SPEAKER_09: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This is part three of the 2020-2021 mini stories episodes where I interview the staff about their favorite little stories from the built world that don't quite fill out an entire episode for whatever reason. But our great 99 PI stories. We have music games with Sean Real, Lost Statues with Joe Rosenberg and overactive heaters with Delaney Hall. Stay with us. Hey, Dee, what do you have for us today? So today I want to talk with you about old radiators.
SPEAKER_05: And have you ever lived with an old radiator? I have. Where we met, like, I don't know, 15 years ago in Chicago when we worked together at the station there.
SPEAKER_09: I lived in at least one apartment that had a radiator, which was, yeah, is a confounding device.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, they are notorious for being loud, you know, like clanking a lot. And also just for being too hot. Yeah, blisteringly hot.
SPEAKER_09: Right, right. So I don't know if you've ever wondered why that is.
SPEAKER_05: But I recently learned that there is a reason for it. And it's actually related not to this current pandemic we're all living through, but to the flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919.
SPEAKER_09: Well, I've heard a little bit about this, but I don't know the full story. So I'm excited that you're bringing this to us. Yeah, yeah. So I, first of all, I learned about this history in an article in Bloomberg City Lab.
SPEAKER_05: It was reported by Patrick Sisson. And it was kind of through that article that I found Dan Holohan. So he grew up in the heating industry. His dad worked for this plumbing and heating wholesaler in Manhattan. And now his family runs a website called HeatingHelp.com. He wrote a book called The Lost Art of Steam Heat. I mean, basically, he's just really into heating, specifically steam heating. It throws such a lovely radiant glow on you. It's like being on the beach.
SPEAKER_03: And it's just a wonderful way to heat. And the dogs are always sleeping in front of him. The cat will pop up on top of it. People will dry their hats and gloves on top of it. It's just a... feels like home. So he can go on and on waxing poetically about steam heat for a long time.
SPEAKER_05: I love it.
SPEAKER_09: And he got really interested in the history of steam heating in the US.
SPEAKER_05: And he said that as he started doing this research, he was looking at these primary source documents, like these old technical manuals. And he kept coming across references to the fresh air movement. I'm on board with the fresh air movement. I'd follow Terry Gross into the gates of hell.
SPEAKER_09: I think we're all part of the fresh air movement.
SPEAKER_05: This is a different fresh air movement. Well, that's too bad. We'll have to work on the other one.
SPEAKER_05: This one, not with Terry Gross, was a health crusade. It started right after the Civil War. And proponents of the fresh air movement basically thought that stale, uncirculated air was bad. Like very bad for your health. They called it vitiated air, which means spoiled air. And they thought that spoiled air was everywhere. Like we were just steeping in it. People didn't bathe regularly. There was unventilated stoves that would be in the place.
SPEAKER_03: So they just said it's dirty air and it's coming off your body and it's coming out of your mouth and you're smoking. And all these things are going on in a sealed apartment that doesn't have good circulation to begin with. So that caught everybody's attention because it was indeed killing people.
SPEAKER_09: And so this was pre-germ theory, right? Yeah, it was.
SPEAKER_05: Do they have a concept of the mechanism of why unventilated air might be making them sick?
SPEAKER_09: They didn't really at this point. They were just sort of starting to realize that something was up.
SPEAKER_05: And one of the main proponents of the fresh air movement was a guy named Louis Leeds. He had been an inspector for the Union Army Field Hospitals. And he got really interested in this idea of vitiated air. He was convinced that something about it was making people ill. And he actually teamed up with Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yeah, they created this traveling road show. They would basically go across the country and give lectures with these magic lantern type slides. She got mom and dad sitting in the parlor and in crawls the baby in a long gown and the baby's bonnet.
SPEAKER_03: And the baby crawls into these vapors that are coming out of the man. And they're done in red. So you see, it comes out of his mouth and it goes to the floor. And the baby crawls into this cloud and the next slide the baby just kind of topples over and dies. Wow, that's some extreme form of scared straight.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, as you can imagine, it was pretty effective.
SPEAKER_05: They really caught the attention of lots of people. And I was really struck by when Dan was describing these lantern slides that they would show. It really actually reminded me of the coronavirus diagrams you'll see where there's like two people talking to each other. And they're sort of spewing red and blue virus droplets all over each other's faces. Yeah, no, that scarred me.
SPEAKER_09: That in the 90s reports from like 2020, they would show the black lights on hotel rooms of all the organic splatter all over hotel rooms. I'm scarred for life for that. So these were sort of like the 19th century version of that.
