Trivia that matter
When the international market for anime collapses, Japan can export fingerpickers. Akihiro Tanaka took second place in the International Fingerstyle Championship at the Walnut Valley Festival two years ago, first place last year, and was a featured performer this year. Meanwhile, Tomoake Kawabata placed second in this year’s contest Thursday.
This has been a brutal year (-17°F in February, 110°+ repeatedly this summer) and it shows in gardens. Yews and arbor vitae are badly damaged if not dead, hostas are shriveled and sugar maples have few intact leaves left for their fall display. However, the naked ladies, a.k.a. Lycoris sqamigera, spent the worst of the heat undeground and look just dandy right now.
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I’m going to be away from the computer for a few days. While I’m gone, you can study the saxophone solo in “Tank!”
Steven wonders if the background music in this scene from Dog Days is Mozart, perhaps from one of his opera overtures. I don’t recognize it, but my knowledge of Mozart and opera is not encyclopedic. Can you identify it?
One of the companies that worked on Dog Days is called “Studio Arkansas.” I wonder if they actually are from there.
Update: If the player above doesn’t work for you, try this.
Pat Metheny on the Emperor of Elevator Music. (Via the professor.)
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Probably apocryphal, but worth reading anyway: Yogi Berra explains jazz.
Interviewer: “What do expect is in store for the future of jazz guitar?”
Yogi: “I’m thinkin’ there’ll be a group of guys who’ve never met talkin’ about it all the time..”
Interviewer: Can you explain jazz?
Yogi: I can’t, but I will. 90% of all jazz is half improvisation. The other half is the part people play while others are playing something they never played with anyone who played that part. So if you play the wrong part, it’s right. If you play the right part, it might be right if you play it wrong enough. But if you play it too right, it’s wrong.
Interviewer: I don’t understand.
Yogi: Anyone who understands jazz knows that you can’t understand it. It’s too complicated. That’s what’s so simple about it.
Interviewer: Do you understand it?
Yogi: No. That’s why I can explain it. If I understood it, I wouldn’t know anything about it.
Interviewer: Are there any great jazz players alive today?
Yogi: No. All the great jazz players alive today are dead. Except for the ones that are still alive. But so many of them are dead, that the ones that are still alive are dying to be like the ones that are dead. Some would kill for it.
Interviewer: What is syncopation?
Yogi: That’s when the note that you should hear now happens either before or after you hear it. In jazz, you don’t hear notes when they happen because that would be some other type of music. Other types of music can be jazz, but only if they’re the same as something different from those other kinds.
Interviewer: Now I really don’t understand.
Yogi: I haven’t taught you enough for you to not understand jazz that well.
A young friend of mine placed second in his division at the Appalachian String Band Music Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia last week. Here is his first-round performance.
He’ll be at Winfield in September. I’ll be there, too.
Very miscellaneous links and curiosities.
Quote of the week:
From the same authority, an appreciation of Joseph Levitch.
A paradox of quantum etymology.
Expected real-life Batman generation rate.
Schopenhauer in the key of E minor: Heavy metal keeps us sane. (Yeah, right. Oh, and G.K. Chesterton was a proto-metalhead.)
Is the heat wearing you out? There’s plenty of snow at Lassen Volcanic National Park.
When it comes to Wonder Woman redesigns, skirts beat pants. Colleen Doran did some “high fantasy” concept drawings of WW, which you can see here, here and here.
Want your very own action figure, just like Danny Choo?
Who needs real musicians anymore? Who needs real singers? All you need are a computer, some good instrument sample sets and a troupe of Vocaloids. Here’s a lively twelve-minute musical vaguely based on Lewis Carroll. (I note with annoyance that the Cheshire Nekomimi doesn’t have a grin.)
Some of the above via The Rat, Jonathan Tappan, Project Rooftop and Vocaloidism.
While digitizing historical documents this past weekend, I discovered that “lolita” fashion predates Mana and Baby the Stars Shine Bright by several decades. Here is a primitive example from 1968:
For the curious, here are a couple of the artifacts I digitized. The first is from 1968, the second from 1970.
Post script: It took me 45 minutes to publish this little post. This would be unacceptable behavior for a free web host, and it’s inexcusable for one I pay. If you are looking for a company to host your website, do not pick AN Hosting.
Neither am I.
I spent part of the weekend digitizing ancient vinyl, including some Significant Historical Documents. Here’s one from 1968:
Here’s a tune for my brother:
Traditional choreography is a branch of computer science. For example:
More algorithms are illustrated here.
What does a sorting algorithm sound like? Something like this:
Update: If an image of a pink pony playing a trombone might “frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress” to you, do not click here:
I note with alarm that a corner of the otakusphere has been invaded by aliens more frightening than zombies or sparkly vampires. These creatures look superficially equine, but their fur and manes typically are colors that do not naturally occur on mammals. Their behaviors sometimes suggest intelligible sentience, but just as often reflect either hypertrophied reflexes or psychoses. Thus far these creatures have been primarily an occidental phenomenon, but they recently have been observed in Japan. Here is some video footage of these entities. (Caution: sit at least 0.6096 meter from the computer monitor while watching this documentary. If you find yourself repeatedly viewing any of the videos posted or linked here, seek professional help immediately.)
I would recommend summoning superheroes to deal with this menace, but I fear that they have already been compromised. I suspect that our only hope is a new corps of mahou shoujo.
Post script: What exactly is Pinkie Pie?
