[tt] Frank Forman, Cochlear Cyborg, update of 2008.4.20
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Frank Forman, Cochlear Cyborg, update of 2008.4.20
Monday, 2008 February 4:
Art Museum: wandered into a lecturer that took those gathered to view
paintings she personally took to and heard quite well indeed. Just compare
this with my early months. I'm ready to attend an hour-long talk with
Russell Sale, a permanent staff member at the Gallery who had the clearest
diction and also the best and most-informed discussions.
I rode home on the subway with Frances Moran, as I did Thursday last week. I
am trying to get her to do much of the talking, so as to help me train my
ears to listen in noisy environments. I am, unlike a lot of people, ready
and eager to talk about lots and lots of things. So is Sarah, and we split
our conversations about fifty-fifty, though I've never timed it. With too
many others, I do most of the talking, though it may not seem so
overbalanced, since I pause regularly and get the other party to say at
least something or just nod his head. And I'll often let him rattle on, even
when I hear little, so that he'll think we are equally sharing our
conversation. Some people feel that when I ask them to repeat what they are
saying, it's a sign that I really care about what they are saying. They
actually care much less whether I absorb it long term, the main reason
being, I suppose, that they realize that what they are saying is not of
long-term value. It's a quite delicate business knowing when to ask for
repeats. One friend, Jeff, generally gives up after two attempts at
repeating, but I can press him for more and rather often do, since he is
quite informed about issues in statistics, which I get into fairly often.
I was using my uni-directional microphone and heard Frances pretty well, but
I'll have to be more insistent about her doing a lot of talking. I realize
that there are gabby people in the world but I don't run into very often.
On the way walking home, I tried to listen to what I would not dispute is
the most glorious recording in my entire collection, namely the live 1940
performance of Schubert's Great Symphony, conducted by Willem Mengelberg. It
did not go well.
Tuesday, 2008 February 5: It didn't go well when I was exercising at the
YMCA either, but in my frustration to hear the scherzo I kept anticipating
the outburst of the finale, which kept going through my head. I mean this in
the ordinary sense of imagining it, not an auditory hallucination. I was
finished with my exercising and decided to let the finale come on. It came
on very clearly and with the notes only somewhat out of place. Fortunately,
Sarah was slow in finishing up, so I was able to listen to all of the
movement while waiting. I didn't have to caution silence to her while I
communed with the gods. The communion was rather imperfect but I do know the
work, and the recording esp., so I was made happy.
I relistened to the first movement of the Great on the walk home and heard
it better this time.
Wednesday, 2008 February 6: Today it is the Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony,
conducted by Yvgeny Mravinsky, who was a well-known in Russia as Leopold
Stokowski was in the United States. He was determined precisionist. Spencer
says he conducts like a over-controlling Communist, but I don't hear it that
way.
Mravinsky's great secret, I heard just by listening, is to bring certain
instrument groups to the fore and let them reside. I once watched two videos
of great conductors. I've often wondered just how a motion of the
conductor's hands got interpreted by the orchestra. It is a tough job to do,
since there will be a certain delay between the gestures and the sound. But
with Mravinsky, he would point his hand toward the instruments he wanted to
bring to the fore. I could now see what I heard. But it was really
exhausting following all this, more than for any other conductor!
Anyhow, I heard the dark opening with the bassoons clearly, but my distorted
hearing made the music sound much darker than it was! I wasn't able to
follow it much.
I had finished the tape with the tail end of Mengelberg's live recording.
This performance was broadcast by French National Radio and picked up off
the air by several people, in various states of incompleteness and
wretchedness of sound quality. But it is so exciting (far more so than his
two studios) that it has been issued several times. Now, I have gotten used
to bad sound, though when I listen to my space capsule tape, much to my
surprise, I find the Mengelberg ending so bad, coming after the stereo
Mravinsky, that I can hardly hear it, though if I were to listen just to the
Mengelberg, everything would be fine. But today, music is so distorted that
I hear them equally badly. A dubious benefit.
[Abondroth's secret is to prolong notes just a little bit. He knows exactly
just when to do this. A master! His Bruckner Fourth is on my tapes, and I
thank the late Allen Mackler for drawing my attention to it. Abendroth is
German for the Germans, while Furtwängler is German for the world. So I feel
that I am intruding on something very private when I listen to him. I know
of no other way to describe it. He recorded nos. 5, 7, 8, and 9 also, and
each one is masterful and very, very special. (I know one is supposed not to
use the word very very often and instead choose something more accurate. But
the secret of good writing is to know when to violate the rules. I may have
succeeded here. Too many writers and speakers over use very, and escalate
someone being mildly irritated to being "very angry," Or classify everyone
as "very liberal" or "very conservative." This polarization is not helpful.
By the way, does anyone know any actual instances where, when the options
are strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree, don't know, don't
care, don't understand the question, won't answer such a loaded question,
won't answer a question whose terms are so ill-defined, none of your
business, will answer only if you pay me, etc., actually analyses the
differences between "agree and strongly agree" or "disagree and strongly
disagree"? I once sat through a boring recital of statistics, where the
speaker just had to say "agree or strongly agree," "disagree or strongly
disagree," over and over again. He should have just said the would make two
conflations.
There was a birthday party for four office members. I heard better than I
did at the party in October but used it for training, just as I did then.
Sound and Beyond: I must have accidentally changed the input into my stereo
but got it working again. My session was going to be absolutely horrible,
getting none of the everyday sentences except by sheer guessing. I'm at
level 3 of 4 now, having moved back down from level 4 in November. I was
doing so badly that I went down to level 1, which has now background racket
at all. I got the first few right, though not without effort. At level 2, I
was missing items. This is a very bad day for me, I thought. So I want on to
the animals and food. Terrible results, though not my worst! Then I found
out that the tape monitor was on, as I intend it to be, since the tape
monitor hooks through a box to compress volume. I'll have to investigate
this later. So I turned it off, went back to the everyday sentences module,
and missed 2 out of 25. I got them all on January 14, so I'll keep training
some more.
Thursday, 2008 February 7: Mozart requiem. Couldn't tell there were voices.
Today, I'd replace my two Mozart items (the other being the 23rd concerto,
with Kempff, chosen because of the performance as much as for the particular
concerto) with Symphony 39, the Clarinet Concerto, and the 27th piano
concerto. Mozart started in new directions about that time and his music
started coming from his own inner urges rather than to satisfy patrons. The
39th symphony is his most ambiguous work. I don't know what would be my
favorite recording, but for the concerti it would be Leopold Wlach and
Wilhelm Backhaus, esp.
I'd also replace the Brahms first symphony with the Clarinet Quintet, the
slow, autumnal work that marks, for me, the swan song of Western
civilization (which has been replaced with Darwinian civilization, of which
I have a whole theory). Two indispensable performances: the first electric,
Charles Draper and the Lener Quartet, here for the agitated playing of the
Leers, not captured in any other recording I know, and Leopold Wlach and the
Vienna Konzerthaus Quartet. The quartet is only satisfactory, but Wlach is
so powerful that I have a feeling of devastation and exhaustion at the end.
I wish I could combine the two, and some day someone will do so.
Sound and Beyond: I picked "parent" while the correct answer is "parents."
So I didn't count it as correct. I missed "Martin Luther King Day." as I
have done many times in the past. With Ron Paul,
I am one of the few who regard the civil rights laws as a gross abridgment
of freedom.
Friday, 2008 February 8: All My Children: Ryan is still in amnesia. He last
remembers being married to Greenlee. (Did I mention that I didn't find her
attractive until Brian gave us a better teevee set?) She is now telling him
how wonderful it was. Annie, his actual and current wife, expresses her
worries to Zach. Spike is soon to get his cochlear implant activated.
Jim Lehrer: I decided to simply turn off the captions and struggle to hear
what is being said when the speaker's face is not being shown. I can
actually do this a bit now. I heard, for example, the words "the U.N.
Security Council," though not the following words, which explained what the
Council did. I'll miss some of the so-called news but will move to a new
level of training. This is a major sign that I continue to improve! But, I
do have work at it.
Music: Uncertain whether it will help me, I've decided to just listen to the
music I know better than anything else, the Beethoven piano sonatas. I've
chosen Bob Silverman's recordings. Not so good the first sonata, and it is
irritating no end that "Jingle Bells" kept going through my head. (Time was
in America, when performances of Wagner would have Yankee Doodle
interpolated into a mighty aria. The gentle classes in the last part of the
nineteenth century decided that this would simply not do and so created the
high-brow/low-brow distinction, which tale is told in a book called _High
Brow/Low Brow_, which I have not read.) I did recognize parts of the first
and second movements of the second sonata, though, but not enough to follow
the movements through.
Monday, 2008 February 11: Art Museum. I stumbled again across a guide
showing off whatever paintings she fancies. But the remarks of this one
weren't particularly enlightening. I could have stayed on for the training
effect but didn't.
Wednesday, 2008 February 13: Sound and Beyond: I'm hallucinating tunes when
nothing is going on. I've reported this in the past but haven't recently, as
the tunes are usually no longer appearing, or maybe it's because I just
haven't been keeping track. The Environmental Sound module can very largely
be a matter of my memorizing what sound is what, rather than really hearing
them. But I'm not always alert and so make mistakes that embarrass me. On
the consonant module, I missed shed vs. sad, surprising, since I'm now able
to hear high-pitched consonants that I haven't heard since I was a child.
Ditto for fell vs. shell. I missed lewd vs. rude, but the Japanese conflate
L and R, while they distinguish two different Ms. I had a Japanese record
with music by the composer Lalo, however that's represented in the special
Japanese syllabary character set, Katakana, used to transcribe words from
foreign languages. However, the man who prepared the record jacket, back
translated the composer's name as "Laro"! I have or have had a great many
Japanese records that have a few English words.
However, later I got leak vs. reek correctly, though I missed lair vs. nair.
Friday, 2008 February 15: All My Children: Zach has to explain to Ryan, who
somehow thinks Zach robbed him of his wife during the period he can't
remember, that Ryan brought it on himself.
Jim Lehrer: Watched without captions, but failed to concentrate and get much
training. I did alternate among cyber ear, meat ear, and both. (Alternate is
not the right word, since the Latin root refers to two only.) I hardly use
my meat ear, except to listen to music. The familiar voices of Lehrer,
Shields, and Brooks sound very different. It is similar, I think, to the bad
scales I have listening to music.
Saturday, 2008 February 16
Gould: Decided to play some non-Gould items on the second iSong disc, since
they had lots of flats. Get a different kind of practice. So I played the
treble only and the bass only of the most simplified forms of Claire de Lune
of Debussy and the 18th Paganini Variation of Rachmaninoff. In the unreduced
versions, the music seems to be mostly chords, but even in the most
simplified there are a lot of them. A lot of octaves, esp., and this is
good, since octaves just don't sound right. I played them all at normal
speed. Well, the octaves didn't sound right during this session, nor did the
rising and falling of notes.
Back to Back! as the Sage of Baltimore would often say. I listened to the
full version, both hands, but slowly of the WTC Prelude 1. This should be
easy, since the notes always rise except on the last two measures.
Frustration. Notes going up the scale just didn't sound subjectively like
they did. I persisted, and the began to sound better. I rounded out the
session with Invention No. 8, full version, left hand only, slowed down from
96 to 40 beats per minute. The problems of hearing the notes go up and down
was pretty bad.
Yet, on some later day or even later hour, I'll do much better. I see no
pattern in this variation, except what seems to be a gradual improvement
over time, and wonder what good the training--trying to make my brain hear
the sound as rising or falling as it does in the score as the case may
be--does when some later time my subjective sounds will be different with
the very same score. What I mean is that if my brain is constructing a map
of subjective score --> objective score and I try to use this map on a
differently perceived subjective score (same piece of actual music), will
the translation be to a wrong objective score?