SPEAKER_05: And they were part of what helped the Fresh Air movement really take hold. So it gets very popular and it gets so popular that building designers actually started adapting their buildings to bring in more fresh air. The tenements suddenly, you know, as they come into their own, have to have air shafts and you have to have more windows and you can't have these hobbles.
SPEAKER_03: You know, like you see in the gangs in New York, that sort of thing. So things got better. But then, you know, it took a crisis like the Spanish flu to really kick it into high gear. What's going on is around this time in the 19 teens, there are these two things that are happening concurrently.
SPEAKER_05: And one is the flu pandemic, which, of course, was a devastating global pandemic that was killing hundreds of thousands of people. And then at the same time, steam heating is really getting going. So steam heating systems are being installed in buildings across the country. And health officials at the time were starting to push this idea that people needed to keep their windows open, even in the winter. And they needed to do that to increase ventilation and minimize flu spread. And if people were going to be keeping their windows open through the winter, they needed like some pretty oversized radiators. And they were saying that because of the fresh air movement, we have to start designing systems big enough that they can heat the building on the coldest day of the year with the wind blowing and the windows open.
SPEAKER_03: Okay. So this is why radiators, like even today, can be so overpowering because they need to be that hot for the windows to be open.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_05: And many of those radiator systems were so sturdy and so well built that they are still in use today. Yeah. The one that was in my apartment was certainly put in in the 1920s.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And the kind of interesting thing is that once the pandemic was over...
SPEAKER_05: People began to wonder, why do we have the windows open? Oh, that was because of the flu. But that's gone more than 10 years. Close the window.
SPEAKER_03: So they closed the window and now they're stifling because it's so hot. Ask anybody that lives in a Manhattan apartment nowadays. And so all of those stifling people started insisting that something be done about this.
SPEAKER_05: And what ended up happening is that basically a whole industry arose to retrofit those big overpowering radiators. So companies began to develop the radiator covers and other people would paint their radiators with this special paint.
SPEAKER_03: But if you use something called a bronzing paint, specifically an aluminum bronzing paint, which has flakes of metal in it, that will reduce the radiator's ability to radiate by 20%. So just by painting the radiator silver with this special paint, you're downsizing it. And this is why radiators are all silver for the most part. Wow. I had no idea that was why they were silver. I mean, they're very often silver.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah, they are. It also must be made worse by the fact that the building around it is becoming more thermally efficient. Like buildings, you know, trap more heat in than they used to. And that must make it even worse. Yeah, yeah. Compared to, you know, the 19 teens, buildings now are basically like hermetically sealed.
SPEAKER_05: In some office buildings, you cannot open the windows. It's not designed that way. It's not an option. And so, you know, as you can imagine, that has become an issue with our current pandemic. You need a lot of air coming in. You need fresh air. So and many of these high end modern buildings can't do that.
SPEAKER_03: And the windows don't open. So that's, you know, this is where we're faced right now is, okay, what do we do with that? I have been wondering, like, if this current pandemic would shift us back a little bit more towards open air buildings,
SPEAKER_09: because the need for fresh air and space seems as necessary as it was in the 19 teens.
SPEAKER_05: Right. Yeah. I mean, I think there's two forces kind of pulling in opposite directions. One is like that knowledge that we have now, like very vividly that buildings need to be ventilated. And then also like this continuing pressure to make them more energy efficient because of climate change. So it'll be interesting to watch what happens. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that struck me as we were doing a bunch of episodes in the beginning of the pandemic and the lockdown is how many things that we're trying today to slow this pandemic down, like masks and quarantine and open windows.
SPEAKER_09: They're so old. They were the same techniques that people were doing 100 years ago. I know. I know. I know. It sort of feels like the vaccine, that is this, you know, monumental achievement of modern science.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, especially these vaccines. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, these vaccines. But everything else we're working with is like a really old technology.
SPEAKER_05: Just like stay away from each other. Cover your faces. Open the windows. That's what we've got.
SPEAKER_09: That was senior producer Delaney Hall. To read Patrick Sisson's full story of steam heating and its connection to the history of the 1918 flu pandemic, visit Bloomberg City Lab. And to learn more about Dan Holahan, visit heatinghelp.com. All right. So I'm here with producer Joe Rosenberg. Hey, Joe. Hey, Roman. How's it going? I'm good. I'm good. So what is the mini that you have for us today?
SPEAKER_10: Well, so what I've got for you here is a kind of mini sequel, because if you cast your memory back, not actually to all that long ago, you will recall 99 PI produced a story about monuments to Lenin.
