Now, umbrella that sings in the rain

German hardware hackers have developed an umbrella that plays music when it is wet. To make it able to do so, Berlina-based Alice Zappe and Julia Lager fitted 12 touch-sensitive sensors to the inner canopy of a brolly. The sensors were then connected to a simple circuit board that spotted when each sensor was struck by a raindrop. It plays a different beep for each sensor to generate a random 8-bit tune in response to the falling rain. The gadget was put together in a day for a 24-hour hardware hacking event in Amsterdam, said Zappe. The first version of the umbrella has the sensors and wires fixed to the canopy cloth using duct tape. The sensors are made of a piezoelectric material that generates a tiny charge when it is stressed or distorted. The charges generated when the piezoelectric sensors were hit by raindrops were picked up by an Arduino microcontroller. This has a simple silicon chip on a circuit board studded with many different connectors that can take in data, analyse it and then produce a response via one of its many outputs. Arduino microcontrollers are popular with many hobbyist hardware hackers because they make it easy to get different components working together. According to Zappe, one tricky part of the project was tuning the microcontroller so it generated enough beeps to make a pleasant tune. Too sensitive and listeners would get a frenetic cacophony in the lightest shower. Not sensitive enough and the music would be too plodding and sporadic to be interesting. Testing the sensitivity of the sensors was tricky, said Zappe, because no rain fell on the day it was being built. A bit of messy experimentation in a kitchen did not really help, she said, so the pair had to go on a foraging trip for a watering can. "We went out to the city on a quest that cost us hours of precious hackathon time. It was ridiculous," she told the BBC. The delay meant there was no time to work on connecting the Arduino to an Android phone because writing software to do that task would have taken too long. As a result, said Zappe, they were forced to fall back on the built-in 8-bit tone generator on the Arduino microcontroller as a musical source. The pair is now working on an improved version of the umbrella. This will have wires and sensors sewn on to the canopy and be able to play more pleasant sounds. "It will also allow you to choose from a few different sounds like piano, guitar, drums and bells - and of course 8-bit," she said.

Earthquake aftershocks turned into music

A sound artist has transformed earthquake recordings into music that will be showcased at the International Computer Music symposium in Slovenia in September. Jo Burzynska from Lyttelton, New Zealand performs as Stanier Black-Five and had recorded the first hour of aftershocks in February last year. Working with the Melbourne sound artist Malcolm Riddich, she transformed these sounds of aftershocks and chaos into a soundscape called Body Waves. "We called the work Body Waves, as this is one of the two types of seismic waves - the ones which travel through the interior of the Earth rather than the surface," Stuff.co.nz quoted Burzynska as saying. "It also refers to the way the performance is perceived, which is as much through the body as via the ears," she said. Seismic waves are actually acoustic waves, sound waves travelling from the source of an earthquake. However, people can't hear them as they pass through the medium of the earth at a frequency too low for humans to register. Body Waves has accentuated the lower frequency harmonics to create music that goes beyond the auditory system to be felt in the body. The pair had performed it at the Sound Spectrum Festival in Perth in May. "It's not a simulation of an earthquake, it is an artistic arrangement of sound. In Perth they were more intrigued by it," Burzynska said. "The room was vibrating. When you get the fundamental frequency of the room you are vibrating, when you talk your voice vibrates and you feel it in your chest cavity, you can hear the sound as well but one of the most powerful things about it is that it is music that you feel," she said.

How long before I can get a haircut?

A guy stuck his head into a barber shop and asked, "How long before I can get a haircut?" The barber looked around the shop full of customers and said, "About 2 hours." The guy left. A few days later the same guy stuck his head in the door and asked, "How long before I can get a haircut?" The barber looked around at the shop and said, "About 3 hours." The guy left. A week later the same guy stuck his head in the shop and asked, "How long before I can get a haircut?" The barber looked around the shop and said, "About an hour only." The guy left. The barber turned to a friend and said, "Hey, Bill, do me a favour, Follow that guy and see where he goes. He keeps asking how long he has to wait for a haircut, but then he doesn't ever come back." A little while later, Bill returned to the shop, laughing hysterically. The barber asked, "So where does that guy go when he leaves?" "To your wife."

UK farmers play rock music to help livestock 'chill out

Far from enjoying the quiet countryside, what farmyard animals really want to hear is a good rock song from the likes of Aerosmith and Bon Jovi, a survey has revealed. The survey that was carried out by RSPCA Freedom Food showed that 77 percent of farmers in the east of England play music or sing to their livestock, tipping Radio 2 as the most popular radio station for their animals, followed by Radio 1. According to farmers, pigs and cows like hearing music of Adele, Bon Jovi, Coldplay and Eminem. The farmers have also admitted to singing hymns, rugby songs and piggy nursery rhymes to keep their animals relaxed. The research found that livestock also enjoyed keeping up to date with the current affairs and sports from Radio Five Live and Radio Four's Today programme. It follows research from Writtle College in Essex that had found that playing background music can have a positive effect on sows and piglets by increasing suckling and making mothers more playful. Mark Hayward of Dingley Dell Pork in Woodbridge, Suffolk, has taken the theory one step further and has an own house band the 'Broadside Boys'. "We often sit on the hay bales, singing and strumming to our Freedom Food pigs and I'm convinced they love it," the Daily Mail quoted Hayward as saying. "And when the bands not playing we have music on all the time, coming from the tractors or my truck. It's really important to be relaxed and calm around farm animals because they respond to your mood and in turn become more chilled out too. "Music and also talking to our animals is a key part of that. I chat away to my breeding sows all the time, although the piglets are often too busy to stay still long enough to listen," he said. The survey found that 59 per cent of farmers talk to their animals with hot topics including the weather and how they were feeling. "Chatting to farm animals may sound daft but there is a clear welfare message behind Freedom Food's survey," RSPCA farm animal scientist, Dr Marc Cooper, said. "The farmers said that their animals are more content, relaxed and calm when they interact with them in this way," "Like our pets, farm animals are intelligent, sentient beings and respond well to positive interaction, he added.

Distorted music is like animals' distress call

The effect of listening to music with distortion is similar to hearing the cries of animals in distress, say researchers. "Music that shares aural characteristics with the vocalisations of distressed animals captures human attention and is uniquely arousing," said study co-author Daniel Blumstein, the journal Biology Letters reports. In distress, animals distort their voices by forcing a large amount of air rapidly through the voice box. Blumstein, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Los Angeles, US, is an authority on animal distress calls, particularly among marmots. In 2010, he and a team of researchers captured media attention with a study of the soundtracks of 102 classic movies in four genres: adventure, drama, horror and war, according to a California statement. They determined that the soundtracks for each genre possessed characteristic emotion-manipulating techniques. Scores for dramatic films, for example, had more abrupt shifts in frequency, both up and down. Horror films, on the other hand, had more screaming females and distorted sounds. The researchers were even able to detect recordings of animal screams in some scores. The latest findings are based on a series of experiments that Blumstein designed and conducted with Peter Kaye, a Santa Monica-based composer of movie and TV scores, and Greg Bryant, an assistant professor of communication studies at California who specialises in research on vocal communication and evolutionary psychology. Bryant is a musician and recording engineer. Using synthesisers, Kaye and Bryant composed a series of original music pieces of several types or "conditions," with each piece lasting just 10 seconds. "We wanted to see if we could enhance or suppress the listener's feelings based on what's going on with the music," Blumstein said. In the control condition, the music was generic and emotionally neutral, without noise or abrupt transitions in frequency or pitch. Bryant likened it to rather plain elevator music. Another condition began in an easy-listening manner but then suddenly broke into distortion, much like Hendrix famously did at Woodstock. Undergraduate students were asked to listen to an example of each condition and then rate the examples based on two factors: how arousing they found the music and whether the emotional feeling in the music was positive (such as happy) or negative (such as fear-inducing or sad). No subject heard more than one example from any condition. When the music featured distortion, subjects rated it as more exciting than the compositions without distortion. They also were more likely to describe the music as charged with negative emotion. "This study helps explain why the distortion of rock 'n' roll gets people excited: It brings out the animal in us," said Bryant. The researchers also believe their study is the first work to incorporate what scientists know about animal communication into the study of music perception. In the future, the researchers plan to test how different types of music affect a listener's nervous system. Past research has shown that calls of distress raise heart rates and skin conductance among animals.

