Author: Laura Conrad

MIDI to MusicXML

One of the problems of sharing music with people who prefer
some other music notation software is that until recently the
best available way to do it was MIDI. MIDI has many fine
qualities, but it doesn’t save the same information that printed
notation needs.

There’s a fairly well-thought-of standard exchange format
called MusicXML. Lots of programs (including lilypond)
implement an import of MusicXML, but export is a lot less
common, so most people (including me) who put their work up on
the web can’t give you MusicXML from their source. Finale users
could, but mostly don’t.

The reason I call it an exchange format is that while it
captures all or most of the information any of the notation
programs save, it doesn’t do it in a way anyone would want to
work with. For instance, here’s the information for one note (a
g quarter note in the second octave above middle C) in
MusicXML:


<note>
<pitch>
<step>G </step>
<octave>5 </octave>
</pitch>
<duration>96 </duration>
<voice>1 </voice>
<type>quarter </type>
<dot/>
<notehead>normal </notehead>
</note>

In lilypond, you would normally enter that “g4” (or just “g” if
it were in a string of other quarter notes) and in ABC it
would usually be “g”. So you can see why people would rather
type ABC or lilypond.

Earlier this week, I wanted to transcribe a piece
by Antony
Holborne. The whole book this piece is in has been
transcribed, and is on the web at the Werner
Icking Archive. But the person who did this did it in a
notation program called Capella 5, which I
don’t have. He did provide sources, as well as PDF and MIDI
files, so I tried importing the MIDI file into lilypond, and
decided it would be easier to just enter the lilypond.

One reason I decided this was that midi2ly had decided to spell
all the MIDI pitches that are a half note below B and a half
note above A as A♯ instead of B♭. (The MIDI format only records
what the pitch is in terms of how many half steps from 0
(roughly the bottom of the piano) it is, it doesn’t know
anything about how a notation system would want to write that
pitch.)

So I was excited when I read in a newsletter from Noteflight that they now
have MIDI import. Noteflight is a web-based notation system
that seemed promising when I looked at it a few months ago, but
hadn’t yet implemented anything I was particularly interested in
using.

So I ran the next of the Holborne MIDI files through it, and
was gratified to see that it spelled the notes between B and A
as B♭ instead of A♯. Unfortunately, it spells the ones between
F and G as G♭ instead of F♯. But you can import the MIDI file,
export the XML file, and import the XML file into lilypond and
get something you can work with more easily in several ways than
the direct import of MIDI into lilypond, which is fairly
orphaned. And it may well be that some of the manipulation
you’re going to have to do to the score can be done more easily
in noteflight than in lilypond, although I can’t tell you that
from personal experience.

So if you’re looking for a web-based music notation software,
or a fairly clean way to get MIDI files into MusicXML, look into
noteflight.

Here’s the Holborne Galliard as I imported it from the MIDI
file. I think the only thing I did was to change the key
signature and edit one G♭ into an F♯.

More ebook sloppiness

I never minded stuff like this when the ebooks I was reading
were being produced by volunteer labor, but now that I’m paying
real money for them, it really irritates me.

I’m reading The
Confusion, volume 2 of The
Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, which I purchased
from fictionwise.com.

The chapter I’m reading takes place at a castle in Germany, and
I believe Stephenson refers to it by the german word Schloß.
However, the producers of the ebook got the code for the German
double s wrong, and so instead of a Schloß, the ebook keeps
talking about a Schloé. (Html entity 233 instead of 223.)

This book is published by “William Morrow, An Imprint of Harper
Collins Publishers” and I’m sure there are lots of people who work
for that organization who could spot a typo that bad and that
consistent, so I can only conclude that none of these proofreaders
was asked to look at the book after the people who converted the
text to the epub format were through. And that the people who did
the conversion aren’t good proofreaders.

Of course, this would be even more irritating if I weren’t
running the illegal script that turns the ereader format back into
html, which I can edit with emacs.

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What I wanted to yell at the President

I watched the address to the joint session of Congress a couple
of weeks ago with a friend. In general, I really like watching
Obama speak, because it’s such a relief to have a President who
isn’t embarrassing me with every sentence out of his mouth.

But there was one point when I was talking back to the TV
screen. It was after he’d talked about how he and everybody else
in the country could design a system from scratch that would work
better than the one we have, but he believed that we could get
more done by building on the system we have.

So then he said, “We will place a limit on how much you can be
charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States
of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.” I
remarked to my friend, “So how is that incremental?” At the time,
and until I just looked at the text of the speech, I believed he
actually had used the word incremental.

