Hum Along to Turing, Part III (+ Free Bonus Album)

“A great science fiction detective story” – Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine
“Cutting edge speculative fiction” – Ernest Hogan, author of Cortez on Jupiter
“Sharply erudite, with the vicious tang of cordite”– Paul Morris, author of Time Traveller Danny and the Codebreaker

Now Available: the Free Soundtrack for the Novel! Click the Banner to Stream or Download.

Days since the Centenary: 313
Days to the Bicentennial: 36,211

Holy cats! The melodic interpretations of the Turing legacy just keep on coming.

(To catch up on previous installments, see: Hum Along to Turing and Hum Along to Turing, Part Deux)

I’ve actually got another music-related post backlogged at the moment, but since this one is time-sensitive I thought I’d better post it now. (Plus, this is a good time to mention a relevant musical freebie, which I’ll get to in a moment.)

1. Album for Bletchley Park

First, we have a brand new album of electronic music called Music by Programmers, released to raise funds for the Bletchley Park Trust and the National Museum of Computing.

Bletchley Park, of course, was where Turing and his fellow codebreakers worked during World War II (see the About Alan Turing tab if you’re new to the subject).

Bletchley Park

According to TechWeek Europe:

The National Museum of Computing and Bletchley Park Trust have announced a novel fund-raising effort to attract young people to begin studying computer programming… The aim is to raise £5,000 to be spent on parent-child maths workshops at Bletchley Park and to allow [the museum] to start a regular computer club for young people. The download will be available from 29 April from CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon MP3 And Google Play with all of the profits going towards the projects.

The album was curated by Jason Gorman, who created Apes With Hobbies, Love Songs from a Gilded Age.  If you want to get an idea of Gorman’s musical sensibilities, you can download Apes for free here.

Gorman is clearly  predisposed to making music that honours great minds, given that Apes open with a track called Feynman Dreams of California Nights.

Music by Programmers and Jason Gorman

The eight tracks on the album are all original, and pay tribute to an earlier generation of electronic musicians, like Kraftwerk (still going strong), Jean-Michel Jarre (who recently released a new album), and Tangerine Dream (who have a new album out this month with awesome Queen-guitarist-cum-astrophysicst Brian May).  Gorman also recorded two of the eight tracks on the album himself.

I think this is an awesome way to raise money for a great cause. You can hear samples on the iTunes web page for the album. Buy it, rate it, and pass the word.

2. The Free Bonus Album

At the outset I mentioned a free bonus album related to Turing, so here’s the scoop.

Regular readers of this page will know that, while I post here for the love of it, professionally I’m a writer and editor.  I’m the non-fiction editor at International Speculative Fiction, which has published numerous award-winning authors, and I have several published works of my own.

My novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Kobo) features a sentient artificial intelligence instantiated in a synthetic human body. By its own choice it is called Alan and the body it uses is the image of Alan Turing. At the outset these choices seem trivial, but they turn out to go deeper than it first appears.

Luck + Death

As with all my books, I try to give readers of Luck + Death a lot of free stuff to go along with the story. There are bonus sections right inside the book that provide background material (including a section on Turing), and the home page (www.LuckAndDeath.com) has more bonus material and a library of free PDFs.

Well, now the novel also has a free soundtrack that you can stream or download, Luck + Death: the Soundtrack for the Movie in Your Head.

Here’s the official announcement for anyone who wants to try it out:

After much work and planning, the free soundtrack album for Luck + Death is now available. Fourteen tracks by artists in eight countries (Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Hungary, Sweden, Turkey, and the U.S.A.).

This is a varied array of musicians and composers, from independent musicians like guitarist Jason Brock and saxophonist Stefan Thaens, to film composer Nathan Fleet, to veteran performer John Pazdan, to classical composer (and music professor) Russell Wilson.

Styles range from dreamy electronic to jumped up funk to electronic classical, all of it spiced up with spoken word performance and bookended by field recordings from the streets of Shanghai.

Here’s a sample, track number eight:

____________________
08 Distrito Federal (Stefan Thaens, Belgium) 4:18

____________________

All tracks are available for streaming or for download as MP3s and the album comes with the choice of two different versions of the cover art, This Version (above) and That Version (below).

And this is a project that appreciates music as more than just a spectator sport. One track is a mix by the author called El Paraíso Perdido (Paradise Lost), which has been posted on ccMixter.org with an invitation to anyone and everyone to remix it, deconstruct it, or reinvent it.

I’ve already received one version from a ccMixter member and I know another is on the way. All mixes are posted on the soundtrack home page.

Here’s one more track to whet your appetite:

____________________

12 Dogware (Zapac, Hungary) 3:40

____________________

Curiosity piqued?

Get it here: Luck + Death: the Soundtrack for the Movie in Your Head.

