How does the space that you’re making music in change the sound of the music? French drummer Julien Audigier, Audio Zero, and Wikidrummers put this video together to demonstrate the “natural echoes and decay patterns” of drums in different environments. No artificial reverb added.

In the archives: more drums and more sounds.

via The Awesomer.

Le Merle (the Blackbird) is a cutout animation directed in 1958 by cinematic innovator Norman McLaren. Based on a French-Canadian folksong, the story tells of a bird who loses a beak, a neck, eyes, wings, legs, etc, and then finds them in duplicate and triplicate.

In the archives: McLaren’s Spook Sport and Boogie Doodle, more 1950s greatness, and one more from the National Film Board of Canada: How Do They Recycle Steel?

"Physics told me some crazy stuff. Say, I’m not just sitting here doing nothing. I’m actually fighting against Earth’s gravity. And I’m not sitting still. I’m spinning at a thousand miles per hour, or even more than that… 67 thousand miles per hour, if you count the rotation of the Earth around the Sun…"

In this graduation project that sums up her efforts in a dual degree program (animation and physics) presented by Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, this is Xiangjun Shi's Why Do I Study Physics?

Follow this up with Vi Hart’s Doodle Music.

One of the great innovations of the twentieth century is likely not well-known, but this video from the Ri Channel is looking to change that:

This is X-ray crystallography. 

Discovered in 1913 by William and Lawrence Bragg, x-ray crystallography is a technique that reveals the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal. When a narrow beam of x-rays is shown through the crystal, it diffracts into a pattern of rays through the other side. 

"To date 28 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to projects related to the field" and 100 years after its discovery, the Curiosity Rover is using x-ray crystallography to analyze soil on Mars.

Science! And if you haven’t seen these yet, we’ve shared some of our favorite science videos for kids over at RiChannel.org, where they know great science videos.

Thanks, Robert.

Geometry has never looked so sweet… or perplexing: Mariano Tomatis shows us how to create chocolate out of nothing.

Related reading: Curse of the crystal skulls and other vanishing area puzzles and the missing square puzzle. There are also more math videos in the archives. 

via Boing Boing.