Peter Gabriel: Panopticom

Peter Gabriel has just released the first single from his long-awaited new album, I/O.

Let's just reflect on the significance of that. When I say "long-awaited" about a Peter Gabriel album, I really mean it. This album has been 20 years in the making. Peter Gabriel is the Leonardo da Vinci of rock - an absolute genius, but he takes forever to get anything done.

Anyway, here's the song. It's called Panopticom .

Lyrically, it's about how information is more available than ever before. Peter recognises the sinister side to this - the title refers to Jeremy Bentham's idea of the panopticon, the perfect prison where all prisoners are under constant surveillance (so presumably have to change their ways because they can't get away with anything) and there's a reference to the Stasi in the second verse. But Peter Gabriel is an optimist, and the song is mainly about the potential of citizen journalism to make us all better informed and hold those in power to account (as his charity Witness seeks to do). The key line of the chorus is Let's find out what's going on. Having worked in two media organisations and done independent research on Fake News Detection, I find this resonates with me, and it's good that the optimism of the early Internet is still alive.

Musically, Peter's in fine voice, there's some nice guitar work from David Rhodes, and Brian Eno adds some atmospheric synths.

I'd say it's worth keeping an eye on Peter Gabriel.

Conlanging and Progressive Rock

Earlier this year, I helped to organise the Sixth Language Creation Conference, which I did so that I could finally get to meet so that I could finally meet some of the friends I've made online over the past few years. Among these were John Quijada (who later wrote some very flattering things about me in the Language Creation Tribune) and David Peterson, of whom some of you may have heard.

Conlanging is not the only thing we have in common. We're all progressive rock fans, too, but while I have never managed to get a band together, John has composed an album's worth of material, and recorded it with David singing. Here's the first track.

The impressive thing here is that David is singing in Ithkuil. Ithkuil is John's conlang, and it's very complex. It has about twice as many sounds as English, and allows more complex combinations. Due to the great precision and concision of Ithkuil, the slightest mispronunciation would change the meaning. It must have taken David ages to learn to sing it.

Reverse Conlanging

As regular readers will be aware, I like Doctor Who and conlanging.
Unfortunately, these don't intersect much, as the TARDIS has telepathic circuits that can translate any language. However, here's an exception

Venusian lullaby

The Curse of Peladon was written in the days when, if you wanted an alien language, you made up some gibberish and hoped for the best. However, this is coherent enough to make some sense of it. Using the Doctor's translation Close your eyes my darling, well three of them at least! I've worked out the following so far

klid

child

kloklid

diminutive, used to express affection

klida

1st person posessed form, used to express kinship

kloklida

My dear child

pɹaθ

eye

paɹθa

paucal, used for more than two, but not necessarily a complete set, for which the plural would be used

men

you

mennin

your

klatʃ

close (hortative)

One thing that might be harder to explain though, is why it's sung to a slowed-down version of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.

Musical moods

Some colleagues of mine are running an experiment to find out what you can deduce about a television programme from its signature tune. The experiment is described in more detail in the BBC R&D Blog.

I had a go myself earlier - you have to listen to a number of theme tunes and then answer questions about each one. The questions change from tune to tune - quite a clever piece of experimental design, in that it prevents you from getting into a rut where you're calculating your answers before the music's finished. Hopefully, it will enable my colleagues to train an AI to recognise genre and mood from theme music.

PS - sorry for the lack of posts recently.

Oh, It Makes Me Wonder

Gradus ad Parnassum, meaning Steps to Mount Parnassus (in Greek mythology, the home of the Muses), is a famous musical composition textbook from the 18th Century. It taught, in a series of step-by-step lessons, the rules of the musical technique known as counterpoint, where several different melodies are composed to be performed in harmony with each other. Of course, once the student had mastered the rules (it was very technical), they would hopefully be able to work out for themselves where they could get away with breaking them for artistic effect.

Led Zeppelin's most famous song is called Stairway to Heaven. You know the one - starts of gently with 12-string guitars, recorders, and references to Tolkien, and gradually becomes more Hard Rock as it progresses (You can listen to it in Pete's Progcast if you wait long enough for it to come round). The resemblence between the title and that of the Baroque music textbook may seem like a complete coincidence. However, there's a bit near the end that goes

And as we wind on down the road,
Our shadows taller than our souls,
There stands the lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The dream will come to you at last
Where all are one, and one is all,
To be a rock, and not to roll!

If you're singing Stairway to Heaven on a karaoke night, about halfway though this bit you realise that you're really going to need a drink after this. Each line of the passage goes to just about the same tune, but is pitched a little bit higher than the one before. In musical terms, that's called a canon. It's a technique that was frequently in the type of music that Gradus ad Parnassum teaches,

Peter Gabriel Back on Songza

A while ago, all the Peter Gabriel songs disappeared from Pete's Progcast. According to Songza's support, this was because their music provider had lost access to those tracks. That took a good proportion of my selection down. However, today it played Sledgehammer followed by In Your Eyes. Hooray!

Why I hate secular Christmas music

So, Advent hasn't even started yet and already all the shops are playing Christmas music. Not even nice carols, but awful secular Christmas music, of the "Let's cash in on Christmas without losing any potential buyers by mentioning why it exists in the first place" type. Cynical, schmaltzy, musically inept and lyrically empty. Take for instance, a song I heard this morning, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. What uplifting and inspiring message does this give us about why we celebrate Christmas?

Reindeer are really shallow.

Has anybody else noticed...

...that the Imperial March from Star Wars is really Baa Baa Black Sheep?

People say I have strange tastes in music...

...and they're right. As I type I'm listening to King Crimson's The Court of The Crimson King on my Songza station, Pete's Progcast. Songza is a social music site where you can set up your own online radio station, and so indulging my love for the weird and wonderful, I've done so. As the name implies, it's mostly Progressive Rock, but with a scattering of other things (early music and folk in particular) to broaden the selection a bit. The voice you'll hear most often is that of Peter Gabriel, either solo or as a member of Genesis.

Give it a listen. If you have any ideas for things I might like to hear, Songza allows you to recommend them.

Meanwhile, the track has changed to Knights in White Satin by the Moody Blues.