Could we really deflect an asteroid heading for Earth? An expert explains NASA’s latest DART mission

A NASA spacecraft the size of a golf cart has been directed to smash into an asteroid, with the intention of knocking it slightly off course. The test aims to demonstrate our technological readiness in case an actual asteroid threat is detected in the future.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) lifted off aboard a SpaceX rocket from California on November 23, and will arrive at the target asteroid system in September, next year.

The mission will travel to the asteroid Didymos, a member of the Amor group of asteroids. Every 12 hours Didymos is orbited by a mini-moon, or “moonlet”, Dimorphos. This smaller half of the pair will be DART’s target.

Are we facing an extinction threat from asteroids?

We’ve all seen disaster movies in which an asteroid hits Earth, creating an extinction event similar to the one that killed off the dinosaurs millions of years ago. Could that happen now?

Well, Earth is actually bombarded frequently by small asteroids, ranging from 1-20 metres in diameter. Almost all asteroids of this size disintegrate in the atmosphere and are usually harmless.

There is an inverse relationship between the size of these object and the frequency of impact events. This means we get hit much more frequently by small objects than larger ones – simply because there are many more smaller objects in space.

Asteroids with a 1km diameter strike Earth every 500,000 years, on average. The most “recent” impact of this size is thought to have formed the Tenoumer impact crater in Mauritania, 20,000 years ago. Asteroids with an approximate 5km diameter impact Earth about once every 20 million years.

The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteoroid, which damaged buildings in six Russian cities and injured around 1,500 people, was estimated to be about 20m in diameter.

Assessing the risk

NASA’s DART mission has been sparked by the threat and fear of a major asteroid hitting Earth in the future.

The Torino scale is a method for categorising the impact hazard associated with a near-Earth object (NEO). It uses a scale from 0 to 10, wherein 0 means there is negligibly small chance of collision, and 10 means imminent collision, with the impacting object being large enough to precipitate a global disaster.

The Chicxulub impact (which is attributed to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs) was a Torino scale 10. The impacts that created the Barringer Crater, and the 1908 Tunguska event, both correspond to Torino Scale 8.

With the increase of online news and individuals’ ability to film events, asteroid “near-misses” tend to generate fear in the public. Currently, NASA is keeping a close eye on asteroid Bennu, which is the object with the largest “cumulative hazard rating” right now. (You can keep up to date too).

With a 500m diameter, Bennu is capable of creating a 5km crater on Earth. However, NASA has also said there is a 99.943% chance the asteroid will miss us.

Brace for impact

At one point in their orbit around the Sun, Didymos and Dimorphos come within about 5.9 million km of Earth. This is still further away than our Moon, but it’s very close in astronomical terms, so this is when DART will hit Dimorphos.

DART will spend about ten months travelling towards Didymos and, when it’s close by, will change direction slightly to crash into Dimorphos at a speed of about 6.6km per second.

The larger Didymos is 780m in diameter and thus makes a better target for DART to aim for. Once DART has detected the much smaller Dimorphos, just 160m in diameter, it can make a last-minute course correction to collide with the moonlet.

The mass of Dimorphos is 4.8 million tonnes and the mass of DART at impact will be about 550kg. Travelling at 6.6km/s, DART will be able to transfer a huge amount of momentum to Dimorphos, to the point where it’s expected to actually change the moonlet’s orbit around Didymos.

This change, to the tune of about 1%, will be detected by ground telescopes within weeks or months. While this may not seem like a lot, 1% is actually a promising shift. If DART were to slam into a lone asteroid, its orbital period around the Sun would change by only about 0.000006%, which would take many years to measure.

So we’ll be able to detect the 1% change from Earth, and meanwhile the pair will continue along its orbit around the Sun. DART will also deploy a small satellite ten days before impact to capture everything.

This is NASA’s first mission dedicated to demonstrating a planetary defence technique. At a cost of US$330 million, it’s relatively cheap in space mission terms. The James Webb Telescope set to launch next month, costs close to US$10 billion.

There will be little to no debris from DART’s impact. We can think of it in terms of a comparable event on Earth; imagine a train parked on the tracks but with no brakes on. Another train comes along and collides with it.

The trains won’t break apart, or destroy one another, but will move off together. The stationary one will gain some speed, and the one impacting it will lose some speed. The trains combine to become a new system with different speeds than before.

