randform

I am currently a bit concerned about the future of music perception in Berlin.

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We add the following three instruments to our unsorted and incomplete list of music instruments that deserve more attention than they get (more…)

It seems to be a London week here at randform.
sensity is an audio-visual artwork that lets you hear and see data collected by wireless sensors around in London.

youtube URL

The band tonrand doesn’t yet have a real homepage (soon to come),
contacts can be made via us. (nad@daytar)
music&lyrics:Niko Lai, vocals: Cat Caspari

The city church of Torgau, built in 1119 is a Hall church (since it is built in late gothic style it may have taken a long time to built it). I am making this post not because of eventually ongoing rumors that Catherine Zeta-Jones thinks about entering a convent (which I definitely won’t believe unless there is more evidence..:)) but rather in order to have an opportunity to mention that Gerhard Richter’s new windows in the dome of cologne are now on display. But of course the church’s architecture is noteworthy in itself:

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The video behind the link shows how to play drums and piano without knowing how to play drums or piano – really. It’s just time line editing: stop motion drums and piano.

a nice flash animation by dustball

I just saw that folksinger Joan Baez is singing in the Zitadelle Spandau today (tickets). Unfortunately I won’t be there.* However I would like to say at this place that I wish Joan Baez wouldn’t need to sing on such occasions as on a concert of the operation cease fire.

Another remark: the Zitadelle Spandau as being a former fortress of the 16th century is also not such a pleasant location but the more it is important that there are nice concerts.

->Joan Baez singing the answer is blowing in the wind

*addendum: I actually managed to go to the concert and arrived there in the last minute. She sang very nicely about strange stories. Interestingly the core of a folk music concert (it was my first folk music concert) seems to be that the audience sometimes forms a choir. After the “more” some more images which are sometimes a bit blurry, since my camera is not so lightsensitive.

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another mathematician’s blog on math, music, art, and stuff.
incidentally he is at TU Berlin at the moment…

A remarkable mathematical conjecture (proven 1995 by Sabitov) is that there exists no rigid bellows. This means if you have a closed volume which is formed by (triangle shaped) “plates” and if you deform it then the volume stays always constant (i.e. if it would have been a bellows then you couldnt press air out of it). This is why accordions need some elastic fabric in order to allow for deformation. May be also a useful knowledge for architecture, since it means that if you press a (closed) house on one side it would bulb on some other side.

The workshop Rigidity and polyhedral combinatorics is discussing related problems.