com/

So, the 20 hour days will now cease and my time will now be occupied with marginally less (or more) busy days dealing with the ongoing development of the project.

A huge thanks to everyone on the web development team, who have proved (again) that we can actually achieve impossible tasks.

Special thank you to;

Diggory, Chris, Joel, Francis, Anna, Andy, Andrew, Peter, Enrico, AdrianP, Phil, LeeA, Joanna, Gage, LeeM, Rakesh, Matt, Dan, PaulH, PaulM, David, Richard, John, Athol, Steve, Ashley, Marc, Ben, Tom, Chris, Tara, Laura, Fahaad, AdrianH, Matt, MySociety.org (Pledgebank.com), VTR, Jerelang, Makeni, Counting Thoughts.

I’m absolutely delighted that we’ve been able to implement Creative Commons and GPL licensing as a core part of the project, integrate with Pledgebank (which is superb!)

I’ve got the responsibility of being “head of internet” which seems to translate into more and more every time, so if you have any ideas about what you think we should add, tell me.

I want to build this into The Place where you manage your carbon lifestyle and make a difference to the world.

I’ll write up some more about *how the hell we did that* soon … but first, sleep….

Oh, but did I mention we launched in English and Japanese?

Random conversations are great.

I’ve been looking at mappings between cosmology and ‘other things’ for several years now. Recent conversations keep orbiting links between psychology, music, perception, spirituality and cosmology …

So I was delighted to see at least one example of cross-over research between MRI scanning and CMBR analysis here;

http://www.nserc.gc.ca/news/stories/041006-2_e.htm

Haven’t found the follow up links yet, but would be fascinating to see the results of a pathalogical or psychological analysis of the Universe using the CMBR treated as an MRI scan…