Word: sonics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more like a language than music," he recalls. "Soundwise, it's like the texture of wind." At 19, while playing violin in a Beijing opera company, he heard his first piece of Western classical music, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which opened up a whole new world of sonic possibilities. He went to New York City to study composition in 1986, and has lived there ever since. "New York is the best place for me," he explains. "It's everybody from everywhere, and something new comes out of it, something blended...
...Austin, Nev., a rickety mining town whose gold ore was exhausted years ago, junk-shop proprietor Leo Wolfers is sweeping up a pile of window glass shattered by a mysterious sonic boom. Wolfers is used to the screaming fighter jets that take off from nearby Fallon Naval Air Station, but he says the plane that smashed his windows was no ordinary craft. "It was diamond shaped. It could rise straight up and hover. One of those planes they aren't allowed to talk about. Their pilots crash into mountains all the time, but the Navy just covers...
Bono: What I'd say is, "F___ right off. We were doing dance remixes when you were still in short pants, you little a_______s." When this bogus term alternative rock was being thrown at every '70s retro rehash folk group, we were challenging people to new sonic ideas. If some little snotty anarchist with an Apple Mac and an attitude thinks he invented dance music and the big rock group is coming into his territory, [that's] ridiculous...
What biochemical magic underlies this incredible metamorphosis? The instructions programmed into the genes, of course. Scientists have recently discovered, for instance, that a gene nicknamed "sonic hedgehog" (after the popular video game Sonic the Hedgehog) determines the fate of neurons in the spinal cord and the brain. Like a strong scent carried by the wind, the protein encoded by the hedgehog gene (so called because in its absence, fruit-fly embryos sprout a coat of prickles) diffuses outward from the cells that produce it, becoming fainter and fainter. Columbia University neurobiologist Thomas Jessell has found that it takes middling concentrations...
...girls rarely seem to have either the chance or the inclination to get plugged in. Just ask Ralph Howell, a New Jersey pharmacologist, who got a Sega game player for his daughter Emily three years ago, when she was six. Emily loved the rollicking Sonic the Hedgehog but turned up her nose at a race-car program and one based on the hit flick Jurassic Park. "Anytime I brought home another game, she just wasn't interested," Howell says. He finally quit shopping...