Archives: Tweets

@BenBurgis I mean, yeah, that whole trilogy but especially that one!

@BenBurgis Honestly, it sounds like the pitch for a James Morrow novel I’d happily read. Or maybe already have read.

@mcjulie @C_Stroop @tgshepherdvan I like Swedenborg’s take on it. “Eh, that happened last year.” (i.e. 1757.) Feels like a way of getting people to shut up about the Final Judgment.

@mythopoetica (I say all this never having played with these devices… just from carefully watching people people use them and thinking, “Well, I think I’d need to mess with the settings to get it doing the kind of thing I’d want.”)

@mythopoetica *(Unless you’re manipulating tuning in a DAW or something, which you can do, but…)

I get the vague sense a lot of MIDI gear does something similar with basic harmony. You can get around it, but it’s probably harder with just pads or a touchscreen interface. @mythopoetica Because it makes sense most people see default simplification as a benefit, not a flaw; a non-traditional interface like touchscreen that wasn’t limited in this would produce what sounds like garbage to most people.

But modify the parameters and you get a really cool tool.

@mythopoetica Yep, I’m not even sure how it works, the pad, but I am curious. My hesitation is a bit like piano: powerful tool, but I’d have to really learn how to use it well if I wanted to avoid being locked into one or another musical system. @mythopoetica I mean, a bit like how the piano keyboard sort of locks you into the equal tempered 12-tone system. (Amazing pianists can mess with that, by playing with harmony in a way that messes with listeners’ perceptions, say, but for most it’s kind of a way of being locked in.*)

@GeekinKorea 🙂 I got the replacement ear pads for my headphones yesterday, by coincidence! Quiet is a blessed thing! Hopefully it’ll help you regale us with more artworks as well! 🙂

@sy876 @t_trace @biotit @haluna7 @futureconsf Thank you so much everyone! I had my phone off last night so I’m only seeing your Tweets now, but I enjoyed the discussion immensely! Thanks for being a great group! And thanks to @futureconsf for organizing everything!

This panel last night was fascinating! And it’s available now for those who weren’t around and would like to see it! (Same link.) twitter.com/futureconsf/st…

@GeekinKorea Yeah, me too. The ear pads are giving out on my headphones, and it’s not great. Ordered replacements, but… anyway, I’m mostly able to keep them charged as much as I need. The one hitch is they need to be off if I use a wired connection (b/c lag, need that for using a DAW).

@mythopoetica Yeah, I only got a little combo keyboard + drum pads thing. Can’t afford the touchpad and I’m not sure I’m interested for now, but it is pretty interesting. The Kaoss Pad thing also looks interesting. (Like here: https://t.co/UIeMT69NFk )

But probably a little square for me. @mythopoetica (Meaning, I find often these pads are good for a certain kind of tonal pattern and loop. I’m trying to break out of looping structures a little, or at least into approaching them differently, so…)

@mythopoetica Ha, I missed this. Yeah, capos I can understand (it’s an autotransposer, after all, and I’m considering learning a similar autotranspose trick on EWI) but the alt tunings are… beyond me, let’s put it that way! 🙂

(Though I’d be game for EWI+MIDI microtuning in Ableton Live.)

Oh, man. That’s… wow. twitter.com/donmoyn/status…

@GeekinKorea Bose noise-canceling headphones have helped me a lot in that regard.

This is really good. Read it! twitter.com/MarissaLingen/…

@mythopoetica That’s cool. Guitars baffle me, though. Too many strings to keep track of! @mythopoetica (And that irregular tuning at the top. Like, wait, it’s not a fourth? I did some bass, so I can grasp 4ths, but then there’s this weird interval on the highest guitar string and I’m looooooost.)

@mythopoetica That’s the advantage of jazz theory training: augmented and diminished chords aren’t harder to deal with for a horn player, really, you just have slightly different targets to hit as you weave through them. Octatonic scale time! Woo hoo! @mythopoetica But the cutting edge theory the cool kids (like Jacob Collier, say) are messing with these days is next-next level. Like, “Hey, let’s mess with different forms of tuning temperament as a mood-enhancing effect on the opening of this song.”

