Happy things thread!

[Tropylium]

Found some very nice blue leather shoes today (no, not suede, it's some proprietary method for indigo-dying regular leather).

[Risla]

So I got stranded in Kobe at a friend's place all day due to the massive-ass typhoon rolling directly through. I had two doctor's appointments in the morning, and one of them ran late and the trains home shut down. But I just had two incredible strokes of luck:

1. The first train line to come back up in the region was my own, and only between the two stations I really needed to go to. I usually transfer to another train, but it wasn't running yet and I decided to walk home—it's only 45 minutes, anyway, and it's a walk I've done dozens of times.

2. After I got away from the station, I spent 45 minutes walking through a dark city in which the power was completely out. I was CERTAIN my power would be out, but as I rounded the final corner towards my apartment…I saw lights. Only my block has power. I have power. Holy shit, guys. I'm still dumbfounded about this. I can't actually believe I have power.

Anyone need any extra luck? I think I have too much…

[alice]

Anyone need any extra luck? I think I have too much…

Glad to hear you survived. I saw some footage on this evening's news and it did look quite terrifying.

Anyway, I could do with a bit of luck right now, if you can get it halfway across the world...

[alice]

Went back to work for half a day; survived with no obvious ill effects.

[Vijay]

I just realized that no one gives me trouble at the office anymore. People screw things up, people certainly give me a lot of work, but at least they seem to appreciate my efforts. A lot of them seem sympathetic regarding any issues I may have. Some of them seem surprised at how much work I agree to do. Some people ask me for help a lot and are apologetic about it, but I tell them they don't need to apologize, and I mean it. I love helping people out.

[Travis B.]

I got my Forth implementation, Attoforth (the name is kind of a misnomer, since it has things that a "small" Forth probably would not have, like preemptive multitasking - I mostly chose the name because the name was not taken, out of the zillions of Forth implementations out there), working to the point that interactive code execution, code execution from a string in memory, and code execution from a file, even when arbitrarily nested, work as far as I have tested them.

[dhok]

I got a Morin Khuur for about $65, which is decently mid-range for a Morin Khuur (they're thankfully not expensive by the standards of instruments). She needs some rosin, and I'm trying to find lessons. I'm hoping one of my students will know somebody who knows somebody. They're cool instruments--as soon as I heard the timbre I thought "This is a blues instrument, but it doesn't know it yet." Her tentative name is Beatrice (edit: or perhaps Katya?), as suggested by a friend.

a piece on morin khuur (and a few other things)

[Raphael]

It being October, the heating at my place has been turned on again.

[Travis B.]

I am really happy with how Attoforth is coming along. I now have a working File-Access API (well, working as far as the parts I have tested) and Wordlist API, and I have some basic concurrency primitives, namely locks and condition variables, working. It still has a ways to go, but it is nice to have made a good amount of progress on it.

[Salmoneus]

I got a Morin Khuur for about $65, which is decently mid-range for a Morin Khuur (they're thankfully not expensive by the standards of instruments). She needs some rosin, and I'm trying to find lessons. I'm hoping one of my students will know somebody who knows somebody. They're cool instruments--as soon as I heard the timbre I thought "This is a blues instrument, but it doesn't know it yet." Her tentative name is Beatrice (edit: or perhaps Katya?), as suggested by a friend.

a piece on morin khuur (and a few other things)

insert remark on cultural appropriation here.

But I've always thought that a lot of Americana styles could really do with a guembri... if you happen to be looking for a bass accompaniment to your morin khuur!

[of course, it's not really loud enough by itself, unless you stick a microphone right next to it or a pickup right on it. But then that's true of almost all traditional instruments. ]

Incidentally, do you know the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack? It's interesting because its "eastern" sound is actually created with a cello, but played in a more eastern style - indeed, some of its lines were originally written for erhua - showing how much of the sound can be in the playing rather than the instrument. [inverse challenge: play some Bach cello suites on the morin khuur...]


Personally, though, on the timbres of bowed string instruments, I think there's something special about the sound of the kamancheh. I'm not usually a fan of that sort of hoarse timbre, but I think the kamancheh gets the balance about right...


And since we don't have a lot of threads on unusual string instruments, I'll use this excuse to share this theorbo video I found. It's de Visee's theorbo arrangement of a piece by Couperin, but unlike a lot of the most popular solo theorbo pieces it really, to my mind, displays the breadth of the instrument - particularly love the low notes at the finale. [of course, the video loses points visually for not actually showing the whole of the theorbo, a beautifully weird instrument]

[akam chinjir]

Someone at a bar I used to go to would play Take Five on the erhu.

[Vijay]

One of the few YouTube videos there are of someone playing Tipu's Tiger has some British dude playing "Rule Britannia" on it.

