#simon kirby

[tomoleary]

Fighting American by Simon/Kirby, although GCD lists all covers by Kirby, pencil and ink.

[burlveneer-music]

Simon Kirby, Tommy Perman and Rob St John - Sing the Gloaming - electronic sounds built around creative vocalizations (Blackford Hill)

Sing the Gloaming is a collaboration between Professor Simon Kirby and artist/musicians Tommy Perman and Rob St. John, taking its inspiration from Simon’s research in the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Language Evolution. It's a project on light, language and landscape, created using experimental art and music, featuring some of Scotland’s finest vocalists: Kenny Anderson, Nerea Bello, Aidan Moffat, Emily Scott, Su Shaw, Hanna Tuulikki and Andrew Wasylyk. Each singer was asked to find a place where light moves, then record short new vocal pieces around particular ‘light words’ there, thinking about the qualities of the space they were in, and those of the words themselves when recording their pieces. The ‘light words’ in Sing the Gloaming are phonaesthemes, words whose form seems to evoke their meaning directly. In the English language, there are many beginning with “gl” which relate to light, for example: glimmer, glitter, glow, gleam and gloom. These words have all evolved from a single word spoken over 5,000 years ago near the Black Sea. Their different forms and meanings bear the hallmarks of their individual routes through history, across languages and cultures to present-day English. Once each singer had finished their recordings, they were passed onto the next singer, who in turn listened and improvised their own ‘light word’ piece. Melodies emerged and evolved in this process: mirroring the real-world evolution of the words themselves. The resulting recordings were (re)composed using a series of innovative production techniques, using modular synthesisers, granular synthesis and convolution reverbs created directly from data on the use of the “gl” words in five million books published since 1500. But for all its conceptual thinking and tinkering: the new record is a playful and joyous listen. The vocals wash in and out, creating new clusters of chords, melodies and rhythms, each singer collaborating with the next, their collective efforts coalescing like the words in language itself. Four additional pieces see Simon, Tommy and Rob develop the source material in creative and unexpected ways. Produced in association with the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh.

[nblizzieforbes]

Watching supergirl and this guy shows up

And he immediately reminded me of Landon Kirby from Legacies. And then he said his name was Simon KIRBY.

[allthingslinguistic]

A new paper about how people with synesthesia map colours onto vowels. Abstract: 

We report associations between vowel sounds, graphemes, and colors collected online from over 1,000 Dutch speakers. 

We also provide open materials, including a Python implementation of the structure measure and code for a single-page web application to run simple cross-modal tasks. We also provide a full dataset of color–vowel associations from 1,164 participants, including over 200 synesthetes identified using consistency measures. Our analysis reveals salient patterns in the cross-modal associations and introduces a novel measure of isomorphism in cross-modal mappings. 

We found that, while the acoustic features of vowels significantly predict certain mappings (replicating prior work), both vowel phoneme category and grapheme category are even better predictors of color choice. Phoneme category is the best predictor of color choice overall, pointing to the importance of phonological representations in addition to acoustic cues. 

Generally, high/front vowels are lighter, more green, and more yellow than low/back vowels. Synesthetes respond more strongly on some dimensions, choosing lighter and more yellow colors for high and mid front vowels than do nonsynesthetes. 

We also present a novel measure of cross-modal mappings adapted from ecology, which uses a simulated distribution of mappings to measure the extent to which participants’ actual mappings are structured isomorphically across modalities. Synesthetes have mappings that tend to be more structured than nonsynesthetes’, and more consistent color choices across trials correlate with higher structure scores. 

Nevertheless, the large majority (~ 70%) of participants produce structured mappings, indicating that the capacity to make isomorphically structured mappings across distinct modalities is shared to a large extent, even if the exact nature of the mappings varies across individuals. Overall, this novel structure measure suggests a distribution of structured cross-modal association in the population, with synesthetes at one extreme and participants with unstructured associations at the other.

Read the whole paper (open access) or read a summary as a twitter thread.

[bluecollarfilm]

The Hole in the Ground (2019)

Trying to escape her broken past, Sarah O'Neill (Seana Kerslake) is building a new life on the fringes of a backwood rural town with her young son Chris (James Quinn Markey). A terrifying encounter with a mysterious neighbor shatters her fragile security, throwing Sarah into a spiraling nightmare of paranoia and mistrust, as she tries to uncover if the disturbing changes in her little boy are connected to an ominous sinkhole buried deep in the forest that borders their home.

Directed by:   Lee Cronin

Starring:   Seana Kerslake, James Quinn Markey, James Cosmo, Kati Outinen, Simone Kirby, Steve Wall

Release date:   January 31, 2019 (on DirecTV's VOD), March 1, 2019 (in U.S. and U.K. theaters)

[alephstudio]

[tomoleary]

Final Adventure Comics with Simon/Kirby’s Manhunter and Sandman before Superboy took over on issue 103. For over two decades.

[tomoleary]

Third batch of Adventure Comics with Simon/Kirby’s Manhunter and Sandman.