Discord – Mike Goldsmith ***

Subtitled ‘the story of noise’ this is a book about noise as nuisance, noise as literal discord and just what noise is – through the ages.

When I started the book I was thrilled – there really hasn’t been a good book about sound that I’ve come across, and inevitably this book puts in place a lot of the science of sound, as well as what turns it into noise. The early part is truly fascinating.

It’s very interesting in terms of noise as nuisance just how far the concept goes back, and also a delight to see the various early legal and scientific attempts to quantify it and control it. Overall, though, the plodding historical approach, almost decade by decade, does become horribly repetitive as the book continues and this really makes what would otherwise have been a truly excellent book a bit of a chore to read.

My other sadness is that there isn’t more about discordant music. As far as I have spotted there are only two references to this, first in the classical era and then 20th century. This misses some great possibilities – for example the way in Tudor/Elizabethan music, effectively a different key was used for ascending and descending note sequences, producing some startling discords – or for that matter the way Bach made use of them and then was Bowdlerized by the Victorians who thought he didn’t mean it.

Overall, then, a great start to an excellent concept, but the book doesn’t deliver consistently and can be more than a bit repetitious.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...

Search This Blog