Muse Inside The Muscle Machine

This definitive work - the only book on Muse - tells the band's story, from their inception in the small coastal town of Teignmouth, Devon in the mid-1990s, through numerous incendiary live shows and grandiose, critically acclaimed albums, to their status as the biggest British rock band in the world.This best-selling book is now fully updated to include Muse's astonishing fourth album, Black Holes & Revelations, which is their biggest selling record to date, having shifted well over a million copies. Ploughing their own distinct musical furrow has finally reaped rich rewards for this trio of unlikely musical heroes, confirming the band as genuine modern day rock gods.In this definitive account, Ben Myers tells the Muse tale through exclusive interviews with the band and numerous associates, and also includes the author's eyewitness accounts at various stages along the way.Ben Myers is a highly respected music journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications including Kerrang!, Melody Maker, Q, Uncut and Careless Talk Costs Lives. He has also written the bestselling book Green Day: American Idiots And The New Punk Explosion, as well as the acclaimed biographies John Lydon: Sex Pistols, PiL and Anti-Celebrity and System Of A Down: Right Here In Hollywood.

Formed in the mid-1990s in a sleepy sea-side Devonshire town, Muse comprises teenage friends Matt Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme and Dominic Howard. After two low-key releases in 1998, Muse's recently released third album, Absolution, went straight to number 1 in the charts. This book tells their story.

Music, race, politics, and conscience. In these eight essays written over the span of a decade and a half, T. R. Hummer explains how, for him, such abiding concerns revolve around the practice of poetry and the evolution of a culturally responsible personal poetics. Hummer writes about the suicide of poet Vachel Lindsay, the culture wars at the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the divided soul of his native American South, and the salving, transcendent practice of musicianship. Inevitably entwined with a personal or cultural component, Hummer's criticism is thus grounded in experience that is always familiar and often straight to the heart in its rightness. In one of those statements of "poetic purpose" that goes hand in hand with a residency, guest editorship, or lecture tour, Hummer once wrote that "poetry inhabits and enunciates an incommensurable zone between individual and collective, between body and body politic, an area very ill-negotiated by most of us most of the time. Our culture, with its emphasis on the individual mind and body, teaches us very little about how even to think about the nature of this problem. . . . E pluribus unum is a smokescreen: what pluribus; what unum? And yet this phrase is an American mantra, as if it explained something." This is a quintessential Hummer moment: a writer has just given himself a good reason to quit. What Hummer knows must happen next is what The Muse in the Machine is all about.

According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions. The latest scientific findings indicate that emotions play an essential role in decision making, perception, learning, and more—that is, they influence the very mechanisms of rational thinking. Not only too much, but too little emotion can impair decision making. According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions. Part 1 of this book provides the intellectual framework for affective computing. It includes background on human emotions, requirements for emotionally intelligent computers, applications of affective computing, and moral and social questions raised by the technology. Part 2 discusses the design and construction of affective computers. Although this material is more technical than that in Part 1, the author has kept it less technical than typical scientific publications in order to make it accessible to newcomers. Topics in Part 2 include signal-based representations of emotions, human affect recognition as a pattern recognition and learning problem, recent and ongoing efforts to build models of emotion for synthesizing emotions in computers, and the new application area of affective wearable computers.