NJ Auditor » Creativity

Auditor’s Piano Lessons

J. Termine — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:03:48 +0000

The Mundelein Society of Ethnomusicologists is conducting a study on an iPhone application called ProChord and its use in teaching others to play the piano. ProChord allows users to select a key signature and select a chord. It subsequently accesses a database of popular music to show which chords are most likely to occur after the first chord in popular music. ProChord does this using a statistic’s engine popular among auditors — the Benford Curve to identify the chord that is most likely to occur out of the sequence.

MSE is also providing free piano lessons in Princeton to interested parties as part of the study. Prospective students have to fill out a “pre-test” of music knowledge and complete an application. They are even paid a small fee for their time working through the pedagogy lessons. If you are interested in working through a MSE pedagogy lesson with me, please let me know.

1 MB of Internet Data Transfer = 1 lump of coal

J. Termine — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:50:02 +0000

One lump of coal is the energy required to move a single megabyte of data across the Internet, according to Jay Walker — the man behind Priceline.com and curator of the Library of Human Imagination which he created in his mansion. Makes you think of the energy one uses to transfer files over BitTorrent each day.

Elizabeth Gilbert @ TED: Nurturing Creativity

J. Termine — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:25:19 +0000

Elizabeth Gilbert, a famous author, spoke at TED about nurturing creativity. In it she describes how the ancient Greeks and Romans considered creative energy exerted by an artist or scholar as coming from a divine source — in Greece this was a “daemon” and in Rome it was a “genius”. By the time the Renaissance came, an individual person was thought to originate creativity from within themselves (“rational humanism“). After the Renaissance, a creative person might BE a genius rather than HAVE a genius. Elizabeth Gilbert wishes we could go back the ancient times, because it places a great burden on creative people to think that they are the beginning and end of their own creative success. This was a fascinating lecture that resonated with me when I saw it.