Brushes and Briars

Here are Jodie and I rehearsing Brushes and Briars (arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams), for a gig on the weekend.

There’s something really nice about the sound in our kitchen, which I’ve only recently noticed. Lovely!

 

Monty Python Monk Cult

Being a Monty Python Monk should be a bonefide cult. I guess that begs the question, what is a bonefide cult?

“I’ve been involved in a number of cults both as a leader and a follower. You have more fun as a follower but you make more money as a leader.” (Creed, from The Office)

 

Up late drinking tea and singing Gumpelzhaimer. Also, Guy Smiley Syndrome.

Over the years a lot of spectacular musicians have played in our humble loungeroom. Brilliant jazz and classical pianists, spectacular vocalists of all kinds, the odd radio announcer. It seems a shame that so much of it has come and gone with virtually no record.

In the spirit of changing that, and of just publishing ourselves a bit more, Jodie and I are tentatively planning to put up at least one recording a week from the O’Regan loungeroom.

This first one is us singing a canon from a book of Classical Canons, a little yellow Hungarian book for hardcore Kodaly ninjas. Jodie’s practising this for an exam in her Masters level advanced super hardcore Kodaly ninja aural pedagogy course this semester, and she roped me in tonight to help out. There’s over an hour of painful process preceeding this of which you have been mercifully spared.

I’m particularly proud of the artistic video framing (oops). Oh, and this was filmed on a Flip Ultra, not known for its audio abilities, but I think it’s done quite an adequate job.

Guy Smiley

Self Operating Napkin - Rube Goldberg

In other news this week, I spent a large part of Tuesday largely convinced that I was Guy Smiley from Sesame street. Since I got new glasses, my internal model of my body has been upset by my body model seeming too tall (I guess the glasses make me seem smaller and shorter). I’ve had weird sensations that either my feet are through the ground, like a bug in a 3D shooter, or that I’m suddenly a dwarf, replete with far too short arms and legs. But Guy Smiley is new. I felt as though I moved like a muppet, that my head was tipping back when I talked, my arms were waving around, and that I actually sounded like Guy. Very vivid. Distracting, and possibly psychotic, but it seemed benign enough. I’m interested to see what happens next. Possibly I should get new glasses, but that’s seems unadventurous somehow.

And also I was a Rube Goldberg version of myself today, mentally, for a while, which was quite distracting and irritating. Obtuse! Sometimes you just want to think in a straight line, and instead this transitive Rube Goldberg mental fractal. Ridiculous.

 

Vocal Blending doesn’t just mean a straight tone

Too often, vocal groups (especially a capella groups) and choirs equate blending with an extremely straight, light tone. That can be lovely, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ways to blend. To blend you need to be in tune, you need matching vowels, you need to use the same vocal placement (forward? Back room? Head? Nasal? Some combination?). Above all, you need to listen to your collegues and try to match their sound; sing with the voice of the group.

Here are some examples of great blend, wildly different, all excellent.

To start, a group who are emblematic of the straight tone in classical ensemble, the Tallis Scholars. But even they include a lot of colour and variation. Here they are singing Allegri’s Misere, famous not only for its beauty, but for the fact that it was kept for the church in Rome, and no one was allowed to transcribe it. This ban was only lifted after 14 year old Mozart visited the Sistine Chapel, heard it, and later that day wrote it down in its entirety.

Il Divo – Adagio

A huge vibrato sound, and quite different vocal qualities, yet they blend amazingly well. Admittedly this recording has seen a long spell in the studio, and yet, still great. Somehow they remind me of glam rock. Oh, and massive bonus points for fireworks at the truck driver’s gear change key change, brilliantly gaudy!

Here’s the Brockington Ensemble singing “It’s a me”. Full on gospel, extremely forward, front of face sound. Awesome blend.

Now a study in the vocal back room, here’s “Bogoroditse Dyevo”, from Rachmaninov’s Vespers. I’m not totally happy with this recording as an example, you could go a lot deeper and bassier and, well, damn it, more Russian. It’s lovely though.

