Scandalous
I think — (hope) — the scanner we have in lab is one of these bad boys:
The instructions, for the lucky scanjet owners:
1. Turn off scanner
2. Set SCSI ID to 0 (using dial on back of scanner)
3. Hold down green button
4. Turn scanner on
via eeggs
Beet Farming
I’ve been craving, CRAVING, the Liszt piano orchestrations (isn’t that backward? De-orchestration?). Unfortunately they were left standing, wailing at the altar of my other computer: the old, crummy, dusty leviathan of a desktop hiding in the undertable dust. It’s a scary proposition to boot that baby up. I’d have to grease the wormgears and prime the pumps and lower the cooling rods, and that’s too tiring after another 11-hour workday (boo-hoo me).
So instead I redownloaded them off of eMusic, which (I bloody hope) you get to do for free. Or at least, I downloaded the one that was really rattling the bars of it’s cage: number 6. Despite the classical music hivemind selecting 5 and 9 as THE SYMPHONIES, I prefer 6 and 7. Especially the first movement of 6. The introductory bars are so… well… what’s it like? It’s like the satisfaction you feel when given a beautifully wrapped parcel, or spectacularly presented desert. It’s the anticipatory x-factor. The mouth whetting.
After satisfying THAT von-Beethoveney urge, I moved over to the Appassionata, which also has a stupendously awesome first movement. That trill, man, it rocks. It sounds so stereotypically classical and prissy, and then those plundering, pounding octaves blast the hell out of it. I love the way Arrau plays it, doing the trill in a really precise, delicate, prompt fashion. It’s almost — not quite — sarcastic.
And musical sarcasm is the quickest way into my heart. And/or pants.
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.
Awesome Beethoven Transcriptions
Guys! After all of the mentions of transcriptions in the last week, and JonJ and Yvonne commenting that there is a well established history of transcripting stuff, I got off my internet arse and discovered several very joyous things. Firstly, the clavier-wunderkind Liszt did piano transcriptions of all of Beethoven’s symphonies — this is probably exceptionally common knowledge to all the seasoned classical listeners out there, but news to me. Secondly, there is a box-set of these available on Naxos, which is itself available on eMusic (see: cheap, good quality, DRM-free MP3s). Hooray!
So far I have listened to the ones I know the best: 6, 5, 9, 7. Only once each so far, as it all just got downloaded about an hour or two ago. Aside from noticing a bunch of stuff which apparently had been completely obscured by my ears during the myriad previous symphonic listens (key changes and modulations seem way more obvious, for example), it’s striking how similar certain sections sound to the (Beethoven) piano sonatas. I don’t yet know if that’s due to Liszt deliberately orchestrating them like that, or if it’s pure Beethoven shining through… or if it’s me trying to be clever. I’ll try and keep you posted on that one. Hopefully it’s the middle one.
Windows Hearts Beethoven
The latest Windows update refuses to install if it senses a lack of Beethoven’s 9th:
Thank you Microsoft for insisting that Beethoven’s MOTHER ********** NUMBER 9 NEEDS TO BE INSTALLED ON MY MOTHER ********** COMPUTER before Service MOTHER ********** Pack 3 can be successfully installed.
Your programmers are morons. Go to hell, the lot of you.
If Windows prefers Beethoven, I bet baroque old Linux likes the intricacies Bach better. What about Apple? Somebody who has form as an utmost priority I suppose… Webern? Nah, that doesn’t feel right. It has to be universally accessible as well. Any suggestions?