This year’s film selection for Black History Month means a great deal to me. I spent the past year finishing my Bachelor’s degree in Filmmaking at Leeds Beckett, supporting the Bradford Hate Crime Alliance through their own celebration of Black culture, and watching a lot of films.
When I learnt I was going to be able to select some of my favourite films from talented Afro-Caribbean creators, I started writing a shortlist. I must have shown up to the first meeting with about 50. It was like Lenny Henry’s MOBO acceptance speech—I was just rattling off names for a couple minutes. Naturally, the shortlist had to be made, well, shorter, so I decided to use this chance to edit, and decide on which thematic direction I wanted to steer the selection in.
Too often, I seem to see the same movies shown over and over at Black History Cinema screenings, focusing on the historical plight of slavery, or the battle for civil rights in America. While these topics are a very real and important part of our history, I do feel like the movies portraying them sometimes overshadow those focused on current topics, more pertinent to the Black community in 2023.
I feel that, while there must be time for lamenting and reflecting on the past, it is just as important (if not more) to celebrate the present and look hopefully towards the future. So, I have chosen five of my favourite lesser-known examples of Black creativity in recent years. I hope to cover a range of aspects of life being Black in the 2020s, to challenge perception of what genre can be, and most of all, to put some people onto some great cinema!
Sorry To Bother You
Sorry To Bother You is easily in my top five favourite films of all time. Director Boots Riley is just at full tilt, constructing a whole Afrosurreal universe, filling it with dynamic characters and a rollercoaster of a plot to boot. His directorial debut, the film critiques capitalism, modern slavery, mainstream media and racial politics. The directional clarity of Sorry To Bother You is irresistibly charming which, by extension, means that the film can make complicated points to the audience seamlessly in an engaging way.
Riley himself describes the film as “an absurdist dark comedy with aspects of magical realism and science fiction inspired by the world of telemarketing”. The screenplay was inspired by his own time working as a telemarketer and in California.
Lakeith Stanfield (who you might recognise from tv show Atlanta or Get Out—which also made the shortlist) is phenomenal as Cassius Green, a man in financial freefall, who desperately takes on a commission-only role as a telemarketer at a call centre. At first, he is unable to get even a few words in, until he finds an unusual route to great success. But now money is the least of his problems, all his other ones only get worse.
Sorry To Bother You is one of those films where you should really go in knowing as little as possible, which always makes recommending it tricky. However, I can say that it starts out weird, and only gets weirder. It’s got something for everyone, it is razor sharp with its satire, and you probably haven’t seen a film like it.
Get Out
Get Out is special to me, not just because it put a spotlight on Black horror as a genre, but also because it helped shoot Britain’s own Daniel Kaluuya to superstardom. His standout performance in the episode of Black Mirror ‘Fifteen Million Merits’ caught the eye of Jordan Peele (Yes, as in Key and Peele) and secured Kaluuya the leading role in this chilling and diabolical study of race relations in the modern world. And he nails this role too.
It’s hard to believe this is the same young man who played Posh Kenneth in Skins (2007) all those years ago (though even at 18 he was head writer on multiple episodes of the first season of the show). Since Get Out hit theatres, Kaluuya has performed starring roles in some of the biggest films of the 2000s. Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) narrowly missed inclusion on this shortlist, but his portrayal of civil-rights activist Fred Hampton garnered him a much-deserved BAFTA and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Young black street-photographer Chris Washington (Kaluuya) has been invited to stay with his relatively new white girlfriend Rose Armitage’s (Alison Williams) family for the weekend. I would imagine a couple of you reading this got a shiver down your spine from that premise alone, but as the plot progresses, it quickly becomes clear that something is deeply wrong at the Armitage’s manor. Themes of sci-fi and horror collide with witty comedy and a plot that takes a disturbingly close look at modern racial tension.
Get Out has, in turn, opened the door for so many other stories and creators from the black community worldwide. Jordan Peele has continued writing and even collaborated with Kaluuya again in cult-horror flick Nope (2022). Get Out was a landmark in the Black horror genre at its time of release but is still as pertinent as it is rewatchable. Not bad, Posh Kenneth, not bad at all.
Moonlight
I suppose I was already curating when the pandemic struck. Sat around in my university accommodation during lockdown, many nights were spent with me sticking DVDs on to entertain my unsuspecting flatmates. Moonlight is the kind of movie I would put on during lockdown to make my flatmates cry. It worked every time. I was the only one in the house with Black heritage, but by the time the end credits rolled, pretty much everyone would be sobbing. It’s rare that we see such a raw and vulnerable character study executed to such a high degree, and even rarer that we see topics like LGBTQ+ life and toxic masculinity examined through a Black lens this way.
Focusing on the life of Chiron, son of a single mother in a neighbourhood in Miami, Moonlight is split into thirds. We see the effect growing up queer and Black has on Chiron from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood. Set by the east coast, there are a few scenes involving Chiron floating in the ocean. However, what the film does perfectly is conveying that same feeling of being lost and powerless to a vast and uncontrollable force on land. The audience is held desperately close to the character of Chiron as the film progresses, and the way time is used makes it feel like we truly know and understand him by the end.
Moonlight is packed with actors at the top of their game, conducted masterfully by director Barry Jenkins. Some characters are portrayed by different actors as time progresses, but the audience is graced with an interstellar performance from Naomie Harris as Chiron’s mother Paula throughout the different eras. The amount of skill and intelligence it must have taken to assume such a role boggles my mind, especially considering Harris is undeniable from the moment she appears. Every aspect of the film has been planned, polished and executed perfectly and, three Oscars later, it seems like time, money and effort well spent. Required viewing for every one of us.