So we won’t experience any impact, ripples or debris from the DART mission.

Is the effort really worth it?

Results from the mission will tell us just how much mass and speed is needed to hit an asteroid that may pose a threat in the future. We already track the vast majority of asteroids that come close to Earth, so we would have early warning of any such object.

That said, we have missed objects in the past. In October 2021, Asteroid UA_1 passed about 3,047km from Earth’s surface, over Antarctica. We missed it because it approached from the direction of the Sun. At just 1m in size it wouldn’t have caused much damage, but we should have seen it coming.

Building a deflection system for a potential major asteroid threat would be difficult. We would have to act quickly and hit the target with very good aim.

One candidate for such a system could be the new technology developed by the US spaceflight company SpinLaunch, which has designed technology to launch satellites into orbit at rapid speeds. This device could also be used to fire masses at close-passing asteroids.

Gail Iles, Senior Lecturer in Physics, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Beatles: Get Back review – Peter Jackson’s TV series is a thrilling, funny (and long) treat for fans

The Beatles’ Get Back project, undertaken in January 1969, has finally been completed. Again.

For most of the last 50 years it has been known as Let it Be, a film and LP record released in 1970. The project, conceived by Paul McCartney, was originally intended to be a television special documenting the band’s preparation for a live concert (their first in two and a half years). Because of the performance element, the Beatles decided to get back to their roots and only develop material that could be played without adding overdubs.

As it happened, the concert didn’t go ahead, the Beatles famously deciding instead to play a short unannounced gig on the roof of their headquarters. The TV special became a feature film, and the audio was handed over to the “wall of sound” producer, Phil Spector (leading to controversial results).

Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, the Beatles withdrew the film version (a fly-on-the-wall documentary directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg) from circulation.

Lindsay-Hogg’s Let it Be is remembered as a portrait of a band in the process of breaking up. And indeed, George Harrison did briefly quit the band early into the four-week project, though Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary does not cover this episode.

Let it Be was seen as a downer in part because the Beatles, especially Lennon, were keen to trash it in the light of the band’s breakup (which occurred just weeks before the release of Let it Be, both film and album). As Lennon said in December 1970, the shoot was “hell”, and Spector was “given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit”.

A different tenor

While the newly released The Beatles: Get Back, directed by Peter Jackson, covers Harrison’s departure and return, Jackson’s film is tonally different from Lindsay-Hogg’s. According to Jackson, the dour account of Let it Be is inaccurate, since there is much “joy” and friendship evident in the 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio tape that has been sitting in a vault for half a century.

Much of this audio has long been available as bootlegs, informing written accounts of this period of the Beatles’ history. The audio without the video, however, doesn’t always tell the whole story.

While Jackson and his team haven’t shied away from the moments of friction, ennui, and aimlessness experienced by the band, the tenor of Get Back is more upbeat than Lindsay-Hogg’s version (though there is perhaps more levity in that film than Jackson or its reputation allows).

But Get Back is not just a recut of Let it Be; it is a documentary in its own right, a film about the making of a film. Lindsay-Hogg is now a character in the drama of trying to work out what the project is about, and how it will end.

Unlike the cinema verité style of Let it Be, Get Back gives much-needed context in the form of titles naming the protagonists and songs, as well as explaining what is happening. The use of a day-by-day countdown to the live performance gives the otherwise shapeless events a sense of narrative and even tension.

Get Back was to be a feature film with a theatrical release, but COVID-19 led to a rescheduling and reconceptualising of the work, so that it became a documentary for Disney+. Recent reports were that the series would be a three-part series with a six-hour running time.

The climactic rooftop concert

As it turns out, that running time is closer to eight hours. (Let it Be is a mere 80 minutes long.) Almost all of these eight hours show the Beatles at work on a sound stage (at Twickenham Film Studios) or in an ad hoc recording studio (put together in the Beatles’ Apple headquarters, when – after Harrison’s walkout – it was decided that Twickenham wasn’t conducive to creativity).

The Apple studio is clearly more pleasant, and the tone is further lightened when the Beatles are joined by an outsider, their old friend Billy Preston, on keyboards (a crucial moment for the project).

