In the book, a kid names Kit gets plucked from his hand-to-mouth existence busking on the streets of a nasty little city on a nasty little planet and turned into Andy Nebula, the next “Sensation Single,” all on the strength of a computer’s analysis of what teens want.

Looks like I might have been on to something. A new study from Emory University suggests that if you record the brain activity of teens while they’re listening to new songs, you can make a pretty good stab at predicting the eventual popularity of those songs.

The study was conducted by Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist (no, I’d never heard of such a thing before, either) and director of Emory’s Center for Neuropolicy, and Sara Moore, an economics research specialist in his lab. The results are being published by The Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Back in 2006, as part of a study into how peer pressure affects teenagers’ opinions, Berns collected 120 songs by relatively unknown musicians without recording contracts from MySpace pages. Then he had 27 kids, aged 12 to 17, listen to the songs while their brains were being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The teens were also asked to rate each song on a scale from one to five. Unknown songs were used to ensure that the teens were hearing them for the first time.

Three years later, while watching “American Idol” with his two young daughters, Berns suddenly heard a song he recognized from that study (“Apologize,” by One Republic), and realized that it had become a hit.

And then he had a brainstorm. “It occurred to me,” he said, “that we had this unique data set of the brain responses of kids who listened to songs before they got popular. I wondered if we could have predicted that hit.”

He went back to the data he’d collected in 2006 and ran a comparative analysis—and discovered a statistically significant correlation between the brain responses in his group of adolescent study participants and the popularity of the songs, as measured by their sales figures from 2007 to 2010: brain responses could predict about one third of the songs that would eventually sell more than 20,000 copies.

The majority of the songs were flops (as, let’s face it, most songs are), with hardly any sales at all. Only three of them were certified hits, with more than 500,000 unit sales. Interestingly, the data was even better at predicting flops than successes: about 90 percent of the songs that drew a mostly weak response from the teens’ neural reward centers went on to sell fewer than 20,000 units.

Meanwhile, the teens’ conscious ratings of the songs did not correlate with the songs’ future sales at all.

Put simply, they were probably thinking too hard: as Berns puts it, “You have to stop and think, and your thoughts may be colored by whatever biases you have, and how you feel about revealing your preferences to a researcher.” Your brain, on the other hand, is entirely honest: you can’t lie to an fMRI.

Berns is the first to admit that this research is just a “baby step.”

“I want to know where ideas come from, and why some of them become popular and others don’t,” he says. “It’s ideas and the way that we think that determines the course of human history.”

But somewhere, you know there’s a record executive already trying to figure out how run brain-scans on focus groups. Because who wouldn’t want to take the guess work out of manufacturing a hit song?

Let me save them the trouble. I have just at this moment come up with the lyrics for a sure-fire number-one hit:

“You said you’d always be my guy/You left, your brain scan tells me why/When I’m with you you always lie/But you can’t lie to fMRI!”

Lady GaGa, call me. We’ll talk.

In real life, alas, music is primarily an auditory rather than visual experience. Although there is certainly interest to be had in watching a musician live (and, as I wrote recently, what we see may even influence our impression of the sounds produced, at least when it comes to percussionists), we’re generally able to enjoy music just fine, and sometimes better, without any visual component at all: hence the people you see closing their eyes at symphonies. (Not the snoring ones, the other ones.)

But a number of researchers have found ways to make music visible—perhaps not quite in Disney fashion, but in a fascinating way all the same.

Chief among these is Bernard Richardson of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University in Wales.

For many years, the school’s “acoustic group” has used a technique called “holographic interferometry” to study the vibrations of musical instruments. These vibrations are tiny: on the order of a micron (one thousandth of a millimeter). A hologram is a record of a light field, the light bouncing off of an object in all directions, created using a laser. A hologram allows the light field to be reconstructed so that the eye sees the object, apparently in three dimensions, even when the object itself is no longer present.

Holographic interferometry as applied to musical instruments involves creating a holographic record of the light bouncing off the vibrating instrument using a laser beam that has been split into an illuminating beam and a reference beam. The areas that vibrate the most show up as patterns of interference, basically dark bands on the image.

