If ever there were a reason to boycott Ray Kurzweil's musical instruments
this would be it
When I first heard about Ray Kurzweil it was in connection with his work in voice synthesis, he created a whole lot of really innovative software that emulated the human voice better than anything before. If it hadn't been for this man millions of illiterate people would be incapable of using computers, if it weren't for this man's work Stephen Hawking would have no voice. My family bought his reading software many years ago and I used it to sample computers reading stuff for my music concrete.
I later learned about his bizarre yet understandable wish to live long enough to live forever when his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology came out after readng a review I became somewhat further endeared because I have a fondness for mad scientists. But learning about his wholesale support for weapons technology and pre-emptive military doctrine have soured me about this guy.
It irks me that a man so ingenious as to do groundbreaking work in reading software for illiterate kids and also some of the meanest looking rack mounted synths on the market would be so gung ho about killing people. It's like finding out Santaclause exists but he's a serial rapist in his spare time.
Ok so that's hyperbole but I hope you see where I'm coming from.
anyway for the handfull of people interested enough in this blog to keep reading it since it became mostly about synthesizers the hypertext at the top may be of some interest. I kind of think it would be cool if some people in electronic music and production were to start a boycott of this man's tech but at the same time I am fully aware that it's wishful thinking on my part and it's not like I could have ever afforded anything of his first hand to begin with. Besides, I don't like the aesthetic of his keyboards and I don't really do rack mounted gear.
When I first heard about Ray Kurzweil it was in connection with his work in voice synthesis, he created a whole lot of really innovative software that emulated the human voice better than anything before. If it hadn't been for this man millions of illiterate people would be incapable of using computers, if it weren't for this man's work Stephen Hawking would have no voice. My family bought his reading software many years ago and I used it to sample computers reading stuff for my music concrete.
I later learned about his bizarre yet understandable wish to live long enough to live forever when his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology came out after readng a review I became somewhat further endeared because I have a fondness for mad scientists. But learning about his wholesale support for weapons technology and pre-emptive military doctrine have soured me about this guy.
It irks me that a man so ingenious as to do groundbreaking work in reading software for illiterate kids and also some of the meanest looking rack mounted synths on the market would be so gung ho about killing people. It's like finding out Santaclause exists but he's a serial rapist in his spare time.
Ok so that's hyperbole but I hope you see where I'm coming from.
anyway for the handfull of people interested enough in this blog to keep reading it since it became mostly about synthesizers the hypertext at the top may be of some interest. I kind of think it would be cool if some people in electronic music and production were to start a boycott of this man's tech but at the same time I am fully aware that it's wishful thinking on my part and it's not like I could have ever afforded anything of his first hand to begin with. Besides, I don't like the aesthetic of his keyboards and I don't really do rack mounted gear.
posted by Chris Rooney | 2:01 AM
1 Comments:
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can't recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil's work. The book is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor's talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It's spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I'm not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I've read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they're making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven't heard Dr Taylor's TEDTalk, that's an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it's 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There's a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best ""Fantastic Voyage"" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!
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