Er. Wow. New technologies!

@mythopoetica Ha, no, not really: the choir revolted and said, “WE CANNOT LEARN THIS!” so I ended up having to improvise fake Gregorian chant while they hummed droning fifths.

@mythopoetica Hm, saxophonist mostly learn harmony through arpeggiation and through melodic implication, so… yes and no? You learn that melodies are sort of how one threads the needle of harmony. I like minimalism a lot, but like, Steve Reich minimalism, where you can feel the earth spinning

@mythopoetica Hm, theory’s… well, I came from a (probably low-)intermediate level of jazz theory to four part harmony and was lost. “What do you mean I can’t use Dorian mode and dominant 7th chords? What do you mean tritones are bad? They’re amazing and chewy!” And figured bass? WTF. @mythopoetica But I seem to have figured out enough to fake out some not-horrible four part harmony, I’m learning, as I notate some old compositions. (Program Eliot’s Music for Murder in the Cathedral, actually.)

@mythopoetica Like, “No, that’s not right. There, that’s it.”

@mythopoetica That’s even more interesting! For me, composing was something mostly that happened “under the hood.” I’m largely aphantastic, and started out also as the musical equivalent of that, unable to really hear much in the way of music in my head. I can do melodies now, but not harmony— @mythopoetica —at least not really. So all my composing was sort of working out as externalization whatever the hell was forming in some part of my brain not consciously accessible to me? Like… ideas were there, but I encountered them for the first time as I worked them out externally.

@mythopoetica Yeah. Well, no. Scales in crazy intervals is horrible, but it’s still very helpful in terms of laying the groundwork for being able to do other stuff. (And for developing the ear.)

Just talking about it, I feel simultaneously wistful and horrified. 🙂

@mythopoetica Yeah! For now even just focusing on the tone and (I assume) hand positions, wrist, plucking strings, etc. very attentively can help make it less boring.

Also, wow: I’ve always been curious what it’s like to have synaesthesia as a musician.

@mythopoetica Yeah, fingerings first, but once you have that, you can add in other things to practice while practicing scales.

(For sax, I often practiced different swing feels—a little ahead of the beat, a little behind, etc.) If I were doing scales these days, I’d do quintuplet swing.

@mythopoetica … or repeated rhythmic patterns other than just straight eighth notes? (Like, maybe, syncopated against your metronome.) That lets you practice other stuff at the same time as the scales. (At least, once you have the scale patterns under your fingers.)

@mythopoetica Ha, all those sharps are a horror! Damned violinists love those sharps, though. 🙁

If you think scales are unfun now, wait till you’re playing them in ascending sixths, or even worse patterns! 🙂 @mythopoetica That said, one way to make them more interesting is to focus on tiny details. I’m a wind player, so I was about to say “tone” but articulation is also good. Like, varying articulation patterns in a sequence: two slur followed by two staccato…

@JustinHowe To be clear, absolutely nothing against gay bars or people (at all); I’m just irked by the immediate assumption by some that anyone who isn’t Korean is in Itaewon and clubbing every weekend and is thus a vector for COVID-19. @JustinHowe I know you know that, but… Twitter being what it is.

Interesting panel on now!

youtube.com/watch?v=cBlzk9…

Ooof, I mean to post this before the first panel, but… it’s been one of those days.

youtube.com/watch?v=K_u8MZ…

It’s on now.

@aliettedb That is absolutely insane, but also absolutely moronic for the reason you say: dumbasses who don’t communicate policies create an incentive to lie (and endanger others).

I’m glad you got the test and that your family got a good test result!

@JustinHowe And I’m sure people would insist that you caught it at a gay bar in Itaewon anyway. @JustinHowe (And then start demanding stricter protocols to prevent “Low Quality Foreigners” from spreading COVID here.)

(And… okay, I’ll stop. I’m having one of those days where the scent of 개저씨 is in the air no matter what I do.)