Hum Along to Turing, Part Deux

“A Great science fiction detective story” – Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

NOW AVAILABLE for instant download! Click to find out more.

Days since the Centenary: 255

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,269

In a recent post entitled Hum Along to Turing I reported that London-based band Fiction was releasing their debut album The Big Other, including a song called The Apple that was about, and dedicated to, our boy Alan Turing.

Somehow my search for a video at the time of that post failed to come up with one that was posted on YouTube waaaaay back in 2010, possibly because it’s not an official video but a live version of the song captured at the Offset Festival in 2010.

(Although, honestly, if you type in search terms like “Fiction” and “Apple” you’d think that a song by Fiction called Apple would come up, irrespective of whether it was a fan video or an official release.)

So, until an official version comes out, enjoy the performance below.

Hum Along to Turing

“A Great science fiction detective story” – Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

NOW AVAILABLE for instant download! Click to find out more.

Days since the Centenary: 246

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,278

Out magazine reports that London-based band Fiction has a single called The Apple on their debut CD The Big Other that is about–and dedicated to–Alan Turing.

Band member Mike Barrett wrote the song and shared its genesis with Out:

Barrett shared that he first learned about Turing from reading his work on algorithms and his contribution at Bletchley Park—which during the WWII was the site of the UK’s main decryption establishment, the Government Code and Cypher School. ”[I] subsequently read about his trial, and the circumstances of his death came as a bit of a surprise… Here’s a genius—a man that arguably invented the computer, who made a priceless contribution to defeating the Nazis—put on trial for his sexuality. Of course, countless others were tried in the UK, and continue to be around the world, but Turing’s story illustrated to me so graphically the sheer absurdity of prejudice, and ‘The Apple’ is a small attempt at understanding his personal torment at that time.”

The Out article seems to be set up to stream the song through Soundcloud, but the streaming isn’t fuctional as of this writing and I can’t find the song through a search of Soundcloud or on Fiction’s YouTube page. So while I look forward to hearing it, I can’t say anything about the sound of the song just yet.

Fiction

The band sounds good overall, though, with a retro-futurismo vibe that calls to mind Roxy Music and certain strains of 1980s new wave, so I’m hopeful. And the Out article does provide the lyrics, reproduced below.

The Apple - For Alan Turing

They said Alan
they said listen, Alan
they said listen, Alan
you’ve got a simple decision
a simple choice
but it’s one or the other

so I had a choice
I had a choice
I had a choice

but they’ve been making my mind up
they’ve been making my body
into something it’s not

the algorithm was nothing special
I just took a bite
the code was really nothing much
and I just took a bite

they said it’s not right
they said it’s not right
they said it’s not right
and we can’t let you do that
we can’t let you get away with that

so I took a bite
I took a bite
I took a bite

because they’ve been making my mind up
they’ve been making my body
into something it’s not

the algorithm was nothing special
I just took a bite

You can find Fiction’s YouTube channel here.

The Big Other will be released on March 4, and Fiction will be on tour in the UK throughout March.

Alan Turing, Muse to Musicians

“A Great science fiction detective story” – Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

NOW AVAILABLE for instant download! Click to find out more.

Days since the Centenary: 20
Days to the Bicentennial: 36,504

Alan Turing has has turned up in many unexpected places in the course of my research and writing for this page, but perhaps nowhere as unexpected as FAWM.

What the heck is FAWM?

Well, it’s an acronym for February Album Writing Month, a NaNoWriMo-style event in which participants attempt to write 14 songs in the 28 days of February (or 14 1/2 songs during leap years).

And what on earth does Alan Turing have to do with a weird, intense, songwriting event?

Alan Turing renders “Molly Malone” on the violin [artist's impression].

Back in 2004, a guy named Burr Settles launched the first FAWM. As part of the event he participated in a “tribute challenge” in which songwriters had to pen a tune as an ode to someone famous. Settles chose Alan Turing.

Since then, other songs have turned up in FAWM that are about, or at least mention, Turing.  Like this one entitled Meles Meles or this one called I Heart Alan Turing.

Apparently Settles’ original Turing tune didn’t quite rise to the lofty goal set for it and “Alan Turing” thereafter took on a specific slang meaning within the FAWM community. There’s even an entry for it in the FAWM glossary:

alan turing (n.) song for which you think your vision might be greater than your songwriting ability.

But the Turing tunes don’t stop with FAWM.  Youtube currently sports two songs for Turing, one titled Song for Alan Turing and one titled A Song for Alan Turing, both embedded below.

Finally, the Molly Malone reference in the caption to the illustration (not to mention the illustration itself) comes from an announcement that experimental electronic duo Matmos were giving away downloads of that song back in March of this year. The song is featured on their EP entitled — what else? — For Alan Turing.  The announcement reads:

Many people are aware that 2012 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, “The Man Who Cracked The Enigma Code”, much of whose work remained secret until after his untimely death in 1952. Less well known is that his Mother was Irish, and his favorite song was Molly Malone, which, so the story goes, he insisted on rendering on the violin to the police who came to arrest him on charges of gross indecency, before agreeing to make his statement to them.

The recording by Matmos of Clodagh Simonds (Fovea Hex / Mellow Candle) singing Molly Malone, was first featured on their FOR ALAN TURING ep, part of a work commissioned in 2006 by The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkely CA on the opening of their new Mathematics Hall. It will be available as a free download for three days only, March 16, 17, and 18, from the Fovea Hex Bandcamp page foveahex.bandcamp.com . Matmos anticipate that the full FOR ALAN TURING ep will be digitally re-released to coincide with Turing’s 100th anniversary in June 2012

That song, too, is embedded at the bottom of the page.

Of course this is not the first we’ve heard of Alan Turing finding musical expression.  Last November in a post called The Turing Elves Put On Radiohead Masks we encountered a song called No Deciding by a mysterious band called the Klein 3 Group, which apparently appeared on their “hit” album OK Computer Science (an album I’ve yet to find anywhere).

And who can forget Epic Rap Battles of Advanced Mathematics, Alan Turing vs. Kurt Gödel? A classic entry in both the music and comedy catgegories.

Still, I would never have guessed that the Turing Elves would have been so busy in the musical corner of the arts.

Molly Malone from For Alan Turing

A Song for Alan Turing

Song for Alan Turing

The Turing Elves Put On Radiohead Masks

Days to Centenary: 214

Turing Elves — to whom I have referred several times on this blog — are those often invisible but near-ubiquitous souls who have no official standing vis a vis Alan Turing, but who nonetheless mount performances, create objects d’art, and otherwise do deeds that honour, commemorate, or even parody the man, his work, and his legacy.  (“Elves” because, like Santa’s Elves, they work unseen offstage and then suddenly brighten everyone’s day by delivering their gifts to the world.)

My hat is off to the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee and all the other official Turing Year folks, who are doing an amazing job — I don’t want to detract in any way from what they’re doing, just to add to it.

The Turing Elves are the DIYers, guerilla theatre artists, and flash mob ghosts of the Turing legacy.  Out of sheer geek love, with a rampant sense of fun and often without even attribution, they enhance the world, each in their own, individual way.

They are people like:

• Posterchild, who decorated Toronto, Canada with the Turingator
• Rupert Rawnsley of Cardiff, UK, who revived the ancient art of the lithophane through a steampunk-ish combination of artisnal craft and 3D printing, and
• The various folks (listed in the credits)  who wrote and performed the awesome Turiung/Gödel rap battle

Heck, the original Turing Elf has to have been Andrew Hodges, who is now a member of the Advisory Committe, but long before the Alan Turing Year was dreamt of he published Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). His book  contributed critically to Turing’s rise from relative obscurity among the general public to something rather better than obscurity today — something bordering on fame, at least as far as awesome mathematicians experience it — and I have to imagine that it was a lonely thing indeed to have been a Turing Elf in those days.

All of which brings us to today’s Elves, the Klein 3 Group, a musical group who recorded a Turing Tune called No Deciding.

They are a band shrouded in mystery — or at least there appears to be little information about them on the net.  The artifact I want to draw to your attention is the YouTube video of No Deciding, which is embedded below, but beyond that there are few clues to their identity, whereabouts, or other output, despite repeated references to their “hit” album OK Computer Science, a riff on the Radiohead album OK Computer.

They have a sound file of No Deciding on SoundCloud, and the page there indicates that they’re from “Richmond, United States,” but doesn’t tell us if that’s the one in Virginia, the one in California, the one in Kentucky, or some other Richmond altogether. The lyrics to No Deciding are included in an academic handout that includes the bandmembers’ names (Sam Cole, Joe Kramer Miller, and David Leibovic), but I have no way of knowing if the list is correct.  (The handout is from a theory of compution course at Oberlin College).  If anyone finds anything more substatial about them, by all means let me know at nas@homoartificialis.com.

Be that as it may, I like the song and maybe you will too, so here it is.  You can find the lyrics below the video.  (I think the lyrics bear some resemblance to the lyrics of The Odds, who are great, though the music is entirely different.)

.

No Deciding

A tape that’s

full up with blank symbols

a 9-tuple that defines you

who knows if you’ll halt?

Q a set of states

and Gamma a set of symbols

Sigma, a subset of Gamma

The tape head

just moves left or right

delta brings us

back and forth with no deciding 3x

halting, problem,

this is my final state

my final configuration

back and forth with no deciding 3x

such a pretty proof of

such a pretty theorem

back and forth with no deciding 3x