SMPC13
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SMPC Day 3: Session 3 (Evolution)
Don’t ask me why, but I fancied carrot cake for lunch on Saturday. I was not really hungry enough for a meal but I wanted to keep trying new food here in Canada and although I like carrot cake in the UK I was reliably informed that it was better here. This turned out to be true! I returned to the conference on a sugar high, having consumed one of my five a day (no, really…) The afternoon session of Saturday featured a session on evolution. The subject of music as evolution has proved very popular in recent years following the discovery of bone flutes aged to around 35,000 years…
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SMPC Day 3: Session 2 (Structure and Syntax)
The mid morning of Saturday featured a neat little session called ‘Structure and Syntax’ but which might more accurately have been labelled ‘Rhythm’, since all 3 speakers were interested in the structure and syntax of the beat to our music (and, as we shall see, our speech). The first speaker was Ani Patel (Tufts University, USA). Ani introduced us to a new approach for the historical study of musical rhythm. I found it to be a very intriguing idea, as very little in the way of traditional scientific analysis is done on historical data. But in music we are of course blessed with many great volumes of musical score going…