Following the Unheard
My mp3 player listens to music alone. Sometimes, starting it up as I enter the outside, it begins playing a piece which was not what I left it with. There is an obvious explanation for this: it so much enjoys the music I listen to that it conducts private performances, hidden safely within the black headphone cord spaghetti. I’m pretty sure that’s it.
Sometimes this misbehavior results in serendipity. For example: this morning. As usual, I skipped down the gleaming, freshly painted steps of my house, brimming with enthusiasm for the day ahead. As I pranced down our path, the family of bunnies in our yard (the Benjamins) paused their game of jump-rope, just long enough to call out a cheerful “top o’ the morning, mister Smith!”. The widely grinning sun tipped his sunglasses and gave me a thumbs up, before removing an embroidered white handkerchief from his back pocket and wiping the perspiration from his forehead. The milkman whistled Frere Jacques as he clinked and clanked merrily up the cobblestones.
Everything seemed so normal and boring, so average.
Then came the shocker. As I pressed the play button on my mp3 player, unfamiliar music wafted violently into the sides of my head. And it was awesome. I swear to god I didn’t leave it paused there before, it was like, providence, or something.
It’s the Nielsen string quartet no. 2. It’s got that funky not-quite-tonal thing going on, which totally floats my boat, and carries my tote, and tethers my goat. If I listen to it more and really get into it I’ll give you more detailed feedback than fanciful caprine (frickin’ word of the day right there, folks) wordplay.
Madécasses
I heard these on NPR last night, and for a few minutes thought they might be late Shostakovich songs that I hadn’t heard before:
It turns out they are by Ravel. They are the chansons madécasses. It’s the sparse orchestration and off-white tonality which reminded me of late Shosty — but these dudes are from the 1920s instead of the 1960s.
This was the the first time I had listened to anything by Ravel since a certain wannabe love interest tried (and failed) to get me pumped up about the rapsodie espagnole.
Transformational
My laptop is scorching my lap. It’s pushing 70C on both cores. Like me, it gets hot and confused when forced to think too hard about math all in one go. Unlike me, it doesn’t scribble all over it’s work and swear at the obnoxiously curly integral symbols.
Why the laptop torture sesh? Well, I’m back on the wildly careening Fast! Fourier! Transform! bandwagon (the exclamation marks are for extra excitement). FFTs are a way to break down a raw chunk of sound (for example, an MP3) into all of its individual frequencies. So for example, if you had a recording of a pure C chord, running an FFT on it would show that it had C, E and G tones in it.
It looks a lot more interesting when there is more stuff going on than that…
…but than it is also harder to see what is happening.
I’m excited about this again because I came across this page, in which they have an algorithm that can calculate the spectrograms waaaay faster than my old crummy one. I haven’t had time to pick apart why that is yet, but it’ll for SURE result in some sexy animations. Otherwise I want all my money back.
Libre Libretto
One of the flopping fresh fish hauled in this morning by the eMailman featured a classical music query, which I’m going to submit to the ultimate crowd wisdom of You Guys. The question in question was whether there is a good location for not only free opera librettos, but also their English translations. It looks like there are options for the former (e.g. Karadar; the Aria Database) but the translation part is trickier.
Any suggestions?
Oops, almost forgot about the (ultra-descriptively titled) Lied and Art Song Texts Page, which is where I go when trying to remember the approximate words to the last two Alex Blok songs. (Which is what I’ve been listening to all day, either in my head or via real, honest compression waves into the ears).
Wireless Access
Most of today was spent trying — and failing — to persuade DNA to be stickier than it wishes. The rest of the day was spent on a personally more interesting, but equally frustrating project. I’m converting my old desktop into a media-serving, AVI playing, MP3 streaming beast. This makes inordinately huge amounts of sense because (a) I listen to all my music via MP3s, (2) I only really use my laptop, which has crappy sound, and (iii) I have a big old, shiny old, fairly new old widescreen monitor just BEGGING to display Hulu.
This project results in gallons of wire being chucked around the room, hard disks being ripped out, stuck back in, pulled out again, cursed at. It also results in the largest dilemma currently known to Ben-kind: what do I do about my radio? Do I get rid of it and wire everything through the computer instead?
No. I don’t want to get rid of my radio. I love my radio, despite its single 3.5mm input. Even if I had the most amazing freakin’ internettified electronic orgy of a media server imaginable, I would still want it. All the digital satellite stations in (or hovering above) the world can’t replace the warm-blanket reassurance of the local station identification monologues. It feels like someone is keeping an eye on the empty corridors of the county while I am falling asleep.
I think what the cool rich kids do is buy a huge fancy schmancy receiver type dealie, with fifty thousand audio inputs on the back. However, since I’m a destitute graduate student I’ll stick with my cute little 1-input JVC jobbie, and try to resolve the wiring issues with careful thought (and also maybe duct tape and solder).
Hmmm. I guess that wasn’t really much of a dilemma after all.