SPEAKER_09: Right, right. Julia Barton did that story for us. It's kind of about what happened to all those Lenin monuments in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 91.
SPEAKER_10: As our listeners probably know, and probably know, even if they didn't hear that episode after the Soviet Union collapsed, a great many of those statues of Lenin busts of Lenin and really all sorts of monuments to Lenin were toppled. They were torn down or pulverized or even dramatically tossed into the Black Sea and consigned to various other sad fates.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And I think what the story was centered on and what was interesting to me is that there are some still standing in Russia, the ones that weren't destroyed that were put in these Soviet nostalgia parks alongside statues of other former communist leaders. It was a way of dealing with this history without completely destroying it.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, exactly. They kind of almost like bracketed it off. They put this kind of meta frame around it and so like it was everyone was able to like, look at it and you could just project what what you wanted onto it in this kind of safer space or something. That is the main thing that most people know about these old Lenin monuments, which is that most of them are gone or defunct in one way or another. But I am here to tell you that there is one monument to Lenin that not only lives on, but I think it's safe to say it will not be toppled anytime soon. It is arguably arguably the most secure Lenin in the world.
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_09: Okay. Why is that? Why is this one survived and will probably survive amongst all the others that have been toppled?
SPEAKER_10: Well, to answer that, first of all, let me ask you, have you ever heard of something called a pole of inaccessibility?
SPEAKER_09: No, I haven't. It sounds a little ominous. What is the pole of inaccessibility?
SPEAKER_10: So a pole of inaccessibility, it's both ominous and not. It is the geographical term that indicates the location on a given landmass that is further from the coastline than any other spot on that landmass. So every continent and every island has its own pole of inaccessibility or POI. So for example, North America's POI is on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. It's 1,030 miles from the nearest coastline. Asia has a POI in the desert of Western China. It's about 1,500 miles from the coast.
SPEAKER_10: But you know, even something like the island of Great Britain has its own pole of inaccessibility. According to the British Ordinance Survey, it is near Church Flats Farm in the county of Derbyshire and is a mere 70 miles from the coast. It's not that inaccessible.
SPEAKER_09: No, I think I think you could knock that one out pretty easily if you wanted to. But anyway, the reason I bring this all up is because way back in 1958, a team of scientists from the Soviet Union became the first people to ever reach the southern pole of inaccessibility.
SPEAKER_10: So this is the POI for Antarctica. Is it actually the South Pole or not?
SPEAKER_09: No. So the South Pole is closer to the coast because if you think about it, like there's that like big chunk taken out of one side of Antarctica. It's a little lopsided, right? It's got that chunk taken out of it.
SPEAKER_10: And so the South Pole is actually much closer to that coastline than the pole of inaccessibility, which true to its name for these Russian scientists was really hard to get to. It's like really inaccessible.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, yeah, like it was so by definition, further inland than the geographic South Pole. Plus, you know, it's Antarctica. So, you know, it was already also on the higher and colder part of the continent.
SPEAKER_10: And then the further you are from the shoreline, the colder it tends to get. So, you know, we made it to the South Pole in 1911. But when the Soviets finally got to the southern pole of inaccessibility, that took them another half century to reach. I mean, I guess it has not doesn't have a lot of symbolic virtue. And it seems like a horrible place. So why would you bother?
SPEAKER_09: They weren't really in a rush to get there. And apparently, they weren't in a rush to stay there either. Because once this team of Soviet scientists got there, they tried to set up this meteorological research station.
SPEAKER_10: But it was like, insanely cold. The average temperature was something like negative 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Average? Oh, my God. Yeah, that's horrible.
SPEAKER_10: So right, like, just after like 12 days, they were like, screw this. And they left. That's smart. Good call. Yeah, excellent call. But before they returned to civilization, they left behind a bust of Lenin.
SPEAKER_10: Of course. It's just the Soviet thing to do. And so here, let me show you a photo of what it looked like.
SPEAKER_09: Wow. Yep, there it is. There's Lenin, a bust of Lenin, right on the top of a kind of like a pedestal of some kind. What is that? So that is actually the chimney of the research station, and which they dragged all the way there thinking probably that they'd use it for longer than 12 days.
SPEAKER_10: But now it serves this function of making sure Lenin is as lofty and dignified as possible as he gazes out over the white expanse.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, despite the stark surroundings, I mean, this looks like just a classic Lenin bust, like generic Lenin bust.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah, totally. The furrowed brow, the jutting chin. It's almost like at the last second before they left, they just grabbed a spare Lenin off the shelf and just kind of took it with them. You know, so I confess, yeah, it's not much to look at. But I kind of think of it as like the gargoyle on the top of a cathedral. Because like, after they left, it was never intended to be seen by anyone.