Update: here’s a better one, sublime. These are Russians. Jodie notes that perhaps we are better to sing the music of our culture, there is a deep foundation which is missing when we sing other peoples’ music. I think that’s a little harsh, but it is true that the best examples of a piece of music are usually by cultural natives. Back to this piece, the highlights for me are the soloist (no youtube commenters, she isn’t out of tune, they’re just not using even tempered tuning), and the basses (!)

How about Crosby Stills & Nash, for some 60s/70s folk blending? A bit forward, but mostly fairly understated, not too much emphasis on production in any particular location:

 

Mr Squiggle’s Guide To Project Management

Mr Squiggle

I’ve been thinking about how you can manage to complete your own projects (stuff you set for yourself, not work projects), if you have very little attention span and/or like starting more than finishing. Like me! Also this works for anyone trying to do anything in their spare time outside of any combination of work/study/family.

Let’s take a cue from Mr Squiggle. He used to finish drawings all the time, even though he had the attention span of a flea. He should have been leaving half finished projects all over the place, but apparently not (in fact, he finished the projects of lazy Australian children!) How did he do it?

1: Miss Jane grabbed him by the foot when he tried to go on a spacewalk

2: His projects (drawings), while physically large, were tiny sized projects.

Now the Miss Jane approach can work, but we don’t always have Miss Jane available, or if we do, we don’t let her do her job. But tiny sized projects, that we can do.

Here’s my categorization of project sizes:

• Tiny: from a couple of minutes up to four hours of dedicated attention.
• Small: from four hours to 2 days of dedicated attention (ie: a full weekend)
• Medium: More than 1 full weekend, up to 4 full weekends
• Large: Anything bigger than Medium.

The way to achieve anything, Mr Squiggle style, is to attempt the smallest possible projects that you can. This will annoy perfectionists, but frankly we just don’t have that luxury.

Why the smallest projects? Because every time you put a project on pause, to continue later, you have put it on death row. Ask yourself how often you pick up projects like this after you drop them? I give mine maybe 50%. If you pause a project multiple times, well, the chances are pitiful.

Tiny projects are the best. No matter what your life circumstances, you will find once in a while that you have a chunk of Tiny project time available. If you manage to find time for one tiny project per week, you are miles ahead of where you could be. Awesome!

Small projects are more troublesome. It can be really hard to find an uninterrupted weekend. These can be good if you can get a day or two of leave, or an unexpected public holiday crops up. Don’t sacrifice these times to fixing the fence, grab them and do something cool (like making a flash game of someone fixing a fence!)

Sometimes your project wants to be small sized, it just wont fit into 4 hours. Then, if you can, break it into Tiny sized chunks (4 chunks works here). Why? Because there’s a trick; if you can finish an entire project (even a tiny one, which is one of several to achieve a small project goal), you’ll feel like you achieved something, and you’ll feel much more able to start a new project using the previous one as a building block, than you would have felt about picking up a paused project and continuing it. I think this is about motivation; finishing is a reward, not only in itself, but because it unshackles you. Every project is a set of shackles. Every completion is freedom. Every experience of the reward of freedom makes you want to come back for more.

(Tip: Remember to overplay your successes. Milk every possible psychological reward out of them. Why not?)

Breaking projects up isn’t a total get-out-of-jail-free card though. For a piece of a larger project to stand alone as a project of its own, it needs to be meaningful on its own, and it must stand on its own. Meaningful on its own means it must be useful in and of itself. You should be able to look at it or think about it and think “yes, I did that, rock”. Stands on its own means it shouldn’t require context; you shouldn’t need to keep notes on where you are up to. You should be able to describe what it is in a short sentence.

Medium projects are danger territory. 2 to 4 weekends, for a person with a busy schedule, is necessarily going to include big pauses between the weekends. The answer again is to break it up. I have an even better approach though, it’s like this:

1 – Break the medium project in small projects.

2 – Break the first small project into tiny projects if at all possible.

3 – *Throw away all the rest of the small projects*

Yes, that’s right, chuck ‘em out. Forget you were ever going to do them. Don’t keep notes, or only the most scanty. The first small project should make sense on its own, as I said above, so that should be ok. Trust your future self to see the finished small project, see the same possibilities as you see now, and pick up with another small project to move things forward.

Gus the Snail

Large projects are the most problematic of all. The grand vision is so unlikely to go anywhere, and will demoralize you in the process, as you beat yourself up for your terrible lack of progress. The answer? Don’t try! Truly! Pick a smaller idea and run with that. Your future self will thank you.

What you can keep from a large project idea is the vision, maybe a sentence long, the high level idea you’d like to reach. That’s valuable. But keep it in your head, there’s no reason to write it down. If you can’t remember the vision, it was probably a crappy idea to begin with.

This approach means you can succeed, even though they are tiny successes. These successes, over time, will make you feel more confident in your ability to succeed in successive projects. Meanwhile, projects wont be a mental burden, they’ll be short and sweet and fun. Over the longer course, you can achieve large things from all these little pieces, in an incremental fashion, that leaves the future you the space to steer the course, and not be committed to what would otherwise be likely to be an increasingly inflexible and inappropriate plan as time wears on.

And of course, you can also afford to fail with tiny projects. So what, it’s only a few hours. That can roll of you like the proverbial water off the proverbial duck’s proverbial back (I assume in a proverbial rainstorm or some such). Being able to fail is essential to being able to try anything unsafe (which is most anything worthwhile).

Trust your future self! Keep it tiny! Keep it fun! Enjoy tiny successes, shrug off tiny failures.

Oh, and don’t watch the tv, it’s just a grumpy snail anyway

(ps: this blog post was a tiny project. I finished. How cool is that? Yeah)

 

Why I will be able to upload in my lifetime

(apologies to Ray Kurzweil)

 

Infinite Bookshelf

Bookcase

I’m looking at a bookshelf and wondering why it exists.

We love to collect books. They’re a symbol of knowledge and learning. Reading is fun, and to look at a bookshelf is to remind yourself of that feeling of being absorbed by a tome, lovely. We have a sensory relationship with books, their smell, their texture. That kind of thing is an emotional connection to a fondly remembered past shared by many readers, an olfactory mnemonic, functioning to remind us not so much of specific readings but of the positive emotions associated with them.

Loaded as they are with meaning and triggers and symbols, they also function as powerful units of consumption. We like to own them. Really they’re excellent in terms of consumer commodity; we feel that owning them will make us happier and or more satisfied in some way (smarter! more knowledgable! more interesting to others!), we feel like their acquisition advances us in some material way toward some perfect ideal of the intellectual life, and we can never have enough of them, because they are barely fungible. It is impractical to own a copy of every book, so there is always something more we haven’t got, something more to lust after and think that if we only had that one, maybe we’d be happy.

These books are the material object, the embodiment. These are the things we can hold in our hand, put on a shelf, throw at someone.These are the things we cache, that we hoard.

There is another book, very different from the book described above. That book is the content, the information separate from the embodiment. It is the ideal platonic book. It is the class of things of which the embodied book is an instance.

When we desire knowledge, it’s an inherently disembodied thing. We want to get it into our minds, and the way it gets there is more or less immaterial*. Also, we want to talk about it with others, and again its form is mostly not interesting.

More or less generally, it is the case that a mind with more knowledge is more desirable than one with less. The infinite regress of this says that one with everything is best of all. So there’s been a dream probably forever, of accessing all human knowledge, and the extension of that via the golden rule, to the concept of universal access to all human knowledge. Everyone should be able to know anything they desire to know.

Wonderful recent inventions to this end have been digital information encoding, and the internet. Cory Doctorow says “The Internet is the greatest copying machine ever invented, and it’s never going to get any harder to copy stuff.”

But let’s get back to the realm of books. Should we wish to, we now have the ability to trivially provide access to all the books ever written and ever to be written to anyone who can get online, and indeed a lot of them already are available in this way.

(Of course many of the books are not online, and wont be for some time. Unfortunately, we have a system in place which controls what platonic information can be available via the great copying machine, and it jealously guards many of the books. It’s about making money, and it is entirely invested in the vision of the book as embodied instance, not as platonic class. They are not selling the platonic book; they are selling wodges of paper with whatever they can decorate it with to make you want to buy it. I don’t really want to go on about that here, except to declare that if we have to take sides, I’m on the side of universal access to all human knowledge. Given the great copying machine, there is an inherent selfishness in any act of restricting access (which includes requiring payment and certainly includes requiring it to be printed on dead trees). For this act to be moral, the benefit gained must outweigh the penalty paid by the entire mass of humanity due to lack of access. A personal gain would have to be huge indeed in this instance. Or, is it just that the owners believe their works to be of such marginal value that excluding the great mass of humanity is barely a cost at all? But I digress.)

Let’s just imagine that everything worth considering is available electronically in some form, for free. To a large extent in fact this is true now; I find I can get by for the most part with freely available information. I feel certain this is a continuing trend, and that as time progresses it will become more and more practical to live this way.

What does this mean for my bookshelf?

It depends a lot how you feel about books. Are books their platonic class, or their embodied form?

If they are the embodied form, then this free availability of (zero cost digital copies of) the platonic form is beside the point. How can I experience the book properly without the paper, the feel of the cover, the smell of the print? How can I make my notes, put in a bookmark, turn over a corner? What about the little rip on page 83 that reminds me of the day all those years ago when my little brother took the book without asking? What about the experience of a library full of row upon row of books? What about a comfortable study, a warm fire, an overstuffed chair, and a shelf of good books?

These are undeniably things of beauty, but it is largely nostalgia. It relates to past culture, and experiences of early life. Subsequent generations have their own culture and nostalgia, and these things you value might mean no more to them than reminiscences of the ice man on horse and cart, or the sound of enslaved africans singing in the cotton fields.

I remember in the mid 90s, arguing with a friend about the merits of adding simulated analogue hiss to a digital recording. His position was that it makes the sound more natural; I just thought it was a cultural artifact, learned by listeners and by sound engineers in their formative years due to the analogue equipment of the era. I predicted future audiophiles, not yet born perhaps, would crave that “ringing” sound of lower bitrate mp3 encodings. Now, more than 10 years later, I read about a survey that “shows increasing preference for MP3 by youngsters.”

So it will be with books. We pine after physical books, but our kids and their kids, well, who knows? Perhaps an aging early generation Kindle, plastic yellowing, reading surface scuffed, will ignite in them the same sensations of intellectual warmth? Or will their eyes tear up ever so slightly at the sight of the splash screen for Adobe Acrobat Reader?

If on the other hand the platonic form is for you the book, then the future is bright. Google’s unassuming search page becomes the door to the thieves’ treasure, and Aladin need only click “search”. Suddenly, the need to cache is gone! If you can believe that the internet will continue, that the mass of information available will only grow, then there is no need to keep a copy, even a digital one. If you need it, you get it, read it, and if you had to download a copy you can just delete it afterwards, because if you need it again in the future, you’ll just go get it again. I find this to be enormously liberating. A cache, a collection, a hoard, is an anchor. You have to devote time and resources and mental energy to its creation, maintenance, management, protection, and it is always imperfect. To suddenly be freed from the need is something difficult to describe; it’s like the feeling of getting rid of all your possessions and just driving. It is weightlessness.

There is something important in the embodied form point of view, though. Whatever the main screen of Google might be, it is both more and less than a bookshelf. That search screen ignites in us the promise of infinite unexperienced treasures, but it says nothing of those treasures we have already experienced, of what has informed us and made us who we are. It is not personal.

This also applies to you if the platonic form is your (perfect eternal) cup of tea. You might be able to access all the books via the net, but can it tell you what you have already read? What about the books you’ve studied, vs those you’ve skimmed, vs those that have been recommended to you but you’ve never gotten around to looking up?

I think this an important function of a bookshelf; it is a history. Any bookshelf is the representation of the thought process of the person who put the books there. This might be the librarian’s structured set of books in various categories, or it might be the haphazard personal collection of somewhat random books collected over decades.

For the digital realm, I’ve been trying to replace this with a fairly minimal effort, my reading list. It’s only a short list so far, but it’ll grow, and eventually become unwieldy. I guess it can go through the natural stages of organisation, from list to hierarchy to search enabled mountain.

But is this the right way to go? I feel as though something more is required. How do we keep a usable history of our access of information, which integrates well with normal use of the web, which scales? What secondary effects could be realised through collecting and organising this information well?

This idea of intellectual history is important I think. It is important because we forget ourselves. We forget what we have read, or we remember it only partially, or incorrectly, or both of these things. We find that we hold opinions which were arrived at by chains of reasoning, but no trace of the chain remains. So over time, without our history, what we considered a mighty intellectual fortress becomes a curiously ornate shell, elaborate, but thin walled and empty.

In that light, the bookcase looks less impressive to me. It was never really fit for that purpose.

-

* apologies

 

Nice fonts

We largely use Open Office at home (one machine still has an old copy of MS Office, but I’m trying to convince the little guy who owns it to try OO.o). Recently Jodie was looking for more fonts (for her windows machine) and we ended up here:

1001 Free Fonts

It looks like a bit of a scam site, but it’s actually very cool, and the fonts are lovely. Well worth a visit. It has good installation instructions too, iirc.

(btw to get these to show up in Open Office, you need to close open office, and all related apps, and reopen it. If you don’t get the splash screen with the progress bar when you open it, then something was still running, try again. If in doubt, log out and back in, or just reboot.)

 

Pre bedtime thoughts

• Our kid’s kids will be perhaps slightly repelled by our compulsion to hoard information, to need to memorize things, to own a copy. But they’ll pity us and say, “it’s understandable, they grew up so poor”.
• Today, we compete in our various chosen activities mostly limited by geography (eg: “I am the only gay in the village”).  I think the future, where we all compete on the global stage in our various fields of interest, will see groupings change from geographical to much more finely grained domain niches. Also I think it will require great humility; when there are billions of people all in together, it’s very hard to be the best at something, or even up to par!
• The internet is an idea machine which is vastly more capable, many orders of magnitude more, than any of us. It’s not whether an idea has been thought of before, but by how many people, how many nodes in the network mind. The results are, for us, riches. And wonderfully, it scales. If we want more riches, we need to keep adding more people, more nodes, to this mind. Give everyone the chance to participate in this. Get Africa online. More population, however we can manage it. Grow this thing.
• If the freemium model says ten percent of users pay for all the rest, then we likely all end up being in roughly the same amount of ten percents. So we all pay, but we all pay a lot less, or get a lot more, or more likely, pay a lot less and get a lot more. That’s good.
• I’m thinking of budgeting a monthly amount for donations to free things. 50 dollars australian? That’s enough to make you a millionare in New Zealand, or around 20 cents US. I might take solicitations from people out there each month on where the money should go.

 

Prospect Singers – Singing in the Gallery

I sing in the Prospect Singers, a community choir, on Friday mornings (it’s run by my darling wife Jodie).

For anyone local, we’re singing in the Prospect Gallery (attached to the Prospect Library), tomorrow morning.

Here’s a map reference. The library is on the corner of Thomas St and Main North Rd. The Gallery is accessed via the library.

Jodie made the poster, using Open Office. Nice!