Almost two years ago now, my friend Becca (@beccatronic) turned me on to this Radiolab podcast about the relationship between music and language (coincidentally titled “Musical Language”) and it has remained one of the most compelling things I have ever had the pleasure of crossing paths with. I had not thought of it too much as of late until I heard R Blank’s presentation at the IDMAa conference this past week, a brilliant talk (which can be viewed here in a older but fairly consistent version) that mixed his ideas of how integral storytelling is to the development of language with the process he went through in creating a computer program called Synthia, that composes music from reading the pixels of images. Anyway, his presentation quoted heavily from this podcast and made me realize that I not only needed to revisit it, but it needed to be shared.
Cheers for the free PR, mate!
That wasn’t the only episode RadioLab I quoted from, but definitely the most relevant.
Also, two other episodes worth checking out, that heavily influenced this talk:
‘Words’ (a more recent one)
and
‘Storytelling’ — which is Robert Krulwich’s talk to the graduates of CalTech on the importance of scientists learning to tell stories.
Viva RadioLab! Robert grounds Jad, and Jad makes Robert cool.
-r