1. Today we are going to do something a little different, in the past few classes, we’ve listened to traditional music from around the world and we’ve talked about the characteristics of these music, what makes these styles distinctive, what kinds of instruments are used, and you’ve talked about what sounds familiar to you and what sounds strange, and many of you found some of what we’ve listened to very strange indeed.Well, today I want to start talking about western music and I am going to start in ancient Greece.
2. But, now here’s the part that’s different, we’re not going to talk very much about the actual music, instead, we are going to talk about what the Greeks believed about music, now, there are some very good reasons to approach the material in this way, first, well, we don’t have very much ancient Greek music studied, only about 45 pieces survived, these are mostly records of poems and songs, and we are not sure how well we can reproduce the melodies or rhythms, because they were apparently improvised in many cases.
3. So we really don’t know all that much about what the music sounded like. What we do know about, and this really is the most important reason I am approaching today’s lecture the way I am, is the Greek philosophy about music and its continuing influence on western attitudes toward music. Now, if we’re going to understand the philosophy, we have to first understand that music for the Greeks was about much more than entertainment.
4. Today, we are going to look at an important area of science, namely, technology, so, what is it? Nano means tiny, so it's science and engineering on the scale of atoms and molecules, the idea is that by controlling and rearranging atoms, you can literally create anything. However, as we'll see, the science of the small has some big implications affecting us in many ways.
5. Numerous science-fiction books and movies have raised people's fears about nanotechnology with scenarios such as inserting little nano-robots into your body that monitor everything you do without you realizing it, or self-replicating nano-robots that eventually takeover the world. So how do we safeguard such a potentially powerful technology?
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