Op 1, No. 15: Why?
Click image above to see full piece:-)
zipTimer: an app for pacing your cello practice – or any practice!
Terry Gross interviews actress Michelle Williams and director Kelly Reichardt.
You will see a visual display of the music as it is played (by real musicians). I believe that Smalin, the author/artist/creator, has written a program that takes a midi file as input and produces the visual display as output. This is then synced to a real performance, hence the good sound. On the author’s youtube site there are many more pieces like this, some with a more straightforward display. This one is especially artful.
zipTimer: an app for pacing your music practice – or any practice!
An elegant physics demonstration of five metronomes coming into sync.
YouTube Video of Coupled Harmonic Oscillators
You have to see it to believe it!
zipTimer: an iPod/iPhone app for pacing piano practice, cooking, workouts, you name it.
The award-winning director Sidney Lumet died Saturday in New York City from lymphoma. He was 86. Lumet was one of Hollywood’s most prolific directors, making more than 40 films, including Network, Serpico, Fail-Safe, Dog Day Afternoon, The Wiz, The Verdict and Prince of the City.
Song of the Earth
The day’s eye is His eye, it burns
With fearsome, hot embrace. She twists, turns
But cannot flee that ancient heavy pull,
That passion which came to her so long ago
And filled the eternal cold of night
With his light, and a thousand songs of love.
And then, after the customary journey,
The sounds of life, a buzzing, humming, and chirping
From every corner of their joyful marriage house.
But now he has grown mad: he spurns the children,
Pulls her closer, ever closer to his raging
Fiery gaze. Waters where fish swam
Have boiled away and now no song is sung.
No birds take wing nor does any seed sprout.
Yet still he draws her closer. She cries out,
But cannot flee that ancient heavy pull.
(c) Jim Carlson 12/9/1993
“I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here.
…As a race we have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend, for example, that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. Look at the depiction of Jesus in our iconography, unchanged since the vanilla ice-cream kitsch of the Nazarene school of painting in the late nineteenth century. These images alone are sufficient proof that Christianity is moribund.
We need images in accordance with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. It can sometimes be a struggle to find unprocessed and fresh images.”
Kinetic Art by Reuben Margolin
YouTube Video: Kinetic Wave Sculptures by Artist Reuben Margolin
This fellow is a genius! Installation art at its highest!!
Some other links on making things and on kinetic art:
Edmund de Waal & Pottery
Kindergarten Shop Class
kinetic art @ vimeo
When I was in high school, all the boys were required to take a class in “shop:” first mechanical drawing, then wood shop, then metal shop. It was a a wonderful experience for all of us, regardless of our level of handiness or geekiness. Learning to imagine, design, and make things should be part of everyone’s education. It is good for you if you become a carpenter, plumber, or farmer. It is also good for you if you become an engineer, a software developer, or a mathematician.
I dedicate this post to my father, Glen Carlson. He taught me how to use my hands. I spent many happy hours in his shop.
zipTimer: an iPod/iPhone app for pacing piano practice, workouts, you name it.
I’ve been working with HH on some interesting problems in musical synthesis — just having fun, not breaking new ground. We’ve worked up a small command line program, sf2a, which transforms solfa syllables into audio files. These were monophonic “compositions”, e.g. e do do q re do fa mi — two eighth notes followed by four quarter notes, a recognizable melody:-) It suffices to say
% sf2a 'allegro: e do do q re do fa mi' -o happy % play happy.wav
to play this melody. Or you could say just sf2a 'allegro: e do do q re do fa mi' -p to have the melody played forthwith.
It occurred to us that it would be interesting to be able to do the same with multi-voice compositions. A minimal example would be something like
voice1: w mi re voice2: w do_ sol_
Both voices move in whole notes. The second is an octave below the first. The solution to this little problem is amazingly simple and elegant. Intermediate files representing the sampled waveforms for voice1 and voice2 are generated. Think of them as representing columns of numbers. So we just add corresponding numbers together to make a third column. This is the sampled waveform for the two voices played together. Of course we all learned that in high-school physics: the superposition principle at work!
Here are the audio files:
voice1: E D + voice 2: C G = Counterpoint!
For the code, see HH’s blog, or our github repository.
zipTimer: an app for pacing your music practice – or any practice!
Circle and Square 