visit the
Mira Mira website
Release date: April 25, 2009 (National DNA Day!).
The album launch party happened Saturday, Apr 25 at Elastic Arts in Chicago. It was lots of fun.
(also be sure to check out the interactive booklet!)
"This is a fine soundtrack for thinking." - Daniel C. Dennett
What is Music for Scientists?
First, it's not music about science, however much songs like "Particle Man" or "The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas" may have entertained us in middle school. This is music for scientists; music for rational thinkers, music for lovers of introspection, of logic, of holing up for a day or a year with a great book or paper or idea and really grasping the essence of what's going on. This is music for the examined life; and it is meant as a bit of a rah-rah dance for those attempting to live it.
The people who choose to live the scientific life need all the support they can get lately. Stephen Colbert has described the country as "a divided nation. Not between Democrats and Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms. No, we are divided between those who think with their heads, and those who know with their hearts."
Thinking with one's head has never seemed like such a bad way to understand the world to me, but unfortunately Colbert's quote is one of those either-way jokes, which would be wholeheartedly agreed upon by both of the groups it purports to represent. Not only are there people (and lots of them) who have elected to "know with their hearts" in lieu of any rational inquiry (or possible doubt), they are proud of this fact... and right now they run the country.
Why else music for scientists? I'd heard that around 80% of major museum collections aren't out in exhibits, but are in the archives: a "backstage" of sorts, where they're available for research but not general viewing. I imagined it looking like the government facility where the Ark is sent in Indiana Jones, a series of giant rooms of dusty things waiting to be catalogued. When this album was about half written, a friend of a friend offered to take me back there and let me see the 'action'. What I saw was a bunch of people — some professional scientists and some volunteers — doing concentrated work on things in which they were deeply interested. I saw a group of women preparing bird skeletons for display (and the bug room in which, beforehand, the bird carcasses are reduced to skeleton-plus-tendons by helpful flesh-eating beetles). I met an insect researcher who had several tarantulae, a black widow and a Madagascarian hissing cockroach above his desk. I got to hold the tarantula.
It's not my point that everyone should be a scientist, or that scientists are doing better work than the rest of us or deserve some sort of exalted moral status above sanitation workers or cops or teachers or — you name it
. You don't even have to like spiders or hissing cockroaches. Science isn't all squirmy: there's fascinating research being done on consciousness and hearing and genetic evolution and whatever's coming after string theory. What I will put forward, though, is that thinking like a scientist is underrated — forming testable ideas about how a part of the world works and then figuring out the best way to test them, and then incorporating those results into your worldview — that's how you really learn things, and that's how we move forward as a society, as an American tribe— and as a world.
