Well, you guys have shown where you are coming from. No wonder engineers and techs, and quite a few chemists, are considered boring and narrow minded by the educated public. Once, decades ago, Ed Dell recommended a book to me: 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain' by Betty Edwards. Basically the book says that most people who go high in the Western educational system, virtually use of the 'RIGHT SIDE' or the artistic and intuitive side of the brain, due to the extensive focus on the Left Side in the course requirements. Works for me!
Yeah, I'm 'name dropping' again. I've known and talked to Ed Dell for over 30 years.
Yeah, I'm 'name dropping' again. I've known and talked to Ed Dell for over 30 years.
diyaudio posts need a "like" button
No not really, but you know what I mean.
Brad
I think John is saying that everyone in a Western university emerges as a highly competent objective scientist/engineer (whatever their discipline), but sadly they have lost their artistic side as a result. If only that were true! We would at least then have competent administrators, cheap reliable products and excellent healthcare even if life then became a bit boring. I'm not convinced that much modern education exercises either side of the brain! (And I am not entirely convinced about this Right/Left Brain dichotomy anyway - it seems rather too simplistic for such an amazingly plastic organ).SY said:
Decades ago some people had their corpus callosum severed surgically (to control serious seizures) and were then unable to integrate perceptions and responses. We really don't get on well without both halves of our hat-rack. Not really surprising on an evolutionary basis - not much can be wasted in a competitive environment.
Thanks,
Chris
Which of course was the opposite of the answers given to the question. But don't let reality stand in the way of a good preconception and snarl opportunity.
Same as many others, I was braught up to appreciate the arts, piano lessons from 4, trombone from 8, bass guitar in later life. Enjoy painting, photography and writing peotry these days
My mum...
dorothy england
Hence the trombone playing , in't brass band.
And like Esperado I believe PCB's should look nice, mine do. I think a love of somthing like art outside of engineering helps, its a sort of yin and yang, the art and fredom of expression offsets the rigid and disciplined world of engineering.
I would still like to know what relevance the origional question had, and in what context! was it saying we are all straight minded objectives who cannot appreciate the beauty of life outside of numbers and data
My mum...
dorothy england
Hence the trombone playing , in't brass band.
And like Esperado I believe PCB's should look nice, mine do. I think a love of somthing like art outside of engineering helps, its a sort of yin and yang, the art and fredom of expression offsets the rigid and disciplined world of engineering.
I would still like to know what relevance the origional question had, and in what context! was it saying we are all straight minded objectives who cannot appreciate the beauty of life outside of numbers and data
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You are correct, John is wrong. The "right brain logical, left brain creative" hypothesis was discarded decades ago (see, for example Toga, A. W. and Thompson, P. M. (2003). "Mapping brain asymmetry". Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (1): 37–48). That's also been referenced to John quite a few times, to no apparent effect.
edit: I swapped the pop-psych mapping- read "left brain logical, right brain creative," which is the actual inaccurate trope.
The evolution of my own compositions and comprehension has been illuminating.
I read an influential book, a veritable polemic by a critic and sometime jazz musician and composer, Andre Hodier, "Since Debussy". In the absence of hearing much of the music described I was, at 13, deeply moved to pursue serial techniques, despite having had very little exposure to more traditional harmony and counterpoint. I initially didn't even understand Schoenberg's approach but I started to hack out some music. I still have remnants and they are ludicrously bad. However, when I started to have access to pianos and hear what some it it sounded like, I realized that I was learning harmony at least in negative relief --- that is, I had to eliminate things that by accident sounded consonant and at times fortuitously achieved some kind of a cadence
Another person who had a huge influence was Denis Dutton, the late philosopher at U. of Canterbury and author of The Art Instinct. He was my best friend's older brother and an avid fan of music. He would play recorded examples for us, and in fact drove my pal Doug further toward extreme antiquarian conservatism and me in the opposite direction (one passage in the Brahms 2nd piano concerto had Doug screaming "NOISE"
).Denis once played the Ives "Concord" sonata. Now that was incomprehensible to me at the time, except of course for the episodes of march music quotes and everyone's favorite movement to attempt, The Alcotts. True, the recording is among the very worst, by Aloys Kontarsky, on the defunct Time Records label (the liner notes are a snooty European avant-garde humbug, a big sneer at the unwashed). But I didn't get it at all.
As time has gone on, now 50-odd years later, I know that piece very well, and in the hands of someone like Easley Blackwood, it damn near sounds like some kind of late-late Beethoven.
But my own musical directions are very different, and I don't think dodecaphonic music makes a damn bit of sense, though there are a few "masterpieces". I think it is truly a dead end, and musicologists with some decent separation from us in time will view it thus.
Oew-Oeww, a quilt made out of old optical fibres & interconnects.
(preferably in some Victorian countryside hunting mO-tiF)
Surely you are not saying that these artistic highly subjective people get their simplistic assertions laterally inverted? You could say they are wrong, but as some of them don't recognise the concept of truth I guess in their own mind they can't be wrong because they don't accept the concept of 'wrong'.SY said:
'The Drawing Machine' Indeed....
I know this fellow very well, otherwise known as 'the drawing machine' ....Bryon Fitzpatrick
Dotted around his home walls were renderings such as this one (the photo does not do it justice) and a bunch of others....he has a simply amazing ability to make a chromed image stand out from a sheet of coloured paper, and correct to the finest details.
Jeffrey Smart's paintings are nice enough, but just that little bit too 'cartoonish' for my taste, but thanks anyway.
Dan.
Haha, that could be true, but one of the times I did go out was to Nymindegab Museum (Denmark) that displayed a collection of beautifully detailed paintings portraying life and times past....interesting history.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
I know this fellow very well, otherwise known as 'the drawing machine' ....Bryon Fitzpatrick
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Dotted around his home walls were renderings such as this one (the photo does not do it justice) and a bunch of others....he has a simply amazing ability to make a chromed image stand out from a sheet of coloured paper, and correct to the finest details.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Jeffrey Smart's paintings are nice enough, but just that little bit too 'cartoonish' for my taste, but thanks anyway.
Dan.
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I think you confuse academics with working artists. I spend most of my non-work time with visual artists and musicians, and most of them are quite articulate and down-to-earth, as well as curious and (generally) knowledgeable about science. Once you get to academics who don't actually produce art or music, the post-modern intrudes.
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