Rocks
Rocks took me by surprise. I put it on expecting a kitchen-sink drama that I could play in the background while I cooked. By the end I had sat and watched the entire thing without chopping a single onion. The true strength of this film lies in its paramount rendering of the characters portrayed by the young starring actresses.
I have spent a lot of time living in London, and these characters are some of the most true-to-life depictions of personas I have grown up around that I have ever seen on the big screen. By combining a meticulous planning period from director Sarah Gavron and the lead writers (Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson) with improvised scenes and workshopped dialogue, Rocks has realism that borders on documentary style at times. Watching it, I recognised aspects of my sister’s personality, that of my friends from school, and the girls around me growing up in London. The payoff from such realism is that the plight of our protagonists seems even more heartbreaking, and the film creates a significant amount of empathy between the audience and the characters.
The film follows Bukky Bakray as Olushola “Rocks” Omotoso, a schoolgirl living in Hackney with her mother and little brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu). When she returns from school to find that her mother has simply walked out on the two siblings, Rocks is shunted into the role of primary caregiver for her younger brother, without letting social services know their situation. Even after enlisting the help of her friends at school, Rocks can only survive so long on her own, and before long she is forced to make some difficult decisions.
This film is a celebration of Black British women, sisterhood and survival through hardship. It’s one of the most accurate depictions of modern adolescence in London that I can think of through a female lens, and it will stick with you for a long time after the credits roll.
From the main entrance, walk through the museum until you reach the end of the Exploring Space gallery. Take the lift or stairs down to Level –1 to the Secret Life of the Home gallery. Turn right and look for the display on the back wall, where you will find objects and stories about central heating. The heating systems we use today are the result of many technological developments and inventions in the early twentieth century.
One inventor was Alice H Parker. She was educated at Howard University in Washington DC, a historically Black research and education institution. On 23 December 1919, Parker successfully patented a new design for a gas furnace to heat domestic spaces. Heating systems were traditionally fuelled by burning coal or wood in a single furnace, which produced lots of smoke and soot. It was also difficult to distribute heat evenly across multiple rooms.
Instead, Parker’s invention was fuelled by natural gas, which reduced smoke and the risk of fire. She also designed a system that used multiple smaller furnaces connected to ducts that would distribute heat throughout the entire home. Her patent application explains that the invention reduces costs and household labour – it can be read online here.
Although her invention never reached mass production, Parker’s design was a ground-breaking precursor to modern thermostat systems many of us use in our homes today. Her legacy and achievements are honoured in the Alice H. Parker Women Leaders in Innovation Awards.
Stop 2: Space shuttle models
Location: Exploring Space, Ground Floor
Model shuttles in the Exploring Space gallery.
Take the stairs or lift back up to the ground floor and enter the Exploring Space gallery. To your right, opposite the projection are a group of model shuttles.
Space flight has been and continues to be an exciting area of scientific discovery from the 1950s to the present. In the early days, very few women, let alone women of colour, had the opportunity to be at the frontlines of space exploration. Black scientists played important roles in NASA; however, their work and achievements were often invisible to the public. The 2016 film Hidden Figures tells the story of three such scientists, the first Black women at NASA – Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan. Over 30 years later, Dr Mae C. Jemison was the first Black woman to travel to space.
Jemison was inspired by Black American actress Nichelle Nichols who played Lieutenant Uhura on the television series Star Trek. She began applying to the competitive NASA astronaut programme and was determined to one day travel to space despite the odds. In 1987, Jemison was one of the 15 people chosen out of over 2,000 applications. She received her first mission on 28 September 1989 when she was selected to join the STS-47 crew as a Mission Specialist. On 12 September 1992 the STS-47 crew embarked on their journey on the space shuttle Endeavor, making Dr Mae Jemison the first Black woman in space.
Dr. Mae Jemison’s story is one of perseverance. As a Black woman in STEM, she faced discrimination and hurdles in her path, but she did not stop working towards her goal. Just like Jemison’s inspiration from Star Trek, it is important for young Black people to see others who look like them breaking barriers. These values continue to be central to Dr Jemison’s work encouraging young people into STEM careers.
Stop 3: Edison’s Electric Carbon Filament Lamp
Location: Making the Modern World, Ground Floor
Original incandescent electric carbon filament lamp, by Thomas Alva Edison, 1879
Walk through Exploring Space until you reach the Making the Modern World gallery. Keep walking toward the lighthouse lamp on the right side of the gallery. To your left you will find a glass case with lightbulbs in it.
Who invented the lightbulb? Most people would say Thomas Edison, who in 1879 designed a filament lamp like the one in this display. But the real story of the invention may surprise you.
Before Edison unveiled his lamp in 1879, the English chemist Joseph Swan had already publicised a lightbulb with a similar design — you can also see an example of this bulb in the display. Edison’s design improved on Swan’s in two ways. Looking at the two lightbulbs in front of you, it’s difficult to see the improvements, but they were significant. Instead of carbonised paper, Edison used a sturdier carbonised bamboo for his filament. He also improved the vacuum inside the bulb. These improvements made the filament last much longer than Swan’s, giving Edison a claim to creating the first practical lightbulb.
