video

ZKO Rollercoaster // GREAT EMOTIONS from virtual republic on Vimeo.

What works

This short video does a pretty good job of teaching someone how they might learn to experience the suspense and exhilaration of classical music. I won’t try to explain it. I just thought Graphic Sociology readers might like it.

It got me thinking about how our senses work separately and together. I don’t experience chamber music as a rollercoaster but I might have learned to think of the peaks and swells of the musical dynamics this way if I had seen a video like this at the outset of my classical music listening. In a way, it’s a little like seeing the characters in a book come to life on screen in a movie before you get a chance to imagine them into life in your head. Once you’ve seen the actors and all of their particularities onscreen, it’s hard to reimagine the character otherwise.

As a radical empiricist, I hesitate to speculate about things like imagination that cannot be measured. Thus, let me be clear that I am not suggesting this one minute Vimeo could forever alter a child’s experience of classical music. Rather, I’m curious about the impact of an initial vision of something in comparison to both the initial aural and the subsequent visualizations of an experience. Does an aural first impression have the same impact as a visual first impression? After hearing a voice for the first time, can you imagine someone’s voice otherwise? I certainly can imagine aural qualities otherwise – I hardly remember the specific qualities of voices after hearing them only once. And I don’t think second and third visual exposures are as meaningful as the first one. But I have no clever experimental research in my back pocket that I can pull out to support or refute my position.

Are there any newcomers to classical music out there? Did watching this video provide enough of a framework to classical music listening that you think you would be more willing to do it going forward? And have you tried thinking of classical music as, say, a series of ocean waves (which was how I used to think of it)? Or some other kind of visual metaphor? Are you stuck thinking of it as a rollercoaster or some other amusement park ride (maybe the songs you don’t like are imagined as merry-go-rounds, pumping away repetitively to the point of nausea)?

References

Virtual Republic. (January 28, 2012) Video Advertisement of Classical Music as a Rollercoaster. For Zurich Chamber Orchestra.

What works

This video does an excellent job of explaining how population growth has happened with beautiful visualizations. Click through to watch it. It’s worth it.

What comes next

It would be nice to have a visualization that could combine population growth visualizations with quality of life visualizations. Quality of life was pretty dismal in the beginning – infant mortality was high, maternal death was high, life times were short and much more of them were spent in grueling conditions. The rising tide of domestic agricultural practices raised all boats. But then quality of life started to become stratified – some people in some places had it pretty good while others were still facing not such great conditions. Now quality of life is extremely stratified but starting to diminish globally and will continue to diminish as the impacts of climate change set in (not to mention the non-climate related concerns associated with what happens when the planet starts to reach its limit in terms of how many human lives it can support at high levels of ‘quality of life’). Fewer people will be able to eat meat regularly (which may or may not be considered an indicator of high quality of life), more people will get asthma as we all move to cities congested with the exhaust of internal combustion engines and coal-fueled power plants, more people will live in drought stricken places, and more people will end up in conditions of poverty if rates of inequality continue as they are.

The video is beautiful as it is. But the beautiful polish helps obscure the notion that population growth is not necessarily a good thing.

References

Cole, Adam and Starbard, Maggie. (31 October 2011) Visualizing how a population grows to 7 billion. NPR.org.