Darwin College Lecture Series

Palestinian Song in Transition | Dr Issa Boulos

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 02:00:00 -0000

Between 1936 and 1948, Palestinian music experienced a transformative period shaped by the establishment of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the Near East Broadcasting Station (NEBS). These radio stations became influential cultural platforms that enabled Palestinian musicians to explore, refine, and project a national identity through music. They created an ecosystem in which diverse traditions could intermingle, inviting voices from across Palestine and the broader Arab region to contribute to a vibrant musical landscape.

Uploaded 13-03-26

Within this environment, vocal genres underwent significant evolution, as traditional folk melodies expanded into shaʿbī songs and new forms such as the Palestinian Qaṣīda emerged. Instrumental compositions also flourished, crafted for both local and Western ensembles, while choirs and children’s programming deepened the reach of musical production. Palestinian musicians simultaneously engaged with Egyptian popular styles and preserved classical traditions, including the muwashshaḥāt.

The opportunities for recording and broadcasting provided by PBS and NEBS not only elevated the visibility of Palestinian musicians but also ensured the preservation and dissemination of their works. This cultural renaissance, marked by innovation and cross-cultural exchange, fostered a distinctive Palestinian musical identity that reflected both regional diversity and local creativity.

Issa Boulos is an internationally acclaimed composer, lyricist, researcher, and songwriter whose works have been performed worldwide. Trained from an early age in piano, ‘ūd, and voice, he later studied composition with Gustavo Leone, Athanasios Zervas, and William Russo at Columbia College Chicago, followed by Robert Lombardo and Ilya Levinson at Roosevelt University. He earned his PhD in ethnomusicology from Leiden University.

Boulos is known for blending traditional instruments with contemporary innovation, creating music for orchestras, chamber, and mixed ensembles, as well as hundreds of songs, several of which became hits. His commissions include four works for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a project with the Silk Road Ensemble, and scores for award-winning films, documentaries, plays, and musicals.

His career spans the United States, the Middle East, and Europe, earning recognition for both performance and scholarship. He directed the Middle East Music Ensemble at the University of Chicago for nearly a decade, co-founded the Qatar Music Academy in 2010 and served as its Head of Music, and co-founded the Palestinian Institute for Cultural Development (NAWA). Today, Boulos is Manager of the Harper College Community Music and Arts Center, adjunct music faculty, and a board member of organisations including Amwaj Choir.

#PalestinianMusic #IssaBoulos #PalestinianCulture #ArabMusic #MiddleEasternMusic #Ethnomusicology #MusicHistory #PalestinianHeritage #ArabicMusic #CulturalHistory #CambridgeUniversity #DarwinCollege #UniversityLectures #MiddleEastCulture #PalestinianSong

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Appearance and Physical Reality by Carlo Rovelli

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 01:00:00 -0000

Can we “see” photons, black holes, curved spacetime, quantum jumps, the expansion of the universe, or quanta of space? Physics challenges appearances, showing convincingly that our everyday vision of reality is limited, approximate and badly incomplete. Established theories such as quantum theory and general relativity and investigations like loop quantum gravity have a reputation of obscurity. Many suggest that science is forcing us into a counterintuitive and purely mathematical understanding of reality. I disagree. I think that there is a visionary core at the root of the best science. Where “visionary” truly means formed by visual images. Our mind, even when dealing with abstract and difficult notions, relies on images, metaphors and, ultimately, vision. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, science is not just about making predictions: it is about understanding, and, for this, developing new eyes to see. I shall illustrate this point with some concrete cases, including the birth of quantum theory in Einstein’s intuition, curved spacetimes, and quanta of space.

Uploaded 21-02-19

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist, known for the development Loop Quantum Gravity, his work on the nature of physical time and the Relational Interpretation of quantum mechanics. He was born in Italy in 1956, has studied in Bologna and Padova and has worked in several Universities in Italy and the United States; he is currently directing the Quantum Gravity group of the Centre de Physique Théorique of the University of Aix-Marseille. He has honorary degrees from Beijing Normal University, and the Universidad de San Martin of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a member of the International Academy for the Philosophy of Science, of the Institut Universitaire de France and of the Accademia Galileana. He has written successful popular science books: his “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” is translated in 41 languages and has sold over a million copies. His most recent book, The Order of Time, is on the nature of time.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Visions by Paul Fletcher

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 22:23:00 -0000

The brain strives to become a model of the world in which it must survive. It is often more important for it to be functional and efficient than it is to be factually correct. Indeed, there are numerous instances in which it seems to favour usefulness over accuracy, expectation over actuality. This has led many to conclude that even normal perception has a constructive or hallucinatory quality. In extremis, under the influence of fatigue, fear, illness or drugs, an entire reality may be created, one that seems to conflict with the reality accepted by those around us. This condition, known as psychosis, offers us important glimpses into the mechanisms of the mind and the many ways in which they may be altered.

