I'll echo this. I'm a grad student at BU; the grad students are more likely to have a landline as well as cell phone (trying to save on minutes and not do overages), but it's almost unheard of an undergrad not having one. Even among the international students, most of the Asian students have one...
I suggest growing zinnias. They're easy to grow, grow quickly, and turn out some darn impressive blooms. Plus, you can always use them to surprise coworkers of the opposite sex...
True. The idea of a "perfect performance" is that the composer can finetune details to such an extent that they fully realize their dream for how a piece should sound. Debate about this since the 60s has posited and reposited it as an ideal, but an impossible one to attain. Suprahuman would be following the tradition of most works specifically for player pianos and their ilk, as I believe you point out in another post...
As a qualification, let me first point out that I'm a graduate student in music and helped construct several electronic music studios. Automation and programming are important issues in electronic music and the idea of a "perfect perfomance"
All of these instruments are variants on the same basic idea of the player piano - recording and reproducing a performance on the same instrument. They are robots only in the limited sense of machines on a car assembly line. All of the instruments in the article can be MIDI-controlled; you can either pre-program them, record live, make post-recording additions or some other combination. Note that a basic MIDI file could be produced just by exporting out of Finale...
Player pianos and their ilk were originally used for home entertainment, back before the days of radio and television. The machines that punched out the player piano [control] rolls were surprisingly accurate, later ones covering a fair range of dynamics. For a more complex performance, one could run the same roll back through the punching machine to add more notes - something George Gershwin did on several pieces, producing music unplayable by a single person at the piano. (As a sidenote, Yamaha has restored and "enhanced" several of Gershwin's piano rolls and included the data on the Diskclaviers for playback, as well as releasing a few CDs).
Step forward several decades from Gershwin, and Gyorgi Ligeti produced a body of works for player piano and (roll-operated) barrel organ. These took Gershwin's double-punched ideas even further, producing pieces that could take 4, 6 or more hands to play. These are dazzling pieces, overwhelming the listener because there is so much going on.
Now, the ModBots are cool because they're generalized controls you can adapt to just about any percussion instrument and/or surface. However, their programming is probably a tad bit tedious and getting a good range of dynamics is going to be a pain in the butt. Think of it as a variation on the drum machine, but hitting live instruments instead of playing samples. The Guitarbot would be cool, in that most of the efforts I've seen to produce one have, well, sucked, but there've been automata taking that approach before. The organ...old news. But the Diskclavier...that one is interesting.
For those of you that don't know, the Yamaha Diskclavier is a grand piano fitted with recording and playback circuitry. Yamaha's other digital pianos use snythesis or sampling to reproduce sound; the Diskclavier does the actual generation with hammers striking strings. This creates a much more authentic sound (since a real piano mechanism is used), if not quite up to the "perfect reproduction" that Yamaha claims. There's a piano competition sponsored by Yamaha that includes long-distance judges who listen to the performance on a Diskclavier recieving webcast data; however, even with the webcast video that accompanies the feed, I believe that this "remote judging" misses out on the essential aspect of a live performance: watching a live performer. Syncing issues aside, there is no comparison towards being in a concert hall watching how a pianist moves, breaths and trembles in his/her playing to watching the same thing on video. Then there's a host of potential technical issues: if a key is sticky or less responsive on the performance Diskclavier, the pianist will compensate...but the extra force will sound wrong on the playback machine; one plays differently in different acoustic environments - an intimate performance in a parlor would sound very out of place in a large concert hall, and different frequencies are reproduced more wherever you go...
Automation is a nifty tool, and useful when you don't have players around up to the stuffing of your works, but I don't expect it to replace live performers anytime soon.
The story for Othello has its own convoluted story. Shakespeare based his play on a translation of an Italian short story (there also existed some poetry on the same), which was itself semi-historical. Desdemona is beaten to death with a sock full of sand (Iago suggests that this won't leave bruises), of all things.
Much the same in Boston, on the T. I moved back for grad school this last fall, and just in the year from when I first visited to then the iPod headphone sightings went from 1-2 on a train to as many as 1/3 of the students. A lot of the students have MP3 players, and Apple's got a better share of the student market here than their sales average...
Comparing ACID to GarageBand is kind of like comparing the AVID video system to iMovie. One's a pro-level program; the other's an amateur, entry-level program. You should be comparing ACID to something like Digital Performer...
For something even funnier, move the mouse over the bard's nether regions a couple times. Not only will he rebuff you, but eventually the barmaid tells you in a deep man's voice to try the Prancing Pony down the street...
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As a former tango instructor, oops! Oh. Euphemisms. Yeah...
