Combining thought and art eats time...
Jan. 14th, 2012 12:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaEarly this evening I was playing with my new hammer dulcimer, which arrived this week, trying to re-learn the songs I had been working on back when I lived in Tasmania, and had a different hammer dulcimer there. However, either I was doing something wrong back then, or this one has a slightly different arrangement of where the notes are than that one did, because the patterns I had learned no longer, quite, apply.
The strings on a hammer dulcimer are in alphabetical order, and, at the same time, different parts are set up to play in different keys. I don't, yet, know different keys by name, but I am able to look at a bit of sheet music and see what notes, if any, are meant to be sharp or flat, then look at the notes on the instrument (literally--they supplied me with printouts that slide under the strings that tell which string is which note) and find a place where I have only the correct sharps or flats available (sometimes this requires remembering details like D-sharp = E-flat), then play the song in that region of the instrument. Sometimes the notes are directly above or below one another, sometimes they are on the other side of the bridge, or over next to the other bridge.
Before I left Tassie I had mostly learned four tunes. Since my new dulcimer arrived yesterday I have tried two of them. However, for one of them the region of the instrument which has the correct sharps is lower than I remember it being on the other instrument, and now I can play all of the notes on one side of one bridge, while I used to have to switch from one side to the other when changing from the lower to the higher notes. The other tune is in the same region as I remember it being, but when I have to reach over to the second bridge to play is different than I remember.
Since I now need to learn a different physical pattern and I was having problems with my first attempt at doing that, I decided to open up my friend, CorelDraw, and draw out the pattern. Step one was to recreate the instrument on one layer, and draw the letters for the notes on it. Step two was to create a new layer which shows only those notes which appear in the song, and to start drawing a line from one to the next, in the order of the tune. As soon as I got to a place where it would be necessary to cross lines I copied over the letters to a new square and started drawing lines between them again. Repeat till the song is complete, making frequent use of copy-paste when a sequence of notes is repeated again elsewhere in the tune. That project wound up eating three hours of my evening, but, not surprisingly, looking at the tune in that sort of graphic presentation makes it much easier to try to go from what I see on the screen to hitting the correct strings. Yes, there will be lots of work required to get my hands to hit the correct string, at the correct time, every time, but the learning what the correct string is part will, I hope, go faster this way
In other news, one of my friends I met at the two European Textile Forums that I attended has published a summary of the last one we attended. Since a number of you are interested in textiles I thought I would share the link here. Do go look, and do consider attending this year's forum, too! It should be lots of fun (not that I can go register until I find out if I will have any teaching commitments that conflict, but if I can go, I shall).
This week's progress report on uni work: Good. Spent Monday-Thursday at the home office of the mining camp, selecting samples for geochemical analysis. Because this is my first contact with drill core one of the geologists there generously gave me her time to work with me, and discuss what sorts of details I should be looking for in the rock when deciding on where to take samples. It was fun and educational.
This morning I didn't get any uni work accomplished, instead I drove out to the hospital for my appointment to get new hearing aids. I didn't really expect to get new ones today, but I did! I explained to the guy that to my mind the most important thing was to get something that could communicate with my phone, and that is exactly what he gave me. I now have a new pair of hearing aids, and a little white box that hangs from a string around my neck that acts as an interpreter between my phone and the hearing aids. If I want to listen to music from the phone I push the music button on the box, and suddenly I can hear music, perfectly clearly. If I get a phone call I simply push the phone button on the box, and I can hear the other person just as clearly as if they were talking to me in the same room. No line noise of any kind. In fact, if the other person doesn't at least say something like "uhhuh" regularly to indicate that they are still listening, I can't tell if they are there at all.
I am not certain that someone who doesn't have a hearing problem can ever appreciate just what a miracle this is. I grew up hard of hearing, and phone calls have always been a challenge for me, since I could not see the other person to read their lips, and the volume on the phone was never loud enough. My first love was so soft spoken it was actually impossible to communicate with him on the phone at all. He would say "mumble, mumble, mumble", and I would say "WHAT?", and he would repeat his unintelligible murmurs, and I would shout "What did you say?".... I suspect that with this new technology it might even be possible to communicate with someone like him over a phone. But, to be fair, I haven't given it that hard of a test, yet.
