FreeMind is useful for taking notes in class, outlining books, or even planning a route to world domination. Each node can contain text, pictures, special icons, or colorful formatting. It acts like an outliner–except that, instead of working with headings and subheadings, you create nodes and subnodes that branch from a central point. I'd like to see how this compares to writely and how I can potentially use it in my class.įreeMind Psychologists say that an effective way to take notes is to put them in a Mind Map–a free-form tree structure that mimics the way your brain works. You can even compare versions to see changes. It lets you create, edit, and share documents with others–directly in your browser. WriteBoard For collaborative editing, you can't beat WriteBoard. I think this will help me find resources as I read blogs and am researching. Highlight a word or phrase, and a pop-up menu lets you submit the highlighted text to search engines, reference sites, online merchants, and more. Hyperwords This Firefox browser plug-in renders any text–on any Web page– clickable. * Is esotericism a word? I don't believe I have used it before, but it says exactly what I mean here.PC World has announced their 101 Fabulous Freebies. Musical delight is a response that says, 'Well I wouldn't have thought of that, but I know exactly what you mean'. And indeed there are pieces of music that fail to move because they are too obvious in their gestures, too blatant - their musical cliffs are too close together.īut it seems to me that when musical emotion works well, it's when the shared patterns of feeling within the style are deployed so as to deliver both that sense of recognition that arises from common experience, and that sense of surprise or revelation that comes from individuality of expression. The Romantics mistrusted the idea of conventionalised codes of musical meaning because they were worried that these would betray the individuality of emotional response. This resulted in some mind-bendingly exquisite music, but also a layer of esotericism* that kept casual listeners at bay.) (Indeed, one of the difficulties art music of the 20th century ran into was that the progressive shedding of conventionalised patterns in the compositional process led to a progressive loss of widely-shared patterns of response from audiences. If they didn't draw on a common currency of meaning, they would make no sense.
But this of course is to look back at that earlier era through the lens of an essentially Romantic aesthetic that sees emotion as spontaneous and individual, subjective and authentic.īut just because Romantic musical gestures are wilder and more colourful doesn't mean that they're not a shared cultural product. Now, when I was a student learning about the baroque 'doctrine of affections', the idea that particular emotions were codified with particular musical gestures was portrayed as a somewhat mechanistic and artificial approach to musical emotion. So this is why any particular type of music feels increasingly expressive the more you spend time with it. As the Italians put it: traduttore, traditore.īut this chart reminds us that this is not just a cognitive matter - there are experiences and internal responses that are distinctive to the world created and maintained by a language. There are things that you can say in one language that you can't say in another.
Further to my post last month exploring the way musical genres carry with them characteristic patterns of feeling, I came across a rather wonderful project to chart emotions that have words in other languages but not in English (hat tip to Sarah Foster for the link).Ī century ago, Saussure gave us the idea that it's not just the signifier (the perceptible signal) that is generated within the system of a particular language, but also the signified (the mental image the signal evokes).
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