The results are both beautiful and informative.

As Richardson puts it, “Guitar-making is a compromise between stiffness and flexibility. The struts on the underside of the soundboard help to create a lightweight but strong plate which creates lots of sound in response to the vibrations of the strings. At low frequencies, the guitar plate moves back and forth not unlike the piston of a loudspeaker.”

In the holographic images, at low frequencies (low pitch) there’s a bright line near the ribs: that’s a “nodal,” or non-moving, line. This mode of vibration, Richardson says, creates large volume changes in the air and thus produces a lot of sound.

At higher pitches the plate of the soundboard divides into distinct patches separated by nodal lines. Not as much sound radiates from these modes, but they color the sound: and since these patterns are different for different instruments, the shape of these patterns is a visual representation of the unique voices of various stringed instruments.

As the frequency continues to increase, the vibrating patches between the nodal lines get smaller and smaller. “Studies of these vibrations and the way they convey energy of the vibrating strings as sound to the listener can assist makers to ‘fine tune’ the tone quality of their instruments,” Richardson comments.

But it’s not just string instruments whose sound can be visualized. I played various brass instruments in high school: primarily trumpet and French horn, but I tried my hand at everything at one point or another, including trombone…which was why a story headlined “Shock wave from trombone filmed” on the BBC News website caught my eye.

Back in 1995 Mico Hirschberg of the Eindhove University of Technology posited the notion that trombones are capable of producing intense pressure waves that could even briefly exceed the speed of sound. Now Kazuyoshi Takayama and Kioynobu Ohtani from Tohoku University’s Institute of Fluid Science have confirmed that idea: not only that, they’ve captured it visually.

They used a technique called schlieren photography that can image variations in the refractive index (the speed of light in a given medium) in air. Shock waves create a stark, sudden change in the refractive index…and sure enough, in their video (which looks rather romantic, actually, since it’s of a trombone playing in front of a big round white background that looks like the full moon), you can see curved shock waves issuing forth from the instrument’s bell.

The researchers measured the pressure at the instrument’s mouthpiece, in the middle of its length, and at the output, and discovered that a train of compression waves built up through the trombone’s length, emerging from the bell as shock waves that travelled briefly at about one percent above the speed of sound.

Such shock waves presumably issue from the bells of other brass instruments, too, especially trumpets…

Just like in Fantasia.

I always heard that film was “ahead of its time.” Guess this is the proof!

(The photo: Regina Lyric Light Opera’s 1989 production of The Music Man, featuring the song “Seventy-Six Trombones.” I played Charlie Cowell, the rather villainous anvil salesman. I’m not in the photo.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Willett Duo with their rendition of “Steamed-Rice Mommy’s Coming to Town,” inspired by the gripping real-life saga of…supper.

It provides 100 percent of your dailycuteness requirement!

Click to play: Steamed Rice Mommy’s Coming to Town

(The photo: Me and Alice, of course.)

By “that,” I mean the process of getting this new computer up and running to my satisfaction. Yes, the new monitor arrived last week, and I spent a few happy (well, mostly happy) hours with plug-ins and cables and drives (oh, my!), losing hours of productivity in order to get a device that is supposed to enhance my productivity to the point where I can actually be productive on it. But it is ever thus, and things seem to be in good working order now, with the old computer still standing by and ready to go in case I suddenly realize I’ve forgotten to transfer something I really need. (Which has already happened about three times.)

But that “that” isn’t the only “that” that I meant when I said “that” was fun. The other “that” that was fun was Regina Lyric Musical Theatre‘s annual fundraising brunch, the first of two installments of which took place on Sunday at the Hotel Saskatchewan Radisson Plaza.

I’ve been involved with Regina Lyric Musical Theatre (formerly called Regina Lyric Light Opera Society, and henceforth to be referred to simply as “Lyric” for the sake of my typing fingers), for (gulp!) more than 20 years ago.