I have no idea and don't know whom to ask.
Sunday, 2008 February 17: Keyboard: I stood up for Christ by pecking out
"Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus" on my own. This doesn't sound like much of an
accomplishment, but I noticed right away when I failed to make a C#. So, at
least this time, I'm making even half-tone distinctions, quite an
improvement. I got out the Methodist hymnal and everything sounded all
wrong. Suspecting this hymnal used a melody I wasn't familiar with, I got
out the Episcopal hymnal, which did.
G8 (G above middle C, 8 representing the octave from middle C, or about 2^8
Hz = 256 Hz, to the next C, 2^9 Hz = 512 Hz, as you may recall) came on very
loudly when I had the keyboard imitate a piano but not when I had it imitate
a harpsichord. (There are 32 imitations to choose from). Not much later, G8
on the piano came on at normal volume. I should report, maybe again, that
sometimes notes don't sound at all. It's not that my Casio CT-650 "Tone
Bank" or my speech processor are defective, it's me that is defective. I
later played, from a score not by pecking out (which I haven't attempted
much at all before today), Jingle Bells. Went poorly.
I haven't much detailed my home listening to the New Testament (famously
designated by Ferruccio Busoni as the 32 Sonatas of Beethoven, while the Old
Testament is the 48 Preludes and Fugues of Bach), as played by Robert
Silverman. Ups and downs as ever, though never as good as before my
operation. I didn't get much out of the Funeral March sonata.
Monday, 2008 February 18, at home for President's Day: On a lark, I ran
through the Dr. Seuss books again, the first time since November 10. I
missed not a thing and even made out what the introductory and closing words
were. I also tried, mostly successfully, to place my hands over the upcoming
sentences, and I got quite a number of them correctly. Of course, my memory
of what the words were played a big role here. There's no software for
tracking my progress and the books proceed at such a rapid pace that
stopping to mark my guesses would be a tremendous ordeal, so my impressions
will have to be quite subjective. (Not that Sound and Beyond isn't: I often
guess correctly, not by really hearing the intended distinctions but by
noting small differences in the length of the sounds, not something intended
by the Nucleus, which made the program. I shall have to write them.) Let me
say that I think my progress has been very good. I have nine books in sound
but only got seven of them in print. I tried to listen to the other two. I
did identify sentences here and there but didn't pursue the exercise, which
would take a lot of time and effort and backing up my CD. I do have a
control to do this, but it is nowhere as good as what I can do with an audio
cassette. With an LP I can quite quickly move the tone arm around. In fact,
I got a turntable used by disc jockies from the late Allen Mackler, Technics
SL-1500MK2, which gets up to speed within a quarter of a revolution and
which one can back up by hand, giving much finer control that an audio
cassette deck can do. I suspect some of the Dr. Seuss books were made with
phonograph records, but our public library doesn't have any. I may have
mentioned before that the cassette tape recordings of these books have a
huge amount of music. There is much less on the CDs of the same books. But
even on the CDs, there are moments of music. I'm happy to report that,
though I couldn't recognize what was being played (often just a note or
two), I could hear them and, for the first time, not sometimes get lost.
Tuesday, 2008 February 19: Sound and Beyond. I reached a record of 17
animals guessed correctly (out of 25) just by my hearing the words and
without looking at the choices.
I took Elizabeth Whitaker, niece of Bob Whitaker, whom I first met at U.Va.
in 1966, to the Sackler Museum to an exhibit "Wine, Worship and Sacrifice:
The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani." This is in Georgia, the Asian country,
not the U.S. state. (When some Americans were on a tour of Georgia S.S.R.
(as it was then) and the bus went past the Georgia Institute of Technology,
the Americans burst out singing:
I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech, and a hell of an Engineer
A Helluva, Helluva, Helluva, Helluva, Helluva Engineer
Like all the jolly good fellows, I drink my whiskey clear.
I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an Engineer
Oh, if I had a daughter, sir, I'd dress her in white and gold,
And put her on the campus To cheer the brave and bold.
But if I had a son, sir, I'll tell you what he'd do--
He'd yell: 'TO HELL WITH GEORGIA!' Like his daddy used to do.
Oh, I wish I had a barrel of rum, and Sugar three thousand pounds
A college bell to put it in, And a clapper to stir it round.
I'd drink to all the good fellows, who come from far and near.
I'm a Ramblin', Gamblin', HELL OF AN ENGINEER!
(text from Wikipedia.)
The sponsors must have wondered whether the Americans had a similar song for
the Moscow Institute of Technology
Georgia Tech's fight song is U.Va.'s *drinking song*, with which I am
perfectly familiar:
http://scripta.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-textwg/cavdaily.pl?str=a14.3&offset=0&fileid=19670901
(dated 1967.9.1, when I was still a student, my memory in brackets)
The rollicking lyrics of "From Rugby Road..." are the result of spontaneous
composition over the years and have been known to vary from the version
presented here.
From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill, (9 syllables)
We're gonna get drunk tonight. (7)
The faculty's afraid of us, (8)
['Cause] They know we're in the right. (7)
So fill [up] your cups, your loving cups, (8)
As full as full can be, (6)
And as long as love and liquor last, (9)
We'll drink to the U. of V. (7)
From Carrols to the Corner, (7)
We will drink our beer and shout [stout], (6)
And if the faculty objects, (8)
They can only throw us out. (7)
So fill up your cups, your loving cups, (8)
As full as full can be, (6)
And as long as love and liquor last, (9)
We'll drink to the U. of V. (7)
Refrain: Oh, I think we need another drink! Heh! I think we need another
drink! Heh! I think we need another drink! Heh! I think we need another
drink! To the glory of the U. Va.
I remember the refrain something like this:
Oh I think we need another drink, Hey!
I think we need another drink, Hey!
I think we need another drink
To the glory of the U.Va.!
I also remember lines from another stanza, perhaps not sung at sporting
events:
We'll take you to a party And fill you full of beer,
And soon you'll be the mother
Of a bouncing Cavalier.
Another site refers to a suppressed verse that began:
"There once was a swat from Agnes Scott"
I found it at
http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2007/07/12/we-object-al-groh-merely-sucks/
#32 - That's phenomenal that the cool UVA alternate fight song is ripping
off Georgia Tech Band inside joke songs. Well played indeed. Why would UVA
even be discussing a school 400 miles away?
A twiddly twat from Agnes Scott went out with a guy from Tech
He brought her to the Varsity, and taught her how to neck
He filled her full of whiskey, he filled her full of beer
And now she is the mother of a bastard engineer.”
ME: There are more vulgar versions that would not be sung in public. Anyhow,
it's a Georgia Tech addition. Agnes Scott College is a private liberal arts
college in Decatur, Georgia, near Atlanta. It is within walking distance of
Georgia Tech.
There could be quite a rivalry among the teams in the Atlantic Coast
[Football] Conference:
http://www.dailypress2.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13467
(dated 2007)
The Rugby Road Song
The Wilk Hall tailgate concludes with a short rally, highlighted by the
"Rugby Road Song," a traditional UVA drinking song. Following is this week's
version.
All "Hoos News" readers are welcome to join us in the U-Hall parking lot. We
set up to the southwest of U-Hall, close to the port-a-potties and overpass
leading to Scott Stadium. Look for the blue Wilk Hall flag flying high.
From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill, we're gonna get drunk tonight.
The Jackets are afraid of us; they know we'll win the fight.
Fill up your cups, your Wahoo cups, as Wilk Hall leads the way.
As long as love and liquor last, we'll drink to UVA.
Chorus:
Oh, I think we need another drink. Hey!
I think we need another drink. Hey!
I think we need another drink,
For the glory of UVA!
Take a drink for our team, and make it strong of course.
Take a drink for Cav-Man, and drink one for his horse.
Take a drink for Chris Long, let out a Wilk Hall belch.
And take a drink all Cavaliers, for dear old George Welsh.
[Cavaliers is the nickname of the U.Va. football team.]
Wilk Hall showed up early, a bunch of hungry Hoos.
Robbie makes fine drinks and doesn’t forget the booze.
Sarge is grilling sausage, the finest in the land.
He'll smile at your girl and put a biscuit in your hand.
[Hoos is an informal nickname of the football team.]
The Hoos will swat the Jackets today, the third win of the year.
UVA will stomp their team, and send them home in fear.
The Hoos will lead the ACC, UNC will cry.
Georgia Tech will have a wreck, and VPI will die.
Virginia was Virginia, when Georgia Tech was a pup.
We'll still be Virginia, if Georgia Tech grows up.
Atlanta is a sewer, keeping Vick instead of Schaub.
Jacket fans hold their tools while hokies hold a cob.
Charlottesville is orange today, our team is on a roll.
Cedric is hot, the defense rocks, and Santi will cross the goal.
The Sea of Orange will shout and roar on every down we play,
So pass your cup and take a shot and drink to UVA!
I met a ramblin' wreck at an outdoor exhibit on the Mall last Summer of
solar houses. He alone was able to answer economic questions, unlike the
moon-eyed idealists sponsoring solar houses from liberal arts universities.
Solar panels are about 20% efficient, meaning all energy in vs. *useful*
energy out. By contrast, as I have read elsewhere, both gasoline engines and
the human body are about 7% efficient. The Georgia Tech house iirc will
store energy in batteries when it is nice and sunny and the energy not being
used in reserve when needed. Solar energy high-rise apartment buildings
aren't feasible yet, since there isn't enough space on the roof to get
energy for the whole building.
And the ramblin' wreck had no problem understanding that the energy "crisis"
isn't real, only a matter of money. It's great going to gatherings at George
Mason where graduate students understand this instantly, while many if not
most economists at mainstream universities do not, but a surprise when a
ramblin' wreck understands this as well. Some people are intuitive
economists, not many, for our default economics from the Old Stone Age is
communism or that of a command economy. This is reasonable, since the chain
from command to action was short, shorter than it was in Massachusetts in
the 1620s, when communism was practiced, crop failures happened, communism
abandoned, a glorious harvest came about, and the Lord stepped in at the
last moment to get the credit.
U.Va. does have a fighting song, which is pretty bad:
http://scripta.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-textwg/cavdaily.pl?str=a14.3&offset=0&fileid=19670901
The Good Old Song
That good old song of Wah hoo-wah We'll sing it o'er and o'er It cheers our
hearts and warms our blood To hear them shout and roar. We come from old
Virginia Where all is bright and gay; Let's all join hands and give a yell
For dear old U.Va. What though the tide of years may roll And drift us far
apart; For Alma Mater there'll still be A place in every heart. In college
days we sing her praise. And so when far away, In memory we still shall be
At the dear old U.Va. Wah hoo-wah Wah hoo-wah Univ. V, Virginia; Univ. V,
Hoo-rah ray! Hoo-rah ray! Ray! Ray!
U. Va. although it is not the official Alma Mater, "The Good Old Song" has
become "th traditional Alma Mater" over the years. No alumni reunion passes
without an emotion-filled singing-or two or three of it.
[I can't remember the tune. The song itself was published in a book in 1906,
though I don't know when it was written. I had no idea it was that old. The
football team's informal nickname was Wahhoh, later shortened to Hoos.]
Well, what about the exhibit? It had to do with the Golden Fleece:
According to legend, Jason and his shipmates, the Argonauts, set sail on a
perilous journey from Greece to Colchis (modern-day Georgia), then located
beyond the known world. Less well known today, however, is the archaeology
and artifacts of Colchis, with its intermingling of Greek and Persian motifs
with local styles and traditions. Metalworking, whether in gold, silver,
iron or bronze, was a traditional focus of Colchian art and craftsmanship.
The earliest evidence of wine and winemaking comes from the area—another
mainstay of Georgian life throughout several millennia.
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/Gold/default.html
I didn't find what was mostly jewlery all that exciting. Jason, according to
the legend, want the fleece off of the winged ram Chrysomallos, the
possession of which would somehow place him rightfully on the throne of
Iolocus in Thessaly. I read _The Argonautica_ in college but found it
boring. It took wadhing through a long list of 60 great ships and all its
crew just to get launched. Far better the launching in _Njal's Saga_: "And
when Hrut was ready, he rode away." I took her over to the African Art
Museum, but she just couldn't get interested. Almost all the art in this
museum is less than two centuries old.
Frances, in the meantime, wants to go to the National Gallery of Art with me
and is especially curious about modern art. I told her I wanted her to be
totally under my command for five minutes. I didn't tell what I would do,
but it's the same thing I did, most successfully, with Sharon a few months
earlier.
In the meantime, I have figured out just what modern art is all about. It's
an original idea, I think, but is actually pretty simple. We shall see.
Wednesday, 2008 February 20: Jogging in, my cassette tape got clogged and so
I just listened to the traffic, though I could have turned my processor off.
I like to do this. Sometimes I sing and strive to get the melodies right.
Alas, My Country 'Tis of Thee came out all wrong, as though I were imitating
my distortions. So I went home, played it on the keyboard, and got it right
the next time I sang this to myself outdoors. As always, there's a lot of
variability here. But today I just listened to the traffic and recognized a
motorcycle coming up from behind me, which is exactly what happened. This is
progress.
Sound and Beyond: I missed baby cry vs. lion of all things, which goes
further to show that my training with the Environmental Sounds module has
much to do with memorization. I tied for a high of 94% of the vowels (still
at level 1), which I had reached last October 16. During this time I had
gone as low as 60% on November 13, though my absolute worst was 56% on both
September 11 and 17.
Thursday, 2008 February 21:
Sound and Beyond: Consonants: Missed get vs. guess. I chose guess, but the
word just didn't sound right. I thought guess was a better guess than get.
Anyhow, this is what training is all about. I tied for 94%, which I hit on
December 31.
Yesterday and today, I thought perhaps that my first guess is the best one.
So, starting Round 39, I did the exercises twice.
Library of Congress: Sharon again came with me to the Library of Congress,
this time so I might do what I failed to do the last time, namely to xerox a
listing over several issues of the American Record Guide of the Victor
Masterworks 78 rpm M-sets and a small compilation by Stuart Upton, _Sir Dan
Godfrey & the Bourne mouth Municipal Orchestra_. This is an absolute delight
and I am firmly convinced that that the earlier generations were deeper
musicians. He strode the world of semi-classical and classical music as Sir
Henry Wood and Arthur Fiddler were to do later. Sir Dan made recordings from
1914 through the early electrics. Most of them take up one or two sides, but
he did make an acoustic recording of VW's London Symphony and electrics of
Debussy-Busser: Petite Suite and the Jupiter Symphony. The last I have. It
is a fully engaged performance and one I would rather listen to than almost
any stereo version, the exceptions being early stereos by the likes of
Klemperer, Walter, Casals, and esp. the one I grew up on, Hans
Schmitt-Isserstedt, quite a surprise. I don't think this is prejudice on my
part, for there are here and there outstanding recordings by musicians I
don't ordinarily rank highly.
We didn't get to the exhibition she wanted to see before too late on our
last hike up there, since we spent so much time just talking (some of it was
about my work, where her ideas have been quite helpful, so I do have an
excuse to be away from my office for too long, as one good idea is worth a
lot of flouncing around). This time, we arrives almost before closing time.
This is a good exhibit indeed, and I shall go up there all by myself just to
see the artifacts undisturbed:
Exploring the Early Americas: The Jay I. Kislak Collection
West Side Story: Birth of a ClassicNorthwest Gallery, Second Floor, Thomas
Jefferson Building, Ongoing Exhibition
Monday - Saturday, 10:00am to 5:00pm
Exploring the Early Americas features selections from the more than 3,000
rare maps, documents, paintings, prints, and artifacts that make up the Jay
I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress. This ongoing exhibition has
three major themes: Pre-Contact America; Explorations and Encounters; and
Aftermath of the Encounter. Like the Jay I. Kislak Collection itself, the
exhibition provides glimpses into the complex and fascinating past of the
Americas. It provides insight into indigenous cultures, the drama of the
encounters between Native American and European explorers and settlers, and
the pivotal changes caused by the meeting of the American and European
worlds. The last theme explores the profound growth of knowledge,
particularly in natural history and geography, resulting from the
encounters. This section includes two extraordinary maps by Martin
Waldseemüller created in 1507 and 1516, which depict a world enlarged by the
presence of the Western Hemisphere.
This installation begins the public’s direct and permanent access to a
remarkable private collection and the collection’s full availability for
research and scholarly exploration. Throughout the exhibition, interactive
presentations enable visitors to learn directly from the artifacts, books,
documents, paintings, and maps. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/ex-current.html
If you can't make it there meatly, you can virtually:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/earlyamericas/
Oh, this is supposed to be about my hearing! Needless to say, I was able to
hear most of what Elizabeth and Sharon said.
Earlier, and yesterday, I wondered whether I might so
Friday, 2008 February 22:
This is George Washington's actual birthday. I do not like the idea of
"Presidents' Day," since Washington was so pivotal that he deserved a day
all by himself. So does Mr. Jefferson, and I'd gladly replace King for him!
And indeed for Labor Day and the days we commemorate out needless wars,
Memorial and Veterans' Day. Also Thanksgiving Day, unless we realize that it
was the wise men who abandoned communism, not the Lord, for whom we should
be grateful. Give to the day of the surrender at Yorktown. It was on 1781
October 19 that the official surrender took place. I had to look it up. Five
days after the surrender, relief to Cornwallis came from General Henry
Clinton. The American victory was a touch-and-go thing all the way through.
All My Children: J.R. was on the way to a hospital to donate bone morrow to
Richie when some thugs kidnapped him. Stay tuned. If you must.
Jim Lehrer: I'm writing this two days later and totally forget everything. I
was so curious about this scandal about John McCain's relationship with a
quite attractive lobbyist, Vicky Iseman that I just followed Brooks and
Shields from the captions. I glanced at the headlines in the Washington Post
the day before, "McCain's Ties To Lobbyst Worried Aides," and snapped it
open to find out how glamorous she was. Otherwise I am ignoring the
campaign.
Here are two favorite quotes about American politics from Mr. Mencken:
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more
closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some
great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-- H. L. Mencken, 1920 July 26, concluding sentences of "Bayard vs.
Lionheart," Baltimore Evening Sun, reprinted in _A Carnival of Buncombe_,
edited by Malcolm Moos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1956).
Turn, now, to politics. Consider, for example, a
campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to
imagine anything more uproariously idiotic -- a
deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle,
Gobbo and Dr. Cook -- the unspeakable, with fearful
snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable? I defy
any one to match it elsewhere on this earth. In other
lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible
issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody
says something, and somebody replies. But what did
Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply? Who was
Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having
perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to
symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here
we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank
cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly.
Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy
reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be
hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to the
plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that
no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of
the sham-battle been developed to such fineness...
--from H.L. Mencken, "On Being an American," _Prejudices: Third Series_
(1922)
I rediscovered the first one when G.W. Bush was running for re-election.
Within hours it was all over the Internet.
Sunday, 2008 February 24:
Keyboard: miserable job of pecking out "From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill."
Monday, 2008 February 25:
Sound and Beyond: I wonder whether my first guess is the best one. There
have been a good many times when I changed it to another answer and to my
regret. This is something we all do. I've already stopped getting repeats
for the eight modules that don't come with harder and harder levels, as I
get so nearly all of them right, esp. when I see the choices before me that
I'm not getting any training. So, on a lark, I wondered about the six other
modules, those that do have levels. Here's the results. (I did most but not
all this experiment, since if I do them all, the software records it.) Of
course, I concentrate more when I know I have only one shot.
So here are the results, with as many repeats as I want up to the three I am
allowed and then with no repeats, just my best intuitive judgment.
Pure Tone Discrimination (I am now at level 4/5): 92% vs. 65%. Quite a
difference. A huge problem is that my brain will often insist that the same
tones will sound low-high-low, even after I get fed the frequencies after I
make a mistake. (First I see Click on the different sound: Sound 1 Sound 2
Sound 3. If I get the answer right, the software goes on to the next
comparison. If I don't, I see and hear, say, 5297-Hz 6207-Hz 6207-Hz.
Sometimes, my brain will tell me, after I see the frequency numbers that I'm
really hearing low-high-low. That's yet another problem I have.
Environment Sounds: 92% and 80%. I didn't expect this much lowering.
Male/Female Identification: 81% and 73%. I expected about this much
difference, in other words a slight one.
Vowel Recognition: 94% and 93%. Insignificant, both really and
statistically. I thought there would be a small difference. (Of course, I
should do this side experiment several times, until I get to the point that
I get so close to perfect that the only way to continue to get training is
to refuse any repeats.) When I started graduate economics, I thought that
the difference between actual significance and statistical significance was
to obvious that only the unwashed public and *other* beginning graduate
economics students would fail to recognize it. A difference is statistically
significant when it is unlikely to have happened by chance. I've reported
such variability in my working through the Sound and Beyond exercises that
the difference between 94% and 93% is just random. After all, my last ten
trainings on vowels got me these percentages: 90, 68, 80, 80, 88, 74, 82,
82, 76, and 94. I notice minute-by-minute variation when I do the training.
On the other hand, a one percent difference could be highly significant,
statistically, in a large enough sample, but of no practical significance
whatsoever.
It turns out that most of the public makes this mistake. When one hears that
such and such increases the chance of cancer and is "statistically
significant," one has no idea whether the chance has merely risen from
microscopic to minuscule. And this is true of statements like so and so
doubles the chance of getting cancer.
Consonant Recognition: 94% vs. 80%. This lowering is similar to the other
modules.
Everyday Sentences: 88% vs. 65%. I cheated here, by pressing the pause
button before every question so that I could read all four candidate
answers. Usually, I concentrate on the first answer. If it doesn't seem to
the right one, I'll try to figure out which it was and then repeat the
sentence. If this sounds right, I'll repeat it again and look at a third
answer. If I think I am hearing my second choice, that's great. If not, I'll
try once again to figure out what is the correct answer, have the sentence
repeated and look at the fourth answer. In other words, I'm trying every
mental tool to get the answer right. I'm not sure whether this provides the
actual best *training* or not, though.
Tuesday, 2008 February 26:
Frances and I went home on the subway, but it was so noisy that she could
hear me only when I leaned very close to her. She was perfectly exhausted
from frustrating work, but somehow she was all smiles and laughter on the
trip home. (Maybe leaning close to her had something to do with it!) She
turns out to be quite concerned about the cruel conditions under which some
farm animals live and won't buy pork products at all. I don't think she
wants a Federal law on the subject, but would rather let others know about
the appalling conditions that some farm animals (esp. chicken) suffer. She
asked me what I thought and I told her its was not much on my radar. She was
a first not happy by my relative indifference, but I told her that I was far
more interested in getting my tapes of the Victor and Columbia 78 rpm sets
of classical music disseminated.