Uploaded 07-02-19

Paul Fletcher is Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, Director of Studies for Preclinical Medicine at Clare College and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. He studied Medicine, before carrying out his specialist training in Psychiatry and taking a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. He researches human perception, learning and decision-making and is especially interested in hallucinations – perception in the absence of a stimulus – feeling that the existence of such phenomena offers us important insights in to how our brains construct our experience of the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Songs We Grow By | Ibrahim Baltagi

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 05:00:00 -0000

From the first lullabies that soothe an infant to the anthems of adolescence, song traces the map of our becoming. More than entertainment, it is a medium through which children learn to attend, remember, speak, and feel with others.

Uploaded 13-02-26

This lecture follows development from infancy through adolescence to show how song supports language growth, memory formation, emotional regulation, and social connection. I will use brief examples from Arabic, French, and American children’s songs. These examples will show how familiar repertoire reflects cultural identity in language, imagery, and style. They will also show shared design features such as repetition, small pitch ranges, and a steady beat, which support learning and belonging.

Drawing on music education, psychology, and neuroscience, I will outline what changes across stages and what endures: the voice as the most immediate instrument, rhythm as an organizer of attention, and shared singing as a practice that builds trust and community. Practical implications for families, schools, and community programs will include simple routines that nurture resilience and inclusive classrooms. In an age of uncertainty, song remains a durable resource for growth and cohesion, binding individuals to themselves, to one another, and to the wider world.

Dr Ibrahim H Baltagi is a music educator and lecturer at the Lebanese American University and Head of Music at Al Makassed schools in Beirut. He has taught at The Ohio State University and Baldwin Wallace University. He earned a PhD in music education from The Ohio State University and holds certificates in the Kodály method and Orff Schulwerk approach. He has led workshops in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Cyprus, and the United States.

His scholarship includes chapters in the International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, peer reviewed publications, and regular conference presentations on song and child development. His work with UNICEF Innocenti focuses on music, learning, and childhood wellbeing, and he has been featured as a music expert in UNICEF parenting masterclasses. He is the author of the Music Garden series and Let’s Read and Write Music, available in Arabic, English, and French. These series provide a pathway for learning through singing, movement, instruments, and creative music making, with emphasis on music literacy, performance, listening, and joyful classroom practice.

Chapters:
00:00 Start
00:25 Master's Introduction
03:39 Dr Ibrahim Baltagi
03:48 Before there was language, there were songs...
10:22 Cycle 1: Regulation and Bonding | Ages 0-2
15:52 Cycle 2: Organizing the World | Ages 3-6
22:56 Cycle 3: Memory and Form | Ages 6-8
27:41 "Tik Tik Tik Ya Em Sleiman"
28:51 Audience learning
37:00 Sing-a-long
38:10 Cycle 4: The Social Rule | Ages 9-11
44:36 "Ya Ghzayel"
45:53 Audience learning
48:32 Sing-a-long
49:13 Cycle 5: Identity and Declaration | Ages 12+
56:08 Master's Summary

#SongsWeGrowBy #MusicEducation #ChildDevelopment #musicandlearning #IbrahimBaltagi #DarwinCollege #UNICEF #universityofcambridge

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throat Singing: Body, Spirit, Pathways, Place | Carole Pegg