SPEAKER_09: Like the gargoyle has a function, but the people on the ground can't see gargoyles. They're meant for the designer of the church and maybe for God. And that's it. Right, exactly. Or in the case of this Lenin, like, you know, pleasing to the materialist forces of Marxist Leninism.
SPEAKER_10: It sounds like I'm joking, but like they even oriented it so that it would forever face towards Moscow.
SPEAKER_09: So are these pictures you're showing me from when it was erected or did people come afterward to check it out? Like, you know, how inaccessible is the Lenin at the pole of inaccessibility?
SPEAKER_10: He's pretty inaccessible. These photos are the originals. There was a brief spurt of visits by pole of inaccessibility standards in the 1960s. The Soviets went back super briefly in 64. Then in 65, an American research team dropped by, climbed up the pedestal and swiveled the bust so that Lenin faced towards Washington, D.C. At which point, learning of the American antics, the Soviets came back down one last time and swiveled him back towards Moscow.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, this is an aspect of the Cold War that I can totally get behind.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah. I mean, if the whole Cold War was just like somehow like dueling pranks for the sake of like national pride, that would be a much better. After that little back and forth, after that little duel for many, many decades, there was nothing. The southern P.O.I. went kind of forgotten and unvisited, which means that all through the rest of the Cold War and Perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, as all the other statues and busts of Lenin were being toppled all over the world, this one lonely Lenin just sat there untouched by the forces of history.
SPEAKER_09: So it wasn't toppled by people marking the end of the regime, but did nature topple it eventually? Like what is the fate of Lenin on the P.O.I.? So this is where the story takes a turn, because when people finally returned to the area in the mid 2000s, the official position of the P.O.I. had actually changed in the intervening years due to like updated calculations.
SPEAKER_10: So the new focus was on being the first to go to these new coordinates and nab that record, and checking up on Lenin to see if he was still kicking, it just wasn't a priority. But nevertheless, there was at least one person who continued to believe that Lenin was still there at the old P.O.I. and could be found.
SPEAKER_04: There's no way I was ever going to let go of it. So one way or other, I was crawling to the pole of an accessibility. I was always going there. So who is that? So that is Henry Cookson. And today he runs an adventure travel outfit called Cookson Adventures.
SPEAKER_10: But back in 2006, he was not a professional adventurer. He was just kind of a random dude who, along with two other friends, Rupert Longsdon and Roy Sweet, just got obsessed with finding this bust of Lenin at the southern pole of an accessibility.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah. None of us had a clue. I had my team. We didn't know where the north south, we didn't know where the penguins were north or south. We didn't know that the polar bears, we knew nothing about these areas. He sounds like the right man for the job.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, but, you know, I actually do firmly believe in beginner's luck. Like, like, you don't know you're not supposed to do certain things. So you just do them and then you kind of get away with them. Everyone else they consulted with basically said, why even bother at this point? Because even if you get there, you're not going to find anything.
SPEAKER_04: They just looked at us and said, look, Lenin is going to be buried under the snow. Huge structures have been buried over the decades. So a small little statue that no one's been to in 40, 50 years, without doubt, is not going to be there.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, wow. So so they could be right on it right there. But Lenin could be so buried, they would not actually find it.
SPEAKER_10: Correct. So they hired a fourth person, a veteran Antarctic explorer named Paul Landry to help supervise their team. But there was still this complication, because even though great parts of the Antarctic ice sheet are, you know, calving away due to climate change, the middle of the continent, the snow is still just accumulating and then compacts down into ice. And at the pull of an accessibility, one of the things that makes it a challenging place to go is that the ice there is, I believe, 13000 feet deep.
SPEAKER_10: But nevertheless, despite the odds, they decided to go look for Lenin. And so they went down to Antarctica. They used kites to help pull themselves and their supplies across the ice. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And I will skip over the details of the journey itself, you know, insert your standard extremes of Antarctica statistics here. But I will just say that to reach the suspected location of the Russian station took them 46 days. Holy moly. Oh, my God.
SPEAKER_10: The whole way there was just pure horizon. You know, an almost entirely flat, featureless landscape. And all through this monotonous journey, they had to contend with the possibility that when they got to the coordinates, Lenin would be so buried in the snow that all they would see was more flat, featureless landscape.