There is nevertheless something of a hermetic feel to most of Get Back, so that when the Beatles and Preston head up to the rooftop to play in public – the cinematic “payoff” that the band and Lindsay-Hogg had been looking for throughout the project – there is a palpable sense of release.

And the famous rooftop concert, presented with creative use of split screen, is stunningly good (and is also, for the first time, presented in its 42-minute entirety).

After the countless run throughs and takes of the same songs over the preceding weeks (as well as numerous covers and early Beatles tunes), the sense of energy and the quality of playing gives the film the climactic moment that it needs, complete with police officers demanding, albeit politely, that the Beatles stop breaching the peace of London’s West End.

Cigarettes, cups of tea, and white bread

Get Back is very different from Let it Be in part due to Jackson’s editing, especially his use of montage, which produces a dynamic, sometimes frenetic, energy. Beyond these stylistic elements, Get Back is notable as a technical feat.

It looks and sounds astonishingly good, not something that was ever said about Let it Be. Jackson and his technical team have employed the kind of film restoration techniques used in his war documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018).

The vision in Get Back is beautifully saturated, sharp, and less grainy than Lindsay-Hogg’s film. Harrison and Starr, in their sartorial splendour, often resemble their cartoon equivalents from Yellow Submarine (1968).

If there is anything unvarnished about Jackson’s film it is the sight of people apparently living off cigarettes, cups of tea, and white bread. Also notably “historical” is the homosocial nature of the project; almost all of the active participants are men. Even Yoko Ono, who sits beside Lennon throughout, is almost entirely silent (save for her vocal participation in a couple of impromptu jams).

While the film has been painstakingly restored, the soundtrack has been almost remade. Much of the audio was recorded on mono quarter-inch tape. Jackson’s technical team used machine learning to effectively “remix” these mono tapes, allowing Jackson to hone in on individual voices masked by other sound sources (voices or musical instruments).

This is an extraordinary technological breakthrough, allowing key conversations to be heard properly for the first time, and for the remixing of the play throughs and rehearsals of songs, which weren’t being recorded as “takes” on the eight-track system.

Get Back is a treat for any Beatles fan. It’s a reminder, too, if one is needed, that some classic songs were recorded for the project. (Given that McCartney supplied at least three of these classics – Let it Be, The Long and Winding Road, and Get Back – it’s unsurprising that he has long been unsatisfied with the way they were originally showcased.)

But Jackson’s film isn’t all sweetness and light. Lennon, for instance, is dismissive of Harrison’s I, Me, Mine, and he makes a throwaway joke about Bob Wooler, a Liverpool disc jockey whom Lennon assaulted in 1963. Also notable is the relative absence of George Martin, who largely hands production duties to his sound engineer, Glyn Johns, surely a sign that Martin found something amiss with the project.

And indeed numerous sequences show a band lacking focus and discipline. Get Back, then, is unquestionably a mixed bag: thrilling, compelling, and funny, but also sometimes just a little boring.

In this, Jackson has been true to the original project. His extraordinary TV series is essential viewing for anyone interested in popular music.

David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pythagoras’ revenge: humans didn’t invent mathematics, it’s what the world is made of

Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn’t “exist” outside the minds of the people who use it.

But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical.

More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously.

As I argue in a new paper, mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world.

Honeybees and hexagons

Bees in hives produce hexagonal honeycomb. Why?

According to the “honeycomb conjecture” in mathematics, hexagons are the most efficient shape for tiling the plane. If you want to fully cover a surface using tiles of a uniform shape and size, while keeping the total length of the perimeter to a minimum, hexagons are the shape to use.

Charles Darwin reasoned that bees have evolved to use this shape because it produces the largest cells to store honey for the smallest input of energy to produce wax.

The honeycomb conjecture was first proposed in ancient times, but was only proved in 1999 by mathematician Thomas Hales.

Cicadas and prime numbers

Here’s another example. There are two subspecies of North American periodical cicadas that live most of their lives in the ground. Then, every 13 or 17 years (depending on the subspecies), the cicadas emerge in great swarms for a period of around two weeks.

Why is it 13 and 17 years? Why not 12 and 14? Or 16 and 18?

One explanation appeals to the fact that 13 and 17 are prime numbers.

Imagine the cicadas have a range of predators that also spend most of their lives in the ground. The cicadas need to come out of the ground when their predators are lying dormant.