But Edison’s design was not perfect. In 1881, the Black American inventor Lewis Latimer found a way to improve it. Latimer’s new design had better electrical contacts within the bulb and also made it cheaper to produce. The following year, Latimer patented a more efficient manufacturing process that reduced waste. This reduced the cost of making lightbulbs, so we have Latimer to thank for making lighting affordable to a wider public.
Latimer had no formal training in science, but he quickly made a name for himself in the lighting sector. He authored the book Incandescent Electric Lighting, which became the standard guide for lighting engineers. He began working with Edison in 1885, and in 1918 became the only Black person to join the Edison Pioneers, a small group of Edison’s early collaborators.
Stop 4: Nintendo Gameboy
Location: Making the Modern World, Ground Floor
Nintendo “Game Boy” hand-held games console
Continue walking through the gallery, on your right hand side will be a display case called Technology in Everyday Life c. 1968-2000.
The Game Boy, seen in the lower right corner of the case, was first released in 1989 in Japan and was Nintendo’s second handheld gaming console. It gained popularity partly due to its expansive library of 1046 games available via game cartridges, also known as Game Paks. However, having such a wide choice of games was not always an option. Dubbed the ‘father of the videogame cartridge’, Gerald (Jerry) Lawson, was an electronics engineer who helped to revolutionise videogames.
The first games consoles, like the Magnavox Odyssey, had the games wired into the consoles’ internal circuitry. Game cards altered the inbuilt circuitry when slotted in, allowing for different games to be played, but the information was still held in the console. This limited the range of games which people could play as well as how complex they could be.
In the early 1970s, Jerry was hired by Fairchild Semiconductors. Despite his lack of formal qualifications, his strong coding and engineering skills were soon realised by the company. He was appointed to lead the development of the Fairchild Channel F gaming console. Under Jerry’s leadership, the Fairchild team used PCBs, printed circuit boards to create ROM (read-only memory) cartridges. The console was the first to have interchangeable games cartridges and paved the way for other gaming companies.
After this success, Jerry Lawson left the company and founded Video Soft, the first Black-owned video game company. Sadly, the company didn’t last long due to the video game crash in the 1980s. Despite this, his legacy has remained through the technology he helped develop and the people he inspired.
If you would like to find out more about the history of gaming and have a go playing classic games to new releases, the hands-on gaming experience Power Up located on level -1 is open daily.
Stop 5: Smallpox Vaccination display
Location: Medicine and Communities , Level 1
Make your way up to the first floor by the stairs or the lifts. You will enter Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries. Walk through and take the left fork when the gallery splits into two balconies, entering the Medicine and Communities gallery. Look to your right until you see the smallpox vaccination glass display.
This display centres around Edward Jenner’s famous smallpox vaccine of 1796. Less well known, however, is how an enslaved West African named Onesimus first communicated the medical knowledge of inoculation.
Packet of dried smallpox vaccine (1986-1658) with six bifurcated needles for smallpox vaccination (1979-61).
In the early 1700s reports of successful inoculation practices across the Ottoman Empire had been in circulation around Europe. In response to a particular report about Ottoman inoculation practices, Cotton Mather (1663 – 1728), a minister from Boston, Massachusetts, stated in a 1716 correspondence that he had asked Onesimus if he had smallpox. Onesimus answered saying both ’yes and no’ and then told Mather about the operation he had undergone which had given him some of the smallpox to preserve him from it.
It is clear from Mather’s correspondence that inoculation was already being successfully practiced across Western Africa. Although Mather did not fully trust Onesimus at first, a 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston allowed him and the physician Zabdiel Boylston to put Onesimus’ words to the test. Their test proved effective. Mather and Boylston’s statistical analysis revealed that out of the almost 300 people inoculated only 2% had died, in contrast to a fatality rate of 14% among those without inoculation. Although remaining a risky procedure, by the 1760s numerous European learned societies had endorsed smallpox inoculation. This ushered in an age of experimentation eventually leading to Jenner’s much safer vaccine.
Black scientists continue to be crucial to vaccine production today, take for example Dr Kizzmekia Corbett who led the development of the Moderna COVID vaccine. The next time you get a vaccination think of the role that Black people such as Onesimus – and Corbett – have played in helping to enable these live-saving procedures.
Stop 6: Saving sight
Location: Medicine and Treatments, Level 1
Samson Akichem Lokele with his portrait on gallery in Medicine & Treatments. Samson was interviewed on his experiences as a surgeon, and photographed by Sian Davey as part of the participation projects for the Medicine Galleries.
Make your way to the other balcony in the Medicine and Treatments gallery. Look for the life-size photograph of Samson Akichem Lokele, a surgeon wearing scrubs. Samson is an ophthalmologist who wants a world free from avoidable blindness. Supported by the charity Sightsavers, he travels across Kenya and Uganda to give people in isolated and nomadic communities access to eye surgery.
Samson performs surgery to treat trachoma – one of the world’s leading causes of blindness. Repeated trachoma infections cause the eyelashes to turn inwards, scarring the cornea. Without timely intervention this leads to irreversible blindness. Trachoma is responsible for the blindness or visual impairment of about 1.9 million people.
Trachoma spreads through personal contact and by flies who have been in contact with an infected person. 125 million people live in trachoma endemic areas and are at risk of trachoma blindness. When Samson started working in eye care in 2007, he became the first trachoma surgeon in Turkana, a region of northwest Kenya. Research in 2010 found that Turkana had the highest rate of trachoma of any district in the country.
