I spent some time this morning transcribing the motives that make up Terry Riley’s In C into TinyNotation so that I could use them in the creation of a script which creates scores instances of hypothetical performances of the work. I have this crazy idea that repeatedly doing this on a large enough scale could generate data enough to facilitate a formalist statistical analysis of this seminal aleatoric work.
Most of the computation time seems to go into into showing the MusicXML score.
I use the vim extension vimwiki to manage a local wiki which I keep scrappy notes in, especially one-line ideas that I am liable to forget. Since I’d like to have access to this anywhere and at any time, I set up vimwiki to use ~/Google Drive/.vimwiki as its main wiki directory, which is kept in sync with my Google Drive. I then use Drive Notepad for quick edits of the wiki files (which are just plain text).
One of my personal goals for this year was to learn enough LaTeX to be able to typeset my undergraduate dissertation, such that it conforms with the fairly strict and idiosyncratic style guide that our department enforces for submitted work. Suffice to say that I’ve learned more about LaTeX and its plethora of packages in the two weeks before submission than I have done in the last few years that I have known of its existence.
I have, regrettably, two Spotify accounts. One was created from within Facebook and automatically included all my Facebook friends who use Spotify. Because I don’t want to lose my Spotify life if I leave Facebook, I created a second Facebook-independent Spotify account using a different email address (this is possible).
However, it would be nice still to follow my Facebook friends’ music selections and activity. Until I close my first account, however, all links to Spotify resources on Facebook will initiate a new session in the Spotify app using my first set of credentials (the Facebook one), and unless I link my second account to Facebook this will remain the case.
Today was spent in a typically traditional manner, home with the family and a full turkey and ham. All very delicious.
The christmas festivities on the day were preceded by an extended service at the local church which entailed a great deal of homophonic hymns.
There was an interesting setting of ‘Ding Dong’ with an insanely chromatic bass-line for the refrain but apart from that, fairly unadventurous.
From today, I’ll try and update this blog daily with some daycently vague observations about life, with a musical perspective.
You know the one; as if a hundred thousand tiny pins are undulating under your skin, from the tips to the base of your spine?
The power of a work of art to move us into what are essentially extra-terrestrial planes defies explanation by even the most staunchly rational scientific mind.
Well, that’s only partly true.
Everyone knows (why, of course, don’t you?) that sensations of happiness are merely by-products of a chemical process.
It seems to me that, increasingly, once you’ve overcome the barrier to entry that is the cost of hardware, the next challenge is to find a reliable, secure and affordable data package that permits you to take your business on the go.
I’m very satisfied with the devices that I’m using right now - a Galaxy Tab 10.1 with a knock-off bluetooth keyboard cover that provides a full, sturdy QWERTY keyboard and portable protection for the tablet.
KeePass Password Safe is a free software password management utility for Microsoft Windows, with unofficial ports for Linux, Mac OS X, and a variety of other systems. (Wikipedia)
They way I like to use this password manager, to ensure I don’t get caught out when on the move or using public computers is as follows:
Store KeepPassX (cross-platform port) executables for as many flavours of OS as is possible on Google Drive
College Board CSS Funding Profile – $25 per university Graduate Records Examination – $170 Going to university in the States – priceless?
I’m writing a final-year paper, much like most finishing undergraduates, and I find the following tools for Mac to be very useful:
BibDesk – a free, open-source bibliography manager which supports importing annotations from .PDF file. Outputs citations in BibTeX format (more on this anon). It permits searching JSTOR and library catalogues from within the application, meaning adding bibliographic records for books and articles requires little or no data entry, where existing records exist.