ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
*****************************************************************************

Here's a plug for a colleague and a frequent contributor to this list:
Charles Stout and his song writing partner, Tom Wolforth, perform and  
record together as 2Dig4.  Last year they released a CD, "Artifacts,"  
of really great pop and rock songs inspired by the duo's years in the  
field as archaeologists as well as a their particular, keen, "big  
timeline" perspective of the world we live in.  While not every song on  
the disc is overtly about science, per se, the album is full of subtle  
reference and inference, including some rather eclectic instrumentation  
that could only be a sign that the artists have spent many a long day  
diggin' for bones.
2dig4.com


___
JasonJayStevens
exhibits . annArborHands-OnMuseum . [log in to unmask]
art . potterBelmarLabs . www.potterbelmar.org . [log in to unmask]
On May 18, 2005, at 7:39 AM, Stephen Uzzo wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology  
> Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related  
> institutions.
> *********************************************************************** 
> ******
>
> The Atomic Age, Stirrat - Zaret stuff from the 50s and 60s has been  
> breathed new life by Jef Poskanzer, who hosts "MP3ed" versions (thanks  
> to Ron Hipschman) of all 6 albums at  
> http://www.acme.com/jef/science_songs/
>
> They may seem camp to the tweens we normally serve, but they are  
> certainly appropriate and acceptable to the "Barney-Set." (or in my  
> case, the "Captain Kangaroo Crowd").
>
> Eric Siegel wrote:
>
>> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology  
>> Centers
>> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related  
>> institutions.
>> ********************************************************************** 
>> ******* When You Wish Upon an Atom: The Songs of Science
>>  By MICHAEL ERARD
>> It's been years since Timothy Sellers, then a budding naturalist,  
>> licked a slug. Now he writes pop songs about scientists who were less  
>> absurd about their empiricism. Thirteen of them appear on "26  
>> Scientists: Volume 1, Anning to Malthus," a CD that Mr. Sellers and  
>> his Los-Angeles-based band, Artichoke, recently released.
>> That's Mary Anning, the 18th-century Briton who assembled fossils to  
>> support her family and who first discovered the ichthyosaur. As in  
>> Artichoke's other songs, the one about Malthus mixes biographical  
>> detail ("Thomas Robert Malthus/the second son of eight kids/grew up  
>> with a stutter") with intellectual history ("with the revolution/came  
>> a lot of high hopes/Malthus took a good look/uh-oh uh-oh) and the  
>> primordial rock chords of G, D and C ("la la la la la/la la la la  
>> la/la la la la la").
>> In the small but slowly accreting world of science-themed music,  
>> songs tend to focus on processes and objects, as in Tom Lehrer's  
>> "Elements." Mr. Sellers, a 37-year-old artist and set painter, wants  
>> to change that balance, focusing on scientists "because people like  
>> to listen to songs about people," he says.
>>  Though he's not a scientist, Mr. Sellers pursued a major in physics  
>> before switching to art at Williams College (where he and this  
>> reporter became acquainted). It seems natural to him that someone  
>> would want to dig up Mary Anning's past, Darwin's wandering attention  
>> span and Einstein's sleeping habits, or take on the challenge of  
>> putting "geocentric," "Copernican" and "phlogiston" into pop songs.  
>> The bigger challenge, Mr. Sellers says, was to "try to write every  
>> song so that people would dig it."
>> He ends up with songs that draw scientists not as heroes or as mad  
>> geniuses, but as ordinary people who befriended a new idea or two and  
>> paid the costs of their passions. Most of the scientists he sings  
>> about have been treated well by history: Einstein, Kelvin, Galileo,  
>> Heisenberg, Darwin, Marie Curie and Joseph Lister. Others, like the  
>> Dutch chemist Jan Ingenhousz, who investigated light, air and plants,  
>> are more obscure.
>> Rock music, even of the indie persuasion, tends to avoid science. The  
>> Pixies have a song about Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, builder of the  
>> Eiffel Tower, and the celebrated geekiness of They Might Be Giants  
>> produced "Particle Man" ("Particle man, particle man/doing the things  
>> a particle can") and "The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas," among  
>> other science-y songs. And the folk-pop duo Kate and Anna McGarrigle  
>> made chemistry a metaphor for romance in "NaCl" ("Just a little atom  
>> of chlorine, valence minus one/Swimming through the sea, digging the  
>> scene, just having fun"). Scientific themes probably show up more  
>> often in music videos, as in Thomas Dolby's 1980's hit, "Blinded by  
>> Science."
>> In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Tom Lehrer, a  
>> mathematician-turned-entertainer , contributed classic science songs  
>> like "The Elements" ("antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium"),  
>> "Wernher von Braun" and "There's a Delta for Every Epsilon."
>> Around the same time, William Stirrat, an electronics engineer,  
>> co-produced six albums of science songs for children ("Why Does the  
>> Sun Shine?" and "Vibration"). Mr. Stirrat, whose songwriting nom de  
>> plume was Hy Zaret, was better known as the person who wrote the  
>> lyrics to "Unchained Melody."