I'll echo this. I'm a grad student at BU; the grad students are more likely to have a landline as well as cell phone (trying to save on minutes and not do overages), but it's almost unheard of an undergrad not having one. Even among the international students, most of the Asian students have one...
I suggest growing zinnias. They're easy to grow, grow quickly, and turn out some darn impressive blooms. Plus, you can always use them to surprise coworkers of the opposite sex...
A revolution? In Nintendo? That's so Third World!
True. The idea of a "perfect performance" is that the composer can finetune details to such an extent that they fully realize their dream for how a piece should sound. Debate about this since the 60s has posited and reposited it as an ideal, but an impossible one to attain. Suprahuman would be following the tradition of most works specifically for player pianos and their ilk, as I believe you point out in another post...
As a qualification, let me first point out that I'm a graduate student in music and helped construct several electronic music studios. Automation and programming are important issues in electronic music and the idea of a "perfect perfomance" All of these instruments are variants on the same basic idea of the player piano - recording and reproducing a performance on the same instrument. They are robots only in the limited sense of machines on a car assembly line. All of the instruments in the article can be MIDI-controlled; you can either pre-program them, record live, make post-recording additions or some other combination. Note that a basic MIDI file could be produced just by exporting out of Finale... Player pianos and their ilk were originally used for home entertainment, back before the days of radio and television. The machines that punched out the player piano [control] rolls were surprisingly accurate, later ones covering a fair range of dynamics. For a more complex performance, one could run the same roll back through the punching machine to add more notes - something George Gershwin did on several pieces, producing music unplayable by a single person at the piano. (As a sidenote, Yamaha has restored and "enhanced" several of Gershwin's piano rolls and included the data on the Diskclaviers for playback, as well as releasing a few CDs). Step forward several decades from Gershwin, and Gyorgi Ligeti produced a body of works for player piano and (roll-operated) barrel organ. These took Gershwin's double-punched ideas even further, producing pieces that could take 4, 6 or more hands to play. These are dazzling pieces, overwhelming the listener because there is so much going on. Now, the ModBots are cool because they're generalized controls you can adapt to just about any percussion instrument and/or surface. However, their programming is probably a tad bit tedious and getting a good range of dynamics is going to be a pain in the butt. Think of it as a variation on the drum machine, but hitting live instruments instead of playing samples. The Guitarbot would be cool, in that most of the efforts I've seen to produce one have, well, sucked, but there've been automata taking that approach before. The organ...old news. But the Diskclavier...that one is interesting. For those of you that don't know, the Yamaha Diskclavier is a grand piano fitted with recording and playback circuitry. Yamaha's other digital pianos use snythesis or sampling to reproduce sound; the Diskclavier does the actual generation with hammers striking strings. This creates a much more authentic sound (since a real piano mechanism is used), if not quite up to the "perfect reproduction" that Yamaha claims. There's a piano competition sponsored by Yamaha that includes long-distance judges who listen to the performance on a Diskclavier recieving webcast data; however, even with the webcast video that accompanies the feed, I believe that this "remote judging" misses out on the essential aspect of a live performance: watching a live performer. Syncing issues aside, there is no comparison towards being in a concert hall watching how a pianist moves, breaths and trembles in his/her playing to watching the same thing on video. Then there's a host of potential technical issues: if a key is sticky or less responsive on the performance Diskclavier, the pianist will compensate...but the extra force will sound wrong on the playback machine; one plays differently in different acoustic environments - an intimate performance in a parlor would sound very out of place in a large concert hall, and different frequencies are reproduced more wherever you go... Automation is a nifty tool, and useful when you don't have players around up to the stuffing of your works, but I don't expect it to replace live performers anytime soon.
The story for Othello has its own convoluted story. Shakespeare based his play on a translation of an Italian short story (there also existed some poetry on the same), which was itself semi-historical. Desdemona is beaten to death with a sock full of sand (Iago suggests that this won't leave bruises), of all things.
Out of curiousity, just what would constitute proof of responsibility? ID and a copy of the will?
Seriously, doesn't the ridge make it look kind of like the Deathstar? With a big enough crater to form the dish...
Much the same in Boston, on the T. I moved back for grad school this last fall, and just in the year from when I first visited to then the iPod headphone sightings went from 1-2 on a train to as many as 1/3 of the students. A lot of the students have MP3 players, and Apple's got a better share of the student market here than their sales average...
Comparing ACID to GarageBand is kind of like comparing the AVID video system to iMovie. One's a pro-level program; the other's an amateur, entry-level program. You should be comparing ACID to something like Digital Performer...
For something even funnier, move the mouse over the bard's nether regions a couple times. Not only will he rebuff you, but eventually the barmaid tells you in a deep man's voice to try the Prancing Pony down the street...