But travelling surgeons like Samson provide hope. ‘You can do this surgery almost anywhere,’ says Samson. ’As long as the quality of the procedure is up to standard, trachoma surgery can be done outside or in any clean and well-lit room such as a village classroom.’ Because of this flexibility, Samson is able to take surgery to the patient – providing treatment to people who might not otherwise have access to this sight-saving procedure.
Stop 7: Kola Nuts
Location: Exploring Medicine, Level 1
Jar containing large kola nuts from Africa, bottled in England, 1830-1920.
Keep walking to the Exploring Medicine gallery. Look for the jars of ingredients underneath the porcelain elephant carrying the Buddha’s alms bowl. One of these jars contains kola, a brown chestnut-sized nut that is naturally high in caffeine and grows in West Africa. Kola was one of Coca Cola’s original ingredients, but the nut has a longer history of production and consumption.
This jar of kola nuts belonged to Sir Henry Wellcome, an American pharmaceutical entrepreneur who used kola to create caffeinated tablets and elixirs. These drugs were supplied in medicine chests, including some that can be seen elsewhere in this gallery. Other chests created by Wellcome were used by colonial agents and soldiers across Africa. The use of kola is an example of African plants being exploited by European colonisers.
Before Wellcome, kola nuts had been cultivated and traded in West Africa for over one thousand years. They are known by various African names, including goro, ombéné, nangoué, kokkorokou, and matrasa. Kola trees only grow in certain areas, but their nuts have been found hundreds of miles away. The nuts require careful transportation after harvesting, so their historic distribution demonstrates the strength of trade networks across Africa as early as the first millennium AD.
In Africa and among African diaspora communities, kola has a long history of both medicinal use and social importance, and nuts are gifted and eaten today at significant occasions. In popular culture, kola can symbolise friendship, ancestry, and respect. Tania Nwachukwu, a London-based Igbo poet, explored the preservation of cultural and familial history in her 2022 performance, The Kola Nut Does Not Speak English.
Stop 8: Blood transfusion bag
Location: Medicine and Bodies, Level 1
Sample pack for Leucocytes, Buffy coat. Contains theatrical blood.
Continue though the gallery to the Medicine and Bodies gallery. To the right, look for a blood transfusion bag (it’s behind the red ‘Measuring the body’ panel).
Blood transfusion bags are used for the collection, preservation, and transportation of human blood for medical procedures. Diseases, like cancer, and incidents where large amounts of blood are lost require blood transfusions to keep a person alive.
During World War II, American surgeon and medical researcher, Charles Drew was appointed by British officials to lead ‘Blood For Britain’. The program collected over 5,500 vials of blood from American volunteers, which were then processed and sent to Britain to treat war victims. It was through this that Drew invented ‘bloodmobiles’, allowing people to donate blood in public spaces, a practice still popular today. The program used Drew’s findings from his doctoral thesis on blood preservation. He proved that blood could be preserved longer than previously thought via separating the blood from the plasma.
Whole blood is made up of red and white blood cells, platelets, and plasma. Plasma is a clear-yellowish liquid which carries blood cells and contains proteins and electrolytes. Unlike whole blood, it can be used with any blood type, is less likely to carry diseases, and can last longer without refrigeration. This makes it ideal for blood transfusions.
He was later assigned to direct a similar program for American soldiers fighting abroad, however, racial segregation of blood donors was part of US military policy, excluding Black Americans from donating blood. Drew campaigned against this racist policy but was not successful, leaving his position in protest. The policy remained in place until 1950. Drew spent the rest of his career as the Head of the Department of Surgery and Chief of Surgery at Howard University, dedicating himself to training Black surgeons and campaigning against racism in the industry.
Stop 9: ‘England and her soldiers’ book
Location: Mathematics: The Winton Gallery, Level 2
Make your way up to the Mathematics gallery and head towards the Life and Death section to the left past the airplane installation where you will find a book with a foldout page in a case. This book was written by Harriet Martineau, with statistical diagrams by renowned nurse Florence Nightingale, who made her name treating soldiers during the Crimean War. But she was not the only courageous woman to go out onto the battlefield. Once voted ’The Greatest Black Briton’, Mary Seacole was a skilled doctor, traveller, entrepreneur, and author.
Harriet Martineau, England and her Soldiers, Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1859.
Best known for treating injured soldiers during the Crimean War, Mary had self-funded her journey to Crimea after being rejected from nursing positions. She described the disappointment as ‘a cruel one’ and questioned if her skin colour was a factor. Mary had previously faced racism during her travels, and her rejections may have been influenced by this; however, her lack of formal application and ageism may have also been factors.
In Crimea, Mary set up the British Hotel, where she provided sustenance and boarding for troops and civilians. After battles, she was known to go out to the field to treat the wounded and give comfort to those dying. One of the treatments she employed was the use of mustard. Its essential oil has been shown to have antimicrobial properties.
Mary’s compassion earnt her the nickname ‘Mother Seacole’. Her medical knowledge came from childhood when she helped her mother run a boarding house. There she learned how to look after people and treat them using traditional Jamaican medicine. She treated enslaved African people on the island, as well as British soldiers. Mary continued to practise her nursing skills before making the voyage to Britain in her teens where she supplemented her medical knowledge.
