Instrument families

I was just creating a new file in Sibelius and I noticed that in the “Add instruments” dialogue, among the “Others” available are theremin and helicopter. I’m glad these are available, in the event that I wanted to transcribe this:

I Just Do Theory

Via Aaronson’s blog. This is song called ‘I Just Do Theory’ is aaaaaawesome.
Here is an mp3 file and pdf file of lyrics.
My best line in the lyrics is ‘Playing games in PPAD’ because that’s what I am doing now.

I guess the next step is to make a video

Complexity 2009 accepted papers

Complexity 2009 accepted papers list is out. Almost every paper sounds interesting to me.

Why I do what I do

I wanted to title this post “If I gave a paper at a conference and no one was there to hear it, does it still count on my CV?” but that seemed a bit long.

I gave a paper at a conference on campus the other day. I was excited for two reasons: a) this was not a music conference and b) the conference took place about 100 yards from my office. I saw this as a bit of a challenge: can I communicate fairly sophisticated musical ideas to a non-musical audience? I also liked the money I saved by walking to the conference. I thought about getting a hotel room just to replicate the authentic conference experience, but ultimately decided against it.

Anyway, I’m generally not one to procrastinate writing papers, and I typically present the finished version to students and faculty here a week or two before the conference to get feedback. But this paper got away from me. My presentation was Thursday and as of Saturday, I only had three pages. I worked furiously all weekend and generated about twelve pages, which I then found far exceeded my allotted 20-minute time slot. So I worked on shaving it down, and shaving it down, and shaving it down. And I edited my PowerPoint show and kept trimming the musical examples–would 10 seconds of opera be enough to make my point? I was up until 11:30 on Wednesday night and finally called it quits. The paper was going to run about 23 minutes, but I simply couldn’t cut any more.

I had ignored grading homework, winged a few lesson plans, put off responding to a bunch of e-mails, and strayed from other more mundane routines to devote every free minute this week to this paper.

On Thursday I stumbled into the room where I was to give my talk. I had made a point of requesting audio equipment, figuring that that would be a special request for a non-music conference. No audio hook-up at all. So I used a small pair of computer speakers that I had brought from my office. As long as everyone sat near the front of the room, I figured I’d be fine.

The session started at 1:00. Two of the four presenters did not show up. There were three people in the audience, the moderator, the other presenter, and four students he brought along to read a scene from a play. Not even ten people, and six of them had to be there.

I guess the bright side is that it was then rather informal and I didn’t feel rushed. We had plenty of time for discussion and questions. I got what I wanted, which was some good feedback from non-music types about my work.

The point of this whole rant is that for the amount of time, energy, etc. that most of us put in to conference presentations, articles, and the like, what purpose does it serve if no one is there to hear it (or read it)? Is a line on the CV really worth that much work (and, occasionally, frustration)? I’ve been to several other conferences where this was the case. One conference was overseas and I was on the last session of the last day of the conference. The room had more than nine people in it, but most of them appeared to be there out of some sense of obligation and not interest. My paper was poorly received (looking back, it was far from my best work) and then I hopped back on the plane and went home, again, after putting considerable time, effort, and (in this case) money into the thing.

I certainly hope to get more mileage out of this paper: I have submitted it to a big music conference and ideally would like to get an article out of it. I guess you have to start somewhere…

April 8, 2009 8:01 pm

ICALP 2009 accepted papers

ICALP 2009 accepted papers list is out. Matching my research interests, the following papers sound interesting to me :

• Adam Klivans, Phil Long and Rocco Servedio. Learning Halfspaces with Malicious Noise
• Neeraj Kayal and Timur Nezhmetdinov. Factoring groups efficiently
• Barna Saha and Samir Khuller. On Finding Dense Subgraphs
• Harry Buhrman, Lance Fortnow and Rahul Santhanam. Unconditional Lower Bounds against Advice
• Michael Ummels and Dominik Wojtczak. The Complexity of Nash Equilibria in Simple Stochastic Multiplayer Games

I wish ICALP and other theory conferences follow the recent trend of FOCS/STOC/SODA of uploading the abstracts of the accepted papers.

April 2, 2009 8:01 pm

Memorizing music

I teach a few private double bass students on Wednesdays and something that has come up in both of their lessons in one form or another is memorization. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in terms of how to teach them to memorize music. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. I’m sure these ideas are a) probably not new to me; b) useful to people who play other instruments as well; c) related closely to the goals of most aural skills curricula; and d) related closely to different learning styles.

As I see it, there are basically three ways one can memorize a piece of music that he or she is playing. I will call these three types of memorization aural, visual, and tactile. To memorize something aurally is to memorize how it sounds and to be able to reproduce those sounds on your instrument (and probably by singing as well). To memorize something visually is to memorize how the notes look on the page. If you’ve visually memorized a piece of music, you should be able to sit down with a blank sheet of manuscript paper and rewrite note-for-note, dynamic-for-dynamic what appears in the sheet music. Tactile memorization involves muscle memory. In the absence of sheet music and/or an aural memory of the sound, your hands/arms/legs/vocal cords should remember what to do to create the particular sequence of sounds that constitute a piece of music.

As with learning styles, most people are probably more adept at one form of memorization than the others, but I think that with practice anyone can develop the other types to be nearly on par (if not on par) with their primary mode. If all three are strong and one of them fails, you can rely on the other two. It seems to me that eliminating one of the methods (perhaps initially the primary method) forces the other two to compensate, thereby strengthening them. Forcing a student to play a solo without sheet music (particularly early in their study of a piece) makes their auditory and tactile memory work overtime.

I should also mention that I’m not interested in having them memorize for the sake of memorization. Warren Benfield, a giant in the bass world once played something like a half an hour of orchestral excerpts on a TV morning show from memory (no doubt captivating television). The host was amazed and asked how he managed to do that. Benfield replied to the effect of, “There are two ways to play: either you know it or you don’t.” I’m sure he had the bass parts in front of him when he played the pieces with orchestra, but I think that if you truly know a piece, you have it memorized, whether you set out to memorize it or not.

Next on the agenda is developing some good activities that develop these different areas.

Thoughts? Opinions? Ideas? Anyone seen something like this before (I can’t imagine it’s novel with me)?

April 2, 2009 8:01 pm

American Idol blogging, or Terms: Part II

I used to blog about American Idol a lot, but I don’t anymore. I think it’s lost a bit of what the French call that certain… I don’t know what. This season I like Danny Gokey.

A few posts ago, I posted a list of musical terms that all music students should know. Studying this list is even more imperative since Paula Abdul has apparently turned into an aural skills teacher, dropping all sorts of music theory words during her post-performance comments.

Says Whitney Pastorek, a writer for Entertainment Weekly:

The elders of Journo Row were plenty depressed by Allison’s comment that she “grew up” listening to “Don’t Speak,” as well as by Paula’s use of the word “axe” in her critique. This is where I started to suspect that Ms. Abdul had accidentally stumbled across the thesaurus we bought for Randy, and the new words — she’d also employ legato, cadence,and aborted tonight, using exactly one correctly — were starting to trip her up.

In a previous episode she marveled at the high A’s one of the singers hit, and she’s been dropping a variety of other music-related terms all season. Keep an ear out, and be sure to have your music dictionary nearby!