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Ringing in the ears? Your diet could help turn it down

This study aimed to provide clinical evidence to inform the development of dietary prevention approaches for tinnitus. What they found was that fruit, fiber, dairy, and caffeine consumption all had the ability to lessen the risk of developing tinnitus. Specifically, higher fruit intake was linked to a 35% reduction in tinnitus risk; intake of dairy products with a 17% reduction in risk; caffeine with a 10% reduction; and dietary fiber with a 9% reduction.

Eno Livestream Weekend – Full Pass – Anamorph

Weekend pass to watch as many of the six “Eno” livestreams as you’d like between March 27-30. Each livestream is a unique version of “Eno”, the groundbreaking documentary about musician and artist Brian Eno that’s never the same twice. THESE ARE LIVE EVENTS. You must be watching on the date and time specified for each livestream. There is no delayed viewing. These versions of the film will never be shown again.

From Joe Boyd’s book:

In the wake of the Moors’ expulsion, playing an oud could land you in big trouble with the Inquisition, so around the courts most musicians turned to the vihuela, a small guitar-shaped instrument with six pairs of strings tuned like a lute. And the vihuela turned into the guitar.

The relationship is even clearer in Portuguese where the guitar is called Violão, which sounds a lot closer to Vihuela.

The following paragraph is a rough translation from a German book I am reading. (((thanks to Steve for letting me know about this gem of a book!))) The book is called Vita Contemplativa and is by the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. It’s been translated into many languages but I wanted to read the original. The second half of the quote really hits home. In a way social media attempts to force us to express ourselves continuously, filling every silence. Many people seem to use it in this manner.

Only silence enables us to say something unheard of. The compulsion to communicate, on the other hand, leads to the reproduction of the same, to conformism: “The difficulty today is no longer that we cannot express our opinions freely, but rather to create spaces of solitude and silence in which we can find something to say. Repressive forces no longer prevent us from expressing our opinions. On the contrary, they even force us to do so. What a liberation it is to not have to say anything for once and to be able to remain silent, because only then do we have the opportunity to create something that is increasingly rare: something that is actually worth saying.”

I added the emphasis. And later:

The compulsion to act, indeed the acceleration of life, proves to be an efficient means of control. If revolution does not seem possible today, then perhaps it is because we have no time to think. Without time, without taking a deep breath, the same thing continues. The free spirit dies out.

The compulsion we feel to constantly react to social media posts and news, but also to all messages and calls, doesn’t let us take a breath and form a coherent thought. Ours becomes a reactive life, always running after something, but never quite reaching it. Always behind. This becomes a means of control. Keep the rats running in their wheels. They will exhaust themselves and won’t be able to breathe or think. The phone has become the wheel.

Behaving like a mule, standing still, not taking orders, not being reactive at all, is the finest response to the present day rush. A mental sit-in. We can create a focus setting on the phone, press engage, and do nothing. I have my phone set up to give me a summary of notifications at 0900 and 1800. Hold my messages. Perhaps that’s even too much and I should switch to once a day, because I do notice the difference it makes.

Now add meditation to the recipe and see where that leads. Meditation is a truly radical act, the act of saying stop, wait, hold that thought. I am just sitting here minding no business at all.

And here is a photo of coffee from Seattle:

Robin Sloan on transparent tracking pixels, the invisible images that can show the sender precisely when an email was opened.

In the marketing context, I think this kind of data collection is okay — barely — but only in the aggregate, i.e. to judge the overall performance of a newsletter.
In the personal context, it’s shockingly presumptuous. An email isn’t a letter, but even so: imagine unsealing a letter, and a winking electronic transponder slips out. You would have questions for your correspondent!

and here is my favorite part:

Anyway, I wish Gmail offered an option less passive than simply declining to display the tracking pixel — maybe some way to send a fart sound streaming back into the sender’s inbox…

LINK

Ah, Metheny’s hair fits perfectly!! Via Cord Jefferson – Tumblr + Wikipedia

Also, Mapquest lets you name the Gulf however you want. I dedicated it to my father – LINK.

In English, we pay attention. In French, we make it. In German, we gift it. In Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, we lend it, as though attention is something that can be used and then duly returned. In Finnish, attention is gathered or added, like a spice that seasons perception. It’s a broad linguistic trend that begs a couple of questions: Are we using this resource efficiently? Are we paying attention to what we should be?
On the Beauty of Distraction | House of Beautiful Business

I like this part:

When performing our lives trumps the actual living of them, attention becomes a commodity. The market vies for our time and focus, knowing there’s a direct correlation between what we pay attention to and what we, quite literally, pay for. This commodification feeds into a larger societal pressure to constantly do more, achieve more, and be more. We live in an era of relentless ambition, where success is often measured by how much we produce and how little we rest. The hustle culture further fragments our attention, as we’re constantly pushed to divide our focus among numerous goals and tasks.

