Music theory exercise

I have a suggestion for an exercise for Michael beginning music theory students: transcribe a recording of a piece of music.

Choose something you haven't seen sheet music for. Select music with some meat to it (i.e. not just I, IV, V, V7 chords), but not overly dense (i.e. not full orchestra). Pick something that you like enough to listen to ad nauseum as you deconstruct it. Consider, though, that your relationship to this piece of music will never be the same. You will forever after hear its parts; listening to it will be a thinking, rather than a feeling, enterprise so don't pick music that you love because of its emotional impact.

Of course, you can write your transcription out on paper. You'll need a big eraser, though, for all the mistakes you'll make. There are software programs for transcribing music that are pretty cool. I haven't researched these fully, so I don't know what's best. I came across Finale which has a suite of programs of varying capability, available on a free trial basis for 30 days. These programs all allow you to enter notes into your score through dragging/dropping a note icon onto a staff, or by "playing" notes on your computer keyboard, or by using a midi keyboard. The software plays your score back to you, so you can hear if you've got it right.

Except for the least sophisticated of the suite (Notepad), the software can automatically provide chord symbols. I'd suggest that you use this capability just as a check on your own chord analysis, a useful part of this exercise.

Start with the melody; then select one instrument at a time and figure out its path through the song. For pop/rock/jazz, I'd suggest doing the bass line after the melody.

In the process of transcription, you'll have to figure out the time signature of your piece; its key; its melody; its harmonies; its phrasing; its tempo and tempo changes; its rhythms; its chord progressions; its organization; the way its lyrics fit; its dynamic changes; and on and on. You'll be forced to grapple with pretty much every concept in music theory.

You may not be able to deconstruct everything, but you'll be surprised at what you can do, once you start pulling the song apart. It's very much like doing a jigsaw puzzle; it's a big impenetrable task to begin, but one little puzzle piece at a time you get intimately familiar with the picture and attuned to the smallest changes of hue. When you're done, qualities of the image to which you were oblivious when you started are pronounced and obvious to you.

Joan Armatrading

We saw her last night at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis. Holy coyote; she was amazingly great.

K was a fan from ages ago and introduced me to her music in 1996. I didn't love her then. I liked her music, but didn't like what she did with her voice.

As we were waiting for the show to start last night, we admitted to each other that we weren't very excited to see her. K was expecting her to have aged way past her prime and I was expecting to hear that voice-thing that I dislike. (I don't know if there's a word for it; it's that Anita-Baker swallowed-sound, cat-yowling thing.)

The Cedar is simultaneously a miserable and fabulous place to hear music. The sound system is outstanding. Tickets are general admission and it's not the kind of crowd that shows up hours in advance, so you can always count on getting a really close seat if it matters to you. It's a short bike ride from our house.

The physical environment at the Cedar is wanting, though. They pack waaaaay too many tiny folding chairs into a small space with too few exits. It's an effort to keep my claustrophobic panic at bay. Beer is necessary to take the vividness out of my imaginings of dying in a fire under the feet of a crowd futilely trying to get to the exits while tripping over downed folding chairs. You just know the electrical system is not sufficiently updated. Do we have no fire code in this city? To top it off, there's no discernible ventilation and tap beer is $5.50.

When Joan came on stage, she first thanked us for leaving our television sets behind for the evening. That seemed unnecessarily condescending and obnoxious. We're sweating, we're squashed in here like sardines, and now we're being insulted.

But then she started playing and blew us away. Her voice has aged like fine wine. Powerful, clear, soulful, interesting, expressive, perfectly on pitch, with zero Anita-Baker yowling. Her vocal prime is now. Her guitar-playing was even more impressive. And with a catalog of three decades to pick from, she had no trouble filling a solid two hours with nothing but great songs.

If you get a chance to see her during her current tour, you just have to do it. (Doesn't look like she's got any Texas stops on her schedule yet, but maybe they're yet to come.)

Update (moments later): One of Joan's old songs is Weakness in Me (1982), with lyrics that describe the pull of an affair. If you listen to her singing it as a much younger woman, it's fine. But her delivery of this today -- standing still on stage, no guitar, no microphone in her hand or stand in front of her, with enough years of maturity to sell the sentiments of the song -- was stunning. It's sort of like Ralph Stanley singing O Death or Johnny Cash singing Hurt; advancing age is a trememdous asset to the song.

Updated again (one more moment later): Video is worth a thousand words:

Using the power of the internet for good. This time: learning languages

Here's yet another way that social networking via the web can be harnessed for good. A person trying to learn a language can, through world-wide social networks, get access to native speakers. And, perhaps more importantly, one can get a motivational boost to learn:

Still, he finds it ultimately worthwhile to work with others on the Web and search for the better partners because that provides a real connection that cannot be found from a book or a simple computer program.

