My violin fingering: is it still right?
I gave up the violin almost 20 years ago. Or over half my life ago. Yet to this day, I often mime the fingering that my left hand would do were it playing the melody of a song I’m listening to, my fingers generally tapping on the pad beneath my thumb.
Or at least I think I am. I have no idea whether the notes that would ring out if a violin were in my hand would bear any resemblance to the song. Maybe so many years of dormancy render the mime talentless and the resulting music similarly tuneless. And doubtless the bow in my right hand would be playing the wrong string anyway.
One day soon, I’ll pick up a violin and see just how true my renditions are to their originals. Until then, you’re safe.
Map of places in songs
A couple of weeks ago, I created a My Map in Google Maps. I put a single marker on it, labelled Up the Junction, Squeeze. The marker sat on the south-west corner of the junction between St. John’s Road and St. John’s Hill, where JD Sports now stands.
The map was created to depict references to places in songs—either in the song title or in the lyrics therein. I invited a handful of friends to collaborate on the map, and I’m happy to say that it’s now up to 379 icons, representing places mentioned in 227 different songs. (The KLF’s It’s Grim Up North accounted for an impressive 66 markers alone.)
The markers are colour-coded by musical genre, and collaborators are asked to follow a short list of rules to maintain the map’s integrity.
Our most northerly markers thus far are Siberia Khatru by Yes, and Frank Black’s White Noise Maker, in which Siberia is also mentioned. Our only Antarctican reference is Ross Dependency, mentioned in Enya’s Orinoco Flow (apparently).
Phase 2 of the project is about to begin, in which a wider set of people will be invited to contribute. If you’d like to be a part of history, drop me a comment, or an email, and I’ll add you to the list.
The first e-orchestra?
I’ve wondered recently whether a group of musicians could perform together live online.
The problem with playing music is that you need the feedback of the other players in order to understand where you are in the piece, and to react meaningfully to the circumstances of the piece. With an orchestra, each member works in harmony with the others (often literally), compensating for balance changes and working with the imperfections that are inherent with human-created music. If the tempo is slightly faster than you’d expected, you don’t resolutely stick to the tempo you know to be correct. If your instrument is tuned slightly flat, you can compensate (with stringed instruments, at least) by playing sharp. And if your fellow members are drowning you out, you can play slightly louder to ensure your section can be heard.
If you set the 50 members of an audience off on the same piece of music at exactly the same time without any feedback along the way, they’d all end at different times and the result would be a cacophony. Hence the need for a conductor.
So what if we had an online orchestra, each member playing in physical isolation from their fellow members, connected only by the internet.
Here lies the problem. Your fellow members need your audio feed to be played to them to allow them to play their own piece in an informed way; and you need your fellow members’ respective feeds to be played to you to allow you to play in an informed way.
Even in an orchestra that is collocated of course, the finite speed of sound means that there isn’t the immediate feedback. Assuming an orchestra pit 14 metres in diameter, the harps (stage left) won’t hear what the double basses (stage right) were up to for a whopping 0.04 seconds. (At sea-level, at least.) With the internet, we’re dealing with the speed of light (880,991 times faster than sound), but with a physical distribution greater than 14 metres, and processing steps in between.
So here’s my question: if everyone had a pretty decent broadband connection and a musical feed piped directly into something internet-enabled, how long would it take for the feeds from the c. 50 members that make it up to be amalgamated and piped back to the people? If it’s a small fraction of a second, then we’re in business.
If so, then I propose getting out my dusty old violin (not a euphemism) and arranging what might be the first orchestra never to meet. Maybe on Twitter. To inform whether or not to do this, I’ve constructed a detailed decision-tree.
Techies, is this doable?
If yes, then: Musicians, are you interested?
Else: sorry to have wasted your time. Carry on.
iTunes enhancements
There are a couple of enhancements that Apple should make to iTunes that would make my life a whole lot easier.
First of all, please allow the de-duplication of tracks without compromising the make-up of albums. I don’t want five identical copies of Blur’s Girls and Boys. As well as eating up memory unnecessarily (a minor inconvenience given the amount of storage available), it means that randomising the order of tracks on the iPod/iPhone/iTunes results in that track being played many times over. (I’m currently going through the songs on my iPhone in track name order (from A–Z), exacerbating the problem, to my exasperation.)
