Last week was physically quite uncomfortable for me; the problem has (mostly?) resolved this morning, thanks mainly to macrogol and senna. I also learned that constipation can cause back pain. On the other hand, I finally got the email from VGZ saying that I have health insurance. (I'm annoyed that it took so long; the fact that I am living in a house that I own should have given them a clue three months ago.)

There was music this week, starting with Leslie Hudson's Hemlock in the Honey tour playlist listening party (all American stops on the tour having been cancelled), and ending with this Star Wars Medley played on the Finnish Kantele, and, by the same performer -- Ida Elina -- the Evolution of Kantele (Finnish Harp). In between, N and I had a practice session. Which, among other things, finally got me off my arse about starting to bring the Kaleidofolk up to date, since one of the songs we worked on, "Life Cycle of Flowers", didn't have chords on the site. (I found the original, printed using an unknown program, in one of my notebooks.)

More music links below, mostly on Saturday. It's been a good week for rabbit holes.

Monday has quite a few good links about how to De-google-ify Internet. My favorite, though, has to be CHATONS. It's French (but easily switched to English or German), and stands for "Collectif des Hébergeurs Alternatifs, Transparents, Ouverts, Neutres et Solidaires". "Chatons" is French for "kittens". Honorable mention goes to a crowdfunding site called "KissKissBankBank".

( Notes & links, as usual )

So the idea of "spirituality" has been in my mind, and to some extent in my journal, where I wrote "Is looking up at the night sky a spiritual practice?" I was remembering, in particular, the night N, Colleen and I came back to the house on Whidbey Island one night not too long after we'd bought the place -- the sky was spectacularly clear, and for a long while we all just looked up and got lost in the depths of it.

Songs came up in my discussion with EG yesterday, in a somewhat different context, and afterward I thought about what songs inspire the kind of awe and grandeur that those stars did.

The first song I thought of was Don Simpson's Ship of Stone. The second was Dave Carter's When I Go. The third was also by Dave Carter -- Lord of the Buffalo. Which I haven't done as a s4s, so I'll just link to Tracy Grammer's cover of it.

(You can also find considerably rougher versions by Kaleidofolk at Or-E-Con 2, 2022 and Lookingglass Folk at Conflikt 2012. Not necessarily recommended unless you're a completist.)

Radiation therapy can lead one down some pretty weird rabbit-holes. I was rummaging around trying to find out why treatment dosage is measured in cGray. Why 1/100 of a Gray? (I note in passing that a Gray is 0ne joule per kilogram.) Well, it turns out that the outdated CGS unit of radiation dosage was the Rad, equal to 100 ergs per gram, and it's equal to 0.01Gy. So the field of radiation therapy goes back a long way, and everyone was used to using rads, so they just kept the numbers and renamed the unit. Besides, it means nobody has to worry about where to put the decimal point -- my prescription, which is fairly typical, is 7000cGy spread over 28 individual 250cGy zaps.

One thing leads to another, so I followed things like radiation poisoning, radioactive waste, and a Timeline of the far future, which somehow wound up at Ray cats. To quote the article,

A ray cat[a] is a proposed kind of cat that would be genetically engineered to change appearance in the presence of nuclear radiation. Philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri originated the idea of a "living radiation detector"[1] in 1984 as a proposed long-time nuclear waste warning message that could be understood 10,000 years in the future...

But how do you ensure that people ten millennia in the future will know why their cats suddenly changed color, and what to do about it? Well, you could make a nursery rhyme about it, and give it a really catchy tune,... The result is titled "10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)". I'm not sure it's catchy enough to do the job, but it is pretty catchy.

See also, Raycats and earworms: How scientists are using colour-changing cats and nursery rhymes to warn future generations of nuclear danger - CityAM, The Cat Went Over Radioactive Mountain | Method, and the podcast Ten Thousand Years - Episode 114 of 99% Invisible (which has the song in it).

...

To change the subject almost completely, but still sort of related, the folks giving radiation treatments at the UW medical center provide background music via Spotify (to keep you from being bored during the prep and treatment, which takes some 20 minutes on a good day.) Naturally I told them to search Spotify for "filk".

The treatment only runs for the last few minutes; the rest is the techs adjusting your position and orientation so that the markers in your prostate line up within a millimeter or so of where they were the last time. So they were still in the room when Paper Pings came on and I was able to say, as calmly as I could, "I wrote that."

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Well, music-adjacent, anyway. Hatnote Listen to Wikipedia is an audio-visual rendering of the Wikipedia edit stream. Scroll down for more information. (This page has more detail.)

Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell.

Note: when you follow the link to the page, you won't hear anything -- it's muted. To unmute it, click on the volume-control slider in the upper right of the header (to the left of the "about" link -- it has rather low-contrast). Click close to it's left-hand (quite) end and adjust the volume from there.

If you've been reading this blog for a while you may have noticed that Songs for Saturday, in addition to having a highly irregular schedule (only 102 entries since I started the tag in 2011), occasionally strays away from the usual run of music-with-vocals that most people consider "songs". But I don't think I've ever strayed quite this far, though that's only because I haven't tagged whale songs or the chirp and ringdown of colliding black holes. Let me fix that.

So with a tip of the hat to ysabetwordsmith, here is The Sweet Song Of The Pando, The Largest Tree On Earth. (Ysabet actually pointed to this NPR article: Eavesdropping on Pando, one of the largest trees in the world. Pando is an aspen clone, spreading over more than 100 acres (43 hectares), with 47,000 tree-like stems growing from a single root system.

I'll get to black holes and whales eventually.