“When I have to do an exercise and submit it to the world, when I know that real people are going to look at it and comment on it, it really jacks up my brain,” he said.

And another stunning vocal display from Adam

Starting at 3:30 is his acoustic Whole Lotta Love encore, performed tonight in San Francisco. I recommend watching all the way to the end.



I love the progression starting at 6:06. And 7:54 to the end is really something.

(Video by Suz526. H/t to Hooplamagnet.)

Update: Another video of the same performance with audio that is better in some respects.

Update 8/9/10:  Another video of the same performance.  This is cut together from several fan-taken videos.

Rachel does bacon

Looks like Rachel is stealing my bacon schtick shtick.

LibraryThing

As I've been working on our book club web site, I've been exploring online book-related tools and resources. LibraryThing is one of my favorites.

At its core, LibraryThing is a digital card catalog for your library. You establish an account and then add your books to your virtual "bookshelves". It's easy to add books; you just start typing a title, and it'll bring up matching books that you select. These are really data files that include the book's ISBN number and other meta data. You can also pick from the cover images available. You can rate your books and write notes or reviews of them. LT analyzes your library and returns statistics about your books, such as the breakdown between male/female authors or living/dead authors, settings for your books, and awards won by your books.

LibraryThing also generates html code for widgets that display your books on websites or blogs. Here's an example:

But LibraryThing isn't simply a personal book database. It also aggregates book information across all its member accounts and facilitates online community. Here are a few examples of what you can do with LibraryThing:

• See community-wide ratings
• View other people's libraries
• Get suggestions from LT about other users with libraries similar to yours and then view their libraries
• Read others' reviews
• "Follow" or "friend" other members
• Get personalized reading recommendations generated by analyzing your taste
• Swap books with other members
• Get free copies of books from other members or from being an early reviewer
• Participate in online chats with authors
• Buy LT merchandise, such as the LibraryThong
• Public, shared “Work” pages, allow users to fill in info about book, like quotes, setting, characters, awards, descriptions
• See community-wide statistics for all the books on all member shelves, like word clouds showing where authors went to college and where they live
• See a feed of upcoming book-related events (e.g. signings, readings) in your geographic area

And that's not even a complete listing of its features and capabilities. I recommend spending some time poking around.

Amazon Associates Program

Blogger is offering a new feature in conjunction with Amazon. You can register your blog/site with Amazon to be an "Amazon Associate", whereby if your blog/site drives a customer to Amazon (via clickable cover images that are linked to Amazon) and results in a book sale, you get a little kickback.

Seemed completely harmless, so I signed my book club web site up to be an Amazon Associate. I figured that at worst, I'd have a license to the cover images (for absolute sure) and a super-easy way to add the images. Also, Amazon provides code for a nifty widget that shows 10 book covers in a rotatable carousel GUI, and I have been hunting for just that sort of thing for both our book club site and for SSJ but haven't been able to find one that I can make work. At best, our book club might make 30-40 cents a year in kickbacks; our book club tends more toward borrowing books from our libraries.

I got an email from Amazon yesterday (emphasis added):

Hello Associate,

We noticed that you were accepted to the Amazon.com Associate Program several weeks ago but have yet to refer a sale.

Oh, Amazon, you crack me up.

Exactly

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fox is not delicious

Frankly, my side of the political spectrum is not really doing my bidding or satisfying my wishes, so I have little appetite for criticizing the right. But this ridiculous cable situation we have in our house, where we've got Fox News but not MSNBC, and the knowledge that countless others out there have this "family" cable package offered by Comcast and so are fed the Fox News diet (perhaps without realizing they're being deprived of another viewpoint), is enough for me to spare a smidgeon of emotional outrage on the nonsense that is Fox "News".

From the American Prospect:

We didn't need a lesson in how good the right is in kicking up these dust storms, because they've done it so many times before. It's a very simple formula: take some incident or person who can embody something you want people to believe about the left (elitists, scary black people, etc.); put it into heavy rotation on Fox and conservative radio; immediately begin screaming that the liberal mainstream media are ignoring this vital story; watch while the mainstream media pick up the story to prove they really aren't liberal. Rinse, repeat. It works pretty much every time.

Karma is amazing (in case I hadn't already mentioned that)

She "qualified" in the "Tunnelers" event yesterday. "Qualified" just means she passed, by completing the course within the requisite time and without faults (like me touching her or her running an obstacle out of order). She ran 144 yards -- almost 1.5 football fields -- in 33 seconds, through 12 tunnels.

Pretty much just want to spend the day telling people about her success. Now who can I tell? And thanks in advance to everyone who pretends to be interested.

