Have Headphones Changed Your World?

How Headphones Changed the World by Derek Thompson - The Atlantic:

Science says we’re full of it. Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song — loud or soft — reduces overall performance for both extraverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music with lyrics to lower scores on concentration tests for college students, and other research have shown music with words scrambles our brains’ verbal-processing skills. “As silence had the best overall performance it would still be advisable that people work in silence,” one report dryly concluded.

…

There is evidence that music relaxes our muscles, improves our mood, and can even moderately reduce blood pressure, heart rate, and anxiety. What music steals in acute concentration, it returns to us in the form of good vibes.

That brings us finally to our final cultural answer: Headphones give us absolute control over our audio-environment, allowing us to privatize our public spaces. This is an important development for dense office environments in a service economy. But it also represents nothing less than a fundamental shift in humans’ basic relationship to music.

From Love To Bingo In 873 Images

Patient research work involving more than 5 thousand photographs resulted in a 1 minute film that AlmapBBDO created to advertise Getty Images, the world leading image database for creating and distributing visual contents. The film is surprising when showing 873 images in 15 images per second, sufficient speed to transform the series into a video that, without any text, tells a beautiful story.

Love the work that AlmapBBDO did for Getty Images in this short film. Patient research work involving more than 5000 photographs resulted in the 1 minute short. The film shows 873 images, 15 images per second, sufficient speed to transform the series into a video that, without any text, tells a beautiful story. All photos, without any exceptions, are from the Getty Images archives. Image 392 made me laugh. 

Designed by Pentagram, 1972-2012

The Forty Story The story of a boy born on the day Pentagram opened and how his life has been tracked (and kerned) by forty years of Pentagram design. Written by Naresh Ramchandani and Tom Edmonds Directed by Christian Carlsson Additional animation by Simone Nunziato Sound design by Iain Grant and Wam London Music by Graeme Miller Titles by John Rushworth Design by Pentagram Voiceover by Daniel Lapaine

The Forty Story is the story of a boy born on the day Pentagram opened and how his life has been tracked (and kerned) by forty years of Pentagram design. This short film is more than a celebration of Pentagram, it is a master class in some of the most iconic design of the past forty years. 

Written by Naresh Ramchandani and Tom Edmonds

Directed by Christian Carlsson

Additional animation by Simone Nunziato

Sound design by Iain Grant and Wam London

Music by Graeme Miller

Titles by John Rushworth

Design by Pentagram

Voiceover by Daniel Lapaine

 

(via Pentagram.com)

Creativity Top 5: May 29, 2012

(via creativity-online.com)

Clay Shirky On Pushing Creative Boundaries

In this video of his talk at PSFK CONFERENCE NYC, Clay Shirky talks about the work of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. After working there as an assistant professor for almost ten years, Shirky describes five student projects that he thinks are pushing the creative boundaries - from interface design to how people cluster to build new work. At the end of the talk, the technology thought-leader compares creatives as members of a philharmonic orchestra and wonders if any rules can be drawn from looking at such an ensemble.

Clay Shirky describes five student projects that he thinks are pushing the creative boundaries - from interface design to how people cluster to build new work.

(via collaborativefund.tumblr.com)