Stop 10: Telephone display
Location: Information Age, Level 2
Bell telephone receiver, mahogany case, made by the India Rubber, Gutta-Percha and Telegraph Works Company Limited, Silvertown, Newham, London, England, 1878.
Keep walking through the Mathematics gallery and you will come to the Information Age gallery. In the Exchange section find the glass case against the wall, titled Telephones Ring the Changes.
We usually think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but the real story is more complicated. The display in front of you shows that the modern telephone had several inventors who contributed to the technology. Bell became the first person to be granted a patent for a practical telephone, which cemented his status as the father of the telephone.
Although the patent was signed by Bell, it was also the work of another man: Lewis Latimer. Bell hired Latimer to draw the diagrams, which were a requirement of US patents if the invention couldn’t be understood through words alone. Latimer’s drawings are the reason we can recreate Bell’s invention exactly as it was originally designed (you can see replicas in this display case).
If you keep walking along this display case to the right, you will come to a display on the invention of the microphone. Microphones from the 1870s use carbon to detect sound, and for many decades this was the only practical design. Carbon microphones were widely used in telephones until as late as the 1980s, when a new design became popular: the electret microphone, a type of electrostatic capacitor-based microphone. Patented in 1962 by Black American inventor James West and German inventor Gerhard Sessler, the electret microphone was compact, inexpensive, and highly sensitive. West and Sessler invented the microphone while working at Bell Laboratories, which traces its existence back to Alexander Graham Bell in the 1870s.
Throughout this gallery, you will see changing fashions in telephone design. Many countries manufactured their own telephones, giving them an individual national style. But most phones, regardless of exterior design differences, use West and Sessler’s electret microphone design. And it’s not just phones that rely on them: 90% of the 2 billion microphones manufactured each year are electret microphones, so they are found in products as diverse as hearing aids, baby monitors, and toys.
When it comes to music, however, even though it is central to human experience, the neural language that underpins it remained mysterious.
Now a major advance in understanding the ‘neural substrate’ of music has come from a study published in the journal PLOS Biology in which AI was used to recreate a piece of music after participants listened to Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1, from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, The Wall. The haunting and eerie results are, says the team, “the first recognizable song reconstructed from direct brain recordings.”
The work dates back a decade when, the chords of the track filled the surgery suite, neuroscientists at Albany Medical Center in New York diligently recorded the activity of electrodes on the brains of 29 patients to monitor their epilepsy as they underwent epilepsy surgery. Unlike electrical signals picked from the scalp, using a method called EEG, those from the electrodes placed directly on the brain are much richer and more detailed.
Of the brain activity recorded from 2,668 electrodes, they found activity at 347 related to the music, mostly located in three regions: the Superior Temporal Gyrus, the Sensory-Motor Cortex, and the Inferior Frontal Gyrus.
The team at the University of California, Berkeley, which included Robert Knight, a neurologist and UC Berkeley professor of psychology, and postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier, then trained an AI computer model on brain data from the electrodes as the participants listened to about 90 percent of the Pink Floyd song.
Neuroscientists recorded electrical activity from areas of the brain (yellow and red dots) as patients listened to a 3-minute snippet of the Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1.” Using AI software, they were able to reconstruct the song from the brain recordings. This is the first time a song has been reconstructed from intracranial electroencephalography recordings. Credit: Ludovic Bellier and Robert Knight, UC Berkeley
Though muffled, as if playing underwater, the phrase ‘it’s just another brick in the wall’ was recognisable, with both melody and rhythms reasonably intact, though whether you could identify the song from the reconstruction alone, if you had not just heard the excerpt, is debatable.
“This study is exciting,” comments Jessica Grahn, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies music at Western University, in London, Ontario. “It’s a real technical achievement to acquire these data, and to be able to reproduce such a complex auditory signal.”
“Song information is incredibly rich–there’s a reason you can’t just sing a tune into Google and have it identify the song for you, despite years of research into analysing auditory signals,” she adds.
Previous research has linked different parts of the brain to perceiving elements of music, including pitch, rhythm, and the texture of sound, called timbre.
The new study found that both hemispheres play a role but, in line with earlier work, the right hemisphere is engaged more with music than the left.
A brain subregion that underlies rhythm perception was revealed. Called the superior temporal gyrus, located in the temporal lobe (which is on both sides of the brain, extending from the temple to behind the ears), seemed to be heavily involved in musical perception, with a particular subregion connected to rhythm, such as Pink Floyd’s thrumming guitar.
Analysis of song elements revealed one region in the gyrus that represents a beat, in this case the guitar rhythm in the Pink Floyd track. “They didn’t have electrodes in many of the other areas we traditionally see responding to rhythm, but it does represent a new discovery to find music engages this part of the superior temporal gyrus,” adds Grahn.
These findings could have implications for developing prosthetic devices that help improve the perception of prosody, the rhythm and melody of speech. Past research has shown that computer modelling can decode and reconstruct speech, but a predictive model for music that includes elements such as pitch, melody, harmony, and rhythm, as well as different regions of the brain’s sound-processing network, was lacking.
Such recordings from electrodes on the brain surface could help reproduce the musicality of speech that’s missing from today’s robotic reconstructions. Knight comments: “As this whole field of brain machine interfaces progresses, this gives you a way to add musicality to future brain implants for people who need it, someone who’s got ALS or some other disabling neurological or developmental disorder compromising speech.”
Grahn added: “From my perspective, as a rhythm researcher, it will be exciting to determine whether this area is communicating with motor brain regions, which control movement, helping us define the brain network that causes us to move to music.