Back when I lived in Weyburn, I was one of the founding members of Crocus 80 Theatre (formed in 1980, in case you couldn’t guess), and eventually rose to the presidency of that august community theatre troupe. When I came to Regina in late 1988 I naturally expected that my ongoing theatrical activities would be focused on Regina Little Theatre, one of the oldest little theatres in Canada…but, see, Lyric did musicals. And I sing. And so…Lyric became my primary theatrical home, rather than RLT (though I have acted in and directed RLT productions over the years).

I was almost immediately drafted to the board of Lyric, and eventually became president, and for many years, I was in every single Lyric production. I can’t say that any more, and I’m no longer on the board, but I continue to be publicity director and I also design posters and programs (oh, and look after the website). And I do perform frequently with Lyric…which is what I was doing Sunday.

Lyric’s musical brunch is a terrific event that offers a great brunch, followed by more than an hour of Broadway-based entertainment. It’s been directed for many years by Jane Ursan (although I directed it a couple of times about a decade ago), and each year she puts together a fabulous line-up of songs, all built around a theme. Sometimes it’s been a particular composer (Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein), but this year it was called From Camelot to Cabaret: The 1960s Broadway Revolution, and featured songs from the amazing shows of that decade. The show features songs from Camelot, Bye, Bye Birdie, Do Re Mi, The Fantasticks, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, 110 in the Shade, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Oliver, Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Funny Girl, Sweet Charity, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and many more, finishing with a rousing rendition of a medley from Hair. (That medley is notable from my point of the view for the fact that I play tambourine on “Let the Sun Shine In.” Tambourines, I have discovered, hurt. The palm I banged it against was sore for a day, my right arm felt like it would fall off, and one night at rehearsal I came within about two minutes of tambourining of developing a blister on my thumb. Considering that, as someone joked the other day, the tambourine was invented so bands had an excuse to put a pretty girl on stage, the fact I’m playing it is odd, to say the least!)

Most years I’ve sung a solo, but this year for a change I was in a trio, “Two Ladies” from Cabaret (“Biddle-dee-diddle-dee, two ladies, biddle-dee-diddle-dee-dee, two ladies, biddle-dee-diddle-dee-dee, and I’m the only man…ja!”), a song whose character is best summed up by pointing out it takes place entirely behind a blanket and I finish it shirtless and with my face covered in lipstick.

It’s a fun song, and it was particularly fun because one of the the two ladies who sang it with me was my real-life lady, my wife, Margaret Anne.

And what made that special was that, although there are many reasons I am fond of Lyric, the reason that stands head and shoulders and an Everest-sized mountain peak above the others is that it was through Lyric that I met Margaret Anne.

And , in turn, means that without Lyric, I would not have my amazing, beautiful, wonderful daughter, Alice…whose picture, looking pensive, adorns the start of this post.

If you happen to be in the Regina area, I hope you’ll consider coming out to this Sunday’s repeat performance. Brunch is at 12 noon, and the singing follows at about 1:15. Tickets are $45, and available from Bach & Beyond in the Golden Mile Centre.  I’d love to see you there!

Biddle-dee-biddle-dee-dee!

The photo: My daughter, Alice, age 9.

Narrator Ezra Knight

Narrator Ezra Knight does an absolutely fabulous job, not surprising considering what an accomplished actor he is. In fact, as I started listening to the book, I had to get out my print copy because it sounded so good I actually thought they must have rewritten the introduction–but no, those were my words!

According to a letter the publisher sent along with the two copies of the audiobook I received, this is the first Enslow Publishers title to be recorded as a full audio book. I feel honoured!

Also, I’m really enjoying listening to my own book. I usually read my own stuff out loud. Nice to hear someone else for a change!