? Absolutely gorgeous song (and video) by Dhruv Visvanath, and a beam of warm sunshine at a moment when it’s needed all over.  tmblr.co/ZwA1ltYyQCjJGa…

@JustinHowe Geez, I suspect even I’ve done more than that, and I’m actively staying home as much as possible. (Mind you, in my case it’s me driving the Kid out into the countryside to fly the drone around outside of the local no-fly zone, and it’s probably only 25 times total.)

That moment when you’re typing a terrible explanation of how to pronounce something and then you realize, “Wait, I can just record myself saying it and send that.”

@themarkrussell Heh, I mean, some of us already do see most religions in the same light as Harry Potter. But… yeah, the Potter cult is gonna suck. “I’m not letting my child marry a Muggle!” Not to mention, you know, how TERFy it’s going to be.

And yes, yes, pandemic, I know. But the obvious answer to that is that during pandemics, we solve the dangers of public transit with more support for telework, not more cars. (Cars don’t reduce exposure in workplaces, eateries, etc.) Not slamming everyone who owns a car, btw—just the idiotic fantasy that more ways of making cars the default answer to everything is the solution to everything. Like, maybe the guy who wants to sell you cars is the wrong person to get advice from on this?

All the people who are saying, “But subways” miss the point: How will people be able to maintain their identities without access to a car at all times when outside their homes?

? https://t.co/KVx0RcInjt Oh, and: I got my first car at age 41, when we moved to the “countryside” and were expecting a baby. It was actually a necessity at that point. Most of my adult life, I had no car. It was fine, because there were… subways and buses. Oh, and a sense of civic responsibility.

And to be clear, this is also a problem in other places. China… Australia… Canada… and more. But in terms of legitimization, I feel like the US often sets global trends for what “liberal democracies” can get away with in the hands of the worst elected parties.

The really horrifying part is how far past “this is unthinkable” we’ve gone. Now it’s not just not-unthinkable, it’s downright not-surprising-at-all. How many other countries would have been sanctioned all to hell if they tried this kind of thing? I don’t know enough to know how other OECD countries could pressure the US into, you know, not becoming Nazi Germany, but I think it’s pretty clear that, like polarization, tolerating this stuff legitimizes it & hastens its spread more throughout the rest of the world.

What horrifies me is how little I’m surprised by allegations of a “uterus collector” doctor operating in the USA’s concentrations camps* for undocumented immigrants.

(*Let’s call them what they are, folks.)

https://t.co/1jV5SDYKmT Oh, and no, you cannot say, “It’s just a bad apple” when your entire system is build on stocking the barrels with apples without any precautions against bad ones getting in—or, indeed, when you knowingly keep bad apples in barrels and try to silence those who talk about them.

@JustinHowe Yeah, probably not. Especially not if a reasonable number of them drop out. The sad thing is this would be easy to fix with some very simple software… but, nope!

RT @JustinHowe: If you’re a weird horror fan then you want this. twitter.com/wickedmilkhote…

@JustinHowe Yikes, that’s… a lot.

@FelicityGS Yeah, his review of Musescore is also a bit critical but he’s right that it’s WAY more useable by a new user.

youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo9…

Entering more wild avant-garde stuff is hard, but I think it always is in notation software.

@FelicityGS Ah, cool. Yeah, I was trying not to laugh too loud in the wee hours because he’s so right—and the notation program I tried to learn on back in the 90s (Finale) was horrible in the eerily similar ways.

Is this gut bustingly funny to non-musicians? I’m curious. (I was laughing my guts out it at a moment ago, mostly in the last few minutes.)

youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wn…

RT @RosemaryMosco: I know I already RT’d this, but it’s one of the most mind-blowing stories I’ve read in ages. Big Oil lied to us about pl…

@GeekinKorea I mean, friends in Canada experiences stuff for appearing or being Muslim, too. Krug’s misremembering hard unless he’s setting the bar at genocide or something dumb like that.

@story_magician @mythopoetica @futureconsf Yep!