“My own lab specializes in the links between music and movement, and how music can help people with movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, so I am personally excited about how the techniques in this study will help us understand how different brain areas work together to produce our responses to music, from dancing to emotions to memories.”
The findings also relate to the new exhibition at the Science Museum that opens on Thursday 19 October. “Visitors to Turn It Up: The power of music will hear from scientists studying whether music can really make our heart beat faster, and how it can transport us back in time,” said Emily Scott-Dearing, Guest Curator. “They’ll see the brain sensors and skin monitors used by scientists to investigate music’s extraordinary effects on our bodies and minds. They can even test their dance moves on motion-capture sensors used to study how we move to music and synchronise to its beat.”
Family using the dance interactive in Turn It Up: The power of music
Fellow curator Steven Leech of the Science and Industry Museum, Manchester, adds: “Our exhibition is packed with music and musicians, including Haile the robot drummer who was designed by researchers at Georgia Tech University to collaborate with human musicians, and the next generation robot musician Shimon who was trained using over 50,000 songs to compose songs and write lyrics using a type of artificial intelligence known as deep learning.”
“We challenge our visitors to see if they can tell AI-from human-composed music and share cutting-edge examples of how AI is being used deliver daily doses of music to improve the lives of people dealing with dementia.”
He adds: ‘We are excited to bring Turn It Up from Manchester to London and bring to life the mystery of music and the incredible ways that it impacts all aspects of our lives. Although we know that some people may lack confidence when making music, through this exhibition we hope visitors will discover that we really are all musical.’
If you would like to find out more about how music shapes our lives, visit Turn It Up: The power of music at the Science Museum from 19 October 2023.
We all know intuitively that music makes us feel good. Research proves that when you listen to music you like, your brain releases Dopamine, a ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter. Not only that, a 2022 research study found that listening to music leads to a clinically significant boost to mental health – improving wellbeing and quality of life.
You can listen to the uplifting suggestions we were sent in our playlist and find out more about some of the reasons behind the selections below.
SPECIAL OCCASIONS AND SHARED MEMORIES
One role of the brain structure, the hippocampus, is to help us remember songs, so that we can recognise our favourite melodies in just a few seconds. Some musical triggers are very personal. We don’t always know why some musical memories are stronger than others.
Music can instantly take us back to big celebrations, long journeys and silly jokes. Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. was Jenny’s favourite song as a child – something that’s followed her into adulthood: ‘it has become a running theme that my friends send me jokes and memes about it and buy me gifts based on it. I put it on the jukebox or request that DJs play it for me at any given opportunity! As soon as the music kicks in I just smile.’
For Stuart, Smash It Up by The Damned ‘reminds me of being 16, carefree and with my whole life ahead of me!’, while for Ali it’s Hanson’s iconic MMMbop which ‘reminds me of my last summer of childhood’. All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem takes one of our contributors back to 2008 when they found themselves back in their hometown after university, surrounded by old friends: ‘This coincided with the global financial crisis – finding work in the arts sector with little experience meant we all became involved in grass roots arts, theatre and music in Glasgow. For me this song is about the happiness found in creativity, about resilience, love, friendship and hope. (And house parties, obviously!)’.
Sometimes one moment is indelibly marked by a song, one specific memory that ties it to a person: Firestarter by The Prodigy makes Francesca smile because it ‘reminds me of watching my son-in-law leaping about the kitchen.’ Waterloo by ABBA makes Harry ‘remember dancing with my mum at my wedding’ which ‘remains a great memory’. For one contributor, the Hot 8 Brass Band’s cover of Sexual Healing makes them smile because they and their partner ‘walked down the aisle to it after we were married!’
Occasionally those memories are an amalgamation of many associations, which then become the soundtrack to a feeling. One contributor chose Right Here, Right Now by Fatboy Slim – ‘This song used to play before every game at the Arsenal, whenever I hear it I am thrown back to 1999 and I see a montage of all the years me and my dad have been going to the games.’ It’s Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits that puts a smile on Matt’s face: ‘My brother always put it on every CD he burned when we first learned how to do it, always makes me think of family.’
For Francesca, Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World means ‘Sunday dinner time, mum cooking with the radio on, family favourites’ and for one contributor, I Feel Good by Beres Hammond ‘reminds me of being back in the Caribbean surrounded by family’. When Naomi hears Let the Great Big World Keep Turning, ‘It always makes me think of my dad who would sing it to me and my siblings when we were tiny (and he’d murder it on the piano but we loved his renditions nonetheless!).’
There were more than a few songs chosen because they came with memories of children. Paulina said that Lucecita by Sofia Macchi ‘reminds me of my baby and how much I love her’ while it’s Get Lucky by Daft Punk for another contributor: ‘it was number 1 when my baby girl was born and she brought the joy in my heart.’ Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen makes Idza smile because ‘for some reason it was on our automatic family playlist when my first child was born and whenever I hear it, I remember the excitement of starting a new phase of my life.’
Michael Jackson’s Beat It reminds Helen of her son, aged 3, it ‘makes me smile because he used to go and get his table chair and piano and put it in front of the tv to sing and play along’ and Sarah shared that Mr. Blue Sky by the Electric Light Orchestra brings her joy: ‘I used to sing it to my son when he was first born – “Hey you with the pretty face, welcome to the human race!”’
