100th Post

Transitions - Best of 2008

Slideshow best viewed at 3 seconds per frame, while accompanied by these three songs in sequence:

1 - Didn't it Rain?
2 - Spiral Re-born
3 - Some Other Time
(All songs composed by Yoko Kanno, they are from the shows
Chikyuu Shoujo Arjuna,
∀ Gundam, and
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, respectively)


For my 100th post, I wanted to do something big. I went through all of the photos I had taken so far this year, and picked out what I thought were the best. I then proceeded to try and whittle the selection down to the best 100. I got fairly close, but it kept getting harder and harder to go any further. After a while I realized that it wasn't too important to reduce it to 100. I discovered that when I viewed the pictures in sequence, the images took on more significance. They start to describe my way of seeing and exploring things, such as how I like to take a picture of a subject within a wide view, and then zoom in to see more details, or how I like to go back and photograph something in different light at a later date. It is these transitions that tell the story. It is through observing the transitions throughout an hour, a day, a week, a season, and a year that I feel connected to a place.
I really enjoy looking through my photos, partly because I can remember the experience of being in that place and seeing that thing, but also because I can often see things that I hadn't noticed at the time. In the picture of the yarrow flowers near the beginning of the slideshow, you can see a tiny spider camouflaged against the flowers. I didn't notice that for a long time, even after repeatedly looking at the photo. I hope you will also observe closely, and enjoy.

A Song

Once I had gotten fairly proficient at playing by ear using my three recorders, I decided that I wanted to be able to read music for them. I wrote a song for my soprano, alto and tenor recorders using Finale, and then set about to learn to read and play it. I got through the tenor part, and then the soprano with less difficulty, since they use the same mappings. The Alto part threw me for a loop, since it is all shifted. It's like having all the cardinal directions rotated 90 degrees on every map, and then having to follow a series of directions while driving. Not easy. But I got through it eventually. It is an interesting mental exercise, so I'm sure I'll do it more often. I used my camera, which has a stereo microphone, to make the audio recordings. This added a step, but otherwise worked fine. I then combined, lined everything up, and did the editing using Audacity, which is a very nice freeware program. You can download the song from my website here:

Recorder Trio Exp.mp3

Well, enjoy, and please let me know what you think of it!

Also, MIDI.

Musical Scales

I have played instruments for many years now. In high school, I was pretty decent at playing my tuba. I had a good ear, and good memory, and a decent sense of rhythm and timing. I could keep up with the group just fine. One thing that tripped me up was sight reading. I knew the patterns for the few scales that were most common. It was enough to get by. But throw a really tough key at me and I was lost. Throw some low notes or high notes in there and I didn't have a clue what the fingering might be. For an instrument like a tuba, where all the different combinations for the notes were within easy reach, why should it be difficult to play all 12 of the different major scales? If I could play the chromatic scale, then why couldn't I play all the different major scales? Short answer: music theory instruction was lacking in the music program. It was all about performing with a group. If you wanted to be really good in band, you had to study that theory stuff on your own time. Be a "band geek" as it were.

Well, I'm a definite geek, so I started boning up on my music theory while I was in college. I learned how the different ranges of instruments were defined, what the different clefs were all about, and some other such basic stuff. It wasn't until recently when I researched the origins of western music conventions that I started to put all the pieces together. I bought a few different recorders over the past few months and have been playing and practicing with them. They are basic instruments with simple rules that provide for a lot of complexity. The instructional resources online for recorders are somewhat confusing, and even the booklet that came with my recorders was jumbled and not very helpful. I decided to take matters into my own hands.

It had been too long since I had last used POV-Ray, so I decided to see what I could do with it to help myself learn how to use my recorders better and understand music better at the same time. I wanted to be able to visualize the patterns and be able to identify whatever key a song was in so I could decode it and better understand and remember it. First of all I wanted a better fingering chart than what I was provided and could find. I wanted it simplified, without all the alternate fingerings thrown in there, many of which weren't even for my instruments. So, I created a simplified symbol system for the different types of keys and fingerings to graphically represent how the instrument is configured and played. I created arrays to lay out the different combinations of keys for all of the different notes a recorder can play (27 in total). I then created loops and conditionals to highlight just the notes in a certain scale, such as the major or diatonic scale. I made it easy to read, and created an animation to shift the pattern so that all 12 keys could be created in one fell swoop. I made a way to change the pattern of steps to explore many various scales, such as blues, augmented, gypsy, etc. I also created a set of note names so that I could know what the different keys were named, for the various types of recorders. Because the alto and sopranino recorders are shifted five half steps from the tenor and soprano, things can get really confusing. They both have the same fingering patterns, but the notes are different. Well, here are the results. I'll show a couple examples below, but you can also download the archive of all thirteen images (12 keys and chromatic) and the .POV source code.