Pay no attention to the title...

It's actually a quintet, of course:



Super Mario Bassoon Quartet - Dorkly Video

Wow.

This morning, on my way to work, the local jazz station played a new recording by Cynthia Felton: an interesting bass-and-vocal duet of Duke Ellington's "In a Mellow Tone."

And I said to myself, I said, "Wow."

Then I found her new album on CDBaby and listened to the previews of the other tunes (all of which are from the Ellington songbook).

And I said, "Wow."

This is high praise from me, as I generally don't enjoy listening to female jazz singers, with the notable exceptions of Diana Krall, Jane Monheit & Stacey Kent. Well, add another name to that list of mine, and probably at the very top. Well, she & Diana can duke it out.

Much praise has been lavished on this new recording, so I'll leave it to the professional reviewers to give more in-depth analyses. My recommendation: just buy it.

Wow.

Have you heard the new piece by W. A. Mozart?

I haven't either, but a fragment at a library in Nantes, France, was recently confirmed as being written in Mozart's hand.

Unknown Mozart fragment found in French library - Yahoo! News

Another comic link

I know I've linked to a lot of Webcomics of late, but when there's a talking musical instrument I'm just compelled to share it...

Wondermark by David Malki ! - 406: In which there's a Problem in the Orchestra

Webcomics Extravaganza

First, a pair of strips from Wondermark, the second of which actually made me laugh out loud. Thank goodness I got in earlier than everyone else this morning so nobody could hear me...

Wondermark by David Malki ! - 383: In which a Fortune is sought
Wondermark by David Malki ! - 384: In which are tried Unconventional Methods

And, since xkcd expressly allows republishing, here's today's strip (this one speaks to me very personally, of course):



As usual, check the text you see when you hold your mouse over the images for all three strips.

Today's FoxTrot

Priceless...

FoxTrot for February 17, 2008

Finally...

Well, after three and a half years of running this blog I finally bought a real domain name: augmentedfourth.com. I might have bought it two years ago; however, right when I was considering it, somebody called the Augmented Fourth Brass Quintet bought it and put up a static page that never changed through the entire two years of ownership.

My blog isn't actually hosted at my new domain; going there in your browser just redirects you back here. However, I do keep a server there for files and other miscellaneous personal use... for instance, you can download MP3 files of my college composition recital (I know, it's more than four years old and I should probably record something new) at http://augmentedfourth.com/media/why_not.zip. Also, if you download that, make sure to use your MP3 player to look at the "lyrics" I've embedded in the files; while there aren't really lyrics to most of the pieces, you can see my Program Notes from the original performance in there.

My new URL!

Geek Code update

Well, since I've been an IT professional for more than 2 months now, I figured that it's time to update my Geek Code (seen at the bottom of any page of my blog). Here it is for those who don't like scrolling:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GIT/MU d+(-) s:+>: a-> C++> ULXB++++$ P+ L++ E--- W++ N o++ K? w-- !O M++
!V PS+ PE+ Y PGP- t- !5 X- R- tv+ b++ DI++ D--- G++ e++(*) h--- r+++
y+++(?)
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

(my geek code decoded)

A Coded Musical Message

It looks like I've found the perfect story to take me out of my blogging hiatus. It's about Giovanni Maria Pala, an Italian musician and computer technician who proposes a very plausible theory that there is a musical composition hidden in Da Vinci's much-lauded painting of "Last Supper."

Come on... it's a guy who's both a musician and a computer tech, and he spent four years solving a pictographic/musicological puzzle. If I lived in Italy, I'm sure I would have been helping the guy! The composition is found by overlaying a musical staff on the painting and treating the pieces of bread and the human hands as musical notes based on where they fall within the staff (here's a photo from the Associated press, though I bet that link will be dead in a week).

I find it odd that he didn't also include the wine glasses as musical notes, given that both wine and bread are still used today in churches as they participate in the sacrament of Communion that celebrates the Last Supper. However. I suppose Pala's book ("La Musica Celata" -- "The Hidden Music") probably serves up some explanation regarding what led him to choose only hands and bread.

Unfortunately the AP article draws a lot of parallels to the pseudo-thriller The Da Vinci Code, but in any case the actual story being covered here is very interesting. I don't think Pala's book has been translated into English, though I'd probably read it if it were. I suppose I can get a friend who lived in Italy for a while to read it and give me the "executive summary"...

Leonardo painting has coded 'soundtrack' - Associated Press

Feeling like a Part of Something Bigger

For me, today's New York Times article on Internet music services is oddly apropos. You see, last night I went to a local meet-up for users of Pandora's personalized Internet radio, and there I was able to meet (and meekly thrust a business card at) founder Tim Westergren.

The meeting was scheduled to start at 7pm, but I showed up in the neighborhood earlier so I could park my car in an out-of-the-way spot I knew about a few blocks away. (Another striking coincidence is that the meeting was held just down the street from the best music-supply store in the city, and I needed a box of saxophone reeds anyway.) I showed up just at the same time as another Pandora listener whose name I unfortunately forget, and together we went into a room with a large number of empty chairs.

We were the first to arrive, and Tim was just nonchalantly sitting on the edge of the small stage and pushing buttons on a handheld device of some sort. I didn't look hard enough to see which device he had-- Blackberry, Treo, or Q, I couldn't care less at that point-- because I was about to meet the guy who came up with and implemented one of the best ideas at the crossroads of music and technology... the Music Genome Project.

We shook hands, and I talked with Tim for a bit while waiting for the hall to fill. Like many people have said when meeting someone they admire, "he was just a regular guy." Tim left to talk to the guy working the venue, and I sat and discussed the service with more listeners who were starting to trickle in.

I was in the second row, and I could feel the room filling fast behind me. When 7:00 rolled around, Tim got up and immediately the chatting ceased. He started by asking if everyone could hear, and he decided to turn off a noisy fan in the back rather than resorting to a microphone.

It really felt like a conversation. He told us about Pandora's history as a company, and attendees felt free to chime in with questions and comments pretty much from the get-go. We ended up talking about the future of Pandora and Web radio, requesting new features, and generally just bouncing around some ideas. The relaxed, casual atmosphere Tim obviously had worked hard to cultivate made it a really interesting, informative, and fun evening.

Somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00, he "concluded" things, basically just excusing those who had already heard what they wanted to hear. A number of people stuck around, including a group of researchers from UCSD who are working on the problem of getting a computer to analyze and classify music (Pandora employs a team of 50 musicologists to study individual songs so they can be matched with others for your custom station). I loved this part; where the conversation got really technical and I was able to geek out to my heart's content.

I managed to hang around in the venue long enough to be the last person there and talk to Tim individually once more. This is when I gave him my card, told him about my fascination with the Genome, and told him I'd love to help his company in any way I could: coming up with ideas for application of their research, testing proposed features, or possibly even (if they might have me one day) becoming one of their Analysts or even part of their Engineering staff.

When I flipped open my phone to call my wife and let her know I was heading home, its illuminated clock read nearly 10pm. Time really does fly when you're enjoying yourself.

Not Talking about the iPod

Oddly, an article about portable media players that doesn't so much as mention the iPod. Granted, the article is about devices with wireless data transfer capabilities, but Apple's market-dominating player isn't even noted for the fact that it lacks such a feature.

Music and Video Players Add Wi-Fi Access - PCWorld.com

Today's 'Bizarro'

Music jokes on the comics page...

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Bizarro for January 10

John Gruber on Universal Music Group

As many technology-minded people are no doubt already aware, Microsoft's new Zune music player is bad for the industry for more reasons than merely its lack of style and just-a-bit-too-late-to-the-party device immaturity.

That's right: Microsoft has agreed to give Universal one dollar for every Zune sold. This is akin to the "piracy tax" that Canadians pay on blank CDs: since the device can be used to play illegally-obtained audio, the music distributor is asking for recompense on those acts of piracy that will "inevitably" occur with the new device. Granted, in the U.S we used to pay a similar "piracy tax" on blank audio cassettes, but the public as a whole was neither interested nor informed.

But since Microsoft has allowed one peddler of recorded music to get in on profits from the Zune, this may open the floodgates to distributors asking for a cut of profits from sales of other devices as well. The link below goes to John Gruber's fictionalized discussion of how such a meeting between Universal and Apple might go, if the media giant wanted to get a piece of the iPod at their next iTunes contract renegotiation.

(Warning: satire ahead)

Daring Fireball: Conjectural Transcript of the Upcoming Negotiations Between Apple and Universal Music