Category: diary

Wave for Android

[tenor serpent mouthpiece]
Tenor serpent mouthpiece by Sam Goble.

Yesterday, I got a new
mouthpiece for my tenor serpent.

The website says, “My mouthpiece dramatically improves the
tuning and makes the sound more direct and precise.” After a
day of fiddling with it, I agree about the sound, but I’m not
yet sure about the tuning. Sam warned me when he shipped it
that I would have to add some dental floss. Sure enough, as it
came from the box, it’s quite sharp, so I added dental floss so
that it wouldn’t go as far into the bocal, and then it was
flat.

So one of the things I spent a lot of time doing today was
playing tenor serpent notes into a tuner. I was originally
using the gstrings
tuner on my android phone. But it’s been telling me from time to
time that it has been superceded by something newer and better,
so I decided to look into that. The reviews complained a lot
about some features that were missing in the new version, called
waves,
but enough people thought there were improvements, that I
decided to try it.

Sure enough, the tuning is much better. Gstrings was
occasionally picking up the wrong overtone, so I would be
playing a possibly out of tune E, and it would be telling me I
was playing A. It doesn’t look like Waves ever does that.

The missing feature is that if you’re asking it to play a note
for you, you can’t at the moment specify the
octave that the note comes out in. Gstrings would let you do
that, but if you didn’t have a speaker plugged in, the bass
notes were practically inaudible, so you were better off with
the octave it picked anyway. I did think about plugging the
phone into a speaker, but didn’t get around to it.

In any case, getting Waves doesn’t remove Gstrings, so if you
really want to do that, you still can.

One of the reasons to get a smartphone is to replace all the
little standalone electronic gadgets. I’ve had some problems
with things like a pedometer, which works, but drains the
battery too much to be usable. I’d say the phone does replace a standalone tuner pretty well.

Maddaddam

This
book is billed as book three of a trilogy, but I understand
book four is already out in the UK.

LIke the first two books, it takes place in a near-future
dystopia where most of the human race has been wiped out by a
genetically engineered plague. I found it a little easier reading
than the others, partly because we’ve already met most
of the main characters. Also because the point of view stays
pretty focused on Toby, who is one of the easier characters to
identify with.

The descriptions of post-apocalyptic survival strategies are
quite interesting. For instance, figuring out what to do with
kudzu is one of their problems. There’s also a long discussion of
what you can and can’t still find in drugstores.

I wouldn’t say to start with this one, but if you’ve tried the
others and found them heavy going, you may like this one better.


http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0385528787&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Ancient Greek Music

[Greek Musicians]
The instruments used – such as lyre and reed-pipes – are known from, paintings and archaeological remains, such as this illustration from The Odyssey by Homer.

This
article is about a scholar who claims to be able to decode an
ancient greek music notation. I can’t tell from the article what
he really did, but you will enjoy listening to the recreation of
the music.

Daylight Savings leaves again

[map of time zone proposal]
Proposed time zones.

I live in the eastern part of my time zone, so the end of
daylight savings always means that it’s dark when people leave work.
This
article wins this year’s prize for best complaint about
daylight savings time.

Here’s part of the argument:

Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans (who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days.

I missed a Sunday afternoon train in Brussels once because it
didn’t occur to me to think about whether they changed time. But
the real point of the article is that not only should a given
place not change time twice a year, but that there should be fewer
time zones. Specifically, the continental US should have only
two — Eastern and Western.

In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early.

It makes one wonder whether the world needs time zones at all
— maybe it should just be like the northern and southern
hemisphere — in some countries, Christmas is in summer and in
some it’s in winter. In some countries, you could go to bed at
midnight and wake up at 7am; in others, you might go to bed at
noon and wake up at 7pm.

Waiting for Godot

[Estragon and Vladimir]
Gary Lydon and Conor Lovett as Estragon and Vladimir in the Arts Emerson/Gare Saint Lazare production of “Waiting for Godot”

It’s apparently “GAH – doh”, not “goh – DOH”. I had always
pronounced it in the French way, but the Irish troupe I saw play
it last night englished it.

It was the Arts
Emerson presentation of the Gare Saint Lazare players doing
it. It was riveting, although I can’t explain exactly why.
Peter Hall, who directed the first London production in 1955,
apparently wasn’t sure it would be until it opened.

One critic (Vivian Mercier) said “Waiting for
Godot is a play in which nothing happens, twice.” With
good players, it turns out that that can be really funny,
especially the second time.

It looks from the audience I saw last night that theater is
doing better with young audiences than early music.

How I use the library

Since I’m posting quite a lot here about what I’m reading, I
thought I should mention how I go about acquiring it. By far the
largest set of books I read these days come from the ebook lending
system of the Middlesex Library Network. The next largest set
come from Project Gutenberg and other online free books source.
And I do buy some books, both ebooks and dead tree books, of which
maybe more later.

The ebook site is pretty complicated, so I thought I’d mention
the way I’ve eventually settled on how to use it.

