Saturday 23 June 2012

Alan Turing: Molly Malone


A lesser known fact about Alan Turing is that his favorite song was Molly Malone (his Mother was Irish, after all), which, so the story goes, he insisted on rendering on the violin to the police who came to arrest him on charges of gross indecency, before agreeing to make his statement to them.

This recording by Matmos of Clodagh Simonds (of Fovea Hex) singing Molly Malone, in itself a sonic marvel of intelligent artifice, was first featured on their FOR ALAN TURING ep, a work commissioned in 2006 by The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkely CA on the opening of their new Mathematics Hall.


I thought this was really moving.
Happy birthday, Alan Turing.

2 comments: