Medieval Voices

Hearing voices.

On the face of it Hearing Voices is an informative and evocative BBC commissioned radio documentary, based on endangered click languages from the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. It juxtaposes recordings of some of the languages in question (both spoken and sung), followed up with translation into English, environmental field recordings that help place the listener into the location, not forgetting...

Lost voices

When a scientist dies too early in their career we miss them as a colleague and as a person and, as Eve Marder explains, we also lose the science they would have done.house died, we experienced the pain of losing a special talent too young. Joplin, Lennon and Winehouse, whether you like their music or not, were special. Each had a voice, both as a sound and as a songwriter, that was unique. Whe...

Feeling Voices

Two experiments investigated deaf individuals' ability to discriminate between same-sex talkers based on vibrotactile stimulation alone. Nineteen participants made same/different judgments on pairs of utterances presented to the lower back through voice coils embedded in a conforming chair. Discrimination of stimuli matched for F0, duration, and perceived magnitude was successful for pairs of s...

Medieval Matching Markets1

This paper presents insights on the market microstructure of the late Middle Ages. In particular it looks into the institution of the broker on medieval markets and fairs. It argues that the broker was a key player in the solution of a two-sided matching market problem. The broker’s obligation was to match sellers to buyers. Medieval market makers, i.e. the town o¢ cials set up rules for broker...

Medieval marriage and superstitions.