... can be art too [scabsbandages.com].

When writing (fan-)fiction [fanfiction.net], adding more science is always a good plan.

It’s not just a jump to the left [mundorare.com] ...

These are dances where everyone performs the same prescribed steps in unison - generally as couples (Line Dancing being much the same thing for singletons).

The odd thing is how little they typically resemble the dances for which they are named. The waltz is probably the one which is most consistently interpreted correctly in sequences named after it. Then the quickstep. The tangos are somewhat iffy and modern Latin styles, such as Mambo and Salsa (just starting to come into sequence names), are the most hopelessly badly styled. There’s an additional complication for the Rumba in that the ballroom convention uses one set of timing while the sequence convention uses another.

I'm not convinced [news.bbc.co.uk] about the design [telegraph.co.uk] of the tower but overall it looks as if it would be much nicer than the hideous angel-of-the-north.

It was rather amusing to see a line dancing teacher [ljs.info] I know make a cameo appearance on Dancing On Ice today. She was cute and bouncy, as ever. But not very much of the line dance seemed to make it into the ice dance performance. Sometime the real competition figure skaters have a cowboy routine though. Eg Samuel Contesti [en.wikipedia.org] or Emily Samuelson and Evan Bates.

In competitions, they don't generally do (any more) the geometric figures which gave this its name; and even when they did (decades ago), the TV coverage was miniscule. At least those were easy to follow though. The jumps are faster and hence harder to identify - especially without knowing what to look for other than the amount of mid-air turn. So, with the figure skating starting again tonight (winter olympics, this time), I thought I'd try to get a better grasp of the significant features.

It turns out that a typical jumper always turns anti-clockwise - rather than that being something on which to discriminate one named jump from another. All jumps are then landed the same way too - travelling backwards (perhaps forwards is too dangerous) on the right leg (left leg for a clockwise turner) using the outside edge of the blade. The thing which differs from one named jump to another is only the take-off. But nearly all take-offs are backwards too - the axel, with its N + ½ turns, being the exception. So that leaves the starting foot (again swapped for a clockwise turner) and blade edge and whether or not the toe pick of the other foot is used to push off.

Axel = forwards, left, outside, no toe

Loop = backwards, right, outside, no toe
Salchow = backwards, left, inside, no toe

Toe-Loop = backwards, right, outside, toe push (ie toed Loop)
{ Toe-Walley = backwards, right, inside, toe push }
Lutz = backwards, left, outside, toe push
Flip = backwards, left, inside, toe push (ie toed Salchow)

So there's a fairly consistent direction of lean into the turn, with the Lutz (and non-competitive Toe-Walley) being the exception. Non-toe versions of reverse lean jumps don't seem to be performed enough to have commonly used names - certainly not in competition. Which probably means the lean makes the jump easier. The Lutz certainly has the highest competition base score other than the Axel (with its extra ½ turn built into the difficulty).

I've been reverse engineering a song from a somewhat dodgy recording made of a new composition written by a school with help from another school.

Of the three adults involved in doing this with the children, it seems none of them either could or did notate exactly how the music was supposed to go (the piano player said it was all just in his head). Even the lyrics on the recording differ somewhat from the stated ones.

Of the massed children involved, the ones singing weren't of a uniformly good standard and they hadn't had much time to learn the song - let alone rehearse it.

So there's quite a lot of uncertainty over when they should come in and what pitch they should be singing whatever word they've decided to sing. (And that's hard enough to determine even with commercial stuff.)

And then I had to add a harmony part for it ...

Allegedly, the school choir which will eventually be singing this song for public performance will be slightly more selected for ability and a lot better rehearsed.

It's that time of year again - cephalopodmas, winterfest, yule etc - when I become a mini factory for turning out cards. Much colouring in, cutting out, sticking on and posting off ensues.

I've only ever saved a few of the designs - on those rare occasions when I had made slightly more than enough instead of (nearly) too few. Repeats are also quite unusual. In particular, I like the stained glass theme enough to have re-used it but the actual design has varied on the few times over the decades that I've made some.

It's a bit of a shame I don't have a back-catalogue. If I'd had a working camera, or computer scanners had been around from the start, it would have been nice to have a record of each year's output.

Among my current set of projects, I've been trying to port many of my existing recorder quartets, which were originally for 2 descants plus treble and tenor, over to pitches and arrangements usable by sopranino and descants with only one low part playable by treble (or tenor). This is because the currently relevant batch of school-children are of smaller size. However, the shift will also then support playing by adults using the larger sizes of recorder - viz trebles/altos and tenors and a bass.

