And we remember… sometimes with help…

If you’re like me, you probably constantly re-searching for things you only vaguely remember. A few years ago, my friend Jamie Teevan of Microsoft Research did a study about how often people try to re-find information that they’d already found. She found that 33% of the time, people are doing web queries that they’d done before. That suggests that people really are looking for memory support–a way to find things they’ve already found, and need to recover from the dusty halls of memory.

We all have moments like this–a bare memory of something that you’d like to recover. But how can you do it?

This week is about how to do that. Let’s start with the first Challenge.

1. I remember visiting a bunch of colleges in the Eastern US with my daughter (who was checking out different institutions as a prospective student) and hearing a remarkable story at one of them. The story was that this concert hall was the one that staged a concert of a piece of music by a slightly crazed but rather famous composer who wrote a piece for orchestra and a complicated color-light display keyboard. The thing is, his vision exceeded the ability of the tech at the time. So, roughly a century later, this institution was able to ACTUALLY perform the piece as written–orchestra, light-show performance, and all of the special effects. Questions: What was that piece? Who was the composer? And what university concert hall held this event?

Here’s a real problem: I remembered some things about this. It’s easy for me to remember things around the thing I’m trying to remember. I remember that I’m in the Eastern US, with my daughter, at a university.

All that context information might be useful IF I was looking for a photo, or trying to pin down the date of my exposure to this piece of music. In this case, I also remembered some things about the music itself (around 100 years ago, it’s orchestra + light-show, with a complicated color-light display keyboard, performed at a university).

For a question like this, I’m going to start with a simple search for a piece like that. Here was my first search:

[ orchestra piece university light-show keyboard 1900..1920 ]

Note that I included a number range (1900..1920) because I wanted documents that mentioned possible dates in that range. (A subtle point: This is a number range, not a “date range” restriction. I’m just hoping that people who write articles about this will happen to include the year in their articles.)

The very first result is a link to an article about Yale’s 2010 performance of Scriabin’s “Prometheus,” with full light-show in the Woolsey Concert Hall. As it points out, this will be the “...first full-production of this multimedia work to benefit from contemporary lighting technology and the recent discovery of the composer’s hand-written directions for its execution.”

Checking my memory: Yes, Yale is a university in the northeast, and now that I see it, I remember walking through Woolsey Hall and hearing this story about Scriabin. Wonderful that can then look up my notes and find an image from that visit.

Woolsey Hall, place where Scriabin’s “Prometheus” was performed with full orchestra and a working luce device.

A little background… Scriabin was a well-known, if controversial, composer and pianist. (I first learned about him in my piano studies. His works are fairly difficult.)

In 1978, a first-edition score from 1913 was found with Scriabin’s hand-written annotations, intended to give guidance for the performance of Prometheus: Poem of Fire. In it, Scriabin gives detailed annotations for the luce (the keyboard that drives the colored-light special effects) part. These instructions gave directions for color and lighting, along with special effects as tongues of flame, lightning flashes, and fireworks. For obvious reasons, this piece has been difficult to perform. It was probably beyond the technology of the time.

It’s worth watching (link to YouTube performance of “Prometheus” in Woolsey Hall from 2010), if only to get a sense for what the future of music looked like from 1910.

I have to admit that I got lucky with this dimly remembered memory. It was the first hit, and then seeing the front of the concert hall tickled my memory. Yes, it WAS there that I first heard about it. The rest was easy.

2. You probably remember that childhood song about “Four and twenty blackbirds, baked into a pie.” Question: Was that for real? Or is it a corruption of some other song / phrase from the older parts of our culture? (I mean… blackbirds? Really?)

One thing I know about old nursery rhymes–they’re complicated. Things are rarely as they seem. So I know I’m going to want to find a number of different sources on this.

[ four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie ]

The first thing I learned is that the name of the poem is “Sing a song of sixpence,” which gives me a whole other thing to search for.

“… If you’re reading this page, chances are you’re here because something about one or all of the entries in The Repository Of Lost Legends (TROLL) section of this site struck you as a tad suspect, if not downright wrong.

If any or all of the stories in this section caused your internal clue phone to ring, we hope you didn’t let the answering machine take the call. That niggling little voice of common sense whispering to you in the background was right — there was something wrong with what you read.

You’ve just had an encounter with False Authority Syndrome.
Everything in this section is a spoof.”

Search Lessons