Suppose there are predators with life cycles of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 years. What is the best way to avoid them all?

Well, compare a 13-year life cycle and a 12-year life cycle. When a cicada with a 12-year life cycle comes out of the ground, the 2-year, 3-year and 4-year predators will also be out of the ground, because 2, 3 and 4 all divide evenly into 12.

When a cicada with a 13-year life cycle comes out of the ground, none of its predators will be out of the ground, because none of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 divides evenly into 13. The same is true for 17.

It seems these cicadas have evolved to exploit basic facts about numbers.

Creation or discovery?

Once we start looking, it is easy to find other examples. From the shape of soap films, to gear design in engines, to the location and size of the gaps in the rings of Saturn, mathematics is everywhere.

If mathematics explains so many things we see around us, then it is unlikely that mathematics is something we’ve created. The alternative is that mathematical facts are discovered: not just by humans, but by insects, soap bubbles, combustion engines and planets.

What did Plato think?

But if we are discovering something, what is it?

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato had an answer. He thought mathematics describes objects that really exist.

For Plato, these objects included numbers and geometric shapes. Today, we might add more complicated mathematical objects such as groups, categories, functions, fields and rings to the list.

Plato also maintained that mathematical objects exist outside of space and time. But such a view only deepens the mystery of how mathematics explains anything.

Explanation involves showing how one thing in the world depends on another. If mathematical objects exist in a realm apart from the world we live in, they don’t seem capable of relating to anything physical.

Enter Pythagoreanism

The ancient Pythagoreans agreed with Plato that mathematics describes a world of objects. But, unlike Plato, they didn’t think mathematical objects exist beyond space and time.

Instead, they believed physical reality is made of mathematical objects in the same way matter is made of atoms.

If reality is made of mathematical objects, it’s easy to see how mathematics might play a role in explaining the world around us.

In the past decade, two physicists have mounted significant defences of the Pythagorean position: Swedish-US cosmologist Max Tegmark and Australian physicist-philosopher Jane McDonnell.

Tegmark argues reality just is one big mathematical object. If that seems weird, think about the idea that reality is a simulation. A simulation is a computer program, which is a kind of mathematical object.

McDonnell’s view is more radical. She thinks reality is made of mathematical objects and minds. Mathematics is how the Universe, which is conscious, comes to know itself.

I defend a different view: the world has two parts, mathematics and matter. Mathematics gives matter its form, and matter gives mathematics its substance.

Mathematical objects provide a structural framework for the physical world.

The future of mathematics

It makes sense that Pythagoreanism is being rediscovered in physics.

In the past century physics has become more and more mathematical, turning to seemingly abstract fields of inquiry such as group theory and differential geometry in an effort to explain the physical world.

As the boundary between physics and mathematics blurs, it becomes harder to say which parts of the world are physical and which are mathematical.

But it is strange that Pythagoreanism has been neglected by philosophers for so long.

I believe that is about to change. The time has arrived for a Pythagorean revolution, one that promises to radically alter our understanding of reality.

Sam Baron, Associate professor, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Concerned about overeating? Here’s what you need to know about food addiction

For many of us, eating particular foods can be comforting: a pick-me-up during a hard task; a reward after a long day at work; a satiating end to a lovely dinner.

But some people have a compulsive and uncontrolled urge to eat particular foods, especially hyper-palatable “junk” foods. This can impact on their day-to-day functioning, and their ability to fulfil social, work or family roles.

People who struggle with addictive eating may have intense cravings, which don’t relate to hunger, as well as increased levels of tolerance for large quantities of food, and feelings of withdrawal.

Rather than hunger, these cravings may be prompted by low mood, mental illness (depression and anxiety), high levels of stress, or heightened emotions.

“Food addiction” or “addictive eating” is not yet a disorder that can be diagnosed in a clinical setting. Yet patients often ask health professionals about how to manage their addictive eating.

These health providers generally acknowledge their patients’ addictive eating behaviours but may be unsure of suitable treatments.

Food addiction is commonly assessed using the Yale Food Addiction Scale.

The science of addictive eating is still emerging, but researchers are increasingly noting addiction and reward pathways in the brain triggered by stress, heightened emotions and mental illness are associated with the urge to overeat.

How common is it?

Many factors contribute to overeating. The abundance of fast food, junk food advertising, and the highly palatable ingredients of many processed foods can prompt us to eat whether we are hungry or not.

