Net Neutrality Moves To The Senate
June 28, 2006
0 CommentsThe amendment failed by a tie vote of 11-11. All ten Democratic committee members voted in favor with Senator Snowe. The eleven remaining Republican members voted against the amendment.
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Loading ...Triple Your Ability To Rock
June 28, 2006
2 CommentsTwo Canadian mathematicians from the University of Moncton in New Brunswick, have created an entirely new kind of string instrument that exploits a kind of mathematics owing more to Pythagoras’s theorem for triangles than to anything he ever thought about music.
Math is integral to music and its instruments. read more.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Musicians Seek Tips On YouTube.com
June 28, 2006
2 CommentsAmateur Musicians, Athletes Seek Tips With Videos On YouTube.com…:
When Eric Nguyen, a 20-year-old student in College Station, Texas, needed some help with a Chopin etude he was learning, he didn’t turn to his piano teacher. Instead, he went on YouTube.com, the amateur-video sharing site, and posted a video of himself playing.
Within 10 minutes, three people he’d never met had given him feedback. One told him he needed to use more wrist action to reduce false notes; another suggested a series of exercises.
What a great idea! Go give Eric some advice.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Naked Pitch
June 28, 2006
0 CommentsThis is what happened to me today. I was listening to a piece of music and the first chord was the same as another song I’ve listened to many times. The voicing, the instrument, everything was the same. I had never made that connection before. To be sure I was remembering the other song correctly, I checked. I was correct. Most people have this kind of pitch memory.
I was in the gym the other day and a trainer and her trainee were playing name that tune as they worked out. The trainee was pretty fast. It only took him a couple of bars to remember the name of the song and the artist. So he, a non-musician, has the ability to attach names to sounds.
That got me thinking. It’s not much different than what we do to learn absolute pitch or relative pitch. It’s like a game of name that tune. Instead of song titles and artist names, we use the basic fundamental labels of music. We use the names of pitches, intervals, scales, chords, and so on.
So you learn to label a minor chord when you hear one. You learn to name intervals. And you learn the names of the individual pitches themselves.
In essence, you are stripping down a particular sound to get to its most basic qualities.
Here’s what else I heard in the gym. If either of them didn’t immediately know what the song was, they would figure out what the song wasn’t. “No, it’s not Peter Gabriel and it’s not Paul McCartney. It’s not Graceland.” Then they would find other distinctions to help narrow down their choices. “It sounds like it’s from the 90s.”
If you’re learning absolute pitch, it may be useful to listen to a sound and figure out which parts of that sound aren’t pitch. It’s not timbre. It’s not volume. It’s not the sound of the instrument. Then find other distinctions to eliminate. It’s too low to be a G. It’s too high to be a C.
You can do this with pitch triggers too. If you have a tune associated to every pitch, you can narrow down your choices. It’s definitely not Beethoven’s 9th (F#). It’s not Mozart’s Sonata in C.
Too often I hear students stop on the first try. They don’t know how to label the sound they’re hearing and they give up.
Don’t give up. If you want to get pitch naked, you have to give it time. Absolute pitch is shy.
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...Al Gore Got It Right, AP Reports
June 28, 2006
0 CommentsThe AP is reporting that Al Gore got the science of climate change correct in his ‘Inconvenient Truth’. Included are quotations from a number of apparently prominent climate change scientists. This is an interesting counter point to the story we saw on this a couple weeks ago.
From Treehugger:
Fox News host David Asman asked his guests to discuss the following question: ‘If people buy into [Al Gore's] global warming hysteria, will it put him in the White House and our economy on the skids?’ Steve Forbes answered yes, and called Gore’s new movie ‘a real recipe for more socialist regulation.
Some people will do anything for power and money. read more.
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