Plinky plonky
The piano/physics/block-slinging little internet game of the day (and believe me there was a LOT of competition for the title) is this entry from Germany. I’d give you some pointers as to how to wrangle the little beastie into submission, but half the fun is working out for yourself what all the knobs and little colored squares do.
I love the tidy little color palettes in the akkord section, that’s a beautiful way of visualizing the harmonies in a chord. A chord. Akkord. Is that where the word chord comes from? Wiktionary says… no. It actually comes from the Greek word khorde which means “string of gut”. Interestingly the same word is also the root of “cord”, as in rope. Huh. That’s one of those things which seem incredibly obvious in hindsight.
No wait a second. That’s not obvious at all. It’s actually completely surprising that chord and cord come from the same source. I think that means it’s bedtime. After all, you know how the old saying goes: “words start overlapping/lie down and start napping”.
It does start a bit quiet…
There oughta be a term for when you can’t find a video on Youtube due to the original being drowned in spoofs, remixes and other examples of poor production values. I was trying to find a video of Lux Aeterna, aka the arpeggioey theme from Requiem for a Dream, because I was gonna say that:
- “I just watched the film for the first time … blah blah blah … depressing depressing … but not quite as much as with David Lynch.” (That is, “his movies have more of an emotional impact on me.” Not: “Requiem would be more depressing if I watched it with David Lynch”. Though that’s probably true too.)
- “Those crazy kids in the Kronos Quartet played a lot of the soundtrack … blah blah blah … why gosh golly, they sure do get around a lot don’t they?”
HOWEVER. Instead of that happening — which is good, because in retrospect that sounds like an pretty boring blog post — I discovered that:
- The piece has been used in fifty-thousand different trailers, TV shows and adverts. Most famously in the trailer for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
- Every fanboy (or fangirl/fanperson; we are equal-opportunity makers of derogatory remarks) on the internet has used that piece to put together their own horribly “deep” trailer for their favorite movie, which is usually Lord of the Rings.
- The version they use is inevitably the re-orchestrated score for orchestra and choir, because it sounds more — cough — “epic”.
Which all adds up to it being vaguely impossible to dig out a video of the string quartet orchestration. Or at least one that isn’t filled Hobbits, or have “It does start a bit quiet LOL” (seriously) whacked on the front of it.
Oh well, it turns out after all that I kind of don’t want to hear it again anyway. We can call that the Pachelbel effect.
P(f)=k
Sometimes I leave my radio tuned between stations. It’s like a mid-20th-century GPS system. The closer I get to home, the clearer the broadcast becomes. At thirty miles out, everything is whirring waves of white noise. At twenty, voices start to swarm below the surface, all oddly shaped and colored, and pushed and pulled and stretched out. At fifteen, the voices slice through the static like a swell torn apart by a breakwater. At ten, as the car snaps around the crest of the closest hill, the last of the whitecaps fall away and disintegrate.
There is something intrinsically fascinating about progress bars, about little flickering percentage signs and numbers. How many times have I watched in torpid enthrallment as a downloading file turns a light-gray bar into a dark-blue bar? Or stared at the microwave for four whole minutes, as it counts down the launch of a plate of chicken pot pie?
The radio-static proximity check is another progress bar, but it’s more beautiful. It’s a parallel journey, it is part of arriving. Hearing the local station identification ritual (“This is WSKG public radio broadcasting on WSQG-FM 90.9 Ithaca, WSQC-FM Oneonta…”) is almost as defining a homecoming experience as seeing the first minor road with a name you recognize.
I was searching YouTube for radio static related goodies, gave up, and then found this (oddly appropriate) piece by Iannis Xenakis on a different search mission:
I like it. Not quite in the same way as I like Shosty; but I like it.
DeMonstered
Monster Cable — that purveyor of interconnects the internet loves to hate — recently decided to drop a lawsuit they had filed against a mom-and-pop mini golf operation. Great job guys. Have you finally noticed that this kind of crap makes every single online geek (i.e., every geek) totally hate your guts? That’s a valuable audience not to piss off: they wield a large amount of purchasing power via advice to their less tech-obsessed friends.
It’s not a one-off. Monster Cable have a long and rich history of pulling this kind of rubbish. They’ve challenged uses of the word Monster in: Disney’s “Monster’s Inc.”; Monster.com; the children’s ski group Snow Monsters; and other such undeserving targets. Have a google for “monster cable lawsuit” and you’ll find all sorts of goodies.
One of the things I heart most about the internet (and man oh man there is a tonne of stuff I heart) is how a bad bit of public opinion can totally shaft irresponsible corporations. There is nothing quite as tasty as a delicious dollop of schadenfreude.
Of course, even without the obnoxious lawsuits everyone still hates ‘em for the insane markups on cables that do not compare favorably to a bent coathanger.
The D5 Not Existing
The ultra-high Scriabin D8 (or… D5, see Zoltan’s comment below) is really real:
Thanks to Zoltan for finding a link to the score (the piece is Scriabin’s Op. 62, the 6th Sonata). It’s on the last page. At the end of the score there is a note which reads:
The D5 not existing on the piano keyboard was substituted by Scriabin, according to contemporary witnesses, by substituting the C5
So, errr, anyone care to hazard a guess why he put it in in the first place? Poor pianists, practicing each page until it’s perfect, and then they reach the last few bars to find a note which exists only in piano fantasy land. It’s a bit like being in a spelling bee where the winning word is just a bunch of clicks and squeaking noises.
Is it because it “should” be there, according to the harmony or something? That doesn’t seem like a very convincing reason.