The reason I’ve continued to think about this off and on for
the last two weeks is that I think that really is the reason
health care reform has been so hard to get. There really isn’t a
consensus in this country that no one should go broke because they
get sick.

This is why, although it was a well-delivered speech, the polls
all found that it didn’t convince anyone. People who believe that
they won’t go broke when they get sick because they’ve done the
right things all their lives, and that the people who will go
broke are lazy and improvident, want to hear why this new system
isn’t going to cause them to go broke because other people get
sick. And the President did say that, but not in a way that anyone
really believes.

The reason I understand this better than President Obama does
isn’t because I’m a better politician than he is. It’s because
he’s spent his life doing what the system says he should do and I
haven’t. I know people who really believe that I should go broke
when I get sick because I retired at the age of 50. They don’t
say it in such crude language, but their disapproval of someone
making that choice says it for them.

So the right way to pitch the reform shouldn’t be telling sad
stories about the people who go broke because of the present
system. It should be making the point that the present system
is in fact making you go broke because other people get sick,
and spending money differently will make you go less broke as
well as making them get less sick. I don’t say I know how to do
that, but I can see that that isn’t what the President is trying
to do.

Report on the September 22, 2009, meeting

We played:

Note that the links for the three voice canzonets are to the
untransposed versions, as the transposed ones aren’t up yet.

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We will probably miss the meetings where there are elections,
i.e., November 3, December 8, and January 19, if the Cambridge
Election Committee continues to hire me to serve as an official.

We may also miss one or two more meetings in December. But for
September and October, assume there are regular dropin meetings.

End is in sight

Of the executrix gig.

I just printed off the statement of income, expenses and
deductions that the lawyer for Bonnie’s
estate needs to file the estate taxes. Yesterday I sent what I
believe to be the final check to the IRS to cover the tax mess she
was in.

If you ever have to do this, you should be more organized about
keeping records than I was. I put everything relevent in a box,
but it ended up being a lot of stuff to sort through to find the
numbers I needed. I had a good spreadsheet about the instruments,
and about the amounts of money that went between my checking
account and hers while I had power of attorney, and between my
account and the estate’s account after I was appointed executrix.
(A lawyer isn’t going to say directly that you should do this, but
I figured out from what he did say the day after she died that I should back date a check
to before she died and put it in my account so that I’d be able to
pay bills in the weeks between her death and my appointment as
executrix. So most of the funeral expenses came out of my
checking account, but it was mostly money that had been in
Bonnie’s checking account.)

But all the stuff about donations and sales of things other
than instruments should have been in the spreadsheet and were
instead in the box.

I think I have to produce an accounting of some sort before I
can pay any money to the legatees, but I’m hoping it won’t make me
feel as helpless as the tax statement did. I’m not sure why,
because I do my own taxes fairly easily, but it reminded me of when
I first went to school and had to do workbooks. I was young for
my grade, and clumsy at writing but facile at talking, so it
always seemed that there was nothing like room enough to really
answer the questions, so you had to not only figure out the
answer, which was easy, but figure out how to fit it into the
space they gave me, which usually seemed impossible.

So even after finding the cool new LaTeX class, I had to take
lots of deep breaths and assure myself that this really isn’t
anything I couldn’t do, and if I really couldn’t find the numbers,
I could just make up something plausible, and finally it’s in the mail.

The marginpar command in the tufte-handout class
is in fact a good feature for something like this. I had a list
of items like:

  • 4 boxes of books to Haverhill Library sale
  • 25 bags of clothes to Big Brother Big Sister

and I put marginal notes in explaining how many pounds in a box or
a bag.

How it went at Arts Around the Block

This was the event I told you about last
week.

Me

My playing went well.

The background noise level when I was
playing outside was not intrusive. I was playing country dance
tunes on the G alto recorder, and it was carrying well enough
that although there wasn’t much foot traffic where I was, people
who were hearing it from a block or two away came to investigate
and stayed to listen for a while. I never had a large, visible
audience, but a woman who was manning one of the booths came up
specially to tell me how much they were enjoying it.

When I moved into the chapel to play the Ortiz, I was able to
take over the audience for my sister’s harpsichord set. She’s
been doing concerts in Fall River for several decades, and has
built up a small but loyal following. So there were a dozen or
so people in the small chapel with some of the best acoustics
for recorder playing I know of.

I’d been working on making the Ortiz variations on Douce
Memoire and O felici occhi mei sound easy
and convincing. I made lots of progress; I probably didn’t
completely succede, but the audience did seem to enjoy it. One
good thing about that audience was that it liked singing; Judy
had given them Greensleeves and Drink to me
only with thine eyes to sing, and they’d sounded really
good. They weren’t quite as good on Douce
Memoire, which most of them had probably never heard
before, but they were making the attempt.

