Tag: music

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Poetry-essays Videos

The Brand New Ancients (Kate Tempest)

Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients won the Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry.

“Just as in her narrative, the ordinary is lifted into the extraordinary; score, writing, band and voice come together to create a package that never makes you question why you aren’t just reading or listening to this. That’s because Tempest, fierce and shy in the same moment, is such a genuinely galvanising presence and acutely responsive to her audience. It matters that we are there; it matters that these stories are told. It matters that we listen.” from the Guardian review by Lyn Gardner.

Part 1 is the performance piece I would like you to watch. (The other parts of the poem are less relevant to the course, and somewhat violent in nature.)

Also by Kate Tempest, check out Icarus

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Audio Videos

Exoplanets: visual summaries

Here is a NASA application called Eyes on Exoplanets that allows you to explore the exoplanet database, including all the Kepler discoveries. (Requires a download and install to run.)

Here is a beautiful visual summary by astrophysicist Alex Parker of over 2,000 high-quality planet candidates identified by the Kepler Space Telescope, visualized as if they are orbiting a common parent star. This gives you a sense of the wide diversity in size and orbital characteristics.

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Audio Videos

Painted Stone: asteroids and asteroid mining

Painted Stone, a piece by composer/astrophysicist Alex Parker. This shows 100,000 asteroids identified by the Sloan Digital Sky survey. (In Fall 2016, the number is now up to 200,000.) The so-called Trojan asteroids that lead, and lag, Jupiter by 60 degrees on its orbit are clearly visible once you get to see the whole collection of objects.

Why is this important? The asteroids might be a source of resources, and a way to fuel our exploration of space. Here’s a short video by the company Planetary Resources, which is hoping to commercialize asteroid mining. (No endorsement is implied here. The following is just a good short video explaining the ‘why’ of asteroid mining.)

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APOD photos

Supernova sonata

SupernovaSonata_parker900
Source: Alex Harrison Parker, http://www.astro.uvic.ca/~alexhp/new/supernova_sonata.html

From the Astronomy Picture of the Day, May 26, 2011. The Supernova sonata is a piece of music composed using the data from the most distant supernovas. Details on the method used, and the background of the composer, Alex Harrison Parker, can be found via the links.

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Videos

Space Oddity on the ISS

This video has received over 30 millions views since the astronaut Chris Hadfield posted it in 2013. David Bowie considers it the ‘most poignant’ cover of his song.

A perfect example the Equivalence Principle in action, and a good intro to our discussion of local frames, the General Theory of Relativity, and so forth…