I've also been drawing out this arrangements in clear B+W GIF form, using a slightly larger version of my original set of HTML-able music GIFs. Quite a few of the resulting scores are already available online.

I spent some part of halloween playing with turning existing images of mine (mostly emoticons of varying sizes) into background repeat patterns - like wallpaper or charges in heraldry. I typically tried out several colour options, including generating pale and dark versions suitable for having text (black or white respectively) placed on top.

I only uploaded a few of them though - to TinyPic. Eg here are some bats (in the "bright" version) which form a dense, swarming flock:



and here's piggles (in the bright version):

Today's post included the new paint marker pens I'd ordered.

On the plus side, several of them are distinctly different from the colours of the same name in the previous relatively complete set I'd bought. This was something for which I was really hoping. Other interesting / interpolating colours I'd acquired in the distant past were only ever odds and ends, are gradually running out and no longer seem to be available (or at least not in the UK).

On the minus side, I've suddenly broken out in a wide-spread skin rash across exposed arms (and perhaps a bit on my face). I now have to be deeply suspicious of the pens - being the new thing in the environment which I'd only just opened (since having a bath and not obviously being covered in a rash).

Still to be determined is whether the paint from these pens will stick to the desired surface when dry. Other paint markers from the same manufacturer (metallic ones) were very good. But that's no guarantee of the performance of a somewhat different variety of paint marker (coloured - and almost fluorescent!) from them.

Quite nice/clever art [telegraph.co.uk] (although surely somewhat unidirectional in effect) but [thisislondon.co.uk] rather dangerous [news.bbc.co.uk].

Well it's art of a sort [leisuregames.com]. That wizard does not look happy (unlike the warrior). Perhaps he never wanted to live in interesting times - let alone have adventures. I think the "noble princess" looks more like an opera singer though - and the queen figure should probably be the princess instead.

NB There are a few more further down the page - viz a vampire and a witch.

Having now had it inflicted upon me (GH4 World Tour, I think), one obvious question which arises is whether it's really an art at all? Some of the music is barely music and the timing of things you're meant to play often don't match up with the music - eliminating a large part of what I would have thought should be the point. It seems unlikely that it would lead to people becoming better musicians in reality.

This year the Royal Mail (Post Office) [royalmail.com] has produced 2 ranges of seasonal stamps [news.bbc.co.uk] which they are calling secular and religious. I'm not sure where that leaves the normal stamps. If they're not regarded as secular, then perhaps they're royalist (where the pretence is that the relevant monarch has divine authority rather than being descended from the most evil, power-mad scum who could dominate others and control history as well as time-travel given the very out-of-date image).

Anyhow, the religious ones are taken from major works of art - not particularly good (being based on a collection of lies and disinformation for a start!) but famous for various reasons. The secular set are pantomime themed, ie taken from the performing arts. However, the most obvious one that people will need, viz the 2nd class one, is hideously ugly. The only vaguely attractive one is the most expensive - the 81p evil queen from Snow White And The Seven Dwarves. I don't even know what sort of post might cost that amount. So I doubt its utility.

Meanwhile, the normal stamps simply aren't available at the moment. Not from the supermarkets (in those special packets) nor even from actual post offices! So the only way to avoid the ugly stamps is to buy the properly numbered ones which sum to the appropriate value. So 27p 2nd class might be 20p + 5p + 2p or 3 of the 9p ones.

I now have an oboe (though it needed some repairs to fix the things the shop broke while repairing the original broken key).

One interesting thing about the oboe is that, despite being nominally in C (non-transposing), its fingering actually favours the key of G - with F# being easier than F and B being easier than Bb. In contrast, the bassoon (also a non-transposing C instrument in the same family) seems to favour the key of C. Its F# and Bb require more finger wrangling than do F and B.

The recorder family, being of simpler construction, has limits imposed by the need for adaptability of fingering with a single set of holes. No extra ones to be opened or closed by keys, apart from those required to reach the bottom notes of the large members of the family. There, the natural F is neither quite F nor F#. However, an F seems to be the intent and its B is easier than Bb. Although the C# at the top of the first octave is almost as easy as the C, all other sharps and flats are harder. So it's largely favouring C (with keys of F and G being easy too).

The flute is in C through and through. The clarinet is somewhat more mixed and the non-transposing C member of the family was abandoned centuries ago in favour of the Bb and A varieties which gave a more pleasingly mellow sound - less brash. But ignoring the transposition component, its Bb is only fractionally more orderly than its B and the upper hole F and F# are largely equivalent too.

The flageolets are broadly similar to recorders and the ocarina is a law unto itself (with the readily available 4-hole ones being vastly inferior to the one I recall having as a child). Has anyone got any bagpipes, or merely bagpipe familiarity, to compare those?