Well, everyone to his own cause, I guess. Pluralism at work. What about
those who don't have causes? Whenever I hear someone moan about the lack of
vision of "today's youth," I feel relieved that some new government program
will not be launched. My own cause is a meta-cause, not to beat a drum for
things in the present, like being nicer to animals, getting the M-sets on a
server, or (more usually) advocating one or another political reform. I
never did read Jacques Ellul's The Political Illusion, but I do agree that
politics is not the be all and end all of life. It was hardly so between the
War and Wilson's getting us into another one; rather, the most talented
became the "great captains of industry." In this century, politics will
recede as technology becomes the great engine of change, which it already
has: the biggest revolution started in 1993 December with the release of the
first widely-used graphics browser that worked for Windows and Mac, NCSA
Mozilla 2.0. (Thomas Bruce's Cello got going on June 8 that year but it was
short-lived, it's last release on 1994 April 9. The browser I mostly use is
text-only, Lynx, which got going in 1992.) How come there aren't any web
grazers? There really no reason why not, as I found out when seeing a whole
display about the differences at the National Museum of Natural History.
Well, the cellFone is another innovation whose impact greatly exceeds
anything done by politicians, certainly since the destruction of the Berlin
Wall. Another reason for the decline of politics is that most of us have
learned that certain political schemes do not work (central economic
planning: even the Democrats don't want the Federal gummint running the
health system) and many of us have learned that most schemes (esp. the
uplift) don't work either.
My cause is a meta-cause: to see to preserve and enhance the capacity of
humans, transhumans (like your cyborg instant!), and posthumans to improve
the world or at least to take it into new directions (pluralism, again).
This can get into (currently) taboo areas.
Wednesday, 2008 February 27:
Sound and Beyond. Just to note that the correct answer for the first eleven
(I got them all) questions in the Vowel module was the third sound as the
different one. This means that the 0.33^10 = 1.69 x 10^-5, which is not
impossible, but that such an improbable run would happen one or more times
on a thousand trials is only 2%, since 0.98 = (1 - (1.69 x 10^-5))^1000.
(I've had about 40 rounds of 14 modules each, so far.) A run of 11 is the
longest I can remember, but having the correct answer be the last one more
often than chance makes me get a higher score than by chance alone. I've
noticed quite a number of other improbabilities, such as my incorrect guess
appearing as the correct one on the next question. Since I'm playing only
against myself, this might not matter very much.
Consonants: I tied for 94% again. I missed lush vs. love. T. Peter Park, was
legendary at U.Va., for taking so long to complete his dissertation and who
was spotted frequently by my fellow Echols Scholars and reported to us. Bob
Whitaker (whose time in graduate economics corresponded with my last three
undergraduate years) introduced me to him as Pete Parker, so I may have been
the first of my friends to have actually spoken with him. He explained that
his Lithuanian family name was Priks, which got changed when they came to
America. I'd stop to chat with Peter whenever we saw one another. His
dissertation was on "the European reaction to the assassination of Francisco
Ferrer." (His pronunciation of that phrase has lodged itself in my long-term
memory. During my third and last year in graduate economics, when I was
*supposed* to be writing my dissertation, I moved with Sarah to Mary
Washington College, where she was *supposed* to complete her bachelor's
degree. I didn't complete my dissertation either, but now I realize that
this was a function of faculty politics: after Tullock and Buchanan left,
the faculty had an attitude of thumbs-down on the graduate students that
were associated with them. "If you give us a dissertation, Mr. Forman, we
will give you a Ph.D." My first topic was the scope of decisions, as I had
come to doubt that the choices economists talk about are really spontaneous
acts of free will. What I can do, in the immediate present, is to decide to
move my arm, but only for the small fraction of a second until I can decide
to stop moving it. When I plan an extended action, I am basically making a
(New Year's!) resolution to carry though a whole sequence of actions.
However, I might well decide later to abandon my project. There's a tension
between be resolute and being foolhardy. Furthermore, such resolutions are
often half-hearted. Ludwig von Mises never thought of this, perhaps because
he, personally, was a resolute man.
Later on, I started writing about what Jim Buchanan regarded as his best
contribution to economic theory, which we read in manuscript in class and
which he later turned into a little book, Cost and Choice. For him, the cost
of doing something was not what is shelled out but the sacrifice of
alternatives that might have been done instead, which is called "opportunity
cost." Opportunity cost is a valuable way of looking at decisions. It also
recognizes that the costs I bear will in general be larger than what I turn
over to someone else. I have to bear myself my own transaction and decision
costs as well as the costs of gathering information on what course of action
(resolution, as in my first dissertation topic) to undertake.
But the set theoretician in me objected: if the cost is the *set* of all the
alternative courses of action, it is a fabulously large set. If I am
thinking of opening a restaurant, I give up opening one identical to my
initial plan except that hundred watt light bulbs will be used than the
sixty watt ones I initially thought of using. Other alternatives would be
opening up a quite different business and putting the money into an index
fund. Besides, the whole idea of cost as a *set* is a bad one. I realize
that economists don't use words as precisely as a set theoretician or
logician would, but I couldn't provide a satisfactory translation. What I
concluded, long after this, was that cost is at bottom an undefinable term.
What I'd do now is to observe economists intuitively steering clear of
absurdities by moving back and forth between cost as payout and cost as
alternative. This is very similar to mathematicians and scientists using
Newton's and Leibnitz's dy/dx notation in calculus, which they continue to
do long after Bolzano (little known) and Cauchy (widely known) had secured
an exact definition, the familiar epsilon-delta definition:
The derivative of a function f at a point a is b if for every epsilon
greater than zero, there exists a delta greater than zero such that if 0 <
|x-a| < delta, then |(f(a+ DELTAx)-f(a))/DELTAx -b| < epsilon.
(I *think* I got it right!)
Here dy is a small change of the value of the function f (at the point a)
and dx (DELTAx) is a small change. The limit idea takes smaller and smaller
changes. If the result stays close to b (the derivative of the function f at
the point a), then we are successful.
What happens is that we never divide a zero change by zero motion and never
really divide by zero, though it seems that way, and dy and dx were called
infintesimals. Bishop George Berkeley, a philosopher who thought that
reality was all illusion, ridiculed this notion of infintesimal, famously
calling them "ghosts of departed quantities."
(Much later in the 1960s, Abraham Robinson developed a precise method of
treating infintesimals and avoiding contradictions. He exploited a fact that
there is often not just one model (toy universe) in which a system of axioms
is satisfied, but others call non-standard. In the standard model of
mathematics, the real numbers make up a whole level of infinity above the
counting numbers. This was shown in 1873 December 7, the date if a letter
from the great Georg Cantor to Richard Dedikind. However, Leopold Loewenheim
showed that any mathematical system had a model consisting of at most the
lowest infinity of elements. What Cantor showed was that one could never
match up the counting numbers with the real numbers *from the inside*. But
the whole scheme, in a non-standard model, would look *from the outside* as
having only the smallest infinity of elements. Robinson exploited this to
great a non-standard calculus. Though Georg Kriesel wrote a calculus book
for undergraduates using non-standard calculus, it never took off.)
The trick was to stay away from actually dividing by zero. Newton and
Leibnitz didn't have the notion of successive approximations, but
mathematicians managed, somehow, to avoid contradictions.
And so in economics, cost as shelling out, what Jim called "the underside of
a decision," and opportunity cost formally contradict one another. I'd
investigate how mathematicians steered clear of contradiction and then how
economists did. I have no solution to the contradiction, neither a
Bolzano-Cauchy definition, nor a Robinson non-standard solution. I maintain
that, at bottom, the very central notion of cost in economics cannot be
defined.
This is not unusual: society, language, law, marriage, and religion are
among central ideas that cannot be nailed down.
Oh, T. Peter Park. He showed up in the house where Sarah and I rented a room
along with a few of her classmates at Mary Washington. He got drunk and
broke one of my prized glasses. Sarah call him "a lech, a leach, and lush."
Thursday, 2008 February 28
Attended a presentation about how well some education programs were working.
I confess to not being very interested in what Mr. Mencken called the
uplift, in this case lifting idiots up to imbeciles, imbeciles to morons,
and morons to dull normals. In general, I am concerned only about the upside
of life. Even though Dad was a physician, I have astonishingly little
interest in how the human body can go wrong and agree with Mr. Mencken that
the truth of the Trinity is proven, as the human body was created by a
committee. I do take in interest in my hearing loss but really about its
*progress* through the high technology of a cochlear implant. Thus this
diary! The presentation was captioned but, not finding the subject matter
enthralling, I went to the front and exercised the opportunity to have a
training session. That was most of my daily hour, which I wrapped up with
finishing my 40th round of Sound and Beyond.
Friday, 2008 February 29
All My Children: Kendall was warned to lock her hotel room by a friend as he
left. She doesn't. Someone outside is about to enter. Commercial break. He
is still about to enter. Commercial break. He comes in a merely want an
autograph. She was in her hotel room just before she called an immediate
press conference to deal with charges by an ambitious black prosecutor
anxious to become a senator. She decides against a long fight so just
confesses that she broke the law and, although she was unaware of any such
law, said "ignorance of the law is no excuse." She says she accepts her
guilt and will have to go to jail. Stay tuned.
Jim Lehrer: Nothing to report, so in the future I won't unless I miss the
show or really do have something to report. (Oh yes, David Brooks spoke at
the end for a couple of minutes about Buckley. His column was far better,
though.)
Saturday, 2008 March 1
Cords: I finally found (I fervently hope) a chord of the right thickness.
Too thick and it causes loud noises in my speech processor when it moves
about in a certain way I can't figure out. Too thin and it is either
impossible to solder in the first places or breaks too easily. I spend much
of last evening on a thin cord. Today I snipped a chord that came with my
RadioSnack outdoor temperature/indoor temp./humidity reader, which is an
improved model of a temp. model without the humidity. There's a wire that
goes to a sensor that I place outside the apartment next to the air
conditioner. The wire I took from the old one was too thin. This time I
simply replaced most of the wire with some speaker cable and made some
solder joints. I know the solution won't last forever, but at last I should
be able to hear music on my WalkWoman out of both ears and smoothly all the
time instead of in jumps and starts and sometimes not at all, whereupon I
burst into song and practice forcing myself to sing the music the way I
think it should. I stood up for Christ into the Fone when leaving a message
for Mom and Sarah says I'm getting better.
Practicing Gould English suite 4 bourree, very slowly (13 bpm) with full
version. with Gould ornaments, treble, bass, both. Paying attention to when
rising notes don't rise and falling notes don't fall. In the bass, the same
note will be repeated but I hear different notes. Similar problem in Sound
and Beyond, where my brain will force low-high-low. Played first piano
reduction faster (30 bpm) , second still faster 74 bpm) and piano break down
3 at tempo (101 bpm). The faster I go, the more I hear rising with rising
and falling with falling. I've noticed this for a long time. I'm getting
some training, for the moment at least, for in breakdown 3 (the fewest
notes) I am no longer hearing repeated notes as different.
Finish up the last fifteen minutes of the hour with my other iSong disk,
this time the first mov. of the Moonschein sonata (Anon E. Mouse, piano). I
ams using the midi right hand only. The score is 54 bpm. I'm trying a
quarter of that. Then breakdown 1 at half speed, then breakdown 2 at full
speed, then double speed. I've been at it for 1:00:29. Good night. In the
future I'll try to record just which notes are off, to see the variation.
I found a great freeware program called Info Note. You can get it by moving
your trackball to the right end of the screen or typing in a hotkey (alt-5
for me, but this might interfere and override other programs), and a place
to type pops in the right hand side. I'll give a firm recommendation if
warranted later.