FEEL THE MUSIC AND DANCE
Did you know that up-tempo music stimulates our nervous system? It elevates our heart rate, blood pressure and temperature, and prepares the body for activity. Those toe-tapping tunes literally affect our bodies.
Man! I Feel Like A Woman! by Shania Twain makes Simon want to dance and for another contributor it’s Let Your Love Flow by The Bellamy Brothers. Others said that It’s Only A Paper Moon gets ‘feet tapping’ and Crazy Crazy Nights by KISS requires a ‘bop along’ while Sarvat said that Never Too Much by Luther Vandross is ‘a song you can’t sit down to.’ Deejay chose Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust because it’s a ‘timeless classic, from the moment you hear that iconic guitar loop to the moment you hear those crisp vocals, I can’t help but sing along and move. It always lifts my mood.’
In contrast, slower music reduces stress hormones, relaxes muscles, and boosts emotions. Annie said that ‘no matter what my mood is, [Take Me To Church by Hozier] makes me dance and sing my heart out! It’s my gym, housework and party go-to song.’
Breathing, heart rate and even our sweat glands are affected when we have an emotional response to music. Kat submitted Touch The Sky by Julie Fowlis because the ‘song feels like the musical version of running through woodlands and climbing a mountain! It makes me feel free and joyous and never fails to provoke a smile’ while Leona ‘can’t listen to [Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride] without my mood just lifting. There’s really no place I’d rather be than on a surfboard out at sea!’ For Sophie, Mixtape: Time Out by Stray Kids ‘oozes pure fun and instantly cheers me up. It is so uplifting.’
Alexa chose get him back! by Olivia Rodrigo: ‘I love it because it is a very upbeat song that makes me smile even in a Monday morning when I have to go to school.’ Another contributor thinks that There Will Never Be Another Tonight by Bryan Adams is ‘is the ultimate feel-good song when you’re getting ready to go out, whatever the occasion.’ Charlotte went with Movin’ Right Along by Fozzie and Kermit because ‘it’s so incredibly happy-sounding, complete with funny noises that you can’t help sing along with.’
MUSIC TO OUR EARS
Emotions are processed and triggered by a part of the brain called the amygdala and it’s the this that causes us to feel that shiver down the spine and goosebumps when listening to music. Music helps us reflect and manage our emotions and we can use it to cheer ourselves up.
Iman chose Fight Song by Rachel Platten because it ‘was the song that got me through my GCSEs, I was struggling in Year 10 and this song helped my power through Year 11 when I was feeling down and needed some hope.’ Mandira heard Wavin’ Flag during the 2012 Olympics and ‘felt so uplifted by the positive vibes, it has remained an anthem for my whole family ever since.’ For Rhona, One Day Like This by Elbow is a reminder that ‘there can always be amazing days ahead.’
Do Your Thing by Basement Jaxx puts a smile on Jasper’s face because it’s an ‘amazing lovely song, about being yourself and feeling happy in your own skin‘, which was what Cathy said about Perfect to Me by Anne-Marie: it ‘helps me feel ok about me!’
Leo picked Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield because ‘this is always a song that inspires positivity and proactivity.’ David selected While You See A Chance by Steve Winwood and said that ‘It’s not just a great song to listen to, it’s a song that inspired me to finally take control of my destiny and immensely change my life for the better.’
If you would like to find out more about how music shapes our lives, visit Turn It Up: The power of music at the Science Museum from 19 October 2023.
When working with GPT, the key to getting accurate results lies in the correct creation of your prompts (the very prompts you use in the CyberSEO Pro and RSS Retriever post title and post content assignments). It often seems that the plugin doesn’t work as expected – it doesn’t fetch the full article, loses the original formatting or simply generates incorrect or empty output. The problem is not with the plugin, it’s with your prompt.
Since access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model is still not available to everyone, and the API for this model is quite expensive to use, you’ll probably have to work with GPT-3.5 models most of the time. While these models may lag behind GPT-4 in terms of intelligence, they are still capable of producing high-quality content that rivals the results of GPT-4. The main difference is not in results, but in prompt engineering, which we’ll explore in this article.
Let’s start by exploring a couple of critical nuances that will directly affect the content generated by the plugin in automatic mode. These nuances will make a dramatic difference.
HTML markup
If you plan to process articles with HTML formatting (in CyberSEO Pro and RSS Retriever plugins, article text in HTML format corresponds to the %post_content% shortcode), remember to instruct GPT to return the result with HTML formatting. Only in this case you will get a rewritten or translated article with the original HTML structure intact, including styles, headings, links, tables, images, etc.
[openai_gpt prompt="Translate the following article into French and return the result in HTML format: %post_content%"]
Note that the “return the result in HTML format” directive is critical if you want to process source articles that contain HTML markup and get the result with the original HTML structure preserved.