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 04:00:00 -0000

“Throat-singing” is timbre-centred vocal music typified by the simultaneous separate sounding of a musical drone and its overtones or undertones by a solo vocalist. Here I also include the timbral vocal technique of heroic epic performers. Often perceived as otherworldly, these vocal sounds have entranced global listeners and inspired many to attempt the technically difficult styles and substyles. My extensive fieldwork among Indigenous nomadic peoples of Inner Asia, the cradle of this genre, revealed how these sounds “place” the bodies of performers and listeners in the local acoustic landscape and mountain-steppe ecology, enable nomadizing along cross-border pathways in an animist tripartite universe, and create kinship relations with living and ancestral humans and spirits. Tyvan “throat-singer” Radik Tülüsh’s suggestion that these connections form a “philosophy”, inspired my theory of “ontological musicality,” that is, an inter-relational musical complex that connects Inner Asian nomadic identities, ways of being, spirituality, personhood, community, and senses of place. Finally, I ask: can Inner Asian “throat-singing” as an ontological musicality, with its respect for the environment and mediation of the potentially opposing notions of movement and place, be of equal relevance to its technical accomplishment in our own “ways of being” in the world?

Uploaded 06-02-26

Dr Carole Pegg is an affiliated Senior Researcher in the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge, and alumna of Lucy Cavendish College. After gaining her degree and PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, she undertook postdoctoral research on the music of nomadic peoples of Inner Asia (Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, southern Siberian republics of Altai, Khakhassia and Tyva). Two ethnographies ensued: Mongolian Music, Dance and Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities (Washington University Press, 2001) and Drones, Tones and Timbres: Sounding Place among Nomads of the Inner Asian Mountain-Steppes (Illinois University Press, 2024). She has served as Chairperson of the British Forum of Ethnomusicology, founding co-editor of the British Journal of Ethnomusicology (now Ethnomusicology Forum), Senior Editor of traditional world music for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (second edition), and editorial board member of the journal Cambridge Anthropology. As an English singer-fiddler, she has recorded as a solo artist, with the folk-rock band Mr Fox, and with throat-singer Radik Tülüsh (of the Tyvan band Huun-Huur-Tu). As director of Inner Asian Music and 7-Star Records, she has toured musicians from her fieldwork areas and produced compact discs of their music.

Chapters:
00:00 Start
00:23 Master's Introduction
03:05 Dr Carole Pegg
58:54 Master's Summary

#ThroatSinging #CarolePegg #DarwinCollege #UniversityOfCambridge #Ethnomusicology #OvertoneSinging #IndigenousMusic #InnerAsianMusic #MusicAnthropology

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Computer Vision by Andrew Blake

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 03:00:00 -0000

Professor Andrew Blake, Samsung AI Research Centre.

Can we trust the judgement of machines that see? Computer vision is being entrusted with ever more critical tasks: from access control by face recognition, to diagnosis of disease from medical scans and hand-eye coordination for surgical and nuclear decommissioning robots, and now to taking control of motor vehicles.

Uploaded 05-03-19

The latest technologies for visual decision-making use neural networks, transmitting signals from input to output in many stages, where the signals at intermediate stages are not easily interpreted. This makes it harder to understand and therefore trust the decisions. Moreover, it has been shown that decisions from neural networks can often be reversed surprisingly easily – by so-called “adversarial” counterexamples, suggesting a certain fragility in a network’s operation. How sure can we be that the computer makes good visual judgements and decisions?

Andrew Blake is a pioneer in the development of the theory and algorithms that make it possible for computers to behave as seeing machines. He is especially interested in segmentation as optimisation, in visual tracking as probabilistic inference, and in real-time, 3D vision. He trained in mathematics and electrical engineering in Cambridge UK and at MIT , and studied for a doctorate in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. He was an academic for 18 years, in Edinburgh and Oxford, ultimately as Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford University. He joined Microsoft in 1999 to found the Computer Vision group in Cambridge, before becoming Director of Microsoft’s Cambridge Laboratory in 2010 and a Microsoft Distinguished Scientist. Currently he is a consultant in Artificial Intelligence. In particular he is Chairman of Samsung’s AI Research Centre SAIC in Cambridge. He is consultant and Scientific Adviser to the FiveAI autonomous driving company, and serves as an adviser to Siemens. In 2010, he was elected to the council of the Royal Society and was appointed to the board of the EPSRC in 2012. He was Director at The Alan Turing Institute 2015-18. He has been Honorary Professor of Machine Intelligence at the University of Cambridge since 2007 and is a Fellow of Clare Hall. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering since 1998 and Fellow of the Royal Society since 2005. He twice won the prize of the European Conference on Computer Vision, with R. Cipolla in 1992 and with M. Isard in 1996, and was awarded the IEEE David Marr Prize (jointly with K. Toyama) in 2001. The Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him their Silver Medal in 2006, and in 2007 he received the Institution of Engineering and Technology Mountbatten Medal (previously awarded to computer pioneers Maurice Wilkes and Tim Berners-Lee, amongst others.) He was named a Distinguished Researcher in Computer Vision by the IEEE in 2009. In 2011, with colleagues at Microsoft Research, he received the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Gold Medal for the machine learning at the heart of the Microsoft Kinect 3D camera. Exactly 80 years after Einstein, in 2014, he gave the Gibbs lecture at the Joint Mathematics Meetings – the 6th British scientist to do so in 90 years. The BCS awarded him its Lovelace Medal and prize lecture in 2017. He holds honorary doctorates at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sheffield.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Song in the Ancient World: Echoes of Religion and Resistance | Matthew Gordley