Intensive mobile phone use triggers sleep disorder and depression

Young adults who are constantly connected to the Internet via their mobile phone or computer are more likely to suffer from sleep disturbances, stress and symptoms of mental health, according to a study. "Public health advice should therefore include information on the healthy use of this technology," researcher Sara Thomee from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, said. Doctoral student Thomee and her research colleagues at the University of Gothenburg's Sahlgrenska Academy have conducted four different studies looking at how the use of computers and mobile phones affects the mental health of young adults. These studies, which included questionnaires for 4,100 people aged 20-24 and interviews with 32 young heavy ICT users, reveal that intensive use of mobile phones and computers can be linked to stress, sleep disorders and depressive symptoms. "We looked at the effects both quantitatively and qualitatively and followed up the volunteers a year on," Thomee explained. "The conclusion is that intensive use of ICT can have an impact on mental health among young adults," she said. The studies reveal, for example, that heavy mobile use is linked to an increase in sleeping problems in men and an increase in depressive symptoms in both men and women. "Those who find the constant accessibility via mobile phones to be stressful are most likely to report mental symptoms," Thomee said. Frequently using a computer without breaks also increases the risk of stress, sleeping problems and depressive symptoms in women, whereas men who use computers intensively are more likely to develop sleeping problems. "Regularly using a computer late at night is associated not only with sleep disorders but also with stress and depressive symptoms in both men and women," she said. A combination of both heavy computer use and heavy mobile use makes the association even stronger. One conclusion is that public health advice to young people should include information on how to use ICT in a healthy way: "This means taking breaks, taking time to recover after intensive use, and putting limits on your availability," she added.

Senior Views

The Importance of walking Walking can add minutes to your life. This enables you at 85 years old to spend an additional 5 months in a nursing home at $4,000 per month. My grandpa started walking five miles a day when he was 60. Now he's 97 years old and we have no idea where the hell he is. ----------------------------------------- I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. The only reason I would take up walking is so that I could hear heavy breathing again. -------------------------------------------------------- I have to walk early in the morning, before my brain figures out what I'm doing... ------------------------------------------ I joined a health club last year, spent about 250 bucks. Haven't lost a pound. Apparently you have to go there! --------------------------------------- Every time I hear the dirty word 'exercise', I wash my mouth out with chocolate. ------------------------------------ I do have flabby thighs, but fortunately my stomach covers them. -------------------------------------------- The advantage of exercising every day is so when you die, they'll look at you there in the coffin and say, 'Well, he looks good doesn't he.' ------------------------------------ If you are going to try cross-country skiing, start with a small country. ------------------------------------------ I know I got a lot of exercise the last few years,......just getting over the hill. We all get heavier as we get older, because there's a lot more information in our heads. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. A ND Every time I start thinking too much about how I look, I just find a pub with a Happy Hour and by the time I leave, I look just fine. You could run this over to your friends But just e-mail it to them! It will save you the walk! THE END!

Spice Girls to reunite for West End musical

All girls band 'Spice Girls' is all set to reunite for their big West End first night. The women behind Girl Power will all be at the world premiere of 'Viva Forever', which will open at the Piccadilly Theatre in December, well before Christmas. 'Ghost The Musical', which is currently running at the Piccadilly, will close in the autumn. Based on the Oscar-winning movie that starred Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, 'Ghost' has some terrific moments but, but it seems that there are not enough such moments that can draw the kind of audiences that will keep the show running. 'Viva Forever', created by Judy Craymer, the powerhouse behind Mamma Mia!, and award-winning funny lady Jennifer Saunders, will feature around 16 numbers associated with the 'Spice Girls' line-up Geri Halliwell, Emma Bunton, Victoria Beckham, Melanie Chisholm and Melanie Brown, respectively Ginger, Baby, Posh, Sporty and Scary, the Daily Mail reported. Previews will begin in November. Auditions will start later this month and run into July, and Craymer and director Paul Garrington want to begin rehearsals around September. Workshop versions of the show have already been held, enabling the creative team, which also includes top choreographer Lynne Page, designer Peter Mackintosh and orchestrator Martin Koch, to explore how to stage the show ahead of rehearsals. Viva Forever will face stiff competition from another show, 'The Body-guard', featuring music connected with iconic singer Whitney Houston, as they will also begin performances at the Adelphi Theatre at around the same time. Both are hot-button productions featuring songs that are already hummable and well known. The 'Spice Girls' show has a mother and daughter story at its heart, with a television talent show as a backdrop. Emma and Mel C apparently cried when they watched footage of the workshops; both felt it reflected the group's ethos - friendship, identity and being true to yourself - and also saw it as an astute commentary on today's obsession with celebrity. Although, Craymer had said a few months ago that 'the show isn't about the Spice Girls directly, but it's sprinkled with their essence'. 'Viva Forever' will include hit songs 'Wannabe', 'The Lady Is A Vamp', 'Who Do You Think You Are' and 'Mamma'.