Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Case of plain plagiarism?

The covers of Olivier Sacks’ Musicophilia and my recent book Iedereen is muzikaal look quite similar. A case of plain plagiarism?


Blogger Harold Schellinx figured it out:

" [..] The covers of these two books, each of which in its own way deals with 'music and the brain', are basically the same (notwithstanding the fact that the one is a portrait of Oliver Sacks, and the other not-a-portrait of Henkjan Honing :-) Both prominently show a listener enjoying music played back through a set of headphones. Both listeners have put their right hand upon the very spot where the sounds originate. This is a common gesture, often made in an attempt to shield off possible 'alien' sounds coming in from the 'outside' and get even more 'inside' the music. And both listeners wear a very private smile: their eyes are closed, thus telling us that whatever is going on, it is going on inside their heads. The pictures show their retreat from all that is space, and thus quite forcefully underline that musical hearing (contrary to the hearing of a mere succession of acoustical events, that I like to call factual) is "the manifestation of time eventuating" (as Viktor Zuckerkandl nicely put it in his 1956 Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World.) [..]" HarS Soundblog (2010)
(See also: een kijkje in de keuken [Dutch])

Monday, January 04, 2010

Is beat induction special? (Part 7)

A recording of a lecture by dr Ani Patel from the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, including an exposé on why beat induction (and/or synchronizing to a beat) might be special to 'musical animals':



ResearchBlogging.orgPatel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038


Friday, January 01, 2010

Y've got the music in ya?

Today - as start of the new year - a link to a review by Harold Schellinx of Iedereen is muzikaal, to give you a flavour of the book.
N.B. Schellinx was a fellow student from the then Utrecht based Institute of Sonology and is now an independent media-artist and -theorist, living and working in Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere.
Let it be a surprising new year!