Original language of the article
If you want to rewrite text written in a language other than English, but you write your prompt in English, GPT 3.5 will likely return the result in English, even if you explicitly request it in the original language. In some cases, it may even respond with “I cannot reword this”. However, if your prompt itself is written in the language of the original article, you will get the result you expected:
[openai_gpt prompt="Reescriba el siguiente artículo con un estilo informativo y devuelva el resultado en formato HTML: %post_content%"]
Precision of your GPT prompt
All GPT prompts should be as concrete as possible, leaving no room for ambiguity. For instance, if you want AI-generated content to include HTML elements, specify it explicitly, as described above. At the same time, if you want certain elements like <h2> headings to be generated, state it directly. Specify whether to use bullet lists and bold or italic text for emphasizing important elements. Perhaps you don’t need a “Conclusion” section at the end of the text – be sure to mention that in your prompt. Want the result formatted according to a specific HTML template? That’s also possible:
[openai_gpt model="gpt-3.5-turbo-16k" prompt="Create pros and cons of olive oil clearly separated in a bullet-point HTML format. Ensure the content is engaging, human-like, and includes natural keyword usage for SEO optimization. Use the following HTML markup template (<h2> tag for a heading): <div class='wp-block-group'><div class='wp-block-columns has-background' style='background-color: #eaebed; border-radius: 10px; padding: 16px;'><div class='wp-block-column'><h2>PROs</h2><ul><li>Pros</li></ul></div><div class='wp-block-column'><h2 class='cons-uline'>CONs</h2><ul><li>Cons</li></ul></div></div></div>" max_tokens="1500" temperature="0.5"]
Raw text processing
If you don’t plan to process HTML content and want plain raw text, use the %post_content_notags% shortcode instead of %post_content%. This shortcode will strip your article of all HTML elements and pass it to the GPT model as plain text. What does this give you? Faster processing speed, a significant advantage in terms of the maximum length of processed content (HTML code is much heavier than plain text), and savings on the fees OpenAI charges for using its models – the more compact the processed articles, the less you pay!
Choosing the right GPT model
Speaking of GPT-3.5, there’s another important detail to note. OpenAI offers two similar but different models, namely OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo and OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct. The cost of using the API for both models is about 10 times lower than the cost of the GPT-4 API, making them extremely attractive for autoblogging. Especially tempting is the GPT-3.5 Turbo 16K model, which allows you to process texts of up to 16,384 tokens, which is quite substantial.
However, you should consider the primary purpose of the model. GPT-3.5 Turbo is a chat model and works on the same principle as ChatGPT, where it is used together with the GPT-4 model, which is also designed exclusively for user chat. This makes both models less suitable for text processing, according to your exact instructions. Both may try to converse with you instead of simply following your instructions. This behavior often leads to unexpected results, such as adding “authorial” comments and remarks to the generated text. To avoid such surprises, it is recommended to use the new OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct model, which is a direct successor of legendary Davinci. The only significant drawback of GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct is its limitation to 4,096 tokens for the processed content. Unfortunately, our world isn’t perfect…
Simultaneous use of multiple GPT models
Note that the [openai_gpt] shortcode allows you to select the exact GPT model you need for each particular task, and also allows you to set various parameters such as the maximum number of tokens and the model’s temperature (creativity). So you can mix different GPT models with different parameters in the same HTML template. This feature sets CyberSEO Pro and RSS Retriever plugins apart from other feed syndicators and no-source content generators for WordPress.
In this article, the author discusses key points related to working with GPT-3.5 models for generating high-quality content. The article focuses on the importance of prompt engineering and provides actionable advice for achieving accurate results.
The first point highlighted is the need to instruct GPT to return results with HTML formatting when processing articles with HTML markup. This ensures that the rewritten or translated article maintains the original HTML structure, including styles, headings, links, tables, and images.
The article also emphasizes the impact of the original language of the article on the generated content. If the prompt is written in English for a text written in another language, GPT 3.5 may likely return the result in English. However, writing the prompt in the language of the original article ensures the desired outcome.
The precision of the GPT prompt is crucial. The prompt should be specific, leaving no room for ambiguity. It is recommended to explicitly specify elements like HTML tags, bullet lists, and formatting preferences.
For processing plain raw text instead of HTML content, the article suggests using the %post_content_notags% shortcode. This allows for faster processing speed, a higher maximum length of processed content, and cost savings in terms of fees charged by OpenAI for using their models.
Choosing the right GPT model is another important consideration. While GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct are similar and cost-effective options, it is noted that GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct is better suited for text processing as it avoids conversational behavior and unexpected results. However, it has a limitation on the number of tokens for processed content.
The article also highlights the flexibility of using multiple GPT models simultaneously with different parameters, allowing for customization and optimization based on specific requirements.
Considering the long-term implications and possible future developments, it can be expected that access to newer models like GPT-4 will become more widely available. This could lead to advancements in intelligence and further improvements in prompt engineering. It is important for users to stay updated with the latest developments in GPT models and adapt their strategies accordingly.
Based on these insights, actionable advice for users would be to:
1. Pay attention to prompt engineering: Be specific and explicit in prompts, including instructions for HTML formatting, language requirements, and desired elements.
2. Experiment with different GPT models: Explore the suitability of GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct for text processing tasks and consider the limitations of token count.
3. Stay informed about advancements: Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in GPT models to leverage new features and improvements.
4. Optimize cost and processing speed: Choose between HTML content and plain raw text based on specific needs, considering factors like processing speed and fees.
5. Utilize multiple GPT models: Take advantage of the flexibility provided by the [openai_gpt] shortcode to mix different GPT models and parameters for enhanced customization.
In conclusion, working with GPT-3.5 models requires careful prompt engineering and consideration of factors like HTML formatting, language requirements, precision of prompts, and the right choice of GPT model. Users should stay informed about advancements in GPT models and adapt their strategies accordingly to achieve optimal results.
Note that the “return the result in HTML format” directive is critical if you want to process source articles that contain HTML markup and get the result with the original HTML structure preserved.