Sunday, 2008 March 2
Cords: Aaack! I couldn't hear my meat ear, but it was simple to fix: when I
screwed in the cap on the plug, I crunched some wires together. Now last
week I managed to hear quite clearly a fugue. I didn't immediately know
which one. So out comes the big Schmieder. It was the great fugue of my
favorite organ work, the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, S. 564. I didn't
launch into the toccata or the adagio however. Later I played the tape
again, but the cords weren't working. Today, everything was fine, cord-wise,
and I did identify the toccata and what I call the "walking" adagio, even
though the Italian word for walking is "andante"! I got distracted and
missed the fugue, so I rewound the tape. This time I did hear the tema
fugatum, as far as the rhythmic pattern goes, though the notes, as usual
unfortunately, were off.
Each year, after I finish my space capsule tapes, I go back to what Mr.
Mencken said, "Bach: Genesis 1:1," and listen to the "free" organ works of
Bach, plus the best set of the chorale preludes (which I dub "music to pass
the collection plate by), namely the Schübler set. I listen to the mono
recordings on Archive, which intones with the Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV
531. This was composed in Weimar about 1709. Actually, the first prelude and
fugue for organ was composed in Arnstadt about 1703/4, namely the one in c
minor, S. 549, but I think of S. 531 as Genesis 1:1. Back to the beginning!
Beginning of what? I would say the composition of self-contained microcosms,
as opposed to music designed for other purposes, like music designed around
a text, be it biblical or secular, or music to pass the collection plate by.
What happened--I stand to be corrected here--in North Germany and Holland,
music was forbidden during the services, which meant that compositional
talent went to *major* microcosms before and after the service, namely the
monumental preludes and fugues (or I guess postludes and fugues) that shine
forth so magnificently. These constitute the "free" organ works.
There are always forerunners, such as the "free" works of Buxtehude. Though
Bach admired Buxtehude so much that he once walked fifty miles to hear him,
I say that Bach's works were the first really great free organ works. This
is a subjective judgment, though the world agrees with me in recording Bach
far more than Buxtehude. Besides, I own and have treasured Helmut Walcha's
last recordings, "Orgelmeister vor Bach," a four-LP set (it was out on CD,
briefly, spanning two separate sets) of several composers, including
Buxtehude. (My favorite is Nicholas Bruhns). How wonderful it is to hear the
Master of organists on this music, which would give me a fair basis for
comparison. Alas, and after repeated listenings, they don't match up to the
great Lutheran master.
The eighteenth century, again with forerunners, saw the deliberate creation
of microcosms in the novel and in political constitutions. Before that,
constitutions were based upon a fictional recovery of an ideal constitution
of the past. "That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among
Men... laying its Foundations on such Principles, and organizing it Powers
in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness."
Happiness as an aim of government. Something brand new was aloft in the
world, as was the novel and the free organ works of Bach, despite Koheleth,
"There is no new thing under the sun" (1:9). Mr. Mencken was more right than
he knew when he said Bach was Genesis 1:1.
Monday and Tuesday, 2008 March 3 and 4
Testing for Sound and Beyond after 40 rounds.
Here are the results of all six tests:
Date Tone Envi M/F Vowe Cons Sent
Possibilities 4x 4x 4x
21 102 12 1163 1163 1440
TESTS
#Quest 60 25 48 48 40 25
Chance % (33) (25) (50) (8) (5) (20)
1 0717 ALL #44 #52 # 8 # 5 #96
2 0830 93 52 #52 26 18 ALL
3 0926 93 56 90 30 28 ALL
4 1030 #89 76 90 *38 35 ALL
5 0110 97 *80 ALL 33 *43 ALL
6 0303 83 *80 92 33 40 ALL
min v 89 44 52 8 5 96
max ALL 80 ALL 38 43 ALL
Quite a bit worse on the pure tones in March and a surprising (if small)
decline in the male/female test. No improvement in any module. This is not
good, but there is a great deal of randomness for day to day or even hour to
hour. Still, I am getting the feeling that, while generally improving, my
rate of improvement is slowing down.
No. Date Ani Foo Col Fam Num Tim Ins Mel|
Poss. 4x 4x 4x 4x 4x 4x |
100 99 100 104 103 100 9 16|
TESTS
#Quest 50 50 50 50 50 50 18 16|
1 0717 #76 #72 #86 #82 #80 #88 #39 #50|
2 0830 92 88 ALL*98 98 94 72 69|
3 0926 *96 96 98 96 ALL ALL *94 75|
4 1031 *96 ALL 96 *98 all 96 89 *94|
5 0110 all all all all all all 89 88|
6 0303 98 98 98 98 all 98 t94 ALL|
minimum 76 72 86 82 80 88 39 50|
maximum ALL ALL ALL ALL ALL ALL 94 ALL|
I might as well discontinue the tests. I flubbed one question in five of the
six word discrimination modules, though getting them all in January. I'm
happy that I got all the "familiar" melodies right.
Wednesday and Thursday, 2008 March 6 and 7
Sound and Beyond: I'm increasing the difficulty levels on four of the six
modules that have levels at all. For Everyday Sentences, I'm just going back
up to the highest level. My score shrank to 76%, more than I thought it
would have, since my scores on previous rounds at the top level varied
between 36% and 84%. I sensed that I was doing worse than usual.
Male/Female got increased to the third and top level. I now much choose
among high and low male and high and low female. On the first level it was
male vs. female, period, while on the second level it was high vs. low male
*or* high vs. low female. Well, I was getting up to 96% on the second level
but on my first run at the third level, I got only 40%! This is all the more
disappointing, since I missed the sex altogether just a few times. One
problem is that I am not sure which male voice, nor which female voice, is
higher! Yet this was a problem I had at the second level. Anyhow, I'm going
to be getting some real training, I think, on this module.
I increased the level for vowels, too. This time, instead of my picking the
odd sound out of three, I am presented with one voice reading two words,
then another voice reading one of them. My job is to say which of the two
is. I thought I'd actually do better, but in fact I did worse, 78%, while at
the first level I ranged from 56% in September up to 95% in October and
again last month. Again, a lot of variability.
For the consonants, I went from the second to the third level. Now I
merely hear only one voice speak and have to chose one of two words. I got
98%, as opposed to at most 96% at the second level. I may move on to a
higher level pretty soon. I peeked at fourth level and got the first 13
right without asking for any repeats. The next and top level will be the
same, except for added background noise.
For the modules without levels, nothing much to report, except that I will
be getting some real training on identifying instruments, for the violin,
French horn, and cello do vary in pitch. It's just that so often I can't
tell, when pecking away at my keyboard, which octave it is.
I went to a meeting about NexTalk, a great piece of software that lets me
Fone what is called the Federal Information Relay Service (they exist for
every state, too) and get the operator to type up what the other party has
been saying. I call her (usually) on my computer, so there's a connection
over the Web. She Fone me (a connection over the Fone system), I call
whoever I want to reach (a second connection over the Fone system), and join
the two Fone lines into a conference call.
These operators vary a lot in their ability and are generally below those of
court reporter (which I can get free at work, though it costs $100/hour for
a minimum of two hours. I get a transcript, which is useful to those who
couldn't or wouldn't attend.) And they are below those who caption on the
fly for teevee. The best are shows to be rebroadcast. They are carefully
gone over thrice and are well-coordinated with what is being spoken. All My
Children is a perfect example, but sadly the Jim Lehrer News Hour, which is
indeed
rebroadcast, usually runs an irritation few seconds behind, though in some
episodes it can actually run ahead. When I train my cyber ear, I try to just
look at the speakers, though I will watch the captions for my favorite
characters on All My Children and if something really interesting is
happening on the Jim Lehrer News Hour. When the camera is off the speaker,
I'll watch the captions just to keep informed, but I'll now sometimes try to
hear the speakers without the captions. I can actually hear them, sometimes
and more and more. However, this means I have to really concentrate. I'm
just not inclined to do so when some foreign policy gasbag is moaning about
"unrest" in some country I don't care about.
Wednesday, 2008 March 5
Sound and Beyond: For my 41st session, I am moving up levels of difficulty
on four of the six modules which have levels. Will I do worse? I did on
three of the four. Much worse on Male/Female. Down from 86% last time, which
was at level 2 (my all-time high at level 2 was 96%) to a mere 40%. The
change was supposedly only to sound a word and let me choose among all four
options, Male and Female 1 and 2. I actually only missed one male vs.
female. So maybe the choices are harder. I don't see how. It must be a bad
day. I can't tell whether 1 is higher than 2 or not. But, excluding the one
gender error, I'm doing WORSE than chance!
For the vowel test, I moved from picking the odd sound out of three at level
1, where I scored 88% last time (and a high of 94% and the lowest 56%) to
listening to two words by one speaker to hear what the words sound like and
then to hear one word by a differently-pitched speaker and then guess. My
first score at level 2 is 72%. Maybe the words are closer.
For the consonant test, the only visible change is not having a speaker read
the two options but to choose right away. I suspected I might actually do
better, since I can run the repeats quickly, which is often a big help.
Indeed, I went from 94% to 98%.
For everyday sentences, I just moved back up to level 5, the highest. A drop
from 96% to 76%. I once got 84% at level 5 back in October.
Thursday, 2008 March 6
Sound and Beyond: Tied at 18 out of 25 food words (closing my eyes and not
looking at the words). The instruments module is good training for the pitch
of the instruments and not much else for me at this stage, I've concluded.
Friday, 2008 March 7
Teevee: Nothing at all to report, really. Someone is about to get shot in
All My Children, but I'll have to wait till next week.
Beethoven's Sonata 26 is somehow the work I want most badly just to hear
right. It is not one of my favorites but I love the way it begins. This
beginning I have kept imagining to myself. I followed it with the score
(Silverman is superb in his broadly-paced opening), and thought I was
tracking it well. Alas, the three movements blend into each other and I was
well into the second movement (as I could see from the track number being
played) while I was still trying to find my way about the first movement in
the score.
Earlier, Frances asked me to recommend a good book on colonial history. (She
is descended from early Maryland settlers but is not sure that they were
actually Roman Catholics, though she most definitely is herself. Maryland
got a majority Roman Catholic population in its early
years, as that was the time when Roman Catholics were being persecuted in
England, the history of settling North America being very much a history of
who was persecuting whom in the Old Country. But the state quickly gained a
Protestant majority after the persecution of Roman Catholics stopped.) I
recommend David Hackett Fisher's Albion's Seed. "I have that book too! Let's
read it together." And so, every time I sit down for a pipe at home, with
the exception of Sunday mornings with the Outlook Section of the Washington
Post and Sunday evening with books by or about Mr. Mencken, I have been
reading this book, tonight being another exception, to listen to the
Farewell Sonata. (Later: I got ahead of her and stopped after the New
England chapter and the Virginia-Maryland chapter.)
I commend the book whole heartedly and am grateful to her for getting me to
read it at last. The book argues that America was settled by those from four
separate regions in Great Britain (New England, Virginia-Maryland, the
Middle States, and Appalachia) and that, not only did the folkways get
repeated but that these initial germs are very much part of regional
cultures in America even to the present day.
This much continuity is too much for liberals, who itch to make over the
world immediately, but Fisher does not assert any sort of biological
continuity. For me, this is axiomatic, that there is a co-evolution of genes
and society. What I hope to get a sense of is *how far* folkways can
continue after original populations have become numerically small. It is a
question of extent. I'll read the end chapter of Albion's Seed, where Fisher
argues for continuity into the present day, being aware that he might well
exaggerate the continuity.
