NPR Night Dispatches
The other day while gleefully typing the praises of NPR, I (luckily for you) forgot to uncontrollably and unreasonably and excessively whine about one aspect of the experience. Unluckily for you, I just remembered it:
The problem occurs when you are lying atop your bed like a delightful angel (this always describes me perfectly) and something totally awesome comes on. And then you fall asleep before they tell you what it is. A variation on that theme is when you do manage to hold out until the announcer announces it, but find on waking that you’ve forgotten the composer, or the piece, or the whole thing. Kind of like all those other stupendous money-making/world-saving ideas you have in bed but can’t be arsed to get up and write down.
Like, the other night there was some Classical piece (capital C Classical, like, Mozart or someone) which had a theme really similar to a bit of the Shosty Invasion theme from the 7th symphony. I wanted to do a not-in-bed comparison, but can’t bloody remember either the composer or the piece. I think it had a clarinet in it, so that narrows it down to about 13,576 pieces.
Sometimes this saves me, which is yet another reason NPR rocks my socks. It has complete listings for Classical Music Through the Night, so if I can remember about what time the radio was on, or maybe the previous item on the playlist, the anonymous performance can be fingered.
That’s what just happened with the fifth one of these
Ready for xmas?
Here’s a gift for your favorite music snob (if that isn’t in fact you):
Favorite comments:
I used to wear that shirt, but it totally sold out.
How do you piss off an indie rocker?
(via boingboing)
Sounds Good
It snowed properly this morning. Properly enough that the city “forgetting” to clean our street was a pain in the arse. I think the problem is that our street is exactly in between two municipal zones of control, and neither wants to take civic responsibility. However, that meant I got to make the untouched snow do that awesome crunchy-squeak thing as I stomped footprints through it.
Liking that noise is cheating, though. I think I mostly like it because I associate it with it being pretty and snowy and xmassy outside. So then I thought, what sounds do I like which are independently wealthy? That is, I like them just because of them, and not because of their associations:
- The noise of industrial air-conditioning exhausts on the outside of buildings, especially the slight Doppler shift you hear when walking past.
- Knots of wood popping in bonfires (alright, this one is probably associationey)
- Echoing foghorns, ship horns, train horns.
- The drone of turboprop propellers, or helicopter blades.
- A ratcheting handbrake
- The BBC shipping forecast
Anyone else?
The third doth rage: and roughly brayth
Because of my desire for a more ascetic life, I can listen to NPR again.
Last week, in a fit of panic at having too much crap cluttering my room I whipped out the old hatchet and scalpel. As — depressingly — always happens, this resulted in piles of dustbin bags full of crap being chucked out and/or donated to charity. It also resulted in a bit of room rearrangement, which led to a cascade of phosphorylations, which led to my radio getting moved back to where the power cord can reach a plug socket
I had forgotten how nice it is to fall asleep to NPRs Classical Music Through the Night. I find that focusing on the melodies helps me to avoid thinking about stress-dream rich material, like lab-work, or programming, or saving the planet. I turn off the lights and lay on top of my duvet (a proper English style one, not that pale American imitation) until I start losing track of the music, and getting cold. Then I fumble the off switch on the remote and get under the covers, and seem to fall asleep very quickly.
The only problem is when something really good which I haven’t heard before comes on. Then I want to force myself to stay awake long enough to find out what it is.
This is what I heard last night:
It’s been AGES since I heard this (it’s the Tallis Fantasia by Ralph V-W for those of you who didn’t click on play) and I don’t remember liking it that much. This time it yanked my listening muscles right out of their sockets. I only caught the last couple of minutes, so it’s really the Tallis melody which caught my attention, and not the Fantasia.
Tallis was around a looong time ago, in the 1500s — way earlier then any music I’ve gotten into. The particular melody which RVW used was the third of a series of nine tunes that Tallis wrote for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter, whatever one of those is. The descriptions of the tunes are absolutely frickin’ stunning:
The first is meeke: devout to see,
The second is sad: in maiesty,
The third doth rage: and roughly brayth,
The fourth doth fawne: and flattry playth,
The fyfth deligth: and laugheth the more,
The sixth bewayleth: it weepeth full sore,
The seventh tredeth stout: in froward race,
The eighth goeth milde: in modest pace.
Isn’t that beautiful?
Score Processing, Part III
Here is the latest product of my epic battle to nicely animate a score to music:
(widescreen here)
The motivation here was to get a program to work out when notes were being hit, just by looking at the volume. The idea is that when the volume suddenly increases, a note is being played. If I can work out exactly when all the notes are being hit in a recording, then I can map the analyzed score (that is, the raw notes from the sheet music) onto the timings, and make a neat animation.
The video shows a moving plot of the volume. Well sort of. It’s the absolute value (i.e., all negative values are made positive) of the amplitude of the waveform. You know how when you look at a speaker cone real close you can see it vibrating? The amplitude tells you how how far it is moving. If the amplitude is large, it is compressing a lot of air, which sounds loud. If the amplitude is very small, the speaker is barely moving, and we can hardly hear anything. This doesn’t exactly correspond to what we hear as volume, because there are lots of psychological effects which affect our perception (for example, hearing low and high pitches differently).
As you can see, it works pretty well when not much is happening, like during the first few minutes. It is interesting to see how the sound slowly drops off after each note is struck. When things get more hectic it gets way harder to separate the notes, since the sound level is continuously fairly high. Quieter notes get lost in the sustains from previous ones.
Imagine hitting a low C on the piano and then immediately hitting a high one, much more quietly. We could probably hear both because they have such different frequencies, despite the volumes. But if instead of hitting the high C you quietly hit the low one again, it would be really hard to hear. That’s pretty much what is happening here. We are not using any of the pitch information.
There is a way to do that, but it is much trickier to program.
Enjoy music.