Everybody else

The big success was Peter and the Wolf. There
were about 40 people, including a lot of children, in the
audience. The musicians for the solo parts were quite good, and
the electric piano filled in for the rest of the orchestra.

The basic problem with the rest of the programming is that
there isn’t enough audience for three classical music venues.
And aside from my recorder playing, the other acts scheduled for
outside weren’t loud enough to draw in from where the foot
traffic was. And the music down the hill did get louder as the
afternoon progressed, so the last outside event (a recorder
group) was partially drowned out, even for the performers
themselves. (Recorder groups need to hear each other.)

Arts Around the Block is a relatively new institution, with
some growing pains that are still in evidence, but there seemed
to be enough success for enough participants that one believes
they will continue and improve.

Mayerling

I put this
movie on my Netflix queue because of this
review, which says:

This is a very sophisticated tearjerker. You can weep
over it without feeling either your intelligence or dignity has
been insulted.

I didn’t weep, but I did enjoy the sophistication.

The review also says:

Litvak lingers too long on ballets and balls and on one really hideous oompah beer garden number.

I enjoyed the oompah beer garden number (which happens twice), but the music I was
really glad the movie lingered on was the gypsy dance band,
centered by a hammered dulcimer.

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Cleaning out the house of a deceased person

I’ve been thinking about this experience because of writing up
the summary for the IRS of what we sold and donated. There are
other good stories to tell, but here’s the email I sent to the
list of Bonnie’s friends about a month after she died:

Subject: [Bonnienews] deadlines

I have been officially appointed executrix of Bonnie’s estate, with
the power to sell things, and specifically real estate.

I am going to be signing an agreement with a realtor, who will be
hiring some men with a shovel and a truck to clean the place out,
starting Monday, July 7, three weeks from today.

If there’s anything in Bonnie’s house that you want to save from the
shovels, you must remove it before then.

As far as I know, I have already removed all the instruments. There
is a rumor of there being a set of handbells, and I think it’s
possible there are some small things like recorders and viol bows that
I haven’t found yet. I found a drawer full of double reeds, so if
there are more of those, it isn’t clear I need them. If you’re
helping clean out and find anything like a musical instrument or part
thereof, give it to me.

An antique dealer has looked at the house; he is buying a desk, and
giving us some assistance with getting two large items to an auction
house.

There are a few items of possible antiquarian interest that I’d like
the dealer to see before I give them away. There’s a mantle clock,
some dolls that look older than Bonnie, a statue of a horse, the
family silver…

We have made major progress in finding and boxing the music. Some
music has been removed; there is still a corner full of boxes; there
are probably a few boxes not in that corner that we haven’t yet looked
at, but we’re on track to have found most of the music. We will need
to move it somewhere for further sorting. I have several volunteers
to help with this; if you also want to help with it, let me know.

The other obvious thing that would be a pity if it goes into the trash
is the collection of scholarly books. (Old English, Middle English,
Old Icelandic, Mediaeval History…) There are people who are
interested in sorting this and finding a destination for it; we may
still need help with transporting it to that destination.

Anything else that would be of use to you, you are welcome to. If you
have a way to take it somewhere and sell it, please do so. If you
make hundreds or thousands of dollars, it would be good if you would
deduct a commission (possibly a large one) and return the rest to the
estate, but if you make only 10’s of dollars, please keep it, and if
you like, donate some of it to a charity of which Bonnie would have
approved.

There is some fairly nice old furniture; there’s a small refrigerator
that works, there’s an upright freezer that works, several fans that
work, there are quite a lot of mystery novels and other books; there
are CD’s, DVD’s and video tapes; gardening equipment and supplies…

If you have young friends who are starting their first apartment and
don’t have all the stuff they need, you might consider seeing if they
want to spend a couple of hours helping out in exchange for everything
they want to snarf.

The clothes and the kitchen stuff can be put in bags and boxes and
donated. If you feel like helping with the bagging and boxing, the
assistance would be appreciated. Anything not in bags and boxes by
the deadline will be trashed.

Please note that I am asking for assistance, not advice. If I had a
year, I could take care of all of this, and everything useful would
get to someone who could use it and everything saleable would get put
up for sale. I don’t have a year; I have three weeks. So the things
that are important to me or to Bonnie’s friends who have time to help
will get taken care of, and the other things won’t.

