Wouter Verhelst: Choir concert
I had been in a choir called "Cantilene" since the age of sixteen.
Since this was a youth choir, however, I was kindly asked to leave when
I hit 26, now two years ago.
Unfortunately, that left me in the cold, as Cantilene was part of the
c-koren family which did not
really have a choir that appealed to me, with hours that would allow me
to attend rehearsals.
This has changed now; since a few months, the C-koren have a new
member choir called "Caljent " (which is supposedly a spanish word
meaning "warmth" or some such—I'm sure Spanish people will correct
me if I'm wrong;-P ), and we will give our first small concert next
week's friday, at 20:30, in the "Sint Lambertuskerk" (church of Saint
Lambert) of Ekeren, my home town. Everyone who can make it is welcome to
be there...
![[dialing phone]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/althea1.jpg)
With daring and finesse, they commandeered an IP phone.
![[talking on phone]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/althea2.jpg)
After 45 minutes of trying to add value, they failed to bring it to the
table, since one major oversight was that they lacked any capacity to
generate speech. H las ! cried the one that wasn't translucent at all,
and he did so silently.
![[typing on keyboard]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/althea3.jpg)
Cleverly devising a backup strategem, they rushed to a computer to send some
emails. Unfortunately, Outlook crashed on them six times, and then they
were, like, totally diverted by a fascinating exchange between two guys named
BJ and William. By the time they managed. To send their first email. Which
they typed like this. Because the little guy on the period key. Had a tick.
It was too late.
![[STD transmission]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/althea4.jpg)
Oh, you poor, foolish things! If only you had used free software, she wouldn't
be giving you oral herpes right now.
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Good times. (Though, I have to admit it was considerably more interesting when it got dark and the torches were lit and we tried to avoid melting the beach ball.)
Helpfully labelled drinks.
Saturday - The Graduation
Good music.
Good speeches. (<plug> yes, this is me </plug>)
Saturday - After We Are Graduated
In which I pose with the superintendant.
In which I pose with my brother outside in the blinding sunshine and blazing heat, while thinking about the cool water that happens to be behind us.
In which I pose with my parents and brother in a moderately more forgiving environment at home.
In which I pose with my brother and grandparents, who could probably stand in for an alternate Matrix cast, and kick your [posterior]. At least in this picture.
In which my cousin Mark discovers that my stole is kinda fun.
In which a good friend of mine gives me a freaking awesome shirt.
I will now proceed to summarily disappear off the face of the ‘net from sometime tomorrow until late Monday or so, in which I Move To Cambridge.
)
Anyway the reason I went to the gig in the first place was that last year one of my partners was a bass-player, and she was often playing gigs in different locations. Unfortunately for the duration of our relationship I managed to never actually hear her play. Not deliberately - it was just the way things worked out. We kinda tailed off seeing each other because I was sleepy and she lived in a different city.
Actually this is a common theme with me. I once lived with a concert chello player and for the entire 2.5. years of our relationship I managed to never hear her play, or practise (and we lived together!). Again not deliberate, it was just the way things worked out. (Even now I don’t think she’s ever heard me play the guitar.) Later I had a relationship with a Swedish dentist and for the duration of our relationship I refused to let her look inside my mouth [mostly 
They represent exactly the same thing, yet someone who knows music
needs a split second to decode the below but a few seconds for the above
(if they understand lilypond's syntaxis). In fact, at first I thought
that I had done something wrong in invoking lilypond-book to
produce that snippet, because I had misparsed the code above (which,
incidentally, is one bar of some actual music that I have in my
~/data/audio/lilypond directory)
The plain text interface certainly does have some
advantages, but IMO the downsides by far outweigh the benefits. In
general, lilypond is not well suited as a way to actually write
music, as opposed to simply typesetting already existing music. I did
actually follow a course on harmonics (although I never finished it due
to lack of time); when writing some new piece, I find that it often far
easier to do the actual writing on a piece of paper and then enter that
in lilypond syntaxis, rather than getting distracted over the lilypond
syntaxis while trying to concentrate on what chords I can and/or want to
use. It is unnatural, and would look like a Japanese person being forced
to read and write texts like 'gaka ga e o kaita' which then get
postprocesssed into something like ' ' (look ma,
Unicode!). Or, in other words: why isn't there just an input method to
write music? There are unicode characters for musical notes,
you know...
When comparing lilypond to finale, it is not hard to understand that
entering music in a graphical environment is just so much easier. When I
last used it, Finale had four input methods: one with keyboard and mouse
(use the numeric keys on the keyboard to enter the desired note length
and the mouse to enter the pitch); one with keyboard only (use abcdefg
etc. to choose the pitch, and the same numeric keys to enter the desired
length); one with keyboard and MIDI keyboard (use the numeric keys to
enter a desired note length, and just press a note on the MIDI keyboard
to choose it); and finally, it can also quantisise music as you play it
(which is the fastest, but least accurate, method to enter music).
Lilypond only allows entering music with the keyboard directly, and then
only displays notes after 'compiling' them, so that you cannot see your
mistakes and typos until much later. I'm disregarding midi2ly, which
converts MIDI files to lilypond input files in a reasonably good way;
but Finale has MIDI import functionality as well, I do not consider that
to be an 'Input Method' as such.
After having entered the music, a musician will want to do something
with it. Have the computer play it, for instance, or print it out so
that he or she can rehearse it and eventually play it themselves.
Lilypond will do neither by itself; however, it can produce postscript,
PDF, and DVI files which one can use to print, and/or MIDI files which
one can have the computer play. The printouts are great, as I've said
before; but playing the MIDI files is another matter entirely.
As I've explained earlier, playing MIDI used to be done through
hardware. When I still had a working SB16-compatible card, I could play
MIDI files on my computer perfectly fine by just using the driver for
that sound card. Since I currently depend mostly on ESS1371-compatible
cards, that do not havve any hardware MIDI synthesizer, however, that
doesn't work. So I have to use software sequencing instead. On Windows,
software sequencing is done by the sound card's driver. On Linux, there
is no software sequencing being done by any driver, so it all has to be
done in userland. In theory, that's just fine. Unfortunately, the
implementation sucks.
The only software MIDI synthesizer available on Debian is
I miss you Radar.
