Listening to music.

摘要

Charlotte Gainsbourg, an actress and singer, daughter of that famous late 1960s couple (Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin) has a new music CD out. It is called IRM (MR imaging in French) as is the hit song it contains. Ms Gainsbourg had a waterskiing accident that led to her having to undergo several brain MR imaging studies, an experience that apparently inspired her (and her producer, Beck) not only to title her album as such but also to use gradient-like sounds as a part of the rhythm lines in many of her songs (particularly in IRM). Having been inside the magnet several times, I wondered how this could possibly work well, but now that I have listened to the CD, I like it. The contents of the booklet that comes with it are also somewhat surprising: It contains several MR angiography views of the circle of Willis (presumably Gainsbourg's) as well as patient identifiers from the alphanumeric information of the study that include her name, date of birth, medical record number, etc, clearly a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act violation. Gainsbourg and Beck are not the first modern musicians to borrow from MR imaging; other rock groups are called MRI, Tesla, The Magnetic Fields, and the more intriguing MRI Resident Research Orchestra and Rock Band.