Update 7/13/10: Here's a video of someone else's dog competing in the same Tunnelers event as Karma ran on Sunday.

NADAC Novice Regular

This is not Karma, but this is a comparable event to her second run today:  It is the same complexity level (Novice), the same event  ("Regular") at the same facility (Soccerblast, Burnseville, MN), at a NADAC-sanctioned event. The dog in this video makes it look easy:



This dog, Mira, makes it look more difficult:

Happy day at our house

Karma competed in her first agility trial today.  The world of agility competition is a complex thing, with many different sponsoring organizations (AKC, North American Dog Agility Council (NADAC), U.S. Dog Agility Association, Canine Performance Events), and with many different varieties of events at each competition at many different levels (i.e. courses vary in complexity/trickiness).  Not all of the organizations allow mixed breeds to compete.  Karma competed in a NADAC event at the least complex level (Novice).  She competed in two events today (regular and "touch-and-go") and will compete in another event tomorrow morning.  This event was indoors.

The whole experience was intensely stimulating for her:  dogs everywhere, her first exposure to Astroturf, strangers in the ring doing the judging, her fear of the unknown, the inexplicable (to her) schedule of sitting in a crate, then competing, then going back in the crate, then competing again.  Her doggy brain had a lot to process.

It's not at all uncommon for dogs new to competition to completely wig out and just zoom around the course paying no attention to the obstacles or their handler.  I had very low expectations going in, but Karma did amazingly well in her first run.  She ran fast and clean through the first 14 of the 16 obstacles (A-frame, tunnels, wickets that she's never seen before), but then she came upon the dog walk and froze.  The dogwalk is an elevated level plank with inclined planks on either end.  She's never had any issue with the dogwalk in practice.  I suspect that from her vantage point as she was getting on, it looked like a teeter-totter, something she hasn't completely conquered yet.  In class, she gets a chance to see all the equipment as we get warmed up before class, so she can tell where the teeter is and where the dogwalk is.

So she took two steps onto the dogwalk, got scared and jumped off.  That's a disqualification.  Also, at some point when I was trying to coax her back onto the dogwalk, I reached out to her and ruffled her neck, not to physically maneuver her onto the walk, but just to give her some encouragement.  That too, though, is a disqualification; there is no touching your dog during a run.  It's a habit I'll have to break.

I was very pleased with her performance for the first time out.  Lots of more experienced dogs ran around completely out of control.

We sat around for a couple hours before the next event, and by that time Karma was pretty much mentally exhausted.  She ran her second run poorly, running around the jumps and getting distracted by smells on the ground.

We'll compete in one more event tomorrow if I can get her out of bed in the morning.  She is one tired pup now.

Sad week at our house

When I joined this blog, Michael promised that I'd offer cat stories.  Now is the time.

In January 1997, K decided he'd like to have a cat. [Update:  He was living alone at the time.] He'd never had a pet before, but he had observed my two cats and concluded that cats added a little life to the house without demanding huge amounts of attention.  They were more fun than plants and less work than a dog. Cats were independent and didn't need much to be content, K thought.

At the time he said he didn't understand why people talk to animals. "What do you SAY to them?  Why talk to them when they can't understand you?" he'd asked me, incredulously, when I said I talked to my cats all the time.

We went to the Minneapolis pound and he inspected the available kittens.  One black and white tuxedo kitten clung spread-eagle to the bars of her cage and meowed with all her might at us.  When K held her, she immediately purred; she put up a huge fuss when he tried to return her to the cage, shouting more than meowing at him.  K was smitten with her feisty attitude.  She had to be held at the pound for three more days before she could be adopted.  That fourth day fell on a day when K couldn't leave his office at midday when the pound opened, but he wanted that particular kitten so I took time off of work to be at the pound the second it opened to nab her for him before someone else got her.

"Diggity" has been passionately devoted to K ever since.  The second he sits down at home, she is on him.  She gazes at him and purrs.  (I've made up a little voice for her that says, "I love you, I love you, I love you" in rapid succession, matching the passion in her gaze.) When he pets her, she drools.  When he tries to get away from her she shouts at him.  When he leaves the house, she sits by the door and yowls.  When he's been away for awhile she yowls more.  When she hears his keys outside the door, she races to the door and yowls some more.

He's expressed annoyance about this over the years:  "Why does she have to be ON me all the time?  Why can't she just be by herself sometimes like your cats?  I got a cat because I thought they were independent."  I remind him that in their initial meeting at the pound, Diggity showed him exactly who she was.  She's so much needier than any of the four cats I've owned but she's a one-person cat so K bears the burden of giving her the attention she demands.

She's smart.  K trained her not to jump on tables and counters EVER and to sit up on command.  Diggity has trained K to talk to animals -- a lot.