Saturday, 2008 March 8
Takeshi Hasewaga, a scientist near Kobe, Japan, whom I knew for record
collecting, was able to see us for a few hours after he flew up to Dulles
from Miami where he gave a talk and before his 18-hour flight back to Japan
tomorrow. As he didn't get in till 4 p.m., I said we wouldn't be able to see
any of the great museums on the Mall but we could go to the Uddar-Hazy
museum nearby and look at a fabulous collection of aircraft, including the
Enola Gay, which dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I say that it did not
save any lives and that the United States should have admitted it had no
business interfering with Japanese colonization, since the Europeans had
done exactly the same thing, until they stopped and got all moralistic about
those who hadn't, and simply gone home. One never hears the Japanese case
for invading Manchuria, which is that the place was in chaos and the Japs
needed to go in an establish peace to protect their business investments. If
the British and Americans had done so, in no uncertain terms, the first time
a Middle Eastern dictator had broken agreements with the western powers to
develop oil and looted them, the world would be a different place indeed. I
have misgivings here: protecting property is the chief business of
government but it could just as well tell its businessmen that they would
invest in other countries at their own risk. In no way, or in no other way,
am I a colonialist. And I don't want my government to impose non-colonial
"values" on other countries.
I told Takeshi that he could identify me easily, since I would be carrying a
recording of Mahler's Second Symphony. This was exactly the same signal I
used (and the very same Bruno Walter recording) that I informed my upcoming
date from Mary Washington College that I would carry with me to the Rotunda
where a bus was to deposit her. I doubt I need to tell you who the girl was.
Why I simply supposed that she would be one of the few college girls who had
any idea who Mahler was, I have no idea! It makes me sometimes think that
probability space is "curved" in some sense, meaning that there are too many
coincidences, in my case a large number being pleasant ones.
Sarah, feeling that perhaps Takeshi might be upset at seeing Enola Gay,
since she has heard of Japanese visitors crying when they saw the plane,
suggested instead that we drive into the Mall region of the District and
look at the outsides of buildings. We saw the Capitol, House and Senate
Office Buildings, Union Station, Library of Congress, Supreme Court, and
down Independence Avenue and up 17th Street where we got a glimpse of the
White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, etc., etc.
It was a confusing drive, since I know the streets on foot (walking and
jogging), while cars have to go the right way on DC's many one-way streets.
We headed out to his motel near Dulles. I had thought I'd have no problem
getting to it, since I thought it was one Sarah and I had been to many times
for various conventions. It wasn't. I had only Takeshi's directions and a
big book of street maps. His motel was just off one of the maps, so we made
many wrong turns. (As it turned out we had been there before, but only
once.) It was quite late, so we headed back. I wanted to talk with him about
recordings, but this will have to wait till another visit. He comes here to
talk about his work rather often and will try to bring his wife next time
and allow more time between planes.
Hearing? I forgot about that. No, I heard him quite poorly, but Sarah did
most of the talking, which was about the buildings we drove him to see the
outsides of. We were able to impart a lot of information that tourist guides
could not and drive by a lot more of them.
Monday, 2008 March 10
Sound and Beyond: Round 42 begins. I can now knock off the whole set of
fourteen modules in just over two hours. So it will be twice a week. (Friday
is my flexday.) Tone discrimination (level 4): tied for a high of 96%.
Male/Female: I've determined that Female 1 is higher pitched than Female 2
and Male 1 higher than Male 2. I went from a miserable 40% to 60%. I can't
go to a higher level, but I'm 40% shy of 100%. Well, it's better than
chance.
Tuesday, 2008 March 11
Sound and Beyond; A new high of 19 out of 25 animal words and a tie of 16 of
18 instruments.
Wednesday, 2008 March 12
Having finished the Bach "free" organ work, I have moved on to what has
become an annual ritual starting with the new year, namely my space capsule
tapes, the Bach organ works (sometimes all or most of them, this time just
the "free ones," and now the Westminster recordings of my favorite lady
pianist, Reine Gianoli (French). I am pleased to report that there has been
a big jump in my hearing while going through them, but today I didn't even
recognize Sonata 11.
Sound and Beyond: Round 43 begins. Pure Tone Discrimination. Missed only two
of the 25, despite my brain attempting to impose a high-low-high pattern!
This took a lot of effort on my part.
On the way home, I hears a most sour Fantasy in c, K. 475. The reason for
not recognizing Sonata 11, it turned out, was simply that I had played the
wrong side of the tape!
Thursday, 2008 March 13
Now the Sonata 11 sounded good and clear, at least comparatively speaking.
Sound and Beyond: Tie for 19 of 25 animal words, a record 18 of 25 color
words, and a record of 15 of 16 familiar melodies. It was the very last one
that I missed. Drat!
Freer Gallery with Sharon: This gallery was founded by the wealthy
philanthropist Charles Lang Freer and has excellent collections of the
American artists Freer admired, such as Whistler and, more importantly, of
Asian art of all sorts. We perused several rooms there, but, alas, the
Japanese paintings were not accidentally arrayed, as they once were, to show
the coming of Western single-point perspective into Japanese art, a gradual
process, year by year, but an overwhelming one in the course of a few
decades. I have become less enthralled by Asian art than I used to be, I
think because so little of it is realistic portraiture, one of the great
glories of Western art. Also not on display was what Freer thought was a
sixteenth century imitation of a ninth century Chinese painting. (These are
profoundly conservative people!) Alas, it was a nineteenth century
imitation. There being other nineteenth century imitations of earlier
paintings on exhibit at the time, I think I detected myself that this must
be a later imitation. (I'm not sure I remembered the centuries correctly.)
There's the case, that Hugh Kenner made famous, of one of the glories of the
Metropolitan Museum in New York City of a Greek or Roman (I forget which)
statue. It was accepted as genuine during the 19th century. During the 20th
century, an expert was walking past it and said "19th century mannerisms!"
This was obvious to him, but not to anyone in the 19th century, who no more
noticed his own period's mannerisms than fish notice the water (or liberals
their own default assumptions). The Met was severely shamed by all of this.
My hearing? I did well enough, but alas I did most of the talking. I've got
to get my partners to talk more and drag them out!
Friday, 2008 March 14
Overjoyed! Sonata 14 (Gianoli still) went pretty well, as well as Sonata 16
(old no. 15) in C, though I did have problems hooking into the second
movement, as I have reported on several occasions last year. The third
movement came in quite well, meaning not that I really heard it correctly
but was able to follow the basic rhythmic pattern.
All My Children: Erika is given eighteen months in jail by the judge, though
the plea bargain with the ambitious senator was only for six months. Adam
has a family dinner but everyone is sullen.
Monday, 2008 March 17
Sound and Beyond: Round 44 begins. Male/Female. Got on 46%, worse than
chance. It's is tough telling Male 1 from Male 2 and Female 1 from
Female 2. On the vowels I got yale vs. yawl, but blew seat vs. sit. I
did get 86% of them, a new high at level 2
Tuesday, 2008 March 18
Sound and Beyond: Color words: a new high of 19 or 25 color words.
Wednesday, 2008 March 19
Sound and Beyond: Round 45 begins. It is taking me just over two hours to
run through all fourteen modules. For environmental sounds, I did get the
typewriter, an device the younger users won't know. There's the typing
followed by a noisy carriage return. 56% in Male/Female. Vowels: a new high
of 88%. Consonants: missed gus-gush (hey, I can now hear the difference but
need the training), shark-shirt, patch-path, peat-peep, and nab-nag.
Thursday, 2008 March 20
Sound and Beyond: Numbers. I must report that 17 and 19 are accented on the
wrong syllables. Tie for 16/18 instruments.
Friday, 2008 March 21
All My Children: A shootout that I can't follow since I didn't grasp the
background. Even Adam shows up armed with a pistol. Stay tuned!
Instead of Jim Lehrer, we watched a two-hour ABC special, "Prostitutes in
America: Working Girls Speak,". 20/20 with Diane Sawyer. I really spent more
time reading the captions that training my ears, since the whole
prostitution business is much in the news, with New York governor Spitzer
being caught patronizing a high-priced on. It is still richly unclear to me
what she offered that commanded $5000. I learned very little from the show,
though.
Monday, 2008 March 24
Sound and Beyond: Round 46: Pure Tones: Sometimes the odd note sounds
blurred or comes on like a chord. This is my brain (badly) at work. It does
help me get the right answer, though. Male/Female: 54%. Part of my
difficulty may be listening to my resident coloratura. Everyday Sentences: A
drop from 84% last time to 68%. Probably just random.
Tuesday, 2008 March 25
Sound and Beyond: 20/25 food words, a new high, and 19/20 color words (a
tie). Still, I often feel that my improvements are slowing down, if not
stopping altogether, as I can do a lot worse on some of the modules as I did
the last time.
Wednesday, 2008 March 26
Sound and Beyond: Round 47: Male/Female, 71%, a new high, but Vowels, 78% a
tie for low.
Thursday, 2008 March 27
Sound and Beyond: 16/17 instruments, a tie. A lot of my errors come from my
inability to gauge pitch correctly. Still, I have missed no more than four
of the seventeen since I stopped looking at the selections before I make my
choice and never ask for a repeat. I have never had any problem or much of a
problem since the early days identifying drum, trumpet, xyloFone, or piano.
I still get stuck on the other five, namely flute, violin, clarinet, French
horn, and cello (rarely the flute anymore, though).
I went to a presentation of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.
Surprisingly, there was no captioner there for what was being disked for
teevee. I asked a question about what, exactly, mathematical thinking
consists of and got a fairly long answer. I'll have to wait for a transcript
to find out what it was. My question was brief, so I didn't elaborate on my
own thinking, which is that if we can put a handle on what mathematical
thinking really is, high school math could be compressed into a single year,
except for those who will go on to become scientists and engineers. Today,
there are only some four to thirteen million of them in the U.S. (depending
on who is doing the counting!), but if math does train the mind and even if
you are among the overwhelming majority who can't recall the quadratic
formula:
If ax^2+bx+c=0 and a not=0, then x=-(b plus or minus sqrt(b^2-4ac)/2a
which you supposedly learned in the ninth grade, your mind will somehow get
trained. How and to what purpose and advantage? That's what should be asked.
If you are on a roll google my submission as a citizen (there is simply no
way it could have gotten past the gatekeepers at work!) by using the phrase,
"Questions for the National Mathematics Advisory Panel." A confederate made
sure my questions got put into the briefing books the Panel members got to
read in 2006 December. But, as far as I know, there wasn't any feedback.
Certainly no one came to me and identified what the great masterpiece of
Western civilization it parodied. Were I to resubmit it, I'd put in an extra
section, "Why These Questions Will Be Ignored." The answer is the Three
Percent Rule for Experts. (I earlier called it the Seven Percent Rule, but
found again its source, William Sheldon's Varieties of Delinquent Youth. He
observed that expert graders of livestock, wine, dog grooming, etc. (boxing
matches and (human) beauty contests also, I think), typically agree with one
another within three points out of a hundred. If you can't, you're regarded
as being as blind as a bat. Sheldon took this to mean that there is some
reality out there that can be trained but no more taught in a formal
classroom than learning how to ride a bicycle, which Michael Polanyi later
called "tacit knowledge." I'm pleased that this meme has diffused far beyond
its original libertarian source.
However, I also see a Darwinian selection process at work: those who
disagree with the experts by more than more than three percent, you are
deselected as being *unfit*. I do indeed suspect that the latter
predominates in expert decisions about which modern artists will get
exhibited in the Hirshhorn Museum on the Mall and the Museum of Modern Art
in New York City.
Now, the math panel was instructed to pay specific attention to high school
algebra, but (I read their entire report) no call for getting rid of
geometry as a waste of time. That would be too radical, far beyond three
percent. (Lot of humanities majors tell me that geometry was their favorite
high school math course. There's something (what?) that seems useful in
learning to do formal proofs (Never mind that Euclid left out a lot of
axioms that were not recognized as necessary until the nineteenth century,
like "if B is between A and C, the B is between C and A.") Now the New Math
was supposed to apply the axiomatic method to algebra, but it wasn't done
very well and was dropped, except that today's student do know such things
as the commutative and associative laws, but not as axioms as such, and
speak of "negative 1" instead of "minus 1."
