Fluted Vocals
Here’s what you do if your flute playing skills exceed your vocal ones:
(For those who don’t spend hours of their leisure time shifting around ones and zeros, this chick is supposed to be singing along to the music. The game processes the notes being sung and gives you points on how well you match the melody. However, the software doesn’t care about timbre or anything fancy, it’s just looking for pitch, so really you can use anything that can produce a tone. Like a flute.)
I tried this once by whistling. It turns out I’m not so hot at holding whistled pitches either.
CDs: in memoriam
There are a few things I miss about CDs.
They started up straight away. Just push play. It was just one mechanical action between you and the music, nothing to boot up and double-click on. It was much less of a physical divide when there is only a split second action required between you thinking “I want to hear this music”, and that music actually starting. With MP3s it’s a much more elaborate protocol of clicks, responses, re-clicks and confirmations. Before you could just get it on with the music, now you have to take it out to a movie and dinner first.
Of course, you now inevitably have a much larger library of music at your mousetips, but you have to go through the booting up ritual even just to see that selection of songs. If, after browsing by mouse through the acres of uncovered albums you decide that in fact nothing suits your mood right now and you’ll listen to chattering rain on the windows instead, it’s too late. You’ve already committed yourself to booting up the computer. There’s this extra task “starting up the computer” which has incised itself into the middle of the music, it’s now a three part process.
But it’s not like that’s a majorly taxing physical task. In terms of purely calorific value, pressing your Dell’s power-on button is worth about negative one-quarter of one M&M. But that’s not the point. It’s the time taken, the wait for the music library to appear on the screen, the worry that the battery might run out before the peasant’s in Beethoven’s 6th get back to their partying. Every little disconnect adds up.
What I want is a hefty leatherbound catalog of my music. Every beefsteak-thick page has the album art, liner notes and track list on it. If I touch the page with my palm my computer instantly starts to play the selected piece. Of course, the major problem would be how the hell to add extra pages to the thing. It’s totally cheating if this all done on a single electronic screen like an iPod. I want physical, tactile interactions. I want to flip pages. I want to be able to measure the size of the library by the heft of the book in my hands — and until we can electronically create mass, which is never — that’s not gonna happen.
I strongly feel that people want music to retain some physicalness, but in an age of MP3s I’m not sure how we do that.
For now, I’ll click folders, and be thankful for the gigabytes of music. I don’t miss CDs enough to retreat back to them.
Fairly Hot Friday Linkage
Instrumental edition. To keep the eye you aren’t pretending to do work with entertained we have for your internetting pleasure….
- The BeoTime alarm clock — homing in like a laser-sighted jaguar on that group of people whose love for woodwinds is only slightly surpassed by the huge piles of money lying around their castle. Yours for a tad under four-hundred smackaroos.
- A woodier woodwind – Like the arboreal George Mallory, this guy had an inextinguishable urge to get all homnidy with what nature had provided. Unlike Mallory this meant wiring up a tree in his backyard and then bowing the crap out of it.
- Playing the black keys – If, like the NYPD, you are finding it hard to relinquish the mechanical ball of joy which is your typewriter AND your wax-cylinder gramophone is currently in the shop for repairs then this musical typewriter might be just what the old-timey doctor ordered. Then again, if you enjoy your music to actually be composed and, you know, pleasurable perhaps it’s better to pass.
Have a good weekend! I have not one, not three, but TWO work barbeques to attend over the next two days — although surprise suprise, now that it’s Friday the weather is switching from as sunny to possible to dribbling water. Oh dear.
Getting Dicey
Stuck for compositional inspiration? Is the I Ching not quite up your alley? Want to do some serious Bard roleplaying in D&D? Take a gander at these bad boys:
Available for a bit less than twenty bucks at musiciansdice.com. (via Wired)
Wolfram Alpha
The geekier amongst you may have been aware of the latest please-oh-please competitor to Google being released last Friday. It’s called Wolfram Alpha, and it’s actually pretty clever — it’s got a little search niche all to itself. The idea is that it’s an interface to organized data, instead of just an interface to a bunch of other webpages. That means you can do queries like: “Wisconsin median household income / musician salary” or “calories in 1 bowl of corn flakes + a glass of OJ” or “probability full house“. And tonnes of other stuff.
Some of my favorite tools are the music ones, since (as I’ve harped on about before) I don’t have a music education, but love trying to understand formal structures and intervals and such. It lets you work out:
- Properties of notes – e.g. “F#“
- Intervals – e.g. “7 semitones“
- Scales – e.g. “E blues phrygian“
- Chords – e.g. “C major seven“
All of these produce cute little diagrams of piano keys, along with other miscellaneous information.
You can also search for composers and get a little timeline, but that isn’t terribly impressive right now. It seems pretty clueless about pieces as well: Beethoven’s 5th give you info about the (horrible) movie, for example.
Does anyone have any more musical searches which work out nicely?