SPEAKER_04: We'd only seen white, you know, white snow and sky on our own selves and tent for the last 50-odd days. And we reach the said coordinates. We are absolutely exhausted. We're freezing cold and we can see nothing. So, you know, we agreed to keep on pushing. And after a few minutes, I see this tiny little black dot on the horizon. A few more minutes and this little black dot starts to grow into something more substantial. And then suddenly you can make out, you know, the outline of a man. And there was this silence. We put down our kites and we just walked. We walked in silence up to this up to this, you know, statue. And there was Lenin.
SPEAKER_09: Wow. I cannot believe they found him.
SPEAKER_10: They did. He wasn't buried under the snow. At least not yet. And I have to say, I just I just love this part of the story because here's a photo of what Lenin looked like when they did find him.
SPEAKER_09: Wow. So it's really just the top of the chimney that's left and the bust. I mean, he's he's just barely hanging on.
SPEAKER_10: It's been reduced to a kind of a I don't know, what do you call it, like a plinth. Yeah. To give you a sense of scale, the snow had been accumulating, obviously, in the previous 48 years, but it hadn't quite made it all the way up. The original chimney of the Russian station was maybe, let's say, 30 feet high. And now only about six to seven feet were left, making Lenin at that pole of inaccessibility a tad more accessible.
SPEAKER_09: You can reach up and touch it. Yeah. Which is exactly what they did. The really bizarre thing was, you know, was expecting this to be a bronze or something, you know, steward.
SPEAKER_04: And it was made of some sort of weird yellow plastic compound, which is very light. You could you could pick him up. Did you pick him up? We did pick him up. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Did they make him face towards London or something?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. So, of course, I asked Henry precisely that. And he said, no, they left him facing towards Moscow, but not before goofing around just a bit.
SPEAKER_04: He might have been dressed up a little bit. You know, nothing too reverent. We put a sort of hat on him and some goggles and took some pictures of us all sort of, you know, group huddle around him and everything else. But, you know, I think he's left with his pride intact.
SPEAKER_09: I'm glad they left his pride intact, but it sounds like he's not going to last for that much longer because if the ice has accumulated around 20 feet in the 50 years and there's only about six feet left, it seems like Lenin will be gone in another decade or so. Could you remind me when his expedition was?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. So Henry's expedition was December of 2006 is when they started. They found Lenin in January of 2007.
SPEAKER_09: So that's already like, you know, 13, 14 years. And so do people know if Lenin is still there? Is it almost up for Lenin?
SPEAKER_10: So, of course, that's the big question, right? And as it turns out, the Russian station has been visited at least two more times since then. And of course, each set of visitors took the obligatory photo posing next to Lenin. So here's a photo of a Norwegian team that got there just one year later in 2008.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, so yeah, he's already lost a foot at least, you know, maybe two or three feet. The bottom of the or the top of the plinth right where the bus starts is just about chest height on most of these guys. I'd say it shaved off. Let's go with a foot. I think a foot, foot and a half.
SPEAKER_10: But even more recent data, much more recent data is from this photo taken by a solo Australian adventurer who went, basically he went yesterday. This photo was taken in December of 2019.
SPEAKER_09: And this one looks like a, like, maybe two foot off the ground.
SPEAKER_10: He's sitting in this photo, but if he stood up, he would be taller than above it. Yeah, much taller. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: I will say, however, that I do I do think that this like kind of drab cookie cutter Lenin with its standard issue defiant expression is the perfect statue for this situation.
SPEAKER_10: Like, you know, because like, he never looks worried like even as the ice encroaches he seems to just be saying like, you know, bring it on. He's definitely facing his fate with a sort of admirable stoicism.
SPEAKER_09: But like, but his fate is coming no matter what. Like, if I were to guess or like it did about another foot in a or two feet in a year. I mean, you're talking five years max before he's like gone for good. Is there any notion that, you know, you should save him? I mean, it's just a plasticine bust of Lenin. We could they just like, take him or what do you think will happen? Well, for starters, it would be a treaty violation.
SPEAKER_10: To take him? Yeah, Antarctica is under the joint jurisdiction of the signatories of the Antarctic Treaty. And in 2012, the signatories approved a list of historic sites and monuments to be preserved. And there's a lot actually there for like 86 monuments on the list.
SPEAKER_09: 86 monuments on Antarctica.
SPEAKER_10: Let me just tell you there's a surprising number of plaques in Antarctica.
SPEAKER_09: Plaques which no one reads. Right, exactly.