She's fierce.  Michael's mother bears scars from wounds inflicted by Diggity.  A couple years ago, my mother and Michael's mother, D, stayed at our house.  D had her cat, Missy, there.  We kept Missy closed up in one bedroom for most of their stay, but D tried to introduce Missy to the rest of our animals in hopes they'd get along so Missy wouldn't have to be sequestered.  Carrying Missy, D walked into the living room where Diggity, Petrik (my cat) and Karma (dog) were lounging.  Diggity decided this was a highly threatening situation and went into attack mode.  She leaped onto D's back, embedded her claws and hung there while yowling ferociously.  It was just like watching a lion leap onto the back of its prey in a hunt.  I was able to save D before Diggity made a meal of her or Missy.

She doesn't like when people yelp or scream.  K and I were watching the X Games one evening when some amazing feat made me hoop and holler.  Diggity jumped onto my head and embedded her front claws in my forehead and her back claws in my neck.  I shrieked and leaped about the room begging K to "get her off of me!" while she clung stubbornly to my head.  K was laughing too hard to help, which got me laughing and then Diggity was willing to let go.

A couple days ago, K noticed that Diggity was peeing outside her litter box.  He took her to the vet, suspecting a urinary tract infection.  We discovered that she did indeed have such an infection; but we also learned that she has Stage III kidney disease.  It's incurable and the vet expects she'll die within the next couple years.  She's 13.5 years old right now, so that'll be an average life span for a cat.  The house will be quieter and more peaceful without her and that will stink.

Marilynne Robinson defends religion

One of my favorite authors, Marilynne Robinson (author of novels Gilead, Home, and Housekeeping), will be on The Daily Show tonight.  She'll be talking about her new non-fiction book, "Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of Self."  I haven't read this, but I see from its WaPo review that it is, at least in part, a defense of religion and that she takes on Dawkins and his ilk.  She's an extremely careful, thorough thinker, so I imagine that she does a good job.

Update:  Wow.  That was a bad interview.  I didn't understand anything she said.  Still, I would expect that the book is good.

Someone spends too much time with her gerbils

Good news!  We did not win an award for writing any of the worst sentences of the year.

This year's winner is Molly Ringle for this counterproductive simile:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

I'm betting Molly has also won an award for worst kisser on the planet.

You're a King, BUT

This is brilliant.  The idea.  The execution.  Perfect.  (And a great marketing ploy for the ad agency itself, Leo Burnett.)

Word count in novels

A blog post by "Blue" lists the word counts of a few dozen novels, including a bunch of classics and some PEN/Faulkner winners.  Blue doesn't exactly identify a source for the info; in the Comments, Blue says they're taken partly from teacher materials and partly from Amazon that used to provide word counts but does not do so anymore.

Median word count in the "classic" novels listed is 99,341; average is 136,604.  War and Peace (version unspecified) is 587,287 and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is only about 25,000 short of that.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay has 216,020.

Anyone have a source for word counts?  I tried the Library of Congress, but I don't see this info there.

Update 1/14/11: Here is a source for word counts. In fact, that's probably the source used by "Blue" above. H/t to Lars Knudsen who commented on Blue's post.

Labels

I am slowly but surely adding tags or "Labels" to our posts.  I've made it through about 500 posts.  Just 2300+ more to go.  (Yeah, I'm not sure I'm that motivated.) The labels serve as an index; they're an additional tool to help find things.  Feel free to add or edit tags.

Update:  Two things:

1)  I've been inconsistent -- whimsical, really -- in choosing whether to tag a post liberally or sparsely and whether to include the topics that appear in the Comments.  Do not try to infer rhyme or reason; there is none.

2) I believe we can "hide" the Labels on the posts, so if you don't like the way they alter the look of the blog, we can fix that.

Comcast's role in delivering audience to Fox News

I've just discovered something unsettling.

We intended to downgrade our Comcast cable TV service for the summer, from the ridiculously priced $80/month package (with gazillions of channels, but no HBO etc)  to their $10/mo plan that would give us decent reception, but no cable channels.  I called to make the service change and the customer service person explained that if we made that change, our internet service would increase by $10 and oh-by-the-way we offer a $20/month "family" cable package that would include lots of channels, though not all that we have been getting.  In other words, for the same amount we were willing to pay for zero cable channels, we could have a bunch of cable channels.  She rattled off the list of channels that I didn't pay much attention to since we were prepared to not have any.

Here's the strangest thing:  the "family" cable package includes Fox News Channel, but does not include MSNBC.  This gives me a new perspective on audience numbers for cable news shows.

Happy Birthday, LJ!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LJ



A present for you. Pretend your name is Terrance.



Update: The birthday boy, Terrance, is the first dancer appearing in the video posted immediately below.