This November 5, 2024 news item on phys.org takes a while before revealing how science is involved in the research,
Physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) have investigated to which extent a piece of music can evoke expectations about its progression. They were able to determine differences in how far compositions of different composers can be anticipated. In total, the scientists quantitatively analyzed more than 550 pieces from classical and jazz music.
It is common knowledge that music can evoke emotions. But how do these emotions arise and how does meaning emerge in music? Almost 70 years ago, music philosopher Leonard Meyer suggested that both are due to an interplay between expectation and surprise.
In the course of evolution, it was crucial for humans to be able to make new predictions based on past experiences. This is how we can also form expectations and predictions about the progression of music based on what we have heard. According to Meyer, emotions and meaning in music arise from the interplay of expectations and their fulfillment or (temporary) non-fulfillment.
A team of scientists led by Theo Geisel at the MPI-DS and the University of Göttingen have asked themselves whether these philosophical concepts can be quantified empirically using modern methods of data science. …
… In a paper published recently in Nature Communications, they used time series analysis to infer the autocorrelation function of musical pitch sequences; it measures how similar a tone sequence is to previous sequences. This results in a kind of “memory” of the piece of music. If this memory decreases only slowly with time difference, the time series is easier to anticipate; if it vanishes rapidly, the time series offers more variation and surprises.
In total, the researchers Theo Geisel and Corentin Nelias analyzed more than 450 jazz improvisations and 99 classical compositions in this way, including multi-movement symphonies and sonatas. They found that the autocorrelation function of pitches initially decreases very slowly with the time difference. This expresses a high similarity and possibility to anticipate musical sequences. However, they found that there is a time limit, after which this similarity and predictability ends relatively abruptly. For larger time differences, the autocorrelation function and memory are both negligible.
Of particular interest here are the values of the transition times of the pieces where the more predictable behavior changes into a completely unpredictable and uncorrelated behavior. Depending on the composition or improvisation, the scientists found transition times ranging from a few quarter notes to about 100 quarter notes. Jazz improvisations typically had shorter transition times than many classical compositions, and therefore were usually less predictable. Differences could also be observed between different composers. For example, the researchers found transition times between five and twelve quarter notes in various compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, while the transition times in various compositions by Mozart ranged from eight to 22 quarter notes. This implies that the anticipation and expectation of the musical progression tends to last longer in Mozart’s compositions than in Bach’s compositions, which offer more variability and surprises.
For Theo Geisel, the initiator and head of this research project, this also explains a very personal observation from his high school days: “In my youth, I shocked my music teacher and conductor of our school orchestra by saying that I often couldn’t show much enthusiasm for Mozart’s compositions,” he says. “With the transition times between highly correlated and uncorrelated behavior, we have now found a quantitative measure for the variability of music pieces, which helps me to understand why I liked Bach more than Mozart.”
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Stochastic properties of musical time series by Corentin Nelias & Theo Geisel. Nature Communications volume 15, Article number: 9280 (2024) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-53155-y Published: 28 October 2024
This paper is open access.
There was a Theodor Geisel who in the US and Canada was better known as Dr. Seuss.
This August 7, 2024 news item on phys.org explains what it means for a microscope to have a resolution of better than five nanometers, Note: A link has been removed,
What does the inside of a cell really look like? In the past, standard microscopes were limited in how well they could answer this question. Now, researchers from the Universities of Göttingen [Netherlands] and Oxford [UK[, in collaboration with the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), have succeeded in developing a microscope with resolutions better than five nanometers (five billionths of a meter). This is roughly equivalent to the width of a hair split into 10,000 strands. Their new method was published in Nature Photonics.
Many structures in cells are so small that standard microscopes can only produce fragmented images. Their resolution only begins at around 200 nanometres. However, human cells for instance contain a kind of scaffold of fine tubes that are only around seven nanometres wide. The synaptic cleft, meaning the distance between two nerve cells or between a nerve cell and a muscle cell, is just 10 to 50 nanometres – too small for conventional microscopes. The new microscope, which researchers at the University of Göttingen have helped to develop, promises much richer information. It benefits from a resolution better than five nanometres, enabling it to capture even the tiniest cell structures. It is difficult to imagine something so tiny, but if we were to compare one nanometre with one metre, it would be the equivalent of comparing the diameter of a hazelnut with the diameter of the Earth.
