Music Memory Recall
Recalls have left Toyota battered and bruised with a very damaged image that now needs rebuilding. Consumer trust is not easily earned. Toyota knows it, too. The automaker worked for decades to build an image that equated quality and reliability with the company name itself. Now under heavy fire over its handling of the problems that led to the floor mat and gas pedal recalls involving its most popular and important models, Toyota has embarked upon a PR blitz intended to convince frustrated customers and a skeptical media that everything's going to be all right.
Whether that's indeed the case will become evident over time. Sales numbers speak for themselves, and if the public isn't buying Toyota's explanation, they won't be buying its vehicles, either. In any case, it'll probably be years before the recall story's epilogue can honestly be written.
For now, Toyota's primary focus is on re-establishing itself as a business that's deserving of consumers' trust. That starts with saying "I'm sorry" as frequently and in as many different venues as possible. The latest part of Toyota's apology blitz comes in the form of a new TV spot called "Commitment." It's embedded after the jump for you to watch. The message is simple and delivered well: Toyota messed up big time, it knows it, and it's fully aware that the onus is on itself to win back customers' confidence.
If Toyota's smart, it'll air during the Super Bowl later this evening. But seeing it also leaves us wondering if Toyota had spent a fraction of its PR resources on getting out in front of these recall problems months ago instead of the damage control its writing checks for now, would it even be in this position today? Unfortunately for Toyota, we'll never know.
[Source: Toyota via Gaywheels]
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It is inside the MNI, in fact, that Zatorre, psychologist Virginia Penhune from Concordia University, and electrical engineer Marcelo Wanderley from the Schulich School of Music have begun experiments to find out what goes on inside the brain of a musician—by having them perform inside an MRI scanner.
The catch: “The scanner is a very strong magnet,” Zatorre ex plains, “so you cannot put anything metallic in it, or even any wires, because they create cur rents that heat up and are extremely dangerous.” Regular instruments were clearly unfeasible, so Zatorre and Penhune approached Wanderley, whose lab designs new digital musical instruments. They challenged him to build an MRI-compatible instrument that used no ferromagnetic materials, one that could be played inside the narrow constraints of the scanner tube and also be monitored by computer.
Avrum Hollinger, then a master’s student in Wanderley’s lab and now working on his PhD in music technology at the Schulich School of Music, got to work, beginning humbly with a section of battered keyboard that he had hacked off a clunker from a local piano repair shop. When he finished, they had an 11-key instrument, mounted on Plexiglas, that used fibre optic cable to send light signals to a controller outside the scanner room and create MIDI-triggered sound.
The MRI-compatible keyboard means the researchers can monitor musicians’ brains and at the same time record every aspect of their playing through the fibre optic system. The MRI images and data this generates will provide a view into the brain never seen before.
Next will be an MRI-compatible cello—complete with diminutive bow—and eventually a wind instrument like an oboe or clarinet. Schulich School musicians, such as cellist Erika Donald, provide critical feedback to ensure genuine playability, Wanderley points out. “As an engineer I can say, ‘This behaves like a cello and should be playable like a cello,’ but if you don’t have an expert cellist testing it, you don’t know whether all the data that is captured will be representative of a true cello performance or not.”
The suite of MRI-compatible instruments will allow the researchers to examine the different brain activity generated by each one. A keyboard, for instance, calls for fairly symmetrical motor control of the two hands, and the cello, very asymmetrical control. A clarinet or oboe will add the brain’s management of breathing and embouchure to the resulting neural picture.
Virginia Penhune is particularly interested in how our brains manage motor control, learning and expertise. “There are a lot of findings that say there are brain structural differences between musicians and nonmusicians,” she says, “and there can also be short-term changes in your brain when you learn something new. So one of the things we’d like to link up is the structural and the functional changes.”
The views into the brain these instruments open up are manifold.
“We can look at the difference between expert pianists and those who are just so-so,” says Zatorre. “We can look at what happens when the note you play produces a sound which is not the one you intended. An expert musical performer can adjust everything on the fly, and that implies a very complex and fine-tuned brain mechanism. There are a million things we can do.”
Zatorre ultimately sees BRAMS and its shared infrastructure and expertise spurring researchers to tackle all sorts of new questions together.
“Usually in our respective fields, we design a specific experiment to answer a specific question. But our philosophy in creating BRAMS was ‘if we build it, they will come.’ There are probably questions that the lab will help to answer that we haven’t even thought of yet.”
The BRAMS lab has received $14 million in funding for infrastructure from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
