I love this three-part BBC series that reviews the history of electricity starting with Isaac Newton & Francis Hauksbee and ending with levitating, room-temperature super conductors.

Episode 1: Spark

Episode one tells the story of the very first 'natural philosophers' who started to unlock the mysteries of electricity. This is the story about what happened when the first real concerted effort was made to understand electricity; how we learned to create and store it, before finally creating something that enabled us to make it at will - the battery.

Episode 2: The Age of Invention

Just under 200 years ago scientists discovered something profound, that electricity is connected to another of nature's most fundamental forces - magnetism. In the second episode, Professor Jim Al-Khalili discovers how harnessing the link between magnetism and electricity would completely transform the world, allowing us to generate a seemingly limitless amount of electric power which we could utilise to drive machines, communicate across continents and light our homes. This is the story of how scientists and engineers unlocked the nature of electricity in an extraordinary century of innovation and invention.

Episode 3: Revelations and Revolutions

Electricity is not just something that creates heat and light, it connects the world through networks and broadcasting. After centuries of man's experiments with electricity, the final episode tells the story of how a new age of real understanding dawned - how we discovered electric fields and electromagnetic waves. Today we can hardly imagine life without electricity - it defines our era. As our understanding of it has increased so has our reliance upon it, and today we're on the brink of a new breakthrough, because if we can understand the secret of electrical superconductivity we could once again transform the world.

 

 


Source: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/01/365_days_1_the_.html

In 1981, Michael Mills' Christian radio shows often discussed hidden satanic messages found in rock music. One of his most popular claims is that Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven contains the following backwards lyrics:

Oh here’s to my sweet Satan.
The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan.
He will give those with him 666.
There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.

Unfortunately for Michael Mills, scientific studies (like Subliminal messages: Between the devil and the media. Vokey, John R) have shown "no evidence to support such a claim and suggest that the apparent presence of backward messages in popular music is more a function of active construction on the part of the perceiver than of the existence of the messages themselves."

 These MP3s are from a tape of one of Michael Mills' radio shows.

MP3:

  1. Introduction (2:36)
  2. Adam Ant and Bow Wow Wow (7:52)
  3. New Lyrical Jargon (3:12)
  4. Show ID (0:31)
  5. Black Sabbath (1:02)
  6. The Beatles (3:53)
  7. AC/DC (6:34)
  8. Led Zeppelin (4:47)
  9. Dan Folgeberg (0:18)
  10. Rush (1:16)
  11. Lucifer's Friend (0:09)
  12. Prince (0:09)
  13. Grateful Dead (0:25)
  14. Meatloaf (0:16)
  15. Judas Priest (0:15)
  16. Blondie (0:16)
  17. The Rhythm Devils (0:11)
  18. Ozzy Osbourne (2:09)
  19. Spirit (0:16)
  20. Electric Light Orchestra (2:16)
  21. Sound (0:35)
  22. Fleetwood Mac (0:18)
  23. Kiss (3:16)
  24. The Beatles (1:02)
  25. The Eagles (2:10)
  26. Santana (0:31)
  27. The Rolling Stones (0:50)
  28. David Bowie (0:15)
  29. Queen (1:23)
  30. Black Sabbath (1:03)
  31. End (2:18)

 

Source: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/01/365_days_1_the_.html


Source: http://boingboing.net/2012/03/30/suzanne-ciani-music-of-atari.html
If you've ever heard Meco's classic space disco version of the Star Wars theme, or played the Xenon pinball machine, or saw the original Atari TV commercials, then you've heard the pioneering electronic music of Suzanne Ciani. From her earliest days studying with Don Buchla at UC Berkeley and Max Mathews at Stanford to her commercial work in the 1970s and 1980s to Grammy-nominated New Age music in the 1990s, Ciani has been a prolific composer and electronic music innovator. Here is a 1979 interview with her about creating the sounds for Bally's Xenon pinball machine:

The excellent Finders Keepers Records has just issued Suzanne Ciani: Lixiviation, a fantastic collection of her early recordings -- TV spots, corporate IDs, advertising jingles, and other short bits of brilliance.
From Finders Keepers:

A classically trained musician with an MA in music composition this American Italian pianist was first introduced to the synthesizer via her connections in the art world when abstract Sculptor and collaborator Harold Paris introduced Suzanne to synthesizer designer Don Buchla who created the instrument that would come to define Ciani's synthetic sound (The Buchla Synthesiser). Cutting her teeth providing self-initiated electronic music projects for art galleries, experimental film directors, pop record producers and proto-video nasties Suzanne soon located to New York where she quickly became the first point of call for electronic music services in both the underground experimental fields and the commercial advertising worlds alike. Counting names like Vangelis and Harald Bode amongst her close friends Suzanne and her Ciani Musica company became the testing ground for virtually any type of new developments in electronic and computerized music amassing an expansive vault of commercially unexposed electronic experiments which have remained untouched for over 30 years… until now.

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[gallery columns="4"]

Suzanne Ciani is an Italian American pianist and music composer who found early success with innovative electronic music. She received classical music training at Wellesley College and obtained her M.A. in music composition in 1970 at University of California, Berkeley where she met and was influenced by the synthesizer designer, Don Buchla. She studied computer generated music with John Chowning and Max Mathews at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Labs in the early 70′s.
In 1974 she formed her own company, Ciani/Musica, and, using a Buchla Analog Modular Synthesizer, composed scores for television commercials for corporations such as Coca-Cola,Merrill Lynch, AT&T and General Electric. Besides music, her specialty was reproducing sound effects on the synthesizer that recording engineers had found difficult to record properly; the sound of a bottle of Coke being opened and poured was one of Ciani’s most widely recognized works, and was used in a series of radio and television commercials in the late 1970s. Such was the demand for her services that at one point she was doing up to 50 sessions a week. Her sound effects also appeared in video games (the pinball game Xenon featured her voice).
In 1977, Ciani provided the sound effects for Meco’s disco version of the Star Wars soundtrack, which was certified platinum. Ciani scored the Lily Tomlin movie The Incredible Shrinking Woman distinguishing her as the first solo female composer of a major Hollywood film, Lloyd Williams’s 1975 experimental film Rainbow’s Children and a 1986 documentary about Mother Teresa, as well the TV daytime serial (“soap opera”) One Life to Live.


Source: http://boingboing.net/2012/03/30/suzanne-ciani-music-of-atari.html




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