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Russian Piano Masterpieces: Shostakovich

Shostakovich had considered the career of a concert pianist, yet his piano music studiously avoids the virtuosity he had assiduously cultivated as a young performer. Almost all his piano writing is in some way experimental and conceptual.

Artificial Intelligence and Humour

Could AI replace stand-up comedians and scriptwriters? This may not be an impossible dream if you accept that nothing we do is forever beyond the scope of computer modelling.

Space Sounds: The Music of the Cosmos

Space today is terrifyingly silent. But it wasn’t always thus: the early universe was filled with a hot plasma in which sound waves could travel. The cosmos was quivering with the aftershocks of the Big Bang.

Networks: The Internet and Beyond

Networks were seen as a rather arcane and dull area in computer science. Then along came the internet, and everything changed for ever.

BBC Radio in the Digital Era (1982–)

On 17 August 1982, the first commercial CD was released. Digital recording and editing have changed the face of music by making recordings easy to originate and share. But has this affected musical quality, and what are the financial and artistic consequences?

Cyber War Crimes

Cyberwar is not waged on physical battlefields following rules of engagement. Aggressors worry less about collateral damage, in part because they aren’t forced to confront the sight of an enemy bleeding to death before their eyes.

Russian Piano Masterpieces: Prokofiev

Prokofiev’s piano music struck his contemporaries as matching the new era: its dynamism was compared to sport (“football music”), and its grinding repeated patterns to industrial sounds (“machine music”).

Computers: A History

Even the most humdrum of electrical devices nowadays contains at least one computer; yet surprisingly few people are aware of their history, their form or function. In this talk we will see that not only is the history of computers rich and diverse, their architecture likewise.

Russian Piano Masterpieces: Stravinsky

Stravinsky’s solo piano output contains one of the absolute pinnacles of piano virtuosity, the Three Pieces from Petrushka.

An Introduction to Programs

Niklaus Wirth said Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. But programs are more than that. They are ubiquitous in modern life, but only a tiny minority of the population know how to program.

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