I bought a bar of chocolate. On the back was printed:

Our chocolate is infused with a 528hz love sound frequency to raise your vibe.

I was intrigued because I hadn’t heard of this love frequency thing. Calculations showed that 528hz would be a very sharp C5 on the piano – since with A4 tuned to 440 the C5 should be 523.251hz. I sent a message to Robby who in addition to being an amazing drummer also plays kora and guitar and piano and sings and… is an excellent piano tuner. I asked Robby whether he ever received a request to tune a piano to make C5 = 528hz. I imagined that Santa Fe or Sedona would be places where that could happen. Robby replied that nobody had ever asked him to tune a love-piano. He hadn’t heard about this frequency either BUT had inherited a tuning fork from another piano tuner that was 528 cycles. He never had occasion to use it and had wondered what that was about. Perhaps SOMEONE had requested a piano tuned to this frequency?

Ottmar: I wonder how they arrived at 528hz being the love frequency?
Robby: Because it is sharp.
Ottmar: Love has a sharp edge?
Robby: Cuts like a knife.
Ottmar: Mystery solved.

Do you remember that ad for Memorex cassette tapes? Is it live or is it Memorex?

I think we will be asking ourselves Is it real or is it AI? constantly during the next few years.

If you want to understand the cataclysmic impact generative AI is about to have on the film industry, this one short video should make it very clear. – Film sets of the near future: Just as fake as the ‘film’ itself

Only one shot is real – the behind-the-scenes footage at the end of the video.

I think that all streaming platforms, video as well as music, need to be compelled by law to label any and all AI content. People can choose to listen to AI content and watch it, but it needs to be a choice. It will also be the only way we can choose to support the work of people in the film and music industry.

You may remember the Big Cave versions I created from the guitar recordings I made last August in the cave – LINK.

Ten days ago, on my way back from Santa Fe, I wondered whether Rain Melody, the last track on the Rain Poems album, would yield a good Big Cave version. So I worked on it. I muted the rain and only left the river in the background.

This track is my gift to you this season. You can download the 16/44.1kHz version HERE

The Big Cave album is only available on Backstage at the moment but will be released to Bandcamp sometime in the Spring.

I wish you Happy Holidays.

Well researched article by Liz Pelly about going ons at Spotify. Here are three short quotes:

The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly

Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.

Before the year was out, the music writer David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video content.

It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.

And then you can add AI into the mix and even remove the musicians who anonymously create the “low-cost playlist filler” and replace them with near no-cost filler…

AI’s Walking Dog – Boston Review:

In an era when “cultivated” people purport to care so much about the origins of the stuff they put into their mouths, will they be as cautious with the stuff they put into their minds? Will they be able to resist the information sausage meat that AI is about to serve them?

I used the Eleven app to hear AI read this article in the voice of Burt Reynolds. It was a very enjoyable way to hear the article while I was walking. That doesn’t take anything away from what Eno writes. I agree with him. Neal Stephenson famously said that it will take humanity fifty years to figure out the internet… how long will it take us to get over, and integrate LLMs or, if it ever happens, actual AGI? What a time to be alive!

Humans may not have survived without Neanderthals:

Far from triumphantly breezing out of Africa, modern humans went extinct many times before going on to populate the world, new studies have revealed.
The new DNA research has also shed new light on the role our Neanderthal cousins played in our success.
While these early European humans were long seen as a species which we successfully dominated after leaving Africa, new studies show that only humans who interbred with Neanderthals went on to thrive, while other bloodlines died out.

Strolling through Nara, I step into a gallery and discover fifty wooden sculptures.

It is the opening of the show and two old men are sitting in the room with the sculptures. One of them speaks English. He introduces us to the artist Etsuya Ichikawa. Out comes the Google Translator and Ichikawa explains that he had wanted to create 100 sculptures for this show but the summer was so hot that he couldn’t work for more than a few hours each day, and therefore only finished 50. He says that the sculptures represent the smoke from incense.

Here is a photo from the incense series I took a few years ago.

I look up Etsuya Ichikawa. He was born in Nara in 1940. After graduating high school, Etsuya enrolled in the carving department of Tokyo University of the Arts, where he learned wood, stone, and bronze carving. He took a special interest in wood carving and began working in Kobe, where he produced contemporary works that garnered praise both in Japan and abroad.

The second old man is a painter who met Ichikawa at the university in Tokyo in the late 50s. Friends for sixty years.