It’s the official US Army Song Book from the Second World War. It begins, as you’d expect, with the Star Spangled Banner (three verses!), but the complete contents is eclectic, to say the least:

1. The Star Spangled Banner
2. Alma Mater
3. Aloha Oe
4. America
5. America, the Beautiful
6. Anchors Aweigh
7. The Army Air Corps
8. Song of the Army Engineer
9. Auld Lang Syne
10. Battle Hymn of the Republic
11. Bombed
12. The Caissons Go Rolling Along
13. Parody Field Artillery Song
14. Carry Me Back to Old Virginny
15. Casey Jones
16. Cindy
17. Colombo
18. Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean
19. Crash On! Artillery
20. Dixie
21. Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes
22. Arms for the Love of America (The Army Ordnance Song) by Irving Berlin
23. For Her Lover Who Was Far Away
24. For Sev’n Long Years
25. God Bless America
26. God of Our Fathers
27. Good Night, Ladies!
28. Home, Boys, Home! & The Infantry (there are two number 28′s: a SNAFU, I guess)
29. A Home on the Range
30. Honey Dat I Love So Well
31. I’ll Tell You Where They WEre
32. The Infantry (different than the previous one by this name)
33. It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
34. I’ve Been Workin’ on de Railroad
35. Juanita
36. K-K-K-Katy, plus parodies of the chorus of K-K-K-Katy, such as “K-K-K-K. P., Dirty old K.P., That’s the only Army Job that I abhor…” or the even more evocative “C-c-c-cootie, Horrible cootie, You’re the only b-b-b-bug that I abhor…”)
37. The Last Round-Up
38. Let Me Call You Sweetheart
39. The Man on the Flying Trapeze
40. The Marines’ Hymn
41. The Mintrels Sing of an English King
42. The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga
43. The Mountain Battery
44. My Buddy
45. My Wild Irish Rose (plus a parody, “My wild eyed cadet,/He ain’t learned nothing yet,/He noses her down/When close to the ground…”)
46. The New River Train
47. Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
48. Oh! Susanna
49. The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be
50. Old Joe Clark (not a song about the former Canadian Prime Minister)
51. Old King Cole (with a modified chorus glorifying the “Fighting Infantry”: each chorus adds another rank, so the final chorus runs, “The Army’s gone to hell,” said the generals;”What’s my next command?” said the colonels;/”Where’re my boots and spurs?” said the majors;/”We want ten days’ leave,” said the captains;/”We do all the work,” said the shavetails;/”Right by squads, squads right,” said the sergeants;/”Beer, beer, beer,” said the privates,/”Merry men are we./There’s none so fair as can compare/With the Fighting Infantry.”
52. The Old Plantation
53. On, Brave Old Army Team
54. Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag
55. Pop! Goes the Weasel
56. The Raw Recruit
57. Red River Valley
58. She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain
59. Slum and Gravy & Sons of Randolph (there are two number 59s)
60. Smiles
61. Song of the Signal Corps
62. A Stein Song
63. Tammany
64. There’s a Long, Long Trail
65. Where Do We Go From Here?
66. Yankee Doodle
67. You’re in the Army Now

It’s an interesting mixture of sentimental old favorites, patriotic  songs, and songs poking fun at Army life. I like, for one example, Bombed:

We were bombed last night, bombed the night before

And we’re going to be bombed tonight as we never were bombed before.

When we’re bombed, we’re as scared as we can be,

They can bomb the whole darn Army if they don’t bomb me.

CHORUS

They’re over us, over us,

One little cave for the four of us,

Glory be to God, there are no more of us

Or they’d surely bomb the whole darned crew.

But I think my favorite part of the book is the warning you can see on the image of the inside front cover:

“This book is the property of the United States Government and its contents may be used only with the military services.”

Which means, of course, that every time since 1941 that anyone has sung “Home on the Range” or “That Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” they’ve been breaking military regulations.

I’ve sung both many times myself. I feel so ashamed.

But that’s all recorded music. Live music remains far rarer. Live musicians may occasionally show up in a public space, but you generally have to seek them out.

Which raises an interesting question. Do we perceive music differently when we watch it being played than we do when we are only listening to a recording?

Michael Schutz is both a noted percussionist and a noted researcher. Currently an assistant professor at McMaster University, he runs a research lab dedicated to studying the cognitive science of music, and the visual component of music is something he’s very interested in.

