Writer’s Shock
Holy frickin’ crap. I don’t know how you professional writer types manage. I just wrapped up and submitted a piece for the Take A Friend To Orchestra Month at Adaptistration, and I have to say, it’s taken rather a lot out of me. I must’ve written, rewritten and re-rewritten my contribution about fifteen times, and I still feel like it isn’t really ready. What we’re hoping is that a large proportion of that worry is due to that classic too-much-exposure problem: you know, when the more you see something the more alien it becomes. It’s like when you were a kid and you tried saying “tortoise” over and over again, and after a minute or two you couldn’t remember what a tortoise was anymore.
The thing is, when I’m typing stuff to go up on this site right here it’s not nearly so difficult. Maybe that’s because I can get away with whatever I like. here, I’m a rather forgiving and accepting boss to myself. It’s very different when you are producing something for someone else, especially when it’s all official with, like, banners and stuff:
I’m really thrilled and honored to take part, especially when looking at all the amazingly impressive credentials of all the contributers who aren’t me. That also makes it more than a little bit scary though, given that everyone else’s biographical description is something like “vice president of being awesome at music” and mine is “physics graduate student”. I only hope that my contribution will actually be interesting or useful to somebody, and I have a newfound respect for professional authors.
Build Your Own Phonograph
After that story about resurrecting the oldest ever recording, lo and behold, up popped on my radar several kits for constructing ones own phonographic recording/playback device. In the red corner we have this bad boy, which uses plastic cups as the recording medium:
Sound of the 19th century is indeed coming back to life now! You can buy this guy over at the Make store, for the low low price of 35ish bucks. Competitor number two ironically uses a CD as a recording medium:
This can be picked up from Very Cool Things for thirty smackaroonies. If you’d like to see how someone got along putting one of them together check out this blog for one guys experience along with a bit more info.
128kbps MP3s don’t sound so bad now, do they?
The world’s oldest recording was played back for the first time a few days ago, and it wasn’t Edison’s doing. The honor goes to the copiously named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who rather asymmetrically invented a device which could record sounds — just — but not reproduce them. Apparently he was prepared for someone else to discover how to do the reconstruction bit, and naturally in this age of scanners and computers a team did just that after discovering the paper recordings of his device in an archive in Paris.
Here is the rather spooky sounding recording, a singer singing Au Clair de la Lune, from 1860, the same year Mahler was born.
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For more of the gruelling details take a peak at the original article in the NYT.
A Bad Analogy
This analogy sucks. Well, maybe it’s a metaphor… no wait, it’s a simile. But it still sucks. My pathetic example of an excuse is that it struck in dawnish daylight, as the royal we was marching up a very steep slope to attend an eight-forty class during which the results of a prelim which sucked even more than my simile did were going to be announced. How’s that for a run-on sentence?
The terrible simile occurred while my sensitive little brain was escaping from prelim fear by reminiscing about “Where’s Wally?“, aka “Where’s Waldo?” if you’re one of those true patriot type people. Ever read them? Each massive double page spread consists of hundreds of cartoon figures engaged in all kinds of activities in a wonderfully detailed landscape. Your object is to find Wally/Waldo/Charlie/Holger/Walter (British/US/French/Danish/German, if you care) within this explosion of figures and activities.
One of the best bits of the books was all the interactions going on in the illustrations. There were thousands of little stories and jokes happening to the myriad figures. However, when you first opened the page your initial impulse was one of being totally overwhelmed by the degree of detail. You couldn’t see the wood for the trees; or the Wally for the, errrm, little figures. However, after your eyes recovered from the initial visual onslaught, everything started popping out and making sense, and a whole world opened up
This suddenly reminded me of listening to a new piece of classical music. the initial confusion over all of the complications of the music, followed by the gradual appreciation of all of the individual details as you slowly become accustomed to it. It brought to mind that most popular pieces are more like an individual single-panel cartoon, something which is designed to be understood immediately. With classical there is always something more to find, some new hidden aspect waiting to be uncovered.
Just like Wally.
Told you it was a horrible analogy.