It is now nearly 01:00, so I had better go do my yoga and get some sleep. We booked the laundry room for 07:00 tomorrow (ok, I suppose that it now counts as today), and it would be nice to get some rest before starting on that project, especially as we have gaming planned for the rest of the day, and it would be nice to be awake for that.
The strings on a hammer dulcimer are in alphabetical order, and, at the same time, different parts are set up to play in different keys. I don't, yet, know different keys by name, but I am able to look at a bit of sheet music and see what notes, if any, are meant to be sharp or flat, then look at the notes on the instrument (literally--they supplied me with printouts that slide under the strings that tell which string is which note) and find a place where I have only the correct sharps or flats available (sometimes this requires remembering details like D-sharp = E-flat), then play the song in that region of the instrument. Sometimes the notes are directly above or below one another, sometimes they are on the other side of the bridge, or over next to the other bridge.
Before I left Tassie I had mostly learned four tunes. Since my new dulcimer arrived yesterday I have tried two of them. However, for one of them the region of the instrument which has the correct sharps is lower than I remember it being on the other instrument, and now I can play all of the notes on one side of one bridge, while I used to have to switch from one side to the other when changing from the lower to the higher notes. The other tune is in the same region as I remember it being, but when I have to reach over to the second bridge to play is different than I remember.
Since I now need to learn a different physical pattern and I was having problems with my first attempt at doing that, I decided to open up my friend, CorelDraw, and draw out the pattern. Step one was to recreate the instrument on one layer, and draw the letters for the notes on it. Step two was to create a new layer which shows only those notes which appear in the song, and to start drawing a line from one to the next, in the order of the tune. As soon as I got to a place where it would be necessary to cross lines I copied over the letters to a new square and started drawing lines between them again. Repeat till the song is complete, making frequent use of copy-paste when a sequence of notes is repeated again elsewhere in the tune. That project wound up eating three hours of my evening, but, not surprisingly, looking at the tune in that sort of graphic presentation makes it much easier to try to go from what I see on the screen to hitting the correct strings. Yes, there will be lots of work required to get my hands to hit the correct string, at the correct time, every time, but the learning what the correct string is part will, I hope, go faster this way
In other news, one of my friends I met at the two European Textile Forums that I attended has published a summary of the last one we attended. Since a number of you are interested in textiles I thought I would share the link here. Do go look, and do consider attending this year's forum, too! It should be lots of fun (not that I can go register until I find out if I will have any teaching commitments that conflict, but if I can go, I shall).
This week's progress report on uni work: Good. Spent Monday-Thursday at the home office of the mining camp, selecting samples for geochemical analysis. Because this is my first contact with drill core one of the geologists there generously gave me her time to work with me, and discuss what sorts of details I should be looking for in the rock when deciding on where to take samples. It was fun and educational.
This morning I didn't get any uni work accomplished, instead I drove out to the hospital for my appointment to get new hearing aids. I didn't really expect to get new ones today, but I did! I explained to the guy that to my mind the most important thing was to get something that could communicate with my phone, and that is exactly what he gave me. I now have a new pair of hearing aids, and a little white box that hangs from a string around my neck that acts as an interpreter between my phone and the hearing aids. If I want to listen to music from the phone I push the music button on the box, and suddenly I can hear music, perfectly clearly. If I get a phone call I simply push the phone button on the box, and I can hear the other person just as clearly as if they were talking to me in the same room. No line noise of any kind. In fact, if the other person doesn't at least say something like "uhhuh" regularly to indicate that they are still listening, I can't tell if they are there at all.
I am not certain that someone who doesn't have a hearing problem can ever appreciate just what a miracle this is. I grew up hard of hearing, and phone calls have always been a challenge for me, since I could not see the other person to read their lips, and the volume on the phone was never loud enough. My first love was so soft spoken it was actually impossible to communicate with him on the phone at all. He would say "mumble, mumble, mumble", and I would say "WHAT?", and he would repeat his unintelligible murmurs, and I would shout "What did you say?".... I suspect that with this new technology it might even be possible to communicate with someone like him over a phone. But, to be fair, I haven't given it that hard of a test, yet.
It is now nearly 01:00, so I had better go do my yoga and get some sleep. We booked the laundry room for 07:00 tomorrow (ok, I suppose that it now counts as today), and it would be nice to get some rest before starting on that project, especially as we have gaming planned for the rest of the day, and it would be nice to be awake for that.