[MacAnDàil]

The conversation about unusual covers with dstring instruments reminds me of two songs I appreciate the originality and musicianship of:

Take Five by Sachal Studios Orchestra (a Pakistani orchestra)
and
Toccata and Fugue by Ulytau (a Kazakh folk metal band)

[Salmoneus]

Maybe nobody else will understand why the Pathetique on a clavichord is so fantastic. Your first reaction will probably be that it sounds weird and ugly. But if you have a spare half an hour, listen to the whole thing!

Here's four great things about it:
a) the clavichord is the most sensitive, faithful keyboard instrument. The player has much more control over its volume than a piano player - they can even change the volume while the note is playing. They can even introduce vibrato! This is inconceivable on ordinary keyboards. In this piece, there are times when Winters (the clavichordist) can drop the volume right to the edge of silence (whereas the piano effectively has a minimum volume below which it can't make any sound) - at one point even reminding me of the silent notes guqin players use, where you can just hear the faintest touch of the string - and then he can crescendo so smoothely and so rapidly! But beyond the things that would obviously be impossible on a piano, throughout the piece we can hear the passion expressed more directly than normally - partly because he intentionally adopts a more heart-on-sleeve interpretation of tempi (etc) but also because the clavichord does just convey the emotion of the player so much more transparently. Playing the piano is like playing through a blanket by comparison...

b) those sounds! Sure, it takes a while to get used to. But if you're used to the piano, having such different timbres puts the familiar music in a different light. Two things stand out to me. One is the way that, like a tangentenfluegel, the clavichord's timbre varies over its pitch range, from the relatively sharp treble through to the more muffled, slightly buzzy bass (that reminds me of the arp stop on a muselaar!). The result of this is that the 'vocal line' stands out more clearly from the accompaniment than on a piano (or harpsichord) which doesn't have that timbral effect. The other is just the remarkable sound in the moments where there's a loud, staccato bass, which buzzsaws into the music in a way you can't get from an piano. It's also worth noting that these sounds are all 'purer' than those of a piano, more harmonic, which is why there's that sort of MIDI-file feeling (again, like a muselaar).

c) it's less insane as an idea than it seems. The pathetique was written in 1798, when clavichords would have been widespread in domestic settings, particularly in Germany. When amateurs bought Beethoven's sheet music and tried to play it at home, a lot of them would have been doing it on clavichords, not on pianos - keyboards were often considered interchangeable back then (hence Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' sonata - simply a demand that it be played specifically on the piano rather than on a different sort of keyboard). Indeed, we know that some experts DID perform Beethoven on clavichords. So, while it's certainly not the sound that Beethoven was intending when he wrote the piece, it's a sound that people in his era would have heard, and that Beethoven would have expected. Indeed, Beethoven himself played clavichords, and it's not impossible that, seated at a clavichord, he might well have played some of his own works.

d) it's a reminder of how revolutionary Beethoven was. Compare this to the usual sort of thing you could hear on a clavichord - Bach, or Mozart. By comparison, Beethoven's music is bursting at the seams of the instrument. Indeed, this piece perhaps as much as any other is why we DON'T have clavichords today, and why the modern piano was invented.


[Why? What's wrong with clavichords? Well, three things. First, the sound is relatively thin, lacking the richness of the piano. It's also in a way pure, whereas the piano's inharmonic flaws make it sound more human, and hence affecting. Second, the sustain is much poorer than on a piano, so you don't get the singing quality. And above all: the instrument is inherently very, very quiet. You have to stand close to it, or use microphones. What you CAN'T do is, as you can on a piano, fill an entire auditorium with a fortissimo that can be heard over an orchestra.]




Some people may also ask: sorry, and what IS a clavichord? Brief answer:

More: show

European keyboards (not including organs, accordians, etc) use mechanical devices to play strings, so that multiple strings can be played at once, without needing as many fingers as normally necessary. You can do this by plucking the string, or by hitting it. This gives two different keyboard families.

Plucked keyboards are generally defined by the orientation of the strings and keyboard. If they're parallel, it's a virginal. If they're perpendicular, like a modern piano, it's a harpsichord. If they're at an angle, it's a spinet. This is a relatively simple mechanism, and it's easy to make a relatively loud, clear instrument. But there are two huge downsides: there's very little control over volume (indeed, if you could play much louder, you'd also be changing the pitch of the note unpredictably), and there's no sustain (partly because it's an inherently sharp plucking sound, and partly because devices in the instrument cut off the sound to prevent blurring, and there's no way to control those devices from the keys). These problems could theoretically be overcome, but it would require a lot of ingenuity and nobody's ever done it.

