What do you get when you combine the Bare Naked Ladies, Chris Hadfield, and a choir of young people?

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – our public network here in Canada – helped to put this together, along with the Canadian Space Agency and The Coalition for Music Education to honour (yes, spellcheck, we include ‘u’)  music education in schools across the country. Hadfield, a Canadian,  is commander of the International Space Station.

Check out the power and beauty of a multicultural society working together to further human knowledge and support the arts:

(h/t to climatedenialcrockoftheweek)

What’s that I hear?

This site is way too cool not to post. It reveals again just how large an interpretative role our brains play in perceiving the world around us… this time involving the auditory sense. But are our perceptions true in fact? Is the subjective interpretation just as ‘true’ as the objective sound? Check out these ten illusions.

(h/t to WEIT)

Storm by Tim Minchen (with text)

Trying to be nice can be very trying. Check out all the usual pap people throw out there to loosely justify nonsensical beliefs:

Music and meaning: Is music something we understand?

Just as facial expressions do not communicate something that can be understood so much as enjoin us to imagine what it feels like when we ourselves make such an expression, so too, according to Scruton (UNDERSTANDING MUSIC: Philosophy and interpretation), does some elemental aspect of musical experience enjoin us to engage our imagining in similar fashion. In this way, and because the experience of music is not, at least not typically, heard as a single expression, the imagination is forced to grapple with the musical shapes and forms as they unfold over time, following its movement as it echoes in, or is anticipated by, the movements of our body and rational imagination.

It is in this aspect of “enjoinment” – of the way we join with the music – that is the key to Scruton’s conception not only of musical understanding but also of its wider cultural and social value. Just as a grimace demands that we imagine the complex of unpleasant feelings and thoughts behind that particular belligerent facial expression, so too music may require us to identify with a world of sensibilities which happens to sit ill with us.

Read the review here.