This week, while stressing about job hunting and waking at 2am to think about what I would write to be said at my funeral and feeling disappointed that I would not be there to see everyone's reactions, I was thinking about a podcast from Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson who is an American astrophysicist and writer. The podcast was about music and the origins or language. If I caught the gist of it, as it was in the background to me gaming, basically they were talking about how it appears the neural structures that encode music are phylogenetically older than those that encode language. This suggests that our ancestors were making music way before we could talk. Firstly though I wanted to talk about what 'Prince Rupert's drop' is. These are glass beads created by dripping melted glass into cold water causing it to solidify into a tadpole shaped droplet with a long, thin tail. This is not to be confused with another princely ornamentation which is the Prince Albert - a penis piercing that gives you a great place to keep your keys so you don't lose them while swimming at the beach, or tapping beats against the porcelain to keep you amused while on the toilet or when brushing your teeth, but is highly frustrating when peeing standing up as the pee tends to run around the ring and shoot out back between your legs (in my experience anyway - fortunately I solved that problem by reconfiguring my instrument so that I never had to take the risk of standing to pee again. Perhaps a little bit of an extreme solution, but I really could not get that ring out!).
Where were we? Oh, the Prince Rupert droplets are characterized internally by very high residual stresses, which gives them some radical properties. You can strike the fat end with a hammer and it won't break, but it will explosively disintegrate if the tail end is even slightly damaged like a fragile male ego. I love how they evoke the sense of how we experience our world as this solid concrete thing, but with the right application of thought we can shatter our perception of reality, our place in the universe and what it means to actually exist.
I'll have to return to the idea about the development of music and language in another post, but did want to talk about the music I want played at my funeral in about 40 years time (all going swimmingly). I think it has to be something by Pink Floyd - which by that stage may have passed out of living memory of many of those attending but will bring that sense of space and wonder. Music transcends words, an idea backed by the science. My top pick is possibly Shine on you crazy Diamond. It begins with that beautiful floating note hanging over a sound landscape a bit like some of Mozart's work. Time is a pretty solid contender or That Great Gig in the Sky which would allow me to bring my own wailing. Both are specifically very good end of life songs. Wish you were here Holds a special place as after one of my own grandmothers funerals me and some cousins got together and sung. However Comfortably Numb has those beautifully transcendent solos. What do you think? It's a dilemma.