However, some people report a lack of control over their eating, beyond liking and wanting, and are seeking help for this.

Around one in six people (15-20%) report addictive patterns of eating or addictive behaviours around food.

While food addiction is higher among people with obesity and mental health conditions, it only affects a subset of these groups.

How can you tell if you have a problem?

Typically, food addiction occurs with foods that are highly palatable, processed, and high in combinations of energy, fat, salt and/or sugar while being low in nutritional value. This might include chocolates, confectionery, takeaway foods, and baked products.

These foods may be associated with high levels of reward and may therefore preoccupy your thoughts. They might elevate your mood or provide a distraction from anxious or traumatic thoughts, and over time, you may need to eat more to get the same feelings of reward.

However, for others, it could be an addiction to feelings of fullness or a sense of reward or satisfaction.

There is ongoing debate about whether it is components of food that are addictive or the behaviour of eating itself that is addictive, or a combination of the two.

Given people consume foods for a wide range of reasons, and people can form habits around particular foods, it could be different for different people.

It often starts in childhood

Through our research exploring the experiences of adults, we found many people with addictive eating attribute their behaviours to experiences that occurred in childhood.

These events are highly varied. They range from traumatic events, to the use of dieting or restrictive eating practices, or are related to poor body image or body dissatisfaction.

Our latest research found addictive eating in teenage years is associated with poorer quality of life and lower self-esteem, and it appears to increase in severity over time.

Children and adolescents tend to have fewer addictive eating behaviours, or symptoms, than adults. Of the 11 symptoms of the Yale Food Addiction Scale, children and adolescents generally have only two or three, while adults often have six or more, which is classified as severe food addiction.

The associations we observed in adolescents are also seen in adults: increased weight and poorer mental health is associated with a greater number of symptoms and prevalence of food addiction.

This highlights that some adolescents will need mental health, eating disorder and obesity services, in a combined treatment approach.

We also need to identify early risk factors to enable targeted, preventative interventions in younger age groups.

How is it treated?

The underlying causes of addictive eating are diverse so treatments can’t be one-size-fits-all.

A large range of treatments are being trialled. These include:

• passive approaches such as self-help support groups

• trials of medications such as naltrexone and bupropion, which targets hormones involved in hunger and appetite and works to reduce energy intake

• bariatric surgery to assist with weight loss. The most common procedure in Australia is gastric banding, where an adjustable band is placed around the top part of the stomach to apply pressure and reduce appetite.

However, few of the available self-help support groups include involvement or input from qualified health professionals. While providing peer support, these may not be based on the best available evidence, with few evaluated for effectiveness.

Medications and bariatric surgery do involve health professional input and have been shown to be effective in achieving weight loss and reducing symptoms of food addiction in some people.

However, these may not be suitable for some people, such as those in the healthy weight range or with complex underlying health conditions. It’s also critical people receiving medications and surgery are counselled to make diet and other lifestyle changes.

Other holistic, personalised lifestyle approaches that include diet, physical activity, as well as mindfulness, show promising results, especially when co-designed with consumers and health professionals.

Our emerging treatment program

We’re also creating new holistic approaches to manage addictive eating. We recently trialled an online intervention tailored to individuals’ personalities.

Delivered by dietitians and based on behaviour change research, participants in the trial received personalised feedback about their symptoms of addictive eating, diet, physical activity and sleep, and formulated goals, distraction lists, and plans for mindfulness, contributing to an overall action plan.

After three months, participants reported the program as acceptable and feasible. The next step in our research is to trial the treatment for effectiveness. We’re conducting a research trial to determine the effectiveness of the treatment on decreasing symptoms of food addiction and improving mental health.

This is the first study of its kind and if found to be effective will be translated to clinical practice.

If you feel you experience addictive eating, talk to your GP or contact an accredited practising dietitian for assessment and support.

Tracy Burrows, Professor Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle and Megan Whatnall, Post-Doctoral Researcher in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Adele has successfully asked Spotify to remove ‘shuffle’ from albums. Here’s why that’s important for musicians

Adele’s long awaited, newly released fourth studio album, 30 was guaranteed to make waves in the international music scene as Adele’s first full-length record in over six years. This week it made the news for a different reason.