This type of microscope is known as a fluorescence microscope. Their function relies on “single-molecule localization microscopy”, in which individual fluorescent molecules in a sample are switched on and off and their individual positions are then determined very precisely. The entire structure of the sample can then be modelled from the positions of these molecules. The current process enables resolutions of around 10 to 20 nanometres. Professor Jörg Enderlein’s research group at the University of Göttingen’s Faculty of Physics has now been able to double this resolution again – with the help of a highly sensitive detector and special data analysis. This means that even the tiniest details of protein organization in the connecting area between two nerve cells can be very precisely revealed.
“This newly developed technology is a milestone in the field of high-resolution microscopy. It not only offers resolutions in the single-digit nanometre range, but it is also particularly cost-effective and easy to use compared to other methods,” explains Enderlein. The scientists also developed an open-source software package for data processing in the course of publishing their findings. This means that this type of microscopy will be available to a wide range of specialists in the future.
Festival in Indonesia and exhibition in Forum Wissen Göttingen [Germany]
Keeping the environment unspoilt, promoting social equality and strengthening sustainability – this is what connects researchers from the University of Göttingen and the university in Jambi on Sumatra with artists from Indonesia and documenta fifteen. Together, they are organising a festival in Permatang Kabau, a village on the island of Sumatra, as part of a collaboration for the contemporary art exhibition documenta, which will be held this year for the fifteenth time. The festival of Semah Bumi (balancing, serving, seeding) will feature concerts, art exhibitions and theatre performances from 12 to 13 March 2022. Starting with the question “What do we want our village to look like in twenty years?”, the participants will formulate their wishes for the future and develop common goals from the perspective of sustainability in the region.
“The holistic approach of our research offers a variety of opportunities to answer questions about sustainability and human-environment interactions from an artistic perspective,” says Professor Alexander Knohl, head of the Bioclimatology Research Group at Göttingen University. The Collaborative Research Centre EFForTS brings more than one hundred researchers from Indonesia and Göttingen together to study the changing ecological and socioeconomic functions of tropical lowland rainforests. They work to find out how the inhabitants of Sumatra can use their land more sustainably, promote biodiversity and, at the same time, meet the local needs.
The village of Pematang Kabau is the perfect spot for this: years ago there were extensive tropical forests there, but today the landscape is dominated by rubber and oil palm plantations. The effects of change are therefore also the focus of the Semah Bumi festival. “This festival connects art, science, nature and society,” says Adhari Donora from Rumah Budaya Sikukeluang, a collective of artists from Sumatra, who are responsible for the artistic conception of the festival. The artists – including Rani Jambak, Helmi Hardian, Uncle Twist and Ismet Raja Tengah Malam – and the researchers want to exchange information with the local community about the latest findings in sustainability research. In addition, they plan to initiate a long-term project, based on local experience, to mix palm oil monocultures with native tree species. Documenta fifteen is supporting this project along with many long-term sustainability projects and one euro from every documenta fifteen ticket sold will go towards these.
The results will be on display at an exhibition at the Forum Wissen Göttingen from June 2022. In parallel to documenta fifteen, visitors will be able to experience the social and ecological dimensions of research in Indonesia from different perspectives.
The project’s overall aim is to explore and implement more sustainable land use and value chain management in two villages in Jambi Province, Indonesia, starting in the village of Pematang Kabau. The results will be presented to the public at Forum Wissen in Göttingen in 2022, taking place at the same time as documenta fifteen.
In March 2022, the first two workshops of this long-term sustainability project will occur during the Semah Bumi Festival in Pematang Kabau. Participants are invited to reflect on their hopes for Pematang Kabau and to try and develop a common vision for the future in answer to the question, “What should our village look like in twenty years?”
The organizers have provide a visual image,
Semah Bumi Festival of Science, Nature, Society and the Arts, Jambi, Indonesia, 2022
Getting back to the Semah Bumi webpage on the Documenta Fifteen website,
The Sustainable Village Project’s research experiences a stronger local anchor through its collaboration with the festival, hosted by the artist collective Rumah Budaya Sikukeluang from the province of Riau in Sumatra.
Various artists will undertake a residency in Pematang Kabau a month before the start of the festival. During this time, they will work collectively to observe, recognize, and experience the local environment and its community while having access to the research of the Sustainable Village Project. Later, the artists and collectives in residence will produce artworks based on their explorations and collaborate on one shared project, which will be led by the local participants and presented during the festival.
Documentation of these works and their development can be found on the Instagram accounts of @sikukeluang and @semahbumi.
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It doesn’t look like there will be a livestreaming or online events for those of us unable to attend Semah Bumi in person.