On the other hand, trigonometry and solid geometry, which used to occupy
12th grade math has all been but gradually abolished, even though it, too,
was urged on the reluctant as "training the mind."
Friday, 2008 March 28
I was feeling agitated and so at midnight, I put on for myself what I have
regarded as Beethoven's greatest work, the thirteenth quartet with die Große
Fuge (Loewenguth Quartet). It did me a lot of good, though I yearn to hear
it properly.
Well, I'm doing a lot better, as listening to the Gianoli tapes has proven,
and I'm listening now to less than completely familiar music as I enjoy a
pipe, in the first instance some Haydn sonatas played by Alfred Brendel.
All My Children: Just watched half, as our friend Ted came over for the
weekend. So I missed Jim Lehrer too and trained by listening to him, who is
a great talker.
Monday, 2008 March 31
Sound and Beyond: Male/Female 585 right, not much better than chance, as I
confused only four makes and females. Consonants: Got hearse vs. hiss right
but missed taught vs. tot and fan vs. Fone.
Tuesday, 2008 April 1
Sound and Beyond Only 60% of Everyday Sentences but 20/25 animals, a record.
FOSE (Federal Office Systems Exhibition, though no one there recalls what it
stands for): I've been to several of them, each time expecting to spend just
an hour but winding up staying till closing time at 4:00. Here's what I
wrote last year:
"I went to a mammoth annual exhibition by those who sell computer stuff to
the feds. It's called FOSE, though no one seems to remember what the
initials once stood for. My ability to hear was quite bad in that noisy
environment, even though I brought along the directional microphone I used
to use with my old hearing aids. But it competes with the mike that is
housed in the same place where the transmitter that goes across my skull is.
Since they were trying to sell things to me, they were cooperative, much
more so that the usual sullen clerk of low IQ that infests our stores.
Having been to this exhibit at least twice before, I initially thought I'd
spend only an hour there. I spent nearly four. It seems that a third of the
displays were given over to disaster recovery (hard disk burn out, lost
passwords, etc.) and a third to security. That the government seeks an
economically too high level of security was quite apparent. There was one
exhibit that did just the opposite, namely Reverse911. This useful outfit
helps local government officials, who may not know much about computers, get
flood warnings and the like out by e-mail, PDAs, websites, cellFones, etc.,
quickly. I, too, would like the world to hear my message! Much more than I
would like to keep it a secret."
I'm inclined to think I'm not really getting better, but rereading this
entry, I am overjoyed to report that I am doing far, far better indeed!
Wednesday, 2008 April 2
Sound and Beyond: Male/Female 48%. No mistaking any males and females, so
worse than chance. Consonants 68% a new low at this level.
Thursday, 2008 April 3
For some reason, I've been dating a great many of these 2007. I used to
ridicule others as being a year behind the times. So I ridicule myself. I'm
still seeing the last century refer to the nineteenth.
Sound and Beyond: 20/25 colors and 17/18 instruments, new highs. I think the
program introduces new words by tracking me, or at least words that I
haven't seen for a long time, like chestnut and reddish as colors. Still
have a problem with the tunes Wedding March (I think it is probably the
Mendelssohn, as I know the Wagner, "Here comes the bride, big fat and wide.
Here comes the groom, skinny as a broom," quite well from my sister.) and
Happy Birthday (too many chords, the tune being quite simple).
Natural History museum: I took Sharon over there to give her an overview of
some of my favorites: Insect Zoo, Hope Diamond (well, the first time I saw
it), whether dinosaurs are warm blooded, giant sloth, etc. Little problem
hearing, but I did most of the talking, Invited eight people where I work to
come along (Bernie Cieplak, Spencer Warren, Harry Kessler, Beth Franklin,
Marcia Kingman, Greg Frane, Susan Thompson-Hoffman, and Brandon Scott), but
everyone of them had some sort of "emergency" to handle.
Friday, 2008 April 4
I must say that music comes and goes, though one the whole there has been a
real improvement.
All My Children: Someone pulls a gun on someone else. I am not so amused as
I was initially on 2007 February 16. I'll stay with it for the two years I
promised myself and Andrea.
Jim Lehrer: A lot of blather about "Dr." King, who plagiarized his
dissertation. I actually *earned* mine. It was the only one in economics, or
any other field, that discussed both the size distribution of galaxies in
the universe and why the brains of primates are too big.
Saturday, 2008 April 5
I should report on a $15 piece of software, called "Singing Coach Kidz,"
which I've had for about three weeks now. I spotted it in an advertisement
for J&R music in the New York Times.
Sunday, 2008 April 6
Gould on iSong: I ran through all seven selections with Gould himself
playing. It took 14 minutes. This is the first time I have felt that I was
now hearing well enough to do so. Then I played the Menuet from French Suite
2 at 10 bpm, instead of 47. Right hand then left hand, but I guessed poorly
whether the notes were rising. On WTC prelude 1, I also reduced the speed
and followed with my eyes closed. I had a hard time knowing when the right
hand began. (Recall that the prelude goes C (half note, RH
CCCCCCCCC This is middle C (C8), played by the left hand.
EEEEEEEE This is E8, played by the left hand.
G G This is G8, played by the right hand.
C C This is C9, played by the right hand.
E E This is E9, played by the right hand.
Those are sixteenth notes and comprise the first half of the first measure.
The second half repeats exactly.
(The next several measures are CDADF, BDGDF, CEGCE (again), CEAEA, CDF#AD,
BDGDG. (B is the note below middle C (B7).)
Monday, 2008 April 7
Sound and Beyond: Round 50: Tied 88% for high on vowels (level 2)
Tuesday, 2008 April 8
Sound and Beyond: New highs: 22/25 animals, 23/25 colors, and all 16
melodies.
Thursday, 2008 April 10.
Sound and Beyond: Having finished 50 rounds, I tested myself again. Here are
the results:
Date Tone Envi M/F Vowe Cons Sent
Chance % (33) (25) (50) (8) (5) (20)
1 0717 100 44 52 8 5 96
2 0830 93 52 52 26 18 ALL
3 0926 93 56 90 30 28 ALL
4 1030 89 76 90 38 35 ALL
5 0110 97 80 ALL 33 43 ALL
6 0303 83 t80 92 33 40 ALL
7 0409 93 72 92 35 38 ALL
min 83 44 52 8 5 96
max ALL 80 ALL 38 43 ALL
In other words, very little change.
No. Date Ani Foo Col Fam Num Tim Ins Mel
1 0717 76 72 86 82 80 88 39 50
2 0830 92 88 ALL 98 98 94 72 69
3 0926 96 96 98 96 ALL ALL 94 75
4 1031 96 ALL 96 98 all 96 89 94
5 0110 ALL all all all all all 89 88
6 0303 98 98 98 98 all 98 94 ALL
7 0409 all all all all all all ALL all
minimum 76 72 86 82 80 88 39 50
maximum ALL ALL ALL ALL ALL ALL ALL ALL
Ah! I finally got every one of these right! But it was hardly an
improvement.
Friday, 2008 April 11
Spent the afternoon with Sarah at the Newseum, a museum for the news. It was
free on the first day, but we managed to see the actual artifacts, old
newspapers and news magazine (which pre-dated newspapers, per se), Mr.
Mencken's spike (a holder on an editor's desk where rejected articles go),
as well as the middle third of the teevee antenna one of the World Trade
Centers and some pieces of the Berlin Wall. We took some pictures on Sarah's
cellFone, but some nice visitors agreed to take and e-mail some with their
camera.) Otherwise, most of what was there could perfectly well go on the
web. So far, very little has gone on http://www.newseum.org. I could easily
spend a whole day there but probably won't shell out $20 anytime soon.
We were told that our wait would be twenty minutes, but the nice guard let
us slip through. Sarah had been cellFoning my sub-boss, Peirce Hammond, who
wanted to come. By the time he got there the alleged wait was forty minutes,
but in fact it was twenty. He made a good choice of what to see, namely the
Pulitzer Prize photographs and some video interviews. These were captioned,
and I didn't use this as a training opportunity. He couldn't stay long,
though. We ran into Ann Slattery, recently retired from the National Library
of Education. I heard the conversation okay. I had problems hearing the
dignitaries' speeches on a huge screen, but I wasn't really trying.
Jim Lehrer: Nice tribute to Van Cliburn.
Saturday, 2008 April 12
Singing Coach Kidz: I've had this program for four weeks now and should
describe it. I got the stripped down version. It has a microphone and lets
you sing into it and see how well you hit a note. You can sing several
songs. The easy ones are Home on the Range (one verse and five verse
versions), Hot Cross Buns (one verse), Row Row Row Your Boat (two verses),
Take Me out to the Ball Game (one and two verses). So far, my record is --,
34 out of 100, 29 out of a hundred, 54, and --, --. -- means I haven't tried
them yet. The medium songs are America the Beautiful (one and seven verses),
Joy to the World (one and three verse versions), On Top of Old Smoky (one
and seven verses), and Yankee Doodle (one and four verses). My top scores
are --, 27, 42, 17, --, 57, 41, and --. The challenging songs are Camptown
Races (one and two verses), Down by the Riverside (one and three verses),
Jingle Bells (one and three verses) and Star Spangled Banner (one verse).
Top scores are 31, 33, --, --, 38, 33, and 38. And that's for the beginner
level!
The nifty thing about this program is that it shows the frequency you are
singing. My voice can bounce up and down rapidly, which I don't understand.
I do try to hold steady, but you can see it waver anyhow. For the beginning
level, you are supposed to keep the tune within half a "step" (whatever that
is) of its actual value, intermediate a quarter, and advanced an eighth.
There are also twenty lessons, but I don't hear well enough to hear them, or
at least would have to struggle hard. ("When all else fails, read the
instruction manual." Maybe this will work. Don't know if I need it. It is
for "kidz" after all.) There are also lots of warm up exercises, like
singing intervals and scales.
I'll report more thoroughly on this later, and I may shell out $50 to buy
the full version. I can compose my own tunes, or read them in from a hymnal
or from a download them off the web. I now can get four tunes from
Carry-a-Song for free. I only know a few, mostly hymns. The full price
version allows for more.
Sunday, 2008 April 13
Keyboard: I started out hearing the scale more or less correctly, but I
quickly degenerated.
Monday, 2008 April 14
Sound and Beyond: Round 51: Tied at 96% for the Pure Tone Discrimination
module. Otherwise, not remarkable. Ups and downs.
Went with Frances to get her violin looked at. It had been given to her by
her mother but she hadn't played it for many years. She is excited by the
way the violin can play two melodies at once. So I lent her one of my
favorite examples, the great Joseph Szigeti playing the Corelli La Folia
Variations in a heavily Romanticized nineteenth version for violin and piano
by Hubert Leonard. (The original has violin, harpsichord, and basso
continuo.) I xeroxed the Leonard score from the Libaray of Congress, but
Szigeti modifies it and gears up the incredible tension in the cadenza even
more than Leonard called for. The Corelli score is rather tame by
comparison. Still it is a work that has garnered quite a number of
recordings. If someone claimed that this was the best pre-Bach piece of
music, I would not disagree.)
A subscriber from the beginning to Washington Consumers' Checkbook,
http://www.checkbook.org, I went online to find out about musical instrument
repair. While there was no article in the magazine, there were several
commentators on the website. I thought it would be better to visit Middle C
Music and take her violin there and get advice. She brought the violin in to
the office. The bow and strings had distintegrated and piece of black wood
from that fits over the top had come unglued.