In response to Adele’s request, Spotify has hidden the shuffle button from all albums accessed via the streaming music platform. In a viral tweet immediately following the release of “30”, Adele commented “We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason… our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended. Thank you Spotify for listening.”

To which Spotify’s official Twitter account responded, “Anything for you.”

The move is likely to be well-received by Adele’s popstar peers, such as Lady Gaga who implored the public listen to her album Chromatica start to finish when it released in 2020.

Shuffle away

Spotify’s shuffle button randomises songs. It is neither new nor unique. In the early 1980s, shuffle was available on CD players and MP3 players. It served as a staple for Spotify’s largest competitor Apple, via iTunes and long-forgotten devices such as the iPod and iPod shuffle.

Shuffle is essentially a random number generator that picks the next songs based on chance. The problem is true randomness means the same song might sometimes play repeatedly. In 2014, Spotify tweaked their algorithm to make shuffle seem more random.

Shuffle is still available on Spotify for playlists, but users must now access it via a menu when listening to albums as opposed to having the option right next to the play button. A statement from Spotify hailed their “new premium feature […] to make play the default button on all albums”. This change applies to all albums, not just Adele’s 30, and features on both mobile and desktop versions of Spotify.

Spotify has faced dissatisfaction and criticism from musicians who decry the appalling low streaming payout rates to artists, and academics who raise concerns over the platform’s lack of transparency around data.

But Spotify has rarely changed course in response to critique – yet Spotify willingly removed the feature from album pages upon Adele’s request to preserve the continuity of her album – a sign of the artist’s immense clout.

The album is not dead

Spotify’s decision to hide the shuffle button contrasts accusations that Spotify is responsible for “killing” the musical album as we once knew it.

As the largest music streaming service by paid subscription, Spotify is a powerful force in the global music industry. Artists, labels and production companies have taken note from Spotify as to what works and doesn’t work on a music streaming platform.

Though revenues from streaming are far lower than purchases or individual downloads, superstar artists like Drake have taken advantage of streaming services to garner billions of streams that pay out millions of dollars in revenue.

Even so, the numbers are underwhelming for mid-tier and independent artists. According to Digital Music News a niche EDM artist who managed the impressive feat of having listeners stream their music one million times over four months only generated about US$5,000 (A$6,924) in 2013.

One important issue is curated playlists. Much like radio stations, Spotify features playlists of the top charting songs in various regions, but unlike radio stations Spotify has a vast library of playlists to match every genre, mood, and moment handpicked by curators or created and shared by other users.

Producing “playlistable” songs that are more likely to be placed on a popular genre or mood playlist is now a crucial strategy to build a following, attract labels and earn a living in music – but doing so comes at a cost. Orphan songs separated on a playlist from their album will not be experienced as part of a story in the context as artists like Adele intended.

The imperative to create popular singles is not new, the music industry is and has been centred around the hits, but the shifting logic of digital music streaming puts pressure on artists to examine carefully the cost and benefits of creating longer form art.

Beginning in 2014, Billboard started calculating album equivalent units, or the number of streams that would count as one album sale when determining an album’s position on Billboard Charts. Having more songs on an album means more streams, which could translate to a higher chart position. It also means more money.

Artists have released longer albums, such as Kanye West’s recent album Donda (Deluxe) with a track listing topping 30 songs. This strategy could be seen to lead to more padding and fewer hits, ultimately diluting powerful records with bland or forgettable tunes, “as if artists are curating playlists rather than crafting cohesive projects”, according to this VICE article.

Adele’s insistence on the importance of streaming the twelve tracks on 30 in their proper order, and Spotify’s capitulation to her request, will resonate with artists who have been urged by labels, publishers, or the industry writ large to create “playlistable” singles or lengthier albums.

Long live the album

The death of the album has been forecast for over a decade and streaming services like Spotify have been one of the many potential culprits blamed. Yet artists are still releasing full, artistically realised albums in 2021.

In 2015, I released an album with my band on streaming services including Spotify and Apple. My band-mates and I experienced firsthand the time and expenses needed to produce a full-length original album. We agonised over the track listing and waited until the full album was finished before we released any of our songs.

Six years later, I fully agree with Adele. I prefer to listen to my album in its intended order and I hope others will too. Like me, the average artist lacks Adele’s persuasive influence to change the design of a major music streaming platform in order to tell a more cohesive musical story.

