Classical Convert

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.

The oldest electronic drum machine

Here she blows:

Man, I love suff with cogs and pulleys and gears and stuff. It’s so fascinating watching little mechanical things moving sinusoidally. I used to be fascinated by street organs as a kid (and actually, I still would be if they ever existed on the street still). That’s why this is cool. It might be more efficient to pipe everything through CPUs and ICs and ETCs, but it isn’t as pleasing to the eye. I think we need to start incorporating analogue wheel and pulleys and stuff into digital electronics.

Or at least have a few pistons around the house. Doing their thing. With steam.

Suck juice from moose

When I was about 8 years old my dad bought me a copy of Carmina Burana on cassette tape (remember them?). It turns out I didn’t really like anything except for O Fortuna!, that staple of medieval action movie trailers. I do remember being excited by the tightly compressed liner notes, which included both the Latin and English translation of the poems. “Velut Luna” has been what I’ve heard when it plays ever since.

It might have been different if I had seen these lyrics first, instead:

On The Pitch

I wish I could tell what note the ceiling was playing when people in the apartment upstairs make the floor hum:

Tags: perfect pitch, youtube

Ranking Beethoven

Remember that post from Monday where I kindly provided you with a crap-load of Beethoven videos on YouTube? Well since all those videos were posted at around the same time — two years ago, yeah it took naive little ol’ me that long to find them — you can get an angle on how popular each of Beethoven’s symphonies are, relative to one another:

Rank	Symphony	Views
1.	No. 9	4426281
2.	No. 5	3914515
3.	No. 7	2769380
4.	No. 3	1292489
5.	No. 6	873106
6.	No. 4	281157
7.	No. 8	265051
8.	No. 1	238895
9.	No. 2	216598

Interestingly they seem to divide into three chunks. The big three are 9, 5 and 7, all with comparably high views of 3-4 million. Next come 3 and 7, with large but significantly less views, closer to one million. Rounding it up are the less popular four: 4, 8, 1, 2. All with less than 300,000 views each.

The top five do not surprise me — however the separation between the top three and the next two do. Especially number 6. I would have thought that would be up there with number 7. Maybe that’s because my personal ranking of the top five is: 6, 7, 5, 9, 3.

Also interestingly (but unsurprisingly) there are about four times more views for the first half of No.9 than there are for the second half. Number five is even more pronounced (eight times more!) — perhaps because most viewers just want to hear the famous beginning.

Tags: beethoven, classical music, popular, symphonies