As he notes in an article published by the Acoustical Society of America, “while purists may argue that music is an auditory experience and therefore visual information is irrelevant, the enormous investment in clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects in live concerts demonstrates audiences clearly respond to and appreciate visual information as part of the musical experience.”

“Clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects” is rather too broad a collection of items to serve as the focus of a practical experiment, so Schutz decided to look at a much narrower question, i.e., “Do the gestures used by percussionists have any musical value irrespective of their acoustic consequences?”

This has long been a matter of debate. Some percussionists are adamant that using a sharp wrist motion produces a more staccato sound than a fluid motion. Others are adamant that gestures don’t matter: a percussion instrument will make the same sound if struck with the same amount of force no matter what gesture is used to produce the blow.

It turns out that they’re both right–or both wrong, depending on how you look at it–because there’s a difference between sound (acoustics) and the way that sound is experienced (perception).

Schutz and colleagues conducted two experiments. In the first, they recorded a world-renowned percussionist performing notes using long and short gestures on a professional-quality marimba. Participants rated the duration of each note twice: once while viewing the gesture, once just by listening.

The result: notes produced by long and short gestures were indistinguishable when judged by audio alone, but were judged to be significantly different when the accompanying gesture was seen…even though the participants had been specifically instructed to ignore visual information when making their ratings. Or, as Schutz puts it, in what at first glance seems a self-contradiction, “while gesture fails to alter the sound of the note, it…alters the way the note sounds.”

Earlier studies had suggested that visual information does not influence ratings of note length, but Schutz suspected his experiment revealed such an influence because of the particularly strong visual connection between the gesture of the marimba player and the sound produced. He predicted the results would only apply to percussive sounds, where the motion producing the sound is clearly visible.

To test that prediction, the researchers paired the original videos with notes produced, not only by the marimba, but by piano, French horn, clarinet and voice. A second set of participants followed the same procedure as before…and found that non-percussive sounds were unaffected by the visuals…not too surprising, since we obviously know that a man hitting a marimba won’t produce the sound of someone singing. (Interestingly, some visual influence was found in the piano…which is technically a percussive instrument.)

All of which seems to indicate that, at least for percussion, there is a very strong link between the sight of a live musician playing an instrument and the listeners’ perception of the sound…and that watching a percussionist play live is a very different experience from listening to a recording.

Percussionists, Schutz suggests, use this “musical illusion” to “align audience perception with performer intent.”

Quite likely, other musicians make use of similar illusions. Pete Townshend’s wind-milling arm may not produce any different sound from an electric guitar than the less flamboyant display of another musician–but that’s not the way we perceive it.

Our brains are so strongly affected by visual stimuli that we literally cannot ignore them…which means that, while recorded music has its uses, it can never replace the impact of hearing, and seeing, music performed live.

Bonus: no silly, uncomfortable earbuds required.

It begins:

What could be better than a wonderful Christmas brunch onstage at the Conexus Arts Centre?

How about a wonderful Christmas brunch followed by a performance by the South Saskatchewan Youth Orchestra?

That’s exactly the hard-to-imagine-a-better-than event scheduled for this Sunday. A silent auction and food kick off the event at 11 a.m., with the concert to follow. Conductor Alan Denike will lead the 45-member orchestra, made up of players whose ages range from 12 to their early 20s, in Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite, selections from Carmen by Georges Bizet, and Leroy Anderson’s Christmas Festival, before finishing up with sing-along carols.

There’s something surreal about watching a symphony orchestra decked out in iterations of green and white playing Prokofiev and Mendelssohn, but even if clothes make the man, they don’t make (or unmake) the concert, and the Regina Symphony Orchestra gave another terrific performance Saturday night at the Conexus Arts Centre.

The highlight was Prokofiev’s “Second Piano Concerto,” considered one of the most difficult pieces of piano music ever composed — and yet, so well played by soloist Hung-Kuan Chen that if conductor Victor Sawa hadn’t told the audience how difficult it was they might not have suspected it — unless they were among the half of the crowd who could see Chen’s fingers flying up and down the keyboard at a speed that might have made you suspect a camera trick in a filmed performance.