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George Colin Stewart Consulting, Minneapolis, MN (2026)

03/23/2022

Minneapolis streetcar routes, ca 1951

07/21/2021

It's all in the pronunciation.

07/06/2021

I ran across this while searching for colophons and just couldn't pass it up.

© Epicenter Press

06/19/2021

Though I heard these growing up, I always wondered where they came from.

03/26/2021

Growing up, I heard this many times in the end of broadcast day video High Flight. I still find it moving.

03/04/2021

I invented an alien language in my mind (and luckily wrote down a description) that uses a very tiny sliver of our sound spectrum. It is based on a range of from 1/2 step below and 1/2 step above a single central tone. Each of those two intervals is divided into 6 steps, so, for example, 3 steps below and 3 steps above would be like our familiar (sort of) quarter-tones.

Their vocabulary is built on those 13 tones -- plus one very, very low tone, more felt than heard -- using jumps, duration, tempo, volume, and silences, to assemble "words" or ideas.

I would guess that their "hearing" is vastly different from our ability to differentiate across a wide tonal spectrum (realizing, of course, that ours, too, is only a small subset of a much wider range), and that they have a keen sense of those unique tonal relationships. I also think that that central tone may be different for every conversation, and that they have no comprehension that it is or can be different. Individuals automatically adapt to the primary tone of the initiator.

As it happens, that primary tone generally lies within our hearing range, though I couldn't tell you why that would be.

Their initial "ship-to-shore" message, or communication, manifests as a VERY loud (though not so loud as would damage our ear drums), rather long sequence of tones (say 1/2 hour), followed by a single boomp! of that very low tone, which does break some windows. That seems to indicate an "end-of-paragraph", because about 15-20 min. later it starts all over again. It can be heard across enormous areas, like several states! It migrates slightly each time.

To say it is (will be) unnerving is putting it mildly.

I do not know what they said.