But that’s exactly what Adele and Spotify have done. Now you are encouraged to stream 30 by Adele in the order the artist intended.

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Assistant researcher, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s 30 years since Freddie Mercury died. His music is still the soundtrack of our lives

Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara in 1946) died on this day 30 years ago. A prolific songwriter, arranger and music producer, a consummate theatrical entertainer and one of the 20th century’s best-known lead singers, Mercury fronted Queen from 1970 until his death in 1991.

Artistically, he challenged many of the prevailing pop and rock parameters, willing to take musical risks and happy not to be part of the mainstream. He fearlessly pushed artistic boundaries, believing in the spontaneity of live performance: every show was different.

The composer

As a composer, Mercury drew on an eclectic range of genres. He wrote songs with poetic and heartfelt lyrics, witty metaphors and memorable melodies, with Queen drawing influences from The Everly Brothers, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and the Beach Boys.

Mercury’s 1979 composition Crazy Little Thing Called Love pays homage to Elvis Presley. In the song, Mercury subtly models aspects of Presley’s vocal tone and rockabilly styling in the catchy chorus.

He gives us just a hint of his vocal range in the bridge, on the lyrics “she gives me hot and cold fever” where Mercury effortlessly uses an octave yodel.

In 1975’s Bohemian Rhapsody, perhaps Queen’s most famous song, Mercury took genre crossing to a new level. This six-minute epic is unrivalled in complexity of form, lavish production, vocal layering and the sheer number of choral overdubs.

The song, which topped the British charts for almost nine weeks, was described by Mercury as a “mock opera” .

The singer

Technically masterful, Mercury possessed a voice that was powerful, agile, and highly expressive. A lyric rock tenor with over three octaves in range, Mercury could belt into his upper register with his signature fast vibrato, or use a controlled pure falsetto with smooth legato phrasing.

Strong musicianship, excellent pitch and vocal control enabled Mercury to draw on a broad array of note choices, dynamics, tone colours and vocal effects. His vocal timbre could depict a delicate vulnerability, especially with his falsetto, or use dynamic extremes to accentuate lyrics with screams and growls.

Mercury demonstrated his versatility, genre crossing and creative exploration on the 1985 song Living On My Own.

Here, he employs scat singing and the opening syncopated repetition of a single note hints at Ella Fitzgerald’s influence. It is a driving, high spirited and fearless vocal solo. Mercury solos again at the end of the song with a loose vocal reference to Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).

The performer

Queen’s appearance at the historic Live Aid Concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in July 1985 remains one of the greatest rock performances of all time.

Mercury and band were in stellar form, having just completed a world tour for their album The Works, recorded in 1984. When the entire crowd of 72,000 joins Mercury in beating out the rhythm to We Will Rock You, it is electrifying.

Further evidence of Mercury’s masterful stagecraft can be found in a bootleg video of Queen performing in Sydney in 1985.

Twelve minutes into the footage, Mercury slowly struts to the piano and improvises a segue into Somebody to Love in a gospel style with a call and response with the audience.

His years of touring experience provided him with an arsenal of stagecraft prowess: strutting, holding poses, dressed in his glam rock style, with white spandex.

Audiences adored his showmanship and flamboyance.

The influencer

30 years on from his death, Mercury’s incredible compositions are still part of the soundtrack of our lives.

Somebody To Love was used in the films Happy Feet (2006) and Ella Enchanted (2004). Lady GaGa coopted her name from Queen’s Radio GaGa.

Ceelo Green attributes his falsetto usage to his collection of Queen albums.

Kurt Cobain listened to Queen’s News of the World on 8-track.

Katy Perry has acknowledged Mercury as a major influence, performing Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now during her Hello Katy tour in 2009. P!nk included the iconic stadium songs We Are the Champions in her tour in 2019.

Many filmmakers have told his story: Bryan Singer’s film Bohemian Rapsody (2018) is joined by a suite of documentaries. Next month, the BBC are releasing a new documentary, this time looking at his tragic death from AIDS at just 45.

30 years on, Mercury is remembered as a powerful songwriter, filled with on-stage magnetism, creativity and intelligence, a hard work ethic and a passion for perfection.

Leigh Carriage, Senior Lecturer in Music, Southern Cross University

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