I have moved the blog from blosxom to wordpress. Blosxom is good software for what it does, but I need features that work out of the box on WordPress, and to use them in blosxom, I would need to write or debug perl code, and that isn’t what I want to be working on.
I intend to eventually move the whole site to wordpress, so give me your comments on the format.
I have imported the old blog entries into the new wordpress blog, so you should be able to read, search, and comment on them.
Plans for May 23 meeting
Once we start working on a new program, the dropin people seem to
abandon us even when we say we’re happy to have their help.
This is a problem, because not all the people who want to
perform start coming all the time. So last week we had a couple
of recorder pieces we would have liked to try, but we didn’t
have 4 recorder players to try them with.
So here’s the schedule from now to the next performance. All
rehearsals start at 7:45.
For the performers’ rehearsals,
everyone should arrive in time to set up so that the actual
rehearsal can start at 7:45. For most people this seems to mean
about 7:30. If people are actually arriving ready to start at
7:45, we could start off with a vocal warmup, which I think
would improve both our sound and our comfort level on pieces
that are at the edge of our ranges.
One of the performer’s rehearsals is likely to be coached by John
Tyson.
There are directions to the performance venue and links to public transportation information
on the Conference site.
So far, we have 4 people officially signed up for the June 21
performance. I need to know who’s playing by the end of this
week, so that we can start assigning parts and constructing a
real playlist.
We did much better on taking the Walk for Hunger seriously than
we’ve done the previous few performances. But there’s still
room for improvement, even on the easy part of arriving at
rehearsals and performances on time and ready to play. We’ve
scheduled more unfamiliar music for this one than usual, so
please don’t sign up unless you plan to make most of the
rehearsals between now and then and to make the performers’
rehearsals and the performance on time.
One of the encouraging things about the Walk for Hunger performance
was how much better the performance was than the last
rehearsal. This means that when people want to, they can work
on their own to improve the weaknesses in their individual
parts. Now let’s see if we can do that work before the final
rehearsals, so that we can start working seriously on what we
sound like when we all know what’s coming next.
I’ve been recording most of my planning in the wiki. If you’re
playing, you’re welcome to help.
I have a script that will print a notebook of all the music in the
wiki playlist. If you want me to run it for you, let me know. I don’t promise that we won’t do a lot of adding, subtracting, and rearranging this notebook, though.
This week, Stuart won’t be able to come, so I thought it would be a
good week to work out some recorder arrangements. One piece
that might be fun to play with is Susato’s
Ronde V, which I transposed for Aldo’s Junior High band into
parts for Bb, Eb, F, and G transposing instruments. This way,
we can stick people on instruments with fingerings they haven’t
learned.
If you look at the playlist, you will see that there are several
Dowlands that we haven’t done very often, so we really do have
to run those again and see which we think we can play in public
in less than a month.
Last modified: Mon May 22 11:36:30 EDT 2006
With an image:
This is actually from May, 2005, but it looks just like that in May 2006. Maybe I’ll take it’s picture again, though.
Plans for the May 16 meeting
This is a drop-in meeting, although we will be doing some
exploration of pieces that we might play on the June 21
program. You can edit the tentative list at the
wiki playlist. Here’s the current version:
We have two Jenkins Pavanes that Bonnie set for us, which she
thinks will go well on the large recorders.
We’ll be meeting every Tuesday for the forseeable future. The
meetings start promptly at 7:45, and are at my place, 233
Broadway, Cambridge.
The May
meetings will probably all be dropin and the first three June meetings will
probably be limited to people playing the June 21 gig. Please
feel free (encouraged, pressured…) to come to the dropin
meetings if you’re thinking of playing the gig, and also free
(encouraged…) if you aren’t thinking of playing it but would
be interested in the music.
I’m trying out a new Wiki technology on the plans for this gig. This
one is a real Wiki, that anyone can edit. It’s at http://www.laymusic.org/dreams06/.
I especially need to know who’s thinking of playing on this
program. You aren’t making a hard and fast commitment yet, but
obviously we can’t program 5-part pieces if only 3 people are even
thinking of doing the gig.
We played:
Last modified: Tue May 16 10:45:27 EDT 2006
Plans for the May 9 meeting
We resume our regularly scheduled drop in meetings tonight. There are
a number of things we’d like to accomplish; I’m sure we’ll manage at
least some of them:
It was fun, and I think we played well. There are a few pictures
in our gallery, and I think we’ll
get some more later. Thanks to everyone who played, or helped
rehearse, or supported us in any way.
We’ll be dropin for the rest of May, and probably limited to the
people playing June 21 for June. As far as I know, we’ll be meeting
at the usual time and place every Tuesday.
