In instrumental music education, the very first thing you do is teach ear training and keyboard skills. And you do that with students who are, frankly, terrible. But anyone can learn perfect pitch (or something close to it, at least). You couple those ears with an understanding of theory, and you’re able to navigate common musical practice.

Yet in audio, I’ll bet the vast majority of people making music and working in sound have never had an equivalent training. And yet the essentials of sound, and tools like compression and EQ, are just as dependent on training your ears. You need to couple that training with a sense of theory.

Right in your browser, listen to equalization by band and amount with actual recordings.

And music software developers are starting to realize that the more you know, the more you’re likely to use their tools.

iZotope had already added extensive education to their offerings – teaching you how mastering works being a great way of getting more mastering customers. But now, they’re doing something much further-reaching, which they call Pro Audio Essentials.

And it’s not just lessons – it’s also a game.

Source: Learn audio skills as a game, free, with your ears as guide – cdm createdigitalmusic

Guy Ben-Ary has spent 4 years collaborating with scientists and other artists to develop a musical instrument controlled by a neural network bio-engineered from his own skin cells.

The “brain” of cellF is a biological neural network that started its life on the artist’s arm. Skin cells taken with a biopsy were converted into neural stem cells using Induced Pluripotent Stem cell technology. These neural stem cells were then fully differentiated into neural networks over a Multi-Electrode Array dish.

The neural network is now able to play live sessions with human musicians by controlling custom-built synthesizers. The music of the human performer is fed to the neurons as stimulation, and the neurons respond by controlling the analogue synthesizers. Both the human musician and Ben-Ary’s extended brain are thus fully interacting with each other to create improvised sound pieces.

Source: cellF, the world’s first neural synthesiser – We Make Money Not Art

For the new study, a team led by evolutionary biologist Anna Karnkowska, a postdoc, and her adviser, Vladimir Hampl, of Charles University in Prague, checked another candidate, a species in the genus Monocercomonoides. The single-celled organism came from the guts of a chinchilla that belonged to one of the lab members. The team decided to test it because it belonged to a group of microbes that scientists posited had lost their mitochondria.

When the researchers sequenced Monocercomonoides’s genome, they found no signs of mitochondrial genes (the organelles carry their own DNA). Digging deeper, they determined that it lacks all of the key proteins that enable mitochondria to function. “The definition of eukaryotic cells is that they have mitochondria,” says Karnkowska, who is now at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in Canada. “We overturn this definition.”

Monocercomonoides may not need mitochondria because of where it lives—in the intestines of chinchilla hosts, which it doesn’t appear to harm. Nutrients are abundant there, but oxygen, which mitochondria require to produce energy, is scarce. Instead of relying on mitochondria, the organism likely uses enzymes in its cytoplasm to break down food and furnish energy, the authors suggest. But energy production is not the only problem that Monocercomonoidessolved. Mitochondria provide another cellular service: synthesizing clusters of iron and sulfur that are essential helpers for a variety of proteins. It turns out that Monocercomonoides has come up with a workaround by borrowing some bacterial genes that perform the same function, the scientists reveal online today in Current Biology.

Source: First eukaryotes found without a normal cellular power supply

Photographer Jeannot Kuenzel trains his lens on the ocean’s unseen: most of his subjects are less than ten millimetres long, about the same length as two grains of rice.

Source: ‘Super macro’ photos reveal the magical world of the tiniest creatures in the sea | oceans | Earth Touch News

[You want to hear this. -egg]

For his project Velocipedia, artist/designer Gianluca Gimini asked friends and strangers to draw a men’s bicycle from memory. Then he digitally mocked up the designs.

Source: Amazingly weird results when people draw a bicycle from memory / Boing Boing

[Don’t try to tell me you haven’t wondered the same thing! -egg]

There are two main reasons why ancient Greek statues have small penises:

Firstly, they’re flaccid. If you compare their size to most flaccid male penises, they are actually not significantly smaller than real-life penises tend to be.

Secondly, cultural values about male beauty were completely different back then. Today, big penises are seen as valuable and manly, but back then, most evidence points to the fact that small penises were considered better than big ones.

[…]

All representations of large penises in ancient Greek art and literature are associated with foolish, lustful men, or the animal-like satyrs. Meanwhile, the ideal Greek man was rational, intellectual and authoritative. He may still have had a lot of sex, but this was unrelated to his penis size, and his small penis allowed him to remain coolly logical.

“Why do all old statues have such small penises?” | How To Talk About Art History

Marine biologists with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expedition in the Mariana Trench encountered a luminous red-and-yellow jellyfish in April, Scientific American reports.

It is believed to be the first time a human has ever seen this species. The scientists will continue searching the extreme ocean depths through June 10.

From the NOAA video description:

This stunningly beautiful jellyfish was seen during Dive 4 of the 2016 Deepwater Exploration of the Marianas expedition on April 24, 2016, while exploring the informally named “Enigma Seamount” at a depth of ~3,700 meters.

Scientists identified this hydromedusa as belonging to the genus Crossota. Note the two sets of tentacles — short and long. At the beginning of the video, you’ll see that the long tentacles are even and extended outward and the bell is motionless. This suggests an ambush predation mode. Within the bell, the radial canals in red are connecting points for what looks like the gonads in bright yellow.

Scientists view never-before-seen glowing jellyfish in Mariana Trench ocean depths

http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/143888807081/death-by-gps-ars-technica-what-happened-to-the

Rich people live longer than poor people. No big news there — we’ve known that health tracks wealth for quite some time now.

But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating.

Since 2001, American men among the nation’s most affluent 5 percent have seen their lifespans increase by more than two years. American women in that bracket have registered an almost three-year extension to their life expectancy.

Meanwhile, the poorest five percent of Americans have seen essentially no gains at all.

Now a three-year gain in average lifespan might not, at first glance, seem earth-shakingly significant. But consider this: If doctors could by some miracle suddenly cure all cancer, federal health officials tell us, the average overall American life expectancy would increase by just three years.

In other words, as MIT’s Michael Stepner puts it, the changes in life expectancy we’ve witnessed over the last 15 years rank as “the equivalent of the richest Americans winning the war on cancer.”

The Death Gap