SPEAKER_10: But, you know, I think this time 99 PI can forgive our listeners if they haven't if they haven't read the Antarctica. But coming in at number four was the bust of Lenin at the southern pole of inaccessibility. Oh, so this is one of the historic monuments that that has to be preserved.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And you know, if it's number four on the list, it's funny, you can like see them.
SPEAKER_10: It's like this one's like this one is listed by Denmark and this one is listed by the US. And like this is I think this is either the first or second like one listed by Russia. It's like, you know, the bet the bust of Lenin stays. So if you tried to move it, Putin would have you killed. Of course. But I personally think there's an even more important reason not to remove it, which is well, actually, let me ask you from an artistic or even philosophical perspective. Would you, Roman, want to see it saved and returned to civilization or left to the elements?
SPEAKER_09: Oh, left to the elements. No question. It should be buried. That's like part of the art project. Is it being buried as far as I'm concerned? Yeah. And I have to totally agree with this. The whole thing that makes gives it poetic appeal is that he is at least most of the time going unseen by anyone.
SPEAKER_10: He almost would like kind of reach his platonic ideal by being rendered completely inaccessible and completely unseeable. And, you know, another person who feels this way is Henry Cookson. He said he considered taking it for a moment. It was a very fleeting thought of putting him in our pulk and bringing him home. So, yes, yes, there's a huge temptation to take it.
SPEAKER_04: But no, I think I think he should remain where he was put. I think if you could get there and his sort of the snow sort of halfway up his face or something, that would be cool. Like only his bald head, his lap sticking out before that, too, is consumed by the snow.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. His final, you know, that final gasp. And then he's disappeared into a silent, icy grave.
SPEAKER_04: You know, that would be poetic.
SPEAKER_09: Well, thank you, Joe. This is a really amazing story. I love it.
SPEAKER_10: Thank you so much, Roman. This one was a pleasure.
SPEAKER_09: I'll play some music games with Sean Real. We're going to compose a song together after this. When you're working on the go, how can you make sure the confidential information on your laptop screen is safe from wandering eyes? 3M has the answer with the new 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filter. Using Nanoluver technology, 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filter is a powerful, powerful, and powerful device that allows you to use the same technology as your laptop. It's a great device for you to use. It's a great device for you to use. It's a great device for you to use. It's a great device for you to use. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC's important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. The IRC's donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need.
SPEAKER_09: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. We'll break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. All right, so I'm here with our composer Sean Real, who has a mini story for us. And you always have a music-related mini story for us every year. Mm-hmm. So that's the case this year, too? Yep, it is. Yeah, very much so. I love talking about music.
SPEAKER_02: So, what do you have?
SPEAKER_02: So today we're going to talk about music games. Okay. And specifically, like, music composing games, which is a term, an umbrella term I kind of came up with. I couldn't really find something that really, to really, like, put all these things together, but I swear it feels related. So, okay, so, you know, so these are music games, but not, like, rhythm games, which I think is what a lot of people think of if you hear the term music game. Like, rock band or bop it or, you know, the clapping games that you play on the playground. Right, right, right. Did you ever play those games, Roman? Rock band for sure. Like, I have a rock band set in my house. I still play. I love rock band.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a lot of fun. What about the clapping games? I don't know if I know any clapping games off the top of my head.
SPEAKER_09: I know them mainly from, there was this amazing sound recordist and sort of audio anthropologist named Tony Schwartz, who was also an ad man in the 60s, and he recorded lots of kids games. Like, he was a New Yorker, and he basically was agoraphobic, and he basically stuck to his block. But he recorded all these clapping and kids games that were amazing. And there's a Kids and Sisters piece about Tony Schwartz, which is stunning and one of my favorite pieces of radio. And so I have some different record albums of Tony Schwartz recording clapping kids games and rhyming games and stuff like that. And I think that stuff is really amazing. But I've never done that myself, you know?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, yeah, I was never really like a clapping game kid at all either.
SPEAKER_02: But it's also because I just don't really like rhythm games. You would think that maybe that wouldn't be the case since I'm a musician. Yeah, and a drummer most specifically. Yes, but I just don't, you know, and I think this is why music composing games really appeal to me is because, so what's different about a music composing game is that there are rules around it to keep it sounding like music or whatever the game determines is music. But the whole idea behind them is that you get something different every single time you play. And there are lots of different examples of how people construct ways of basically generating songs and generating different kinds of song experiences from a set of rules. And some of these examples are a little less maybe historically significant than others, but this is my personal museum we're about to step into. These are my favorites. Okay, well let's hear them. What's the first one like?
