[Samuel Ford]

Sorry for the shameless self-promotion here:

I’ve just released my first album – Inventions and Discoveries – all original piano pieces written throughout my twenties, generally starting with the earliest and ending with the most recent pieces.

Available on Spotify through this link – https://open.spotify.com/album/4wewkz3PH690zlfTdLSfol?si=xyo9SV9WSUWlZnWewQ0cUw

It’s also available on the streaming platforms Tidal and Deezer if you are on those instead.

Hopefully you might consider at least some of this music for your right hemisphere…

[Samuel Ford]

Hi Luke – interesting paper!

I think in these cases the previous brain damage was so severe in the hemisphere being removed that before the operation it wasn’t contributing anything anyway? (Apart from severe epilepsy). It is surprising though.

[Samuel Ford]

You’re a fan of Rick Beato I’m guessing? Loved his recent Keith Jarret interview, though it was heart-breaking seeing that he can no longer use his left hand after the stroke.

I think grunting/strange vocalizations or involuntary movements must be part and parcel of improvisation and musical expression. I remember watching something about tourettes by the neurologist Oliver Sacks in which he said that many people with tourettes are drummers, and he thought that this might be because both drumming and tics require a kind of lack of inhibition/immediate action without thought.

Here’s the jazz pianist Errol Garner being brilliant (and grunting throughout) –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1kZSkNBU9Q&ab_channel=TerminalPassage

And there is the famous example of Glenn Gould, who hummed along with everything he played –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPZ-xNjzfLI&ab_channel=Pianoforte#

Another example: I play keys in a funk/soul band and often my legs will shake uncontrollably, our drummer lets out a constant stream of grunts while playing!

[Samuel Ford]

Tenet (2020)

The only one of these films that I quite disliked. A machine is invented that can reverse the flow of time for everything that enters it, resulting in impossible-to-understand scenes as normal people and objects interact with ‘reversed’ people and objects. This makes no intuitive right-hemisphere sense, it is another one of the paradoxes that emerge from the left hemisphere viewing time as a ‘timeline’ that can be reversed and jumped around in.

Westworld (TV Show 2016-present)

Directed and written by Jonathan Nolan, a western theme park opens where the actors who play the roles of cowboys and indians are all in fact robots. These robots (or ‘hosts’) become more conscious throughout the series. In later series robot copies of real humans are made by producing their memories (another one of the doppelganger tropes) and they often break down in unsettling ways because they cannot process reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJGgnxTMVd4&ab_channel=PorterNetwork

Further on in the Westworld series, two brothers invent an artificial intelligence that predicts the future perfectly (reminiscent of Laplace’s Demon), and one of the brothers develops psychosis as a result of their endeavors. In the latest (poorly written) installment of Westworld, human beings are now controlled by the robots using an infectious virus. The whole seires, especially the latest series, seem very much like paranoid delusions.

[Samuel Ford]

I’ve cared for a number of individuals who had suffered from a severe stroke / brain injury when they were young (some of whom then suffered from epilepsy afterwards – but in all cases this was more or less controlled by medication and wasn’t as severe as those who might require hemispherectomy).

In my experience these individuals can be profoundly disabled; one man I worked with was in his fifties but was mentally very childlike, required assistance in every basic aspect of living (washing, eating, travelling), he could speak but his vocabulary was extremely limited and repetitive. He did not understand much that you told him, any instructions needed to be broken down to extremley simple components. He had difficulty walking and could not use his left arm, difficulty with emotional regulation…etc (I’m not trying to diminish this person, I actually really got on with him and enjoyed caring for him.)

In table 3 some gross deficits are recorded before the operation – essentially could they walk, talk and did they have fine motor control (and it looks as if many of them couldn’t). This is not enough to see how these brain injuries/epilepsy have affected the person, I suspect from my own limited experience, and simply from the fact that this surgery is being performed at all, that these people were profoundly disabled to begin with.

Also I think what you said about the tests not being sophisticated enough is true, to be honest I don’t know how any test could fully capture somebody’s personality and individual, particular deficits – you would simply have to meet the people!

[Samuel Ford]

Interesting video RE: jazz musicians and the right hemisphere – two musicians speaking about the great jazz pianist Herbie Hancock and the three principles he used to create beautiful inspiring music in so many different groups and styles.

1. Trust

2. Exploration

3. Imagination

All 3 are values of the right hemisphere!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIIno_kxrw&ab_channel=OpenStudio

[Samuel Ford]

“I have known a number of wonderful, classically-trained musicians who feel like this about music: for them the achievement has really been about left-hemisphere criteria such as precision, fluency, mastery- so, deviation from these aims is seen as risky or even dangerous. Indeed, it probably is all of these things where the expression is part of an orchestral presentation. But it is a feeling many of them find hard to shake when they play elsewhere.”

Yes I agree, and for this reason many people who have had some classical training are hopeless at writing music and at improvisation (excluding the true masters and composers). They have often been trained just to complete what’s on a page, not necessarily to understand the patterns of music at an intuitive level. There are many people who can play a fugue, but how many can compose or improvise a fugue? That might seem like a big ask, but such skills were expected of working musicians in the baroque period when fugues were actually being written (this tradition is now slowly coming back with the re-discovery of ‘partimento’ teaching techniques).

Great Jazz players such as Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Thelonius Monk, Chick Corea, Bill Evans could sit at a piano and create new music in real-time, much more impressive in my opinion than being able to sight read somebody else’s work – the jazz pianist Erroll Garner (the fella in the video I posted in this thread) was once asked criticised because he couldn’t read sheet music, he simply responded “No-one comes to watch me read”.

[Samuel Ford]

Yes, I remember being blown away by the Interstellar and Dune soundtracks, both scored by Hans Zimmer I think.

[Samuel Ford]

Thanks for sharing Don, nothing wrong with simplicity when it’s done right – enjoyed the poem very peaceful. Have you any other pieces online that you’ve composed?

[Samuel Ford]

Haha very good, I’ll try that trick if I get locked up!