Last modified: Mon May 1 14:59:44 EDT 2006
Set up a google calendar
I’ve just started using google
calendar for my appointments, so I put the Cantabile ones on
their own calendar and exported it.
So you can go to the Cantabile
google calendar and include it in your own google
calendar, or import it into whatever ics or xml based calendar
you use.1
Last modified: Mon May 1 14:59:44 EDT 2006
I’ve been running Openzaurus 3.5.4 for some
time now. It’s really good for reading books — they improved
the fonts a lot. I haven’t had time to check out sound, but
because of having previously
worked on it, someone who did wrote me his results.
From: Lee Phillips
Subject: Sound on Zaurus 5500
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:03:30 -0400
Hi,
Thanks partly to your website and some others that you linked to,
I managed to get sound recording and playback working on my Z with
OZ 3.5.4.Mainly through ignorant but systematic trial and error I came up
with these procedures:Record (through left headphone) with
cat /dev/dsp1 > s.raw
Playing this back with cat s.raw > /dev/dsp gives slowed down sound, as
you know.But if you install sox on the Z (no problems using ipkg from the command
line; as you’ve probably discovered the GUI package manager is useless) you
can convert to another raw sound file withsox -V -b -s -r 8000 -c 2 s.raw -b -s -c 1 so.raw speed 1.333 avg -r
and this sounds normal when catted through /dev/dsp1.
But we want a portable sound file. Sox won’t encode to mp3 on the 5500,
but it will make an au (Sun format) file, which is pretty widely useable
(Quicktime plays it on my Mac):sox -V -b -s -r 8000 -c 2 s.raw -c 1 -v 4 so.au speed 2.6666 avg -r
You might find values for speed and volume (-v 4) that work better,
again this is trial and error and sounds ok for speech.
Last modified: Tue Apr 25 11:32:28 EDT 2006
Report on April 18 meeting
It was a pity this one happened while we were preparing for a gig.
The power was off for over half the rehearsal time, and it would
have been fun to just do stuff we could do without music and
forget about trying to read dots on paper, or to see if we could
do the Dowland facsimiles around a table with candles. But we
had to light candles and stick to our planned music.
We played:
The next two meetings are limited to and compulsory for the people
playing the Walk for Hunger. Our regular drop-in meetings
resume on Tuesday, May 9.
If you are coming to the meetings, please arrive on time and with
your music in order. We’re attempting to rehearse and hour of
music in a two and a quarter hour of rehearsal time. If it were
all solid and only needed running through, this would still need
as much rehearsal time as we could get. Since some of it is
unfamiliar to everyone, and some of it Paul hasn’t seen at all,
we really need everyone to be there for the whole time.
Last year, I got tired of repeating the whole playlist and part
assignments in the blog
every time we made a minor change. So this year I’m using a
non-linear blogging software called tiddlywiki. The tiddleywiki
for this gig is here.
I’ll be mailing a view of it to the participants for their
review soon.
Last modified: Thu Apr 20 10:30:03 EDT 2006
Report on April 11 meeting
We played:
This year I’m trying out a new technology for the web presence of
this gig. The place to look for the play list, part assignments
(when we make them), timings, pointers to the PDF’s, etc. is here
.
Next week is still open to non-performers at the Walk for Hunger,
but they should be aware that we’ll be working pretty intensely
on the Walk for Hunger music. The following two weeks are
exclusively for performers. After that, we’ll have some more
dropin meetings. We may try to schedule a coaching session with
John Tyson for May or early June.
Last modified: Thu Apr 13 13:38:35 EDT 2006
Report on April 4 meeting
We played:
So far, we have 5 people signed up for the Walk for Hunger, and you
need to let me know very soon if you want to play and haven’t
told me yet. The people who are signed up are me, Anne, Bonnie,
Ishmael, and Paul. Stuart is available to play, but has limited
rehearsal time in April, so he’s welcome to come, but I have the
impression he’s thinking of skipping it this year. Did I say
you have to tell me NOW if you want to play?
If you aren’t signed up to play, you’re still welcome to come to
the rehearsals next week and the week after that, if you
feel like doing the music on the playlist below.
I haven’t timed anything, so I’m sure this is way too long. The
ones marked (?) are the ones I’m going to think hardest about
dropping when this turns out to be an hour and twenty minutes
worth of music. But let me know soon if I’m leaving off
something you’d especially like to do, or if you know for sure
you don’t want to work on something on that list hard enough to
perform it.
Last modified: Wed Apr 5 10:05:06 EDT 2006
LayMusic.org 