SPEAKER_02: So there are like a few games, I kind of feel like they're in the same vein, like kind of through the 1600s to the 1800s. And some of them are done with dice. A composer might like lay out like a certain number of notes or maybe write like a few different like melody variations. And then they kind of like write them on sheets of paper maybe or like assign, you know, and assign numbers to them. And then you roll some dice and then you like notate based on what numbers you roll. And so basically you're making a song through chance. Like, you know, like you may have even like written sections of music, but how one goes into the other and how the song starts and is like is all based on just like the chance of the dice. And, you know, it's the kind of thing that you could use maybe as like a writing prompt to like to, you know, to be like, Oh, I'm totally stuck right now. Well, I'll just like, well, I like these notes. I guess maybe I'll just like see if I can like just like leave it up to God. And I really like that because it sounds like a good way to maybe just like get yourself out of your own way when you're like, you know, when you're working on something. And I, you know, as someone who has like deadlines for music, like I've never tried doing that, but I'm like, I'm very interested in like seeing how that could play out.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_09: It seems that the success of this game is contingent upon the little melodies that you assign have to be good in and of themselves and combine well in a random fashion, which is in and of itself its own difficult task. Yeah. Like you really have to be like a composer already to play a game like this.
SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, it's like you have to have parameters already set. You know, that also like is dependent on like rules you learn based on what you consider to be music. Right. OK, so next stop on in the museum of my favorite music games, we've got a little program computer program called Microsoft Song Smith. Have you ever heard of Microsoft Song Smith? I have not. I mean, it sounds vaguely familiar, but I've never used that.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_09: No, I'm going to let Microsoft Song Smith have the first word here. This is a little Song Smith commercial where they explain how it works.
SPEAKER_02: You're writing music? When did you learn how to write music?
SPEAKER_06: You sing into a microphone while the drummer plays along. And then when Song Smith makes the music, you're on your way to a song. Now, Song Smith comes up with a music that matches your voice. You sing into a microphone while the drummer plays along. And then when Song Smith makes the music, you're on your way to a song. You can choose the style, you can set the mood and the chords will match what you sing. You can change the music as much as you like, so it really is your thing.
SPEAKER_02: So basically, like you can sing like, you know, anything that's vaguely melodic into Song Smith and it will generate music around that. Wow, that's something else.
SPEAKER_09: And this is from like the mid 2000s and like all the promotional material I find about Song Smith is like, it's a great like, you know, like sketch tool for musicians.
SPEAKER_02: And it's like, you know, it's for like, like there's like, it feels like they're trying to market to like serious songwriters. And I mean, you know, to be fair, I think that's like entirely valid. Like I think if someone wanted to use it that way, they totally could, you know, because generally people do write music within a certain set of rules and parameters. Like as much as we want to think that we all do like things that are completely unique and like and stuff. It's like there's a certain amount of just like, you know, like we're within a scale. We're within like, you know, like a certain Western tradition. That does make sense.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, but there is something about Song Smith where like the sound of the instruments and everything is so, so silly that it's really like provided a lot of great opportunities for wonderful joke songs.
SPEAKER_02: And my favorite thing that someone's ever done with Song Smith and actually there are a lot of these on YouTube. You can find videos of people who have taken isolated vocal tracks from hit songs and put them into Song Smith. Oh my God. Okay. So I'm going to play you one of those right now.
SPEAKER_03: I hurt myself today to see a fast defeat. I focus on the pain beyond the planetry.
SPEAKER_08: The needle tears a hole in the dark.
SPEAKER_02: Very different take on that song. Very different take. Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_09: That's hilarious. What a novel use of that technology. That's a really fun thing to do. Yeah, I think it's genius. It really like it really feeds my soul.
SPEAKER_02: These like these Song Smith covers. I think that like music is the language of the soul. But I think that humor is also like a huge part of the language of the soul. And so I think, you know, I, I consider this to be valid art personally. Totally. I do too. You know, like it's just a different form. I mean, it has its limitations, but it's, it's lovely and brings joy and makes you think about the original song and the art of that song.
SPEAKER_09: Even designing the algorithm that creates the song is an art form. And that's so cool. So the next stop on the tour. This also kind of gets into some territory that it's going to, it's kind of feels less like a game, but it feels really related to Song Smith and to this whole idea of having a set of rules and, you know, and generating songs for entertainment out of it.