Collaborative Research Centre 990: Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems (Sumatra, Indonesia) (Phase 3: 2020 – 2023)
Over the last decades, the lowlands of Jambi province in Sumatra (Indonesia) have undergone a major transformation from forests towards a cash crop-dominated landscape of rubber and oil palm plantations. EFForTS is a Collaborative Research Centre 990 funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) that investigates the ecological and socio-economic effects of such transformation based on research carried out in the Bukit Duabelas and Hutan Harapan area in Jambi province focusing on smallholder systems.
In the EFForTS project, more than 160 researchers from the University of Göttingen in Germany and the Indonesian universities IPB University (Bogor), UNTAD (Tadulako University, Palu) and UNJA (University of Jambi) work in close cooperation, representing a wide range of disciplines including ecology, forestry, agriculture, remote sensing, economics, human geography, and cultural anthropology.
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The art bit
There are two artist collectives involved. Rumah Budaya Sikukeluang in Sumatra is hosting the Semah Bumi festival and workshops (March 12 – 13, 2022) in Pematang Kabau, Indonesia. ruangrupa, a Jakarta-based artist collective, is providing artistic direction for documenta 15 (June 8, – September 25, 2022 in Kassel, Germany).
Before describing documenta 15, here’s an introduction to documenta (from its Wikipedia essay), Note: Links have been removed,
documenta is an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultural Show) which took place in Kassel at that time.[1] It was an attempt to bring Germany up to speed with modern art, both banishing and repressing the cultural darkness of Nazism.[2] This first documenta featured many artists who are generally considered to have had a significant influence on modern art (such as Picasso and Kandinsky). The more recent documentas feature art from all continents; nonetheless most of it is site-specific.
Every documenta is limited to 100 days of exhibition, which is why it is often referred to as the “museum of 100 days”.[3] Documenta is not a selling exhibition. It rarely coincides with the three other major art world events: the Venice Biennale, Art Basel and Skulptur Projekte Münster, but in 2017, all four were open simultaneously.
ruangrupa is the Artistic Direction of the fifteenth edition of documenta. The Jakarta-based artists’ collective has built the foundation of their documenta fifteen on the core values and ideas of lumbung (Indonesian term for a communal rice barn). lumbung as an artistic and economic model is rooted in principles such as collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation, and is embodied in all parts of the collaboration and the exhibition.
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In parallel with Kassel-based documenta 15 (June 8, – September 25, 2022), Forum Wissen, an academic museum, at the University of Göttingen, will display results from the Semah Bumi Festival and workshops held in Indonesia.
Weirdly and even though most of this paper’s authors are from the University of British Columbia (UBC; Canada), only one press release was issued and that was by the lead author’s (Gesa Busch) home institution, the University of Göttingen (Germany).
I’m glad Busch, the other authors, and the work are getting some attention (if not as much as I think they should).
A research team from the University of Göttingen and the University of British Columbia (Canada) has investigated how people in five different countries react to various usages of genome editing in agriculture. The researchers looked at which uses are accepted and how the risks and benefits of the new breeding technologies are rated by people. The results show only minor differences between the countries studied – Germany, Italy, Canada, Austria and the USA. In all countries, making changes to the genome is more likely to be deemed acceptable when used in crops rather than in livestock. The study was published in Agriculture and Human Values.
Relatively new breeding technologies, such as CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing, have enabled a range of new opportunities for plant and animal breeding. In the EU, the technology falls under genetic engineering legislation and is therefore subject to rigorous restrictions. However, the use of gene technologies remains controversial. Between June and November 2019, the research team collected views on this topic via online surveys from around 3,700 people from five countries. Five different applications of gene editing were evaluated: three relate to disease resistance in people, plants, or animals; and two relate to achieving either better quality of produce or a larger quantity of product from cattle.
“We were able to observe that the purpose of the gene modification plays a major role in how it is rated,” says first author Dr Gesa Busch from the University of Göttingen. “If the technology is used to make animals resistant to disease, approval is greater than if the technology is used to increase the output from animals.” Overall, however, the respondents reacted very differently to the uses of the new breeding methods. Four different groups can be identified: strong supporters, supporters, neutrals, and opponents of the technology. The opponents (24 per cent) identify high risks and calls for a ban of the technology, regardless of possible benefits. The strong supporters (21 per cent) see few risks and many advantages. The supporters (26 per cent) see many advantages but also risks. Whereas those who were neutral (29 per cent) show no strong opinion on the subject.
This study was made possible through funding from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and Genome BC.