So, earlier in the week I linked to a song, Children Of Darkness by Richard Fariña (as sung with his wife Mimi) -- you'll find the lyrics under the cut, as well as at the link.

Here's another version, sung by Mimi's sister, Joan Baez. Not sure how I feel about the orchestration, but...

I like both versions, but with a preference for the Fariñas'. It's a weird little song, but it fits my mood and the times. Unfortunately. I'd much rather sing cheerful songs in happy times, but that isn't what's happening right now. Another song that's been in my mind lately is Bob Dylan's Desolation Row. Same kind of thing. When things are bad I want a song that resonates with the mood rather than fighting it. (That's related to the standard advice for talking to someone who's depressed or grieving. And the joke that goes: They told me, cheer up -- things could be worse. So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.)

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Since I got confused and ran this week's "Done Since..." post yesterday, I think I'll overcompensate and post an "s4s" post as "Songs for Sunday". (It wouldn't be the first time for either of those, although it may well be the first time I've done both in the same week.) And besides, this isn't really about songs.

Anyway, this week's rabbit hole started with an article on Aeon.co called either "The pharaoh’s trumpet", or "What King Tut's treasures reveal about daily life in ancient Egypt", depending on whether you look at the page's H1 tag or its title. In any case, last Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Among the lesser treasures there were a pair of trumpets, one made of gilded bronze, and one of silver. The article embeds a video, Tutankhamun's Trumpets played after 3000+ Years. I'll wait while you go and listen.

Which led me to Wikipedia, to find out why they were called "trumpets rather than bugles. There, I learned that "bugle" typically refers to the military signaling device, which is limited to the five notes of the "bugle scale", corresponding to the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth harmonics of the horn's fundamental. In the key of C these would be C, G, C, E, and G. You'll note that the 2nd and 4th harmonics are an octave apart, as are the 3rd and 6th.

That led me to the Natural trumpet, on which by going up to the 16th harmonic a skilled player can play an entire chromatic scale by bending, or "lipping", the 7th, 11th, 13th, and 14th harmonics to bring them into tune. Modern trumpets and other brass instruments use valves, of course, which side-tracked me for a while into looking up the difference between piston and rotary valves.

From there I started getting into the difference between "just intonation", which uses pure whole-number ratios, Pythagorean tuning, and the modern equal temperament system, which divides the octave into 12 equal semitones with a ratio of 2^-12 (the 12^th root of 2) between them. Just temperament is used primarily by a capella groups and string quartets.

After that I started getting into modes, diatonic (and other) scales, and some of the more arcane places music theory has gone in the last hundred years or so. I think things beyond that point are mostly of interest to academic music theorists -- mathematicians and physicists got off this bus around the harmonic series.

Yesterday's concert involved a lot of firsts, and not nearly enough preliminary testing; I was impressed if I get a recording that's as much as halfway decent. I'd hoped to have audio to post today, but that's not going to happen. Maybe tomorrow.

This was the band's first Zoom concert, and the first concert where I used the Allen & Heath ZEDi-10 mixer/USB interface. Results were mixed. And, fortunately, also unmixed. Because I got two sets of recordings. Let me back up a bit.

Note: the rest of this post can safely be skipped if you're not interested in home recording.

The A&H (henceforth "mixer") outputs four channels of audio over USB (Linux spuriously exposes the first channel as stereo -- weird) and has both balanced XLR outputs for the main mix, and unbalanced RCA outputs for the monitors and headphones. Since Zoom only supports two channels, I ran the main mix from the XLR outputs into my old Edirol UA-25 interface. The UA-25 has both balanced and unbalanced outputs -- I ran the outputs to my old pair of studio monitors, which I set up so that we could all hear the other side of the zoom meeting.

On a second laptop (Panther, which normally lives in my studio EDU) I set up Audacity to record the four channels of USB audio from the mixer. The default is for these to be the four microphone inputs, and by a happy non-coincidence we had four microphones set up: for me, Naomi, Magpie, and (guitar) Plink. N and m had various percussion instruments, which were not separately mic'ed. I ran the mixer's monitor outputs (set up to mirror the main mix) into the little hardware!Zoom (no relation to the video conferencing software!Zoom) H2 that I use for recording concerts.

We had determined during our rehearsal on Saturday that when you record a meeting using software!Zoom you get 32kHz mono. Yuck! We also re-arranged the living room so that we were all facing the monitors (both the speakers and the LCD) instead of clustered around the keyboard. This made a horrible tangle out of the cables, but fortunately I'd used velcro strips to color-code them, so untangling them this evening was comparatively easy.

The recording of the mix from the H2 ended up being pretty noisy, with a noticable amount of hum, poor balance on a couple of songs, and a few bad noise spikes that I wasted a lot of time this afternoon trying to fix. A lot of the noise was probably due to the crappy cable I used. I'd considered running Audacity on same machine that was running software!Zoom, but I hadn't tested that configuration and didn't trust it.

The 4-channel direct recording is much cleaner, (there were noise spikes, but all in the intros rather than the songs -- weird) but since I decided to work with the 2-channel version first, you'll have to wait until tomorrow (or later) to hear something decent enough to publish.

Kaleidofolk had a good rehearsal this afternoon -- I finally got most of the tech to cooperate. But it turned out that the recording I got off of Zoom was 32kHz mono. I can see why they'd want to do that, but grump anyway. I will try several other things tomorrow morning. The concert's at 2:30.

Anyway, the real s4s post this week will be "Songs for Sunday", tomorrow.

This, I think, needs no further introduction: The Typewriter - Leroy Anderson And His "Pops" Concert Orchestra - Muppet Version