PS Spookily, Google appears to have declared this to be bagpipe day [google.co.uk].

I've been having trouble trying to identify tunes again - from knowing the sound of a fragment of the music. It's interesting that this is a far more difficult proposition than finding text within the body of page somewhere on the internet. Search engines for doing that have become quite refined (and cope with an extraordinarily large amount of data). I think they even make allowances for accented characters as well as punctuation and incorrect spelling these days.

With music though, there isn't even a widely used standard for writing it, such as the western alphabet provides. There are issues of timing which don't exist in speech (although whether or not to use a contraction in a half-remembered quote is a remaining difficulty). There's also the issue of pitch. The shape of a tune is the same regardless of absolute pitch (hence the sol-fa system working at all) and few people are going to recall the written pitch of something they can only just hum or whistle.

So timing issues are always a problem. Varying key signatures mess up the use of letter notation (regardless of octave issues). Sol-fa doesn't seem to be that widely used in the first place (it's only really for singers, not instrumentalists). Even ring-tone notations vary (there's all the different keypress versions as well as the RTX coding standard). The most amusingly viable method is via Parson's code - just labelling the repeats, ups and downs does quite a good job of uniquely specifying themes.

However, I'm still stuck on my fragment from the middle of a piece of music and it looks as though I haven't even been able to find the same music search engines I tried a year or so ago. Not that I was successful in using those back then anyway. Identifying music still seems to be something best done by humans - at least in part because not so much research effort has been put into the endeavour as for finding text.

This [musipedia.org] is one of the sites I tried this time. It has several methods of tune entry - all of which failed to identify my fragment.

I bought a 61 key (5 octave) roll-up keyboard (the logo says "R@ller PIANO") the other week. Unfortunately I can't really recommend it.

Obviously I knew it wasn't going to have much in the way of "touch" - being a flat thing. However, it's much more unreliable than it had any need to be on sounding notes at all when touched. Notes which aren't there when you hit them really disrupt the flow of playing anything.

Competing with that for badness (and without any shred of excuse for being bad) is the fact that the white to black space ratios are wrong. There's not enough room to play white notes (the way one would on a real piano) without accidentally brushing black ones - and of course those mis-hit ones are guaranteed to sound.

Also the transformer's power plug won't stay plugged into some sockets. I had to choose between the toy and being warm until I found an extension plug setup it could tolerate. Additionally, the synthesised instrumental sounds it makes aren't as good as the quality of my now very old electronic keyboard (a Casio).

So it really is only a toy, not usable for anything remotely like a serious purpose.

My other new "toy" is a relatively cheap (ie still very much more expensive than the roll-up keyboard) second-hand oboe. I don't have custody of it yet because the shop is repairing a broken key. It's one which wasn't essential to its operation, merely for a particular trill, or they'd probably have fixed it already.

Yet I have considerably better hopes of the usability of this item once I do get to play with it. Even though the powering of it is going to be my intrinsically dodgy breathing, at least I'm unlikely to randomly lose the notes I've chosen to play.

I've been trying again, and a bit harder, to track down any copy or access to an original print of Michael Praetorius's "Terpsichore, musarum aoniarum quinta" [hyperion-records.co.uk] - a collection of the secular music of his era and continent. Musically, this is something like the equivalent of Newton's "Principia" or the Dead Sea Scrolls and it's really quite shocking that it still doesn't seem to be publically available online for free. There have been previous reprintings of it but all of those are long out-of-print, with second-hand copies being largely unobtainable and/or hideously expensive.

The best the British Library seems to be able to manage, among some modern derivative publications (ie arrangements of small sections of the original) is this item [catalogue.bl.uk]which, on consulting some BL people by phone, is suspected to itself be only a subset of his publications.

At the BL they have the facilities to do better searches of material than are available online though and they reckon there are genuine full copies (dating from 1612) in Germany and France - except the French library is currently closed for some reason. They're going to try and email me the details of the German place and I can then see if there's any way of getting a modern photocopy (eg from microfiche archives) from them.

. . .

The email has arrived and reveals that they found their catalogue to be in error! The only old edition in the BL collection is actually of another work by Praetorius mislabelled as being Terpsichore (hence the German looking wrong). They've now amended the listing so it no longer appears under searches for Terpsichore. They just have the modern arrangements of subsets of that. Not even a modern(ish) full reprint of the original.

Meanwhile, they think the German library with an original is "the Staats und
Universitatsbibliothek in Hamburg". The French library with one, according to the printed RISM catalogue, is "the Bibliotheque National in Paris".