I don’t mind there being different versions of the same song. But if there are two tracks with the same song name, within a second or two in length, with similar musical make-ups, then give the option of creating a master and a slave copy, and managing the music that way. (If the master is deleted, then replace one of its slaves with the master and re-point all of the other slaves etc.)
And please have the concept of a device-independent star-rating and play count. When I change my device, I shouldn’t have to re-star all of my music; and my 25 most played tracks shouldn’t be reset.
Can you sort it, Apple? Well, can you?
Musical artists I know little about
In an effort to extend the breadth of the publicised subject matters I know little about, I thought I’d continue with the theme set out in this post of a month ago, in which I asked for index cards on each of religion, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine to bring me up to speed. (Apart from a link kindly provided on Israel/Palestine, nothing has been forthcoming.)
This post lists a few musical artists that are sufficiently mainstream and well-respected to warrant people having a good, high-level background on them, but for which I have no such background, for whatever reason. (Too busy listening to shit pop in the 80s, I expect.)
Anyway, in no specific order, below is my starter list for ten.
- Neil Young
- Bob Dylan
- Johnny Cash
There are lots more. But I can’t think of them right now, so I’ll append as I remember them.
Apologies if this ill-education offends anyone.
Agadon’t: the importance of intonation
On speaking about his band’s re-release of Agadoo to mark the single’s 25th anniversary, Black Lace singer Dene Michael was quoted by BBC News as saying:
"With all the doom and gloom in the world, this is just what we need."
I think this should have read:
"With all the doom and gloom in the world, this is just what we need."
Subtle but important distinction.
(Post categorised as music for want of a more suitable alternative.)
The Dandy Warhols’ sleeping arrangements
The sleeping arrangements in the Dandy Warhols’ Bohemian Like You have troubled me since I bought it upon its release in 2001 following the relentless airtime it received courtesy of Vodafone. Specifically, the following extract from the lyrics causes consternation.
Wait, who’s that guy, just hanging at your pad.
Hes looking kinda blah, yeah, you broke up that’s too bad.
I guess it’s fair, if he always pays the rent, and he doesn’t get bent about sleeping on the couch when I’m there.
Here’s my question: where does "that guy" sleep when the singer isn’t there?
If he sleeps with the girl, then that’s very bohemian and accommodating of the singer—that’s where I’m leaning. If he sleeps in his own room, surely the singer staying over doesn’t mean that "that guy" vacates his bed for the singer (a) because the singer would likely sleep with the girl and (b) if he didn’t, what right has he of kicking "that guy" out of his own bed?
Anyone?
Top three children’s TV tunes
Admittedly I have a lot of experience of this subject. But the three examples below all have fabulous theme tunes, each with a link. So, in no specific order, the top three children’s TV tunes are:
Best moments in songs (part 3)
A couple of additions to the first and second posts detailing the best moments in songs:
- The opening piano notes in Take That’s Shine
- The syncopation of "I Can Fly" by the backing singers in R. Kelly’s I Can Fly. The one at 4m35s is fabulous, surpassed in beauty a mere 23 seconds later.
Best Christmas choon ever
Enjoy the Top of the Pops version or a live concert rendition. Equally fabulous, and both equally toothless.
Eagerly-awaited lines (part 2)
In addition to the three eagerly-awaited lines in Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson, I feel bound to give similar stature to the following line from Eartha Kitt’s Santa Baby, which attracts significant iPod playtime at this time of year.
- A ‘54 convertible too, light blue.
The enunciation is sublime. Just lovely.
A sheltered upbringing
I had quite a sheltered existence as a teenager. I didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink that much before hitting 18, and sex was not quite as commonplace as were Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit singles.
Listening to Primal Scream’s Rocks yesterday, I wondered whether an element of this straightlacedness was a result of my ambivolence towards musical lyrics, making me less aware of the forbidden fruits on offer.