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 02:23:00 -0000

We have no shortage of evidence about the importance of song in the ancient world, including written descriptions of music in literature, songs embedded in narratives, standalone hymnic texts, and collections of psalms and hymns. While we can only imagine the melodies and modes of performance, the surviving texts reveal an imaginal world in which the divine and the human were inextricably interwoven.

Uploaded 20-02-26

In Greco-Roman antiquity we see how songs of one time and place became an evocative source for later generations to reflect on their particular realities in light of larger forces they saw at work in the world, including in the divine benefactions of their rulers. Early Jewish and Christian psalms and hymns show that their authors had complex ways of reworking traditions and themes to meet the needs of a new era, both religiously and politically.

This lecture explores the rich treasury of ancient religious song, looking especially at how songs functioned for the communities that preserved them. We will pay attention to the affective dimensions of ancient songs, their power to shape a community’s perception of reality, and their suitability to serve as vehicles of resistance through the reimagining of earlier images and forms. If we listen carefully, even today we can hear echoes of religion and resistance in the songs of antiquity.

Matthew E Gordley is a scholar of Christianity and Judaism in antiquity who has been researching and writing on the influence and impact of ancient song for more than two decades. His work on early Christian and Jewish psalms and hymns seeks to situate these poetic compositions within their ancient historical and cultural contexts so that they may be more fully appreciated by readers today.

His scholarly monographs on the subject include The Colossian Hymn in Context (2007), Teaching through Song in Antiquity: Didactic Hymnody among Geeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians (2011), and New Testament Christological Hymns: Exploring Texts, Contexts, and Significance (2018). His latest book, Social Justice in the Stories of Jesus: The Ethical Challenge of the Parables (2024), uses a similar historical and cultural approach to understand how the stories Jesus told continue to engage and challenge readers to this day.

He earned a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and currently serves as Interim Provost and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Carlow University (Pittsburgh, PA), where he also holds a tenured faculty appointment as Professor of Theology.

Chapters:
00:00 Start
00:24 Master's Introduction
02:48 Professor Matthew Gordley
52:14 Master's Summary

#DarwinCollegeLecture #AncientWorld #ReligionAndResistance #AncientMusic #ReligiousStudies #TheologyLecture #AncientHistory #BiblicalStudies #Classics #PublicLecture #UniversityLecture #HistoryOfReligion #PsalmsAndHymns #EarlyChristianity #AncientJudaism #GrecoRomanWorld #AcademicTalk #Humanities #IntellectualHistory #CambridgeLectures #darwincollege #universityofcambridge

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How song shapes society, and society shapes song | Richard Morrison

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 02:00:00 -0000

From Renaissance princes and popes to modern-day democrats and dictators, those who rule countries, religious communities and empires have often kept a close watch on singers, songs and those who compose them. Equally, song has often been used as a subversive weapon, a tool of protest and a call to arms, as well as to bolster communal or national pride and morale. The tensions around songs and singers are no less prominent today than in the past, as is shown by the recent controversies surrounding what gets broadcast from the Glastonbury Festival, who gets to sing at Covent Garden, or which nations are allowed to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Uploaded 20-03-26

But does music have a real capacity to change society, rather than merely acting as a vent for strong emotions? How does singing affect us as individuals? Can it actually make us feel better – physically, mentally and spiritually? Can it change minds? Conversely, can the withdrawal of opportunities to sing, whether for political, religious or medical reasons, be regarded as a crime against humanity? And does the act of singing as a community bind us together, or reinforce tribal divisions?

