COMMUNICATION

Ponto Cor Delicadezas.

crudistore via Instagram

Que trabalho maravilhoso!!

Tissue Series

These pieces are made of Japanese mulberry paper and the gilded edges of old books. They are constructed by a technique of rolling and shaping narrow strips of paper called quilling or paper filigree. Quilling was first practiced by Renaissance nuns and monks who are said to have made artistic use of the gilded edges of worn out bibles, and later by 18th century ladies who made artistic use of lots of free time.

- by Lisa Nilsson

Muito bom!!

Resist the road-rage on the protein super highway.

Be sure to check out all our science GIFs here for your studyblrs, teacher websites, presentations, or mind-numbing entertainment! Just please keep our name on there and don’t sell them! :D

“Throwback 2019”

Visit Instagram Profile > Hisa instagram

yuri mizutani Original_2015

Chopin, Bach used human speech ‘cues’ to express emotion in music

Music has long been described, anecdotally, as a universal language.

This may not be entirely true, but we’re one step closer to understanding why humans are so deeply affected by certain melodies and modes.

A team of McMaster researchers has discovered that renowned European composers Frédéric Chopin and Johann Sebastian Bach used everyday speech “cues” to convey emotion in some of their most famous compositions. Their findings were recently published in Frontiers of Psychology: Cognition.

Their research stemmed from an interest in human speech perception — the notion that “happy speech” for humans tends to be higher in pitch and faster in timing, while “sad speech” is lower and slower.

These same patterns are reflected in the delicate nuances of Chopin and Bach’s music, the McMaster team found.

To borrow from Canadian singer-songwriter Feist, we “feel it all” because the music features a very familiar cadence or rhythmic flow. It’s speaking to us in a language we understand.

“If you ask people why they listen to music, more often than not, they’ll talk about a strong emotional connection,” says Michael Schutz, director of McMaster’s MAPLE (Music, Acoustics, Perception & LEarning) Lab, and an associate professor of music cognition and percussion.

“What we found was, I believe, new evidence that individual composers tend to use cues in their music paralleling the use of these cues in emotional speech.” For example, major key or “happy” pieces are higher and faster than minor key or “sad” pieces.

The team also discovered that Bach and Chopin appear to “trade-off” their use of cues within the examined music.

Sets with larger pitch differences between major and minor key pieces had smaller timing differences, and vice versa. This may reflect efforts to balance the cues to avoid sounding trite, Schutz explains.

Schutz and Matthew Poon, a Music alumnus from the Class of 2012, began analyzing a complete body or “corpus” of three 24-piece sets by Chopin and Bach several years ago, as part of an Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) project. Poon is now a graduate student at the University of Toronto.

The pair analyzed all 48 preludes and fugues from J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1); as well as all 24 of Chopin’s Preludes (Op. 28). The pieces were chosen based on their historical significance and enduring popularity amongst performers, educators and audiences.

In order to ensure the tonal areas of each composition stayed in their stated keys, analysis was confined to the first eight complete measures — excluding pick-ups — from each of the 72 pieces.

Previous research on musical emotion has often involved manipulating existing melodies and compositions, Schutz explains. For example, transposing a melody higher or playing a song slower than written, in order to explore changes in emotional responses.

The McMaster-led study built upon that work by exploring how Bach and Chopin used emotional cues in their actual work — music still performed and enjoyed on a regular basis, hundreds of years after it was composed.

Can the same research be applied to modern pop music? Schutz says yes, although it’s much easier to analyze classical music based on the availability of sheet music and detailed notation, he offers.

Fantástico!!

What’s that green streak in front of the Andromeda galaxy? A meteor. While photographing the Andromeda galaxy last Friday, near the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower, a sand-sized rock from deep space crossed right in front of our Milky Way Galaxy’s far-distant companion. The small meteor took only a fraction of a second to pass through this 10-degree field. The meteor flared several times while braking violently upon entering Earth’s atmosphere. The green color was created, at least in part, by the meteor’s gas glowing as it vaporized. Although the exposure was timed to catch a Perseids meteor, the orientation of the imaged streak seems a better match to a meteor from the Southern Delta Aquariids, a meteor shower that peaked a few weeks earlier

Object Names: Andromeda Galaxy

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: Fritz Helmut Hemmerich

Time And Space

A Wider Set of Eyes on the Universe

After years of preparatory studies, we are formally starting an astrophysics mission designed to help unlock the secrets of the universe. 

Introducing…

the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, aka WFIRST.

With a view 100 times bigger than that of our Hubble Space Telescope, WFIRST will help unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, and explore the evolution of the cosmos. It will also help us discover new worlds and advance the search for planets suitable for life.

WFIRST is slated to launch in the mid-2020s. The observatory will begin operations after traveling about one million miles from Earth, in a direction directly opposite the sun.

Telescopes usually come in two different “flavors” - you have really big, powerful telescopes, but those telescopes only see a tiny part of the sky. Or, telescopes are smaller and so they lack that power, but they can see big parts of the sky. WFIRST is the best of worlds.

No matter how good a telescope you build, it’s always going to have some residual errors. WFIRST will be the first time that we’re going to fly an instrument that contains special mirrors that will allow us to correct for errors in the telescope. This has never been done in space before!

Employing multiple techniques, astronomers will also use WFIRST to track how dark energy and dark matter have affected the evolution of our universe. Dark energy is a mysterious, negative pressure that has been speeding up the expansion of the universe. Dark matter is invisible material that makes up most of the matter in our universe.

Single WFIRST images will contain over a million galaxies! We can’t categorize and catalogue those galaxies on our own, which is where citizen science comes in. This allows interested people in the general public to solve scientific problems.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Meu canto

Entrevista