SPEAKER_02: And it's also like another one of my favorite things ever. So I'm just going to read this, I'm going to read a bit of this how stuff works article, like pretty much word for word real quick. So researchers from the University of Toronto trained a recurrent neural network, a type of complex artificial intelligence to write a song inspired by an image of a Christmas tree. They taught the AI to compose tunes by feeding it 100 hours of online music. They also gave the program thousands of images with captions so that it could link specific words to visual patterns. Then create the lyrics and music when provided a picture. Sanja Fiddler, one of the folks who worked on it says, instead of buying a karaoke machine with a certain track on it, you can create your own karaoke at home by throwing in some interesting photos and inviting the machine to generate music for you. I think it has endless possibilities. End quote. Now, now I'm going to play you some of the song that this artificial intelligence wrote. Okay, so here's the photo that they fed into the computer.
SPEAKER_09: It's a photograph of a Christmas tree. It's lit, it has presents around it. It's the bottom half of a Christmas tree, very classically done with red and green and gold ornaments. Very, very fancy.
SPEAKER_02: And here's the song.
SPEAKER_07: What's to decorate the room? Christmas tree is filled with flowers. I swear, it is Christmas Eve. I hope that is what you say. The best Christmas present in the world is a blessing. I've always been there for the rest of our lives.
SPEAKER_02: It's a little ominous.
SPEAKER_07: And then a half hour ago, I am glad to meet you. I can hear the music coming from the hall. A fairy tale, a Christmas tree. There are lots and lots and lots of flowers.
SPEAKER_08: I love this song.
SPEAKER_09: That is amazing, like eerie and cool and odd. It reminds me of like, you know, kind of like a kid might write before they have like internalized all of these like ideas of like, what is good and bad songwriting or something like that, which is which is ironic because like this is coming from like an AI that has been fed so much conventional music.
SPEAKER_02: It just makes me think like, you know, like I want this AI to be to stay exactly as it is forever. Like, you know, whatever, whatever, like, you know, whatever iPhone app is going to like come from this kind of technology. Like, I feel like it's going to be less interesting than if you just take the code as it is and slap it in our hands right now. Let's start giving it pictures.
SPEAKER_09: So funny. OK, so what's your what's your final one? OK, so the final thing I thought we'd we'd play a little game of our own.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, cool. That's exciting. OK. Yeah. So I made a music game for us to play that I composed music for. So basically this is like this is like a 99 PI song music game. And OK, how does it work? So I've composed six rhythm parts and six lead like sort of lead instrument piano parts. And we're going to roll dice to determine what order they are played in. Oh, good. OK. OK. Do I need two six sided dice or two six sided dice?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, two six sided dice. OK, hold on. So first, take one of the dice and roll for the tempo.
SPEAKER_02: Three.
SPEAKER_02: OK, so three is 80, which is, in my opinion, the best tempo for this song. So good work, Roman. You're all you're already great at this game. With your two dice, designate one die for rhythm and one for lead. So if you have to roll them in separate places or something, you know, they're very different.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, good, good, good.
SPEAKER_09: OK, one for rhythm, since I did the last one was the tempo one, I'll do the tempo one is rhythm. OK, OK, the tempo one is four and the leader is a one.
SPEAKER_02: OK, four and one. We're off to a very dramatic start. OK, and so now we're going to do that seven more times.
SPEAKER_09: Same order, five and three. Five and five. Oh, six and six. How very conventional.
SPEAKER_09: Two and four. Oh, six and six again. One and two. Four and five. You just wrote a song, Roman.
SPEAKER_02: I'm so excited. I didn't know I had it in me.
SPEAKER_09: Let's see how it sounds.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, so good.
SPEAKER_02: That was a false ending.
SPEAKER_09: That was my one and two, the one that went down to that. Yeah, that's so funny. Oh, it turned out so well. So I've rolled this a couple of times with Courtney, my partner yesterday, and we I mean, that's something that I thought was great was the false ending.
SPEAKER_02: Like, that's the kind of stuff I really like and I think it's great for a laugh and makes it feel like a game.
SPEAKER_09: I love it. It's so much fun. Thank you for helping me write a song this afternoon. Thank you for writing a song with me, Roman. Oh, it's my pleasure. I never knew how talented I really was. I always knew.
SPEAKER_09: At the beginning of 2021 99% invisible is Katie Mingle, Kurt Kohlstedt, Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sean Rio, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lay, Sophia Klatsker, Chris Berube, Abbie Madone, Christopher Johnson, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KLW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are part of radio topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Discover, listen and support them all at radio topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. We'll be returning to our normal reported stories next week, but if you like these mini stories and you haven't heard them all over the years, I think this is episode 11 at this point, you can find them all at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_09: Radio topia from PRX.
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