Richard Morrison has worked for The Times for more than 40 years, first as a classical music and opera critic, then as arts editor and now as chief culture writer. For the past three decades he has written a wide-ranging weekly column commenting on the impact of the arts on society and politics, and vice versa. He also writes a monthly column in the BBC Music Magazine and is an occasional broadcaster on BBC Radio 3. His centenary history of the London Symphony Orchestra was acclaimed as a “warts-and-all” chronicle of an orchestra’s struggle to survive, flourish and make great music through the turmoil of the 20th century.

Educated at University College School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, he has also been the organist and director of music at a North London parish church for all his adult life. He is married and has four children.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Songs of the Stars: Unravelling Stellar Music with Asteroseismology | Professor Conny Aerts

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 01:00:00 -0000

For the past two decades it has been possible to measure the seismic activity of stars with high precision. This is thanks to dedicated telescopes operating from space. Using these recorded ‘songs of the stars’, asteroseismologists can gaze into stellar interiors. By doing this, it is possible to probe the physical conditions and chemical composition of these hot balls of gas millions of light years away.

Uploaded 05-03-26

Asteroseismology is a unique and powerful tool to determine the size, mass, and age of stars to a higher precision than ever before. It also offers a way to better understand the fastest rotators in the Universe on their way to supernova explosions and gravitational waves. Using the insights gained, astrophycists are able to perform archaeology in our Milky Way galaxy, and to characterise exoplanets. In this talk, 2022 Kavli and 2024 Crafoord Laureate Conny Aerts will explain how to use the songs of the stars to unravel their stories and to see the invisible.

Conny Aerts graduated as a mathematician from Antwerp University (1988) and defended her PhD thesis in astrophysics at KU Leuven (1993). Competitive personal grants allowed her to work as independent postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (1994 – 2001), performing numerous stays in Europe, Chile and the USA . She was appointed as Lecturer (2001), Associate Professor (2004), and Full professor (2007) at KU Leuven. She also leads the Chair in Asteroseismology at the Radboud University Nijmegen (NL, 2004+) and is External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society (Heidelberg, 2019+).

Conny’s research covers stellar astrophysics, including stellar structure and evolution and variable stars. She is a pioneer of asteroseismology, which received a major boost thanks to the CoRoT (2006+), Kepler (2009+), and TESS (2018+) space missions. Prior to high-precision space photometry, Conny developed rigorous mathematical methods to detect and identify non-radial stellar oscillations in high-resolution time-series spectroscopy. Her team also designed and applied statistical classification methods in a machine-learning context, discoving numerous gravity-mode pulsators in space photometry. As Chair in Asteroseismology at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Conny introduced herself into the topic of subdwarf stars, their binarity and pulsations, with current focus on development and exploitation of BlackGEM in tandem with gravitational wave studies.

In 2008, Conny was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant, PROSPERITY to exploit CoRoT and Kepler space photometry. Her PhD students made major contributions, such as the discovery of non-radial pulsation modes, of dipole mixed modes, and of non-rigid rotation in red giants, following her own detections of internal mixing and rotation in massive stars. The ERC offered her a 2nd AdG, MAMSIE (Mixing and Angular Momentum tranSport in massIvE Stars, 2016-2021) to bridge stellar physics, asteroseismology, and 3D simulations in order to quantify limitations in stellar evolution theory. This culminated in the 2012 Francqui Prize and the 2020 5-year FWO Excellence Award, also termed Belgian and Flemish Nobel Prizes, where Conny was the first woman to receive these prestigious awards in Science and Technology since their creation in 1933 and 1960, respectively. Conny is the recipient of the 2022 Kavli prize in Astrophysics and the 2024 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy; she acts as corresponding Principle Investigator of the 2022 ERC Synergy grant 4D-STAR.

Chapters:
00:00 Start
00:24 Master's introduction
03:02 Professor Conny Aerts
58:44 Master's Summary

#Astronomy #Astrophysics #Asteroseismology #SpaceScience #Stars #StellarPhysics #StellarOscillations #ScienceLecture #AstronomyLecture #SpaceResearch #Universe #Cosmos #Exoplanets #MilkyWay #GravitationalWaves #Supernova #SpaceTelescope #KeplerMission #TESSMission #CoRoT #ScienceT

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices