NPR’s Morning Edition has been airing a series exploring the intersections between art and science. It’s had some fine moments, and it’s definitely worth listening to on the web. Probably my favorite segment was on Louis and Bebe Barron, pioneers of electronic music in the 1950’s.
An apparently eccentric husband and wife team, the Barrons found ingenious ways to get crude 1950’s-era electronics to make strange noises. Frequently, they would deliberately push circuits beyond their limits, creating various whirrs, whistles, and pops as the circuitry fried — that is, they made instruments that made music through self-destruction.
The home page of the series reads like a kind of Dream-Jobs-Only classifieds section.