As it turned out, a violin and bow maker, Edoardo Matus, was in the store
and he took her violin to estimate the cost of repairs. On display in the
store were a student violin for about $600 and a professional one he made
for $6000 or so. They both looked exactly like Frances's! I am not sure
whether she could her much difference.
It amazes me record reviewers often comment on the violins being played,
though rarely on the pianos, which certainly sound far more varied. It is
true that piano companies will give certain famous pianists one of their
pianos in promise for their endorsement, but Glenn Gould is the only pianist
whose pianos have been the subject of extended discussion.
When tapes of a live performance by Artur Schnabel of Beethoven's Fourth
Concerto with Izler Solomon and the Columbus (Ohio) S.O. was discovered,
passages were missing and were spliced in with a studio recording on a
Steinway piano (Stock, Chicago), so as to match more closely the Steinway
used at the concert, rather than the Bechstein piano used in his studio
recording with Sargent and the LPO. The slow movement is near the top of my
list of magical performances and is well worth the price of the 3-CD Pearl
set, which contains the five concertos with Sir Malcolm, which you may
already have in your collection. Get them if you don't, though Gould somehow
remains my favorite for these work, except for that movement.
Tuesday, 2008 April 15
Sound and Beyond: The eight modules without levels: I thought that, rather
than just look at ups and downs for each level, I'd start totaling the
number of mistakes across all modules. I missed 31 out of 184, a record low.
This is good news.
Wednesday, 2008 April 16
Sound and Beyond: Round 52: A record of 88% on Everyday Sentences, but
otherwise, nothing much. I decided to stop restarting a module when I flub
the first question, which I had because I thought I wasn't hooked into the
specifics of the specific module. I had also sometimes also cheated by
restarting the whole module when I got a particularly bad beginning on the
first several questions. I don't think this will make a great difference.
Again, the whole point is training, not high scoring!
Frances spoke to me at length (my hearing was excellent) that she felt
uncomfortable speaking with an atheist about her deep Catholic faith and
needed to get comfort with those on the same quest to know God and not go
home with me on the subway nearly so much. I thought I could supply an
outsider's perspective, just as I did with Sarah Clayton (geb. Jensen) with
her Mormonism. She said I was the kindliest atheist she ever met, and I
tried to reassure her that she could trust me completely. I really do want
to understand what her experiences were like. I told her I would retrieve
for her a book Sharon gave me about prayer but loaned back to me, that it
was extremely helpful to me in gaining insights about the varieties of
religious experience (to cite the title of William James's celebrated book).
She thinks listening to great religious music would be a distraction, though
I think the greatest religious products of Western Christendom are not
paintings or architecture but, aside from the Summa Theologica of Thomas
Aquinas, the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven and the German Requiem of Brahms.
(Never mind that Beethoven switched back and forth from the Roman
Catholicism of his youth and pantheism and that Brahms was an agnostic.)
Got to thinking about what religion means. It's not just a set of rules that
have to be obeyed or a sharing of one's beliefs with others but also a love
of the religion as such. I mean here, not Christianity, which comes in many
flavors but the whole of a particular flavor, in her case Western
Catholicism, by which I mean its Europeanized form. I put a copy of James C.
Russell, The Germanization of Early medieval socioreligious approach to
religious transformation. (Revision of the author;s Thesis (Ph.D.)-Fordham
University 1990. NY: Oxford University Press, 1994) into my knapsack. I plan
to represent to her that religion she loves is particular and that Vatican
II represents a de-Germanization of the faith she wants to see maintained.
Greek Orthodoxy, while differing from Roman Catholicism only in one word,
filioque (the Holy Ghost proceedeth from the Father "and from the Son"), the
two are separate religions as they relate to the lives of their separate
believers. Protestantism and Mormonism are more closely related to Latin
Christianity than either is to Greek Orthodoxy. These three branches are
also more closely related to each other than to Latin American Catholicism
or any of those in Africa or Asia. (Don't know anything about Antarctic
Catholicism. Can't say about Russian Orthodoxy. This depends on how one cuts
up the world's cultures. Catch me: I'm *assuming* that religions adhere
closely to their surrounding cultures and that Christianity is not the
universal religion it so often makes itself out to be. Sociologists, of
course, agree with me, but if believers say no, then what is universal about
a universal religion is a small subset of it, namely the requirements for
salvation. From the New Testament, it's not clear what they are. Accepting
the Good News on faith certainly seems to be one of them, as Jesus said so
himself (if the Gospels are authentic). But the case of Saul is a glaring
exception, as he not only did not accept the Good News but was actively
persecuting Christians.
I can see why she might find me disturbing, arguing like this!
We had two fake fire alarms in one day and had to evacuate the building
twice. I hadn't seen Greg for quite a while and gave him a general summary
of my progress: better for hearing people face to face, worse but coming
along on the Fone, and quite bad for music. I sang some songs to him. He
said my Star Spangled Banner was good, but that's one I've been practicing
with, on the keyboard, with Singing Coach Kidz, and just singing to myself.
He said I did pretty well with some other songs. I thought I could show him
how badly I managed with "O Columbia the Gem of the Ocean." I do do it badly
singing it when walking home from the subway, but I put on a good
performance for him. But with the Navy song, "From the Halls of Mountesuma
to the Shores of Tripoli," I did pretty badly. He kindly just held his palm
outward, rotating it in a gesture meaning so-so. He was of great help to me
during the first several months and earns my gratitude as a true Virginia
gentleman.
Thursday, 2008 April 17
Riding in on the subway, I eavesdropped on three passengers who may have
been headed to see Pope Benedict giving mass about a mile from where I work.
I did pick up some phrases and short sentences, which I think is an
improvement.
Sound and Beyond: Worse this time. Missed 44 out of 138, instead of 31 two
days ago.
I spoke with Bertie Cieplak, a co-worker of Frances and also a Roman
Catholic at length. He is quite good humored about his faith but is no less
sincere. He and Frances talk about me. Anyhow, Frances was not interested in
Jim Russell's book, at least not then. I didn't get to explain to her why I
think it is an important book.
Pope Benedict XVI is re-Germanizing Christianity. Sarah told me he said that
the church may become smaller as a result of his papacy, but it will become
truer. He does not seem to be Hell-bent on getting Heaven as populated as
possible (sorry, I couldn't resist). And he is not afraid to antagonize
other faiths, like Mahometanism. Rumors got spread that he was thinking of
rehabilitating Martin Luther. I found this absolutely extraordinary and the
surest possible sign of re-Germanization, but the Vatican later said it was
but a rumor. Still, the such a rumor would take wing evidences
re-Germanization.
(Yes, Luther and Ratzinger are Germans, but Germanization as used by Russell
is a broader term that really means anything to the north of Greece and
Southern Italy. It includes speakers of the Celtic as well as the Germanic
branches of Indo-European.)
Hillaire Belloc, the French conservative thinker, profoundly and crptically
remarked, "The faith is Europe; Europe is the faith," the faith being, I
think, Roman Catholicism and not Catholicism + Proestantism. The Pope
understands this at best subconciously, however, as the cautious statements
on Latin American immigration indicate.
I say: "The faith is America; American is the faith," where the faith is
Mormonism. I can send you my ideas. Just ask.
Fracnes reported that Matus wanted $230 to fix what he said was a $600
violin. She suspects he will do more work on it than would matter to her,
given his high professional standards, and will seek a second estimate. I
suggested Potter's, a store in Bethesda that has been around for a long time
and got more recommendations from online readers of Consumers' Checkbook
than any other. I've been in the store at its old location but just barely,
since I'm not in the market for an instrument and it had little sheet music.
Friday, 2008 April 18
Teevee: All My Children: spent most of the hour with my cords, which once
again have gone on the blink. Nothing much seems to have happened during the
two weeks since I last saw it. Jim Lehrer: nothing much either.
Saturday, 2008 April 19
Time, well time, to get this out. I left some notes at my office about
specific words on the modules. They will have to wait. I did reorganize the
whole diary: latest batch, introduction, the diary in chronological order. I
plan to go through it all, correct typos and the like, and splice in some
explanatory words. I do want to keep it pretty much as it was sent out, but
I have all my e-mails if some one thinks this diary merits a varorium
edition.
I finished the Haydn sonatas for my pleasure and turned to the nearly
complete Backhaus acoustics made for the Gramophone Company. (One disc never
turned up and perhaps may never have been issued, but he recorded the same
Chopin pieces was recorded twice again for HMV. The 2-CD Pearl set finishes
with some early electrics, including D 1033. I had contradictory information
about what was on this disc and told Don Hodgman about it. His pique
intrigued, he at last found a copy. It is the copy known to the Pearl
compilers to exist, and such compilers have a big network of collectors to
ask to loan records for CD transfers, far greater than in the LP days. Don,
before he sold off most of his collection as he got older, had 50,000
records and a second house to keep them in. He had a quite good job as a
municipal bond lawyer and supported not only his hobby but a third house
(for people near NYC, the first two being in LA) and a cabin in Oregon for
his wife and three children. We once had lunch with Don and asked him about
his work. He just wasn't interested in it! In spite of having one of the
world's biggest collections of classical music, I could find things from
other collectors and send him tapes of tapes, particularly of live concerts.
But it was mostly my digging out discographic information, on my own and at
his request, that led to our friendship over the years.
I didn't hear these acoustics at all well.
I fixed my chords--again--and got stereo going for the first time for a
certainty. As you may remember, I made sixteen CDs from stereo LPs and
called them "Essential in Stereo." (Just serach the phrase for the list.) I
started out with what is surely the most music performance of Wellington's
Victory. The first movement, you will recall, has the French army and its
melodies on one saide and the English with its army and melodies on the
other, with bullets going back and forth, with the bullets coming less and
less frequently as the French lost. (The second movement is a "Symphony of
Victory" and is good solid Beethoven. I don't know why this work is so
scorned. What *is* lower drawer Beethoven is a Cantata, The Glorious Moment,
composed for the same occasion but published only after his death as Op.
136. I have the first extant recording. live by Scherchen and sung in
Italian (!). I think at least two studios (sung in German) have come out
since.)
Switching from stereo to mono and back does make a difference. But my
problem is that I hear low notes better in my meat ear than my cyber ear but
high notes the reverse. I can't follow the thrice familiar tunes but could
note the gunfire. Later on my disc are the four Bach trio sonatas (some not
by Bach, and I don't see how Schmieder would ever have accepted one of
them), arranged for flute, oboe, and harpsichord and played by the Baroque
Trio of Montreal on a wide-channel separated early Vox stereo LP. Recall
that these trios actually had a fourth instrument, for basso continuo. What
is so wonderful about this record is that the flute is far over in one
channel, the oboe far over in the other, with the harpsichord straight in
the middle. This makes for terrific enjoyment in hearing the melodies bounce
back and forth. This recording never did get reissued, as transcriptions are
"inauthentic," as though Bach never made any himself.
The performances are as idiomatics as any I know, though I do shy away from
the more anemic "historically informed performances" (HIP). Richard Taruskin
is entirely correct that these reflect *current* attitudes to music, in
being extremely stripped down, rather than actual practices. Andrew Manze
has revolted against all this and have given us deliberately robust
readings, not a robust as the best of the OLD recordings on 78s
but just about the most exciting violin playing today.
I will be playing these trio sonatas for my own enjoyment.
Sunday, 2008 April 20
Just to report that the efforts on fixing my chords may have been wasted,
but maybe not, as it turns out that the attenuating patch cable I got from
RadioSnack became frayed. This is the second time this has happened. The
cable has one small resistor at one end and two at the other. Bending my
cable many times causes them to fray. They were not designed to be stuffed
into my jogging clothes!
I am sure I left out a bunch of stuff that will make more clear what I
meant. Next time, maybe, I'll clarify.
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