Struck keyboards, however, have an even bigger problem: they don't work. If you hit a string with a hammer, it doesn't make a sound, because the hammer is then lying on the string, damping it. Human string-hitters hit the string and then pull back the hammer, but that's very, very not easy mechanically.

So instead, what people used were 'tangents': you don't so much exactly "hit" the string as hit it and slide past it. It's that sliding that provides the sound. And it also does something really weird: because the initial hit and the sliding hold the string in place, as it were, the tangent both plucks the string and defines its length at the same time. This instrument is the clavichord, and this is why wobbling the key the right way lets you wobble both the volume and the pitch of the note. And unlike a sharp 'pluck', you can scrape past the string more or less quickly, or even changing the speed partway through the note, giving you vastly more control over the volume and contour of the sound. Magical! And because the mechanism is very simple indeed (it's basically just a lever with a pointy bit at the end), it directly mirrors the fingers of the player and is very quick, with no confusing lag between action and sound - and it's cheap to make! And it can also do something else other keyboards can't: because the string length is defined by the tangent, it doesn't have to be predefined, which means you can play multiple notes on the same string. Theoretically you could play all the notes on the same string - though that would negate the whole point of a mechanical keyboard, and in practice "fretted" clavichords tended to just have two or three notes per string. (some clavichords were 'unfretted' like pianos or harpsichords, to increase the ability to play many notes at once - but fretting means you need fewer strings, so it reduces the price and the size of the instrument, making fretted clavichords ideal for domestic and travel purposes).

BUT: you can't play too loud, because otherwise you change the pitch. And no matter how loudly you play, most of the energy is wasted: you lose all the energy of the initial hit (which just defines the string) and have to rely on the much less efficient process of sliding past the string to generate sound. And what's more: because only the string on one side of the tangent speaks, you end up wasting at least half your energy on the mute string. So the result in an inherently quiet instrument, no matter what you do to it.

Therefore a new invention arose: the tangentenfluegel, or 'tangent piano'. Actually, a bunch of inventions arose, but the tangent piano is the notable one (with one exception - see below). The tangent piano abandons the clavichord idea, and is basically a harpsichord where the harpsichord action is adapted to striking rather than plucking. The vital part is that rather than the key in some way hitting the string, instead the key fires a projectile at the string from below, which hits the string and bounces back into place. This is only a little more complicated than a harpsichord.

...and although it's a mechanically ingenious device with a unique and interesting sound, the tangent piano is now also obsolete, because some bloke called Bartolomeo Cristofori invented an entirely new mechanism, by which hammers could hit strings and then be retracted - and all it took was a couple of dozen moving parts. This immediately meant you could play louder, softer and with more control than the tangent piano, and the new instrument - once people swallowed the high price tag - quickly made all other keyboards obsolete.

[Linguoboy]

Everyone likes to complain about Kids Today, but I just filled my student assistant position and was remarkably impressed with my applicant pool. Ultimately, I decided to interview six candidates. Two e-mailed me to let me know they were no longer interested in the job. The four I interviewed all showed up on time or early and asked me good questions. One wrote me afterwards to tell me he'd accepted another job.

I'm just not used to that level of responsiveness and thoughtfulness for a part-time position that pays $11/hr.

[Salmoneus]

Everyone likes to complain about Kids Today, but I just filled my student assistant position and was remarkably impressed with my applicant pool. Ultimately, I decided to interview six candidates. Two e-mailed me to let me know they were no longer interested in the job. The four I interviewed all showed up on time or early and asked me good questions. One wrote me afterwards to tell me he'd accepted another job.

I'm just not used to that level of responsiveness and thoughtfulness for a part-time position that pays $11/hr.

I'm always amused these days at the people complaining about young people these days these days.

Ugh, young people these days, with the hair and the music and the historically low levels of alcohol consumption and the declining violent crime rate and the plummeting rate of teenage pregnancy and the lack of the drugs and the sexual abstinence and the political awareness and the diversity of tastes and fashions and the...

[Salmoneus]

Unrelatedly:

I feel almost religiously driven to announce: my word, that was probably the best beef stew I've ever had. Tears-to-my-eyes-just-remembering-it good. Wow. Honestly, just a few psalms short of a religious conversion experience good.

[alice]

I'm always amused these days at the people complaining about young people these days these days.

Aye, young people were *proper* young people when I were young...

[Linguoboy]

I've finally gotten around to watching Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and it is glorious.

Also, the café at work has reopened and they sell respectable tea. They have worse hours and I'll miss the old cashier, but having tea as good or better than I can make at home to dunk my donuts in makes up for all that.

[alice]

I've finally gotten around to watching Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and it is glorious.

Are you watching it for the acting, or for the truth???