>> Now, most science songs are written for middle school science  
>> students, says Lynda Jones, a former teacher and a co-founder of the  
>> Science Songwriters' Association in 1999. The association now has 40  
>> members, a mix of professional musicians and science teachers. Dr.  
>> Greg Crowther, an acting lecturer of biology at the University of  
>> Washington and an association member, has archived 1,800 songs about  
>> science on his Web site.
>> The association also helps amateurs record their music, encourages  
>> songwriters to fill out the song paradigm (marine biology lacks  
>> songs) and keeps the science up to date.
>> Scientific accuracy is a big challenge, Ms. Jones says, interrupting  
>> a telephone interview to sing a problematic lyric she adamantly  
>> opposes: "Just one element is what an atom's made of."
>>  "No, no, no, that's wrong," she says. "No scientist talks that way."  
>> She often brushes up the science in her own songs. At the recent  
>> meeting of the American Chemical Society, she was reminded that  
>> electrons do not actually orbit the nucleus of the atom, but vibrate  
>> in a cloud around it. "And I thought, well, I have to change my  
>> song," she says.
>>  In his quest to enshrine scientists in rock 'n' roll, Mr. Sellers  
>> forced himself to choose just one for each letter of the alphabet.  
>> "D" was crowded, but Darwin ("grandson of a poet, also of a potter,  
>> was brought up by his sister") beat out da Vinci and Doppler.
>> The list still provokes conversations about whom to include, but  
>> mixing the well-known with the obscure was deliberate. "If I picked  
>> all totally obscure scientists, people wouldn't go 'ah-hah' quite so  
>> fast or at all," Mr. Sellers says. "I also like scientists people  
>> know something about because they come with a context."
>> Finding women was also a challenge. Volume 1 includes Marie Curie and  
>> Mary Anning; Volume 2 will have a song about the physicist  
>> Chien-Shiung Wu, whose quip makes up the chorus: "There's only one  
>> thing worse than coming home/from the lab to a sink that's full of  
>> dirty dishes foam/and that's not going out to the lab at all."
>> Mr. Sellers also minds the accuracy of his songs. In some cases, he  
>> explains, the song's structure "selects for" a certain line. In the  
>> song about Dr. Wu, who died in 1997, he needed to add another  
>> syllable to her conclusion that "parity was not conserved." (In  
>> physics, "parity" hypothesizes that two symmetrical systems will  
>> develop symmetrically. Dr. Wu and her colleagues showed this wasn't  
>> the case.) The line, which now reads "parity was not quite  
>> conserved," scans better - though it softens Dr. Wu's claim.
>> If Mr. Sellers is self-congratulatory about anything, it's the band's  
>> ability to rock. On a recent Sunday evening, Artichoke rehearsed in  
>> the living room of Mr. Sellers's Los Angeles home, thick sheets of  
>> foam hung over the windows to keep the Pixies-like guitar hooks and  
>> bass riffs away from the neighbors.
>>  This brand of garage psychedelia still finds room for an accordion  
>> as well as the de rigueur theremin, played by the band's only real  
>> scientist, Steve Collins, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion  
>> Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
>>  Their sound has won some notice, including a 2002 review in The Los  
>> Angeles Times that praised the "inspired songwriting" and "infectious  
>> indie pop."
>> Mr. Sellers grew up in upstate New York, the oldest son of  
>> back-to-the-land parents who took to the woods and built an A-frame  
>> house with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Mr. Sellers calls it  
>> his "Robinson Crusoe childhood." He and his younger brother created  
>> their own natural history society, where all the members were  
>> required to present their discoveries.
>> Mr. Sellers's slug-licking episode occurred when he was 10 and was  
>> helping his mother tend their garden tomatoes. As he removed slugs  
>> from the plants, he recalled asking, "Why don't the birds eat them?"  
>> Because they don't taste good, she replied. Disbelieving, he picked  
>> up a slug and licked it, an act he quickly regretted: the slug indeed  
>> tasted bad, and its slime burned his tongue. But he used his data. He  
>> wrote about the experience to get into Williams, singing the praises  
>> of first-hand exploration.
>> Eric Siegel
>> Executive VP
>>    Programs and Planning
>> New York Hall of Science
>> 47-01 111th Street
>> Queens, NY 11368
>> esiegel at nyscience dot org
>> ********************************************************************** 
>> *
>> More information about the Informal Science Education Network and the
>> Association of Science-Technology Centers may be found at  
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>
> -- 
> Stephen Miles Uzzo
> Director of Technology
> New York Hall of Science
> 47-01 111th Street
> Flushing Meadows Corona Park
> New York 11368     U.S.A.
> v. +1.718.699.0005 x377
> f. +1.718.699.1341
> http://www.nyscience.org
>
> ***********************************************************************
> More information about the Informal Science Education Network and the
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