I have one quick comment about the methodology. It can be difficult to get a sample that breaks down along demographic lines that is close to or identical to national statistics. That said, it was striking to me that every country was under represented in the ’60 years+ ‘ category. In Canada, it was by 10 percentage points (roughly). For other countries the point spread was significantly wider. In Italy, it was a 30 percentage point spread (roughly).
I found the data in the Supplementary Materials yesterday (July 13, 2021). When I looked this morning, that information was no longer there but you will find what appears to be the questionnaire. I wonder if this removal is temporary or permanent and, if permanent, I wonder why it was removed.
Participants for the Canadian portion of the survey were supplied by Dynata, a US-based market research company. Here’s the company’s Wikipedia entry and its website.
Information about how participants were recruited was also missing this morning (July 14, 2021).
Genome British Columbia (Genome BC)
I was a little surprised when I couldn’t find any information about the program or the project on the Genome BC website as the organization is listed as a funder.
There is a ‘Genomics and Society’ tab (seems promising, eh?) on the homepage where you can find the answer to this question: What is GE³LS Research?,
GE3LS research is interdisciplinary, conducted by researchers across many disciplines within social science and humanities, including economics, environment, law, business, communications, and public policy.
There’s also a GE3LS Research in BC page titled Project Search; I had no luck there either.
It all seems a bit mysterious to me and, just in case anything else disappears off the web, here’s a July 13, 2021 news item about the research on phys.org as backup to what I have here.
A June 9, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now highlights research into a common phenomenon, photographic exposure,
Photoinduced chemical reactions are responsible for many fundamental processes and technologies, from energy conversion in nature to micro fabrication by photo-lithography. One process that is known from everyday’s life and can be observed by the naked eye, is the exposure of photographic film. At DESY’s [Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron] X-ray light source PETRA III, scientists have now monitored the chemical processes during a photographic exposure at the level of individual nanoscale grains in real-time. The advanced experimental method enables the investigation of a broad variety of chemical and physical processes in materials with millisecond temporal resolution, ranging from phase transitions to crystal growth. The research team lead by Prof. Jianwei (John) Miao from the University of California in Los Angeles and Prof. Tim Salditt from the University of Göttingen report their technique and observations in the journal Nature Materials.
The researchers investigated a photographic paper (Kodak linagraph paper Type 2167 or “yellow burn paper”) that is often used to determine the position of the beam at X-ray experiments. “The photographic paper we looked at is not specially designed for X-rays. It works by changing its colour on exposure to light or X-rays,” explains DESY physicist Dr. Michael Sprung, head of the PETRA III beamline P10 where the experiments took place.
The X-rays were not only used to expose the photographic paper, but also to analyse changes of its inner composition at the same time. The paper carries a photosensitive film of a few micrometre thickness, consisting of tiny silver bromide grains dispersed in a gelatine matrix, and with an average size of about 700 nanometres. A nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre. When X-rays impinge onto such a crystalline grain, they are diffracted in a characteristic way, forming a unique pattern on the detector that reveals properties like crystal lattice spacing, chemical composition and orientation. “We could observe individual silver bromide grains within the ‘burn’ paper since the X-ray beam had a size of only 270 by 370 nanometres – smaller than the average grain,” says Salditt, who is a partner of DESY in the construction and operation of the GINIX (Göttingen Instrument for Nano-Imaging with X-Rays) at beamline P10.
The X-ray exposure starts the photolysis from silver bromide to produce silver. An absorbed X-ray photon can create many photolytic silver atoms, which grow and agglomerate at the surface and inside the silver bromide grain. The scientists observed how the silver bromide grains were strained, began to turn in the gelatine matrix and broke up into smaller crystallites as well as the growth of pure silver nano grains. The exceptionally bright beam of PETRA III together with a high-speed detector enabled the ‘filming’ of the process with up to five milliseconds temporal resolution. “We observed, for the first time, grain rotation and lattice deformation during photoinduced chemical reactions,” emphasises Miao. “We were actually surprised how fast some of these single grains rotate,” adds Sprung. “Some spin almost one time every two seconds.”
“As advanced synchrotron light sources are currently under rapid development in the US, Europe and Asia,” the authors anticipate that “in situ X-ray nanodiffraction, which enables to measure atomic resolution diffraction patterns with several millisecond temporal resolution, can be broadly applied to investigate phase transitions, chemical reactions, crystal growth, grain boundary dynamics, lattice expansion, and contraction in materials science, nanoscience, physics, and chemistry.”