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Kansas weather is sometimes a little too interesting for my taste. (The heat didn’t make it into the house, but the wind did wake me.)
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Animation of a different sort: time-lapse photography of the beginning of the recent Grimsvötn eruption in Iceland:
(These are large files and might take a while to load.)
Although this might have been a larger eruption than Eyjafjallajokull’s last year, because of the prevailing winds and the composition of the ash, it was far less disruptive. Grimsvötn, incidentally, has a long and busy history, including the Lakagigar eruption of 1783, which was perhaps more consequential than Krakatau’s a century later.
I recently upgraded my installation of Filter Forge. Here are some variations on a theme:
Continue reading “The seven faces of Kyubey, and other matters”
Stephane Grappelli as the cat in Peter and the Wolf.
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“Just once, I’d like to meet an alien menace that wasn’t immune to bullets.”
An outstanding example of obsessiveness: a fan-made Doctor Who anime.
(Via Chizumatic.)
Update: And it’s gone, which is a pity. The video was an impressive piece of animation. The auteur’s site is here.
Update II: You can watch it here.
I got UTAU running on my ancient Mac:
This is essentially Animenz’s arrangement of “Sis Puella Magica!,” with “Camila Melodia” doing the the quasi-vocals. She just sings “na na na” because I didn’t have the lyrics at hand, and I didn’t manipulate the sound beyond changing the syllables from the default. The harp and synth were added in Logic.
So UTAU works, sorta. Making it sound like music is another matter. Not the least of the challenges is that the GUI is in Japanese, which I don’t read. Fortunately, the manual has been translated into English with numerous screen shots; unfortunately, the interface for the Mac version was significantly revised, so many of the instructions are no longer quite correct. ((There does exist a hack to convert the UTAU GUI to English, but it looks like it only works in Windows.)) The range of topics in the manual suggest that the skilled user has a great degree of control over the sound. I’ve heard some UTAUloid recordings that are much more lifelike than the above, though none are as convincing as the better Vocaloid efforts. It should be possible to make Camila sound more alive and intelligible, though that probably means tweaking multiple parameters for each and every individual syllable.
It might be less trouble to just take voice lessons and pitch-shift recordings as necessary.
I’ve been fortunate so far with Miku Hatsune and her ilk. The Vocaloid engine has not yet been ported to Macintosh, so I haven’t been tempted to spend all my evenings and weekends tinkering with vocal synthesizers. But my luck may have run out. There is now a Mac version of UTAU, the freeware/shareware counterpart of Vocaloid. If it’s possible for someone without Japanese to figure out — there is an English-language UTAU community online, so help is available — what free time I had this summer is gone.
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Apparently the Madoka soundtracks will be available only as part of the Japanese BD editions. That presents a problem for those of us who can’t spare $70, or $87.99, for a half-hour of music.
Fortunately, the sheet-music people are on the case. Here’s a nice piano arrangement of “Sis Puella Magica!”, and there are other Madoka arrangements here (third and fourth from the bottom) and here. I hope to see more soon. Update: here’s another.
Update: This is seriously creepy.
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Frëd has been watching Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, or at least the opening.
During the ’80’s, I quit listening to the radio entirely, focusing instead on building up my classical music library. This illustrates why. ((There was some great rock recorded during that decade: Steve Morse’s The Introduction, King Crimson’s Discipline, Steve Vai’s first two albums, Joe Satriani’s Surfing with the Alien, early Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Djam Karet, Boiled in Lead, Adrian Belew, and more I’ll think of later. But most of these are primarily instrumental efforts, and it’s hard to write intelligently about music as music — too hard for Rolling Stone writers, who’d rather drivel on about politics, transgression and other nonsense than actually listen to the music they review.))
One of the 19th-century piano virtuoso’s stocks in trade was the operatic paraphrase, in which he took themes from a popular opera and assembled a fantasia with them, often highly elaborate. The practice fell out of favor in the twentieth century. However, if you substitue anime for opera, it is alive and well in otakudom. Here is a piece using themes from Yuki Kajiura’s OST for Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica:
Here’s a novel treatment of a theme from Madoka:
(Via Anime Instrumentality.)
I wonder if might be possible to make an opera out of Madoka. Perhaps not; it would take considerable ingenuity to condense the story to two or three hours and still have it make sense, and there are no significant roles for adult male singers — you could cast Kyubey as a tenor, but he would be cuter and creepier as a boy soprano. While a clever designer can probably think of a way to present the witches, the events of the last episode are another matter entirely.
Nevertheless, if it could be done, and done well, it would potentially be overwhelming. The composer would not necessarily have to be Yuki Kajiura, though I would be curious to hear if she’s capable of something as complex as an opera.
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Not anime-related, but noteworthy: an arrangement of a Lady Gaga tune that bears listening:
(Via Darwin Catholic.)
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Susumu Hirasawa, guitarist and singer of P-Model and composer of soundtracks for Satoshi Kon, has made a number of his pieces available for free download. I particularly recommend “The Girl in Byakkoya,” the ending theme of Paprika.
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What is the greatest problem with the American legal system? Perhaps it’s that judges have lousy taste in music.
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A problem with Windows computers you might not be aware of:
Which country has produced the stranger musicians, the USA or Japan? Let’s see.
Let’s see if this media player works for .ogg files:
(Via Dustbury.)
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Fortunately, I’m not a Linux user.
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And now for something perhaps a little less frightening: a friend of my brother has released a new tune. If you like loud music, give it a listen. It has more cowbell.