All my life I’ve heard stories that start, “X had such a wonderful
collection of Y, but it disappeared when he died…” I now have more
sympathy with the executors who get blamed for the disappearance.
Some of them may not have tried as hard as I have to get the friends
and family to take care of the things they care about. But likely
they all tried a bit, and if the people telling the stories had said,
“Would you like me to come pack up the collection of Y and put it in a
safe place until you have time to deal with it?”, the collection would not
have been lost. So if you’re thinking of telling those stories about
the terrible executrix of Bonnie’s estate, think about asking to help
now, instead of telling the story later.

I will generally be there on Wednesday and Thursday, and other times
by appointment. Once you’ve seen the lay of the land, I can tell you
where the spare key is and you can go any time that’s convenient to
you, but the first time you go, you should have a guide (me or one of
the other people who’s been helping regularly) to where the sorted
piles are.

In the end, we didn’t end up hiring the men with the shovels —
the real estate agent found enough things wrong with the house
that she decided it should go to someone who wanted to do enough
work that some extra shoveling wouldn’t bother them. So we
actually had until the sale of the house in mid-September to clear
things out.

Earplugs: should music be hazardous to your hearing?

I started thinking this diatribe when I ran into a jazz
musician friend and asked him, “How are you?”, and he replied, “I
just got a new set of earplugs.” He realized that wouldn’t be an
exciting part of most people’s weeks, but for him being able to
both talk to the other musicians in his band and listen to what
they were playing without having his ears damaged was a major
improvement in his life.

I’ve run it by a lot of musician friends since, and haven’t
heard anything that seems like a valid counterargument to me.
Naturally, this has done nothing to change the number
of places I’m glad I have my earplugs along, or sorry I don’t have
them with me.

I basically think that if both the performers and the audience
need earplugs to listen to the music safely, it’s too loud.

I understand that if you’re playing acoustic music in a large
venue, it might be a good idea for some of the performers to need
the earplugs so that the audience has a chance to hear the whole
sound.

But if it’s amplified music in a normal sized room, there’s no
reason the volume level can’t be kept to one that doesn’t do
permanent damage to anyone’s ears.

So what kind of earplugs do I need?

For casual listening, those cheap
foam ones that come in boxes of 200 are probably good enough,
although if you spend a lot of time listening to loud
music, you might need something better.

If you need to both hear conversations and listen carefully to
the loud music, you’re better off with something designed
specifically for that purpose. After being too close to a loud
cymbal crash in the band a year ago, I bought a pair of these.

If you buy directly from the
manufacturer, you can get a quantity discount on more than 4
pairs. I didn’t do that, but there have been a couple of times
when I wished my pair were in my backpack, and not in my tuba
accessories pouch.

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No-knead bread

I tried doing this when the famous Mark
Bittman article came out in the New York Times. I may well
have done something wrong, but the dough I produced was a gooey,
unmanageable mess.

The NPR interview with the author of Kneadlessly
simple (Nancy Baggett) convinced me to try it again.

I’ve baked two loaves out of the book. I can’t say that either
of them was an unqualified success, but the method does definitely
produce good bread dough if you mix the ingredients the way she
tells you to and leave the bowl on your kitchen counter for a
day. I do seem to need to modify her instructions for the baking part, though.

I know the conventional wisdom is that you should buy an oven thermometer and
test the temperature of your oven, but I’ve never seen any
reason to believe the oven thermometer that costs $4.99 at the
hardware store is any more likely to be
accurate than the one in the stove that cost $499 at the
appliance store. And usually when I set the temperature
specified in a
recipe on the stove, what I’m baking comes out roughly the way I
expect it to.

Both the loaves of bread I’ve made from the recipes in this book have burned on the bottom before the
internal temperature of the bread got to where the directions said
it should. So I’ll be baking subsequent loaves at a lower
temperature, or maybe to a lower internal loaf temperature, or
maybe on a higher shelf in the oven.

But after I fed the burned part of the crust to the dog, the
rest of the bread has been quite good. I fed some to a dinner
guest last night, and he agreed that it was a very good texture
and flavor.

I’m definitely going to be baking more bread like this. It’s
about as little work as using the bread machine for the kneading
part and baking in
the oven, and you don’t have the bread machine cluttering up
your counter.

I will leave the bread machine to clutter up my pantry,
however. There really are times when you need the bread less
than a day and a half after you decide to make it.

My favorite bread machine use was the time I got home from
buying dinner ingredients and realized that I’d forgotten to get
bread. So I decided it was easier to throw flour, water, salt,
and yeast in the bread machine than to go back to the store. I
took the bread out of the machine just as the guests were
arriving, and had a house that smelled like baking bread as a bonus. To do this as a no-knead recipe, you would have to be organized about the bread the previous morning, not at 4 the afternoon of the dinner party.

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