I loved music, and still do, but was way more aroused by the tune than by the underlying meaning of the lyrics therein. To me, the lyrics were merely there as something to mouth/sing to the song. Beyond that, they held little importance in my enjoyment of the work.
So lyricists that wrote about sex, drugs and all-night drinking sessions—or indeed all of the above—might as well have been writing about raspberry-ripple ice cream, spearmint mouthwash and Tesco’s deli counter as far as I was concerned. I genuinely wouldn’t have known which they were writing about, as the words were mere syllables to me.
In the main, I’m the same, arguably shallow self today. While my awareness of lyrics has indeed increased, it still and will always play second fiddle to the musical make-up of the song.
Incidentally, the Primal Scream lyrics that I chose to analyse on the bus yesterday read as follows:
Dealers keep dealin’
Thieves keep thievin’
Whores keep whorin’
Junkies keep scorin’
Trade is on the meat rack
Strip joints full of hunchbacks
Bitches keep bitchin’
Clap keeps itchin’
Back in high school
I had a friend, was a big baseball player
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool
Bruce Springsteen, Glory Days.
Back in high school: musical genius or arrogant laziness? I’d like to think the former. Either way, a fabulous track.
Glissando
I find it odd that the musical chromatic scale is made up of twelve notes, the thirteenth repeating the starting note an octave higher. And that the major and minor scales are made up of seven notes each. I’m not suggesting that any other numbers would be any more logical; merely that having any number higher than two play such a pivotal role in something as fundamental as music seems bizarre.
I wonder whether relative pitch resonates (in the mind sense of the word) with us as humans more than it does with other animals. And would we find it musically odd our scale were broken into any number other than twelve intervals? After all, pitch is a continuous scale (ask anyone who listened to me play the violin), so have we artificially manufactured the notes that we know and love? (I’m guessing that there is something inherently significant about two notes an octave apart, given the way they resonate with one another.)
Westwood in da field
The controversy should not be over Jay-Z headlining Glastonbury. The controversy should be over the fact that Westwood is there to represent him from a reporting perspective.
Musical gerunds
As far as I’m aware, there are few songs whose titles are a non-finite clause including a gerund. (Surprised no one else has writen about this very subject.) The only two I can think of are Squeeze’s Pulling Mussels from a Shell and Shed Seven’s Chasing Rainbows. The only such band is Counting Crows, although not sure whether this is acting as a present participle.
That is all.
The World’s Greatest?
Now that R. Kelly has been acquitted, is it OK to listen to his music again? (I completely understand that an embargo of the music of Gary Glitter is a given.)
Pressing times
I used to estimate that the average shirt took five minutes to iron. Tonight, I added some science and accuracy to this. Below are the results.
Dress-down Fridays meant that tonight’s quota of creased-up shirts totalled four. And tonight I decided to iron to music (iPod and earphones), something I rarely do but something which brings with it a mechanism for time-based accuracy.
For the first shirt, an easy-iron, blue-check number, the end of its ironing coincided beautifully with the end of The Libertines’ Can’t Stand Me Now, a song that’s bugged me for a few days now, in none other than good ways. So shirt one: 3m 27s.
Shirt two was a cerise, difficult-to-iron item, the ironing of which took exactly the same length of time as the first: the first 3m 27s of 4Hero/Minnie Riperton’s Les Fleur. Third up was a very simple purple-check number, complete in a lightning 2m 44s, accompanied by Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5. And the blue shirt that used to have a twin came last, reverting to the three and a half minute standard, this time to The Human League’s Together In Electric Dreams.
I think the 2m 44s shirt was a freak, and I’ll probably find out in the week that one of its sleeves remains unironed. So the verdict is 3m 30s for a shirt, 30% quicker than the original estimate.
Can’t Stand Me Now
For the last hour or so before leaving work yesterday, I was longing to leave the building, plug in my new in-ear earphones (in-earphones?) and blast The Libertines’ Can’t Stand Me Now into my head while walking along sun-drenched Whitehall. I have no idea why. But I was. And I did. And I loved it.
Shine
Pretty shit day in the office today. Some of which has been offset by listening to Take That’s Shine on the bus. Oh. The Ramones’ Baby I Love You has just kicked in. All is forgotten.