  1. Whenever I get an email notice that
    a book I have on hold is available, I log in and take that book
    out.
  2. I then look at all the books on my wish list, and take out
    any of those that are currently available I want to have.
  3. Then I look at the new
    ebooks     menu item, which lists all the ebooks they have in
    reverse order of acquisition. I put anything I might want to
    read on my wish list, and anything I’m sure I want to read as soon
    as possible on my hold list.

If I’m feeling insecure about where the next book I read is
coming from, I do steps 2 and 3 even if I can’t do step 1.

The Great Gatsby

I watched
this
movie last night — it was more enjoyable than I expected.
Mostly the music and the dancing girls, although the acting was
pretty good, too.

I’ve never read the book — my parents owned Tender is
the Night, and I tried to read it several times and
always got bored, so I never went in for any other F. Scott
Fitzgerald, either. I did see the
version
with Robert Redford in the 70’s, and remembered it visually
but not for the plot. For instance, I remembered the scene with
Gatsby floating dead in the pool, but not the details of how
or why he died.

This version is a much more lavish production — I don’t
remember there being scantily clothed dancing girls doing
production numbers in every drug store in the other version.

It’s definitely a Hollywood production and not a BBC
historically accurate costume drama. I remember hearing an
interview with a famous actor who had worked in both American TV
and British TV, and he said the difference was how much less
important the actors were in the British version. He’d have
these fittings for costumes, and they’d find a jacket that fit
him pretty well and make notes about how to alter it for his
exact shape, but also for the exact year of the scene he was
wearing it in, as in “We’ll take off these buttons — they
weren’t made until the ’20s and this is 1904.” And the
people who knew about the buttons were treated as well (or
badly) as the actors who wore the suits.

They didn’t do that in this movie. I don’t know enough about
buttons to say when the ones in this movie were made, but I did
get startled when a scene very explicitly billed as 1922 was
playing Rhapsody in Blue as a background to the
fireworks. I looked it up, and sure enough, it wasn’t until
1924 that Gershwin wrote it. It did work really well as the
background to the fireworks. Maybe the Boston Pops Fourth of
July concert could use that instead of or in addition to
Tchaikowsky some year.

I also noticed that the English actress Carey
Mulligan’s American accent was better than some. It didn’t
sound like any American I’ve ever known, but she did almost
convince me that she might know something I don’t about how a Louisville
debutante born at the turn of the 19th century might have
spoken.

If none of this sounds like I spent a lot of time caring about
what happened to any of the characters in the movie, I didn’t. But I did enjoy
it.


http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00ESY77LO&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00AEFY66U&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Music and Success

A friend forwarded me this
article from the New York Times. I read it hoping it would be
the blog post for that day, and found the reasoning fairly
shallow, although there were some good quotes from musicians who
had achieved success in other fields about how learning music had
helped the other activity.

This morning, the Times published a set of letters
making many of the same points I would have made had I posted.
One being the obvious one that correlation isn’t causation, but
the other being that even if we knew that learning music could
cause success in other ways, that wouldn’t be the reason to learn
music. Here’s the letter making that second point, which I
couldn’t have written but am glad to have read:

While learning music may indeed be correlated with later career success in life, it is not a reason to encourage music education for our children.

Music foremost provides our children with access to an abstract mode of expression of human emotions that cannot be emulated by words, making their lives richer.

Indeed, teaching children music with the expectation that it will improve their performance in other fields may add competitive pressure to the experience that can sometimes undermine the capacity to express oneself using this beautiful language.

YUVAL SHEER
New York, Oct. 13, 2013

Perdido Street Station

I had read a couple of books by China Miéville and remember not
particularly liking The City and the City and
enjoying Embassytown pretty well. I read Perdido
Street Station because John Scalzi said it was the best SF book of the current century.

I finished it yesterday, and I think he may be right.

In terms of plot, it’s the normal fantasy plot with a giant
monster (in this case a moth of enormous strength whose wings have
changing patterns that mesmerize potential victims so that their
brains can be sucked dry) who goes around killing everyone until
it’s the end of the book and something works so that it gets
killed instead.

But the world-building and characters are both superb. The
world is inhabited by a number of intelligent species, which over
most of the world coexist by having their own territories, but in
New Crebuzon, the city where the action takes place, most of the
races are represented. Most of the main characters are humans as
we know them, but one is a hybrid beetle/human, who communicates
by sign language
with her own species, and with humans, such as her lover, who have
learned the signs. But she can communicate, although slowly, by
writing on a pad. And she’s a sculptor. In the climactic scene, she reenacts the
Orpheus/Euridice myth, with Eurydice’s motivations much
better explained than I’ve seen them in any other work of art
based on the story.

Another is a bird/human hybrid, who has been
punished for a crime by having his wings sawed off. There is also
a large population of the “remade”, who have been altered as
punishment, either just to punish them, or to make them useful for
some industrial process.

The main character, Isaac, is a scientist who makes a number of
morally dubious choices in the course of saving the city from the
moths, but is forced at the end to realize that all the choices he
could possibly make for using his invention to save his friend the
wing-deprived bird hybrid are wrong.

So if you want to know what the state of the art in Science
Fiction/Fantasy is, read this book. There are two others set in
the same world, and I have the next one on hold at the library.

http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0345459407&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr