In Tune

My sister and I took piano lessons when we were children.  She continued to play after the lessons ended; I didn’t.  But although she likes to play the piano she really always wanted to play the violin.  So for her New Year’s resolution, she decided she would take some lessons.  She rented a violin and found a teacher and has been enjoying herself.   A few weeks ago she was playing some of the tunes she had learned for me and she remarked that the violin sounded out of tune.  So she started trying to tune it and ended up very frustrated.  I was no help.  I know nothing about violins and although I could hear that she was in tune on the first note I didn’t think she was out of tune later while she was sure that she was.  

The violin, unlike a guitar, has no frets.  So a violinist must tune only by ear without any help from the instrument itself.  Recently Sam, at Inside the Classics, wrote an interesting post that may explain why it was so hard.  He wrote it as an adjunct to a post by Jan Swafford at Slate on the History of Tuning.   Sam tells us that there is no such thing as Perfectly in Tune, it is all a matter of taste.

… what sort of tuning sounds best to your ear depends in large part on what kind of music you like to listen to. If you’re a big fan of renaissance music, for instance, you absolutely need all the fourths and fifths to be perfectly in tune, which means that some of the thirds won’t be, but that won’t bother you so much, since there aren’t very many of them in renaissance music. On the other hand, if you love big Romantic symphonies, those thirds are just crucial, since triads are the basic building blocks of that era, and your brain won’t even notice the occasional slightly out of tune fifth.

What is he talking about – thirds and fifths?  Swafford explains, and explains the problem:

In dealing with tuning, there are two main terms to know. One is interval. It means the distance between notes. The basic science of intervals was laid out in ancient Greece, perhaps first by the mathematician Pythagoras. The first notes of the C major scale are C, D, E, F, and G. The note E is the third note up from C, so the interval C-E is a third. The note G is five notes up, so C-G is a fifth. So musical intervals run second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. (Some intervals can be major, like F to A, or minor, like F to A flat.)

OK? Now, as Pythagoras discovered, intervals are also mathematical ratios. If you take an open guitar string sounding E, stop it with your finger in the middle and pluck, you get E an octave above. The octave ratio, then, is 2:1. If you stop the string in the ratio 3:2, you get a fifth higher than the open string, the note B. The other intervals have progressive ratios; 4:3 is a fourth, and so on.

So far, all very tidy. But this is where things get hilarious. As Pythagoras also realized in mathematical terms, if you start with a C at the bottom of a piano keyboard and tune a series of 12 perfect 3:2 fifths up to the top, you discover that where you expect to have returned to a perfect high C, that C is overshot, intolerably out of tune. In other words, nature's math doesn't add up. A series of perfect intervals doesn't end at a perfect interval from where you started. If you tune three perfect 5:4 major thirds, it should logically add up to an octave, but it doesn't; the result is egregiously flat. It is this innate irreconcilability of pitch that, through the centuries, has driven men mad.  …

What all this means in practice is that in tuning keyboards and fretted instruments, you have to screw around with the intervals in order to fit the necessary notes into an octave. In other words, as we say, you have to temper pure intervals, nudge them up or down a hair in some systematic way. Otherwise, you get chaos. So there's the second word you need to remember: The business of adapting tuning to nature's messy math is called temperament.

How crazy is that?   Maybe this is why I liked playing the piano – I never had to tune it, there were professionals who did that.  I never had to make the choice that tuners have to make:

There is no perfection, only varying tastes in corruption. If you want your fifths nicely in tune, the thirds can't be; if you want pure thirds, you have to put up with impure fifths. And no scale on a keyboard, not even good old C major, can be perfectly in tune. Medieval tunings voted for pure fifths. By the late Renaissance the tuning systems favored better thirds. The latter were various kinds of meantone temperament. In meantone, most of the accumulated fudges were dumped onto two notes, usually G# (aka A flat) and E flat. The shivery effect of those two notes played together in meantone temperaments earned it the name "wolf," which, like its namesake, was regarded with a certain holy fear.

All of this is difficult for tuning fixed tuned instruments like the piano or harpsichords.  But violins aren’t fixed tuned instruments.  They can be tuned by the musician “on the fly”.  The voice is also not a fixed tune instrument and can be tuned on the fly.

Meanwhile, an orchestra is made of a bunch of instruments, some of which tune naturally by ear—strings, woodwinds, brass—but also instruments in fixed, equal temperament: harp, marimbas and xylophones, harpsichord and piano, etc. What do orchestras do to harmonize all those conflicting demands? They do the best they can and try not to think about it too much. It can make you crazy.

Swafford’s piece in Slate is well worth reading.  In the meantime, Sam plays the viola for the Minnesota Orchestra, so he understands string instruments.  And maybe understands why Sr. Emily really didn’t want to teach my sister the violin when she was a small child:

My viola has only four fixed pitches – my open strings – and I can even change those within a few seconds if I need to. I have no frets, either, to control where my fingers land for any particular pitch, so my intonation is entirely within my control (or lack thereof.) This is the major reason why a pianist who’s only been taking lessons for a few years will almost always sound miles ahead of a violinist with the same amount of training. There’s very little that bothers the ear more than out-of-tune music, and in a particularly cruel twist for parents of young musicians, correct intonation is one of the very hardest things to master on string, wind, and brass instruments.

Just Like on CSI …

This is cool:  a giant screen touchpad – like a giant ipad.  Except it can can keep track of the fingers of multiple users. 

These screens maintain their sensitivity to touch even when mounted behind bulletproof glass up to one inch thick, which makes MultiTouch’s screens equally suited to the board room, a university lab or public displays. Though they are probably too expensive to put one in your home, unless your home has been featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or Cribs.

How expensive?   About $17,500.   But like most things, that price will probably drop over time and, within a couple of years, I bet we see them on family room walls. 

In the meantime, what are they being used for?   Well … “A university is using it to perform virtual autopsies, with a realistic, 3-D model of a corpse …”   Um. ok.   What else?

At the Detroit Auto Show, eight people used one of these systems at the same time in a demonstration — that’s 80 fingertips and 16 palms to keep track of. In France, they’re already installed in photo-editing kiosks, where people can insert an SD card, touch up their digital photos with their hands, and print them. In Finland, one appeared on a public street for people to interact with, and in Venice, visitors to an art gallery used one to improve art that was designed with audience interaction in mind.

I do not need one of these.  But I want one …

Fiction vs. Reality

A couple of times I’ve blogged about the difficulty some authors seem to have, when writing historical fiction, in coming up with the fiction part.  When I blogged about Loving Frank I complained that the author, Nancy Horan, seemed constrained by the historical facts she was working with and that made her narrative dull in parts. 

The novel suffered from too much exposition and not enough "scenes". It also suffered from lack of a dramatic arc. One of the problems with writing historical fiction is that history is history and lives don't always have dramatic arcs although they may have dramatic moments. To make a better story the author might have to alter history. Since Horan obviously didn't want to do that, it seemed to me that she really wanted to write a nonfiction work but didn't have enough research to make a whole book.

One of the books I am currently reading is Lindsey Davis’ Rebels & Traitors and I’m finding it far too full of exposition about the English Civil War and not full enough of the story of the characters.  So I’ve been thinking a lot about historical fiction lately.

I was, therefore, delighted to read a piece that David Simon recently wrote in the Times-Picayune in connection with his new television series Treme that addressed this issue.  In Treme Simon is portraying the post Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and he says

… we have tried to be honest with that extraordinary time -- not journalistically true,  but thematically so. We have depicted certain things that happened,  and others that didn't happen,  and then still others that didn't happen but truly should have happened.

This is a nice way of saying we have lied.

I’m glad he put it so bluntly.  I’ve come to believe that lying is essential to good historical fiction – lying is the “fiction” part of historical fiction.  If you stick only to the “historical” part and ignore the “fiction” you might as well write a non-fiction book or do a documentary.  There is nothing wrong with documentaries or non-fiction books, they convey truth.  But do they convey the whole truth?

By referencing what is real,  or historical,  a fictional narrative can speak in a powerful,  full-throated way to the problems and issues of our time. And a wholly imagined tale,  set amid the intricate and accurate details of a real place and time,  can resonate with readers in profound ways. In short,  drama is its own argument.

It is a delicate balance.  Too much reality and the argument can be ruined.  Not enough reality and the argument isn’t made.  How does a writer find the balance?

If we are true to ourselves as dramatists,  we will cheat and lie and pile one fraud upon the next,  given that with every scene,  we make fictional characters say and do things that were never said and done. And yet,  if we are respectful of the historical reality of post-Katrina New Orleans,  there are facts that must be referenced accurately as well. Some things,  you just don't make up.

Admittedly,  it's delicate. And we are likely to be at our best in those instances in which we are entirely aware of our deceits,  just as we are likely to fail when we proceed in ignorance of the facts. Technically speaking,  when we cheat and know it,  we are "taking creative liberties, " and when we cheat and don't know it,  we are "screwing up."

I don’t have cable and I haven’t seen any episodes of Treme, so I can’t say if Simon achieved the right balance.  At least, not until it comes out on DVD. 

Catch a Fallin’ Star

There was a meteor shower last week that was visible in Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and other parts of the Midwest and, instead of seeing shooting stars, people saw balls of fire in the sky. The people in Wisconsin got a lot of national news from this, but people here in St. Louis saw it too.

"Directly in front of me I saw something fall from the sky, and it looked like it was fiery," said Kathryn Woodcock, a Maryville University student. "I called my mom to ask if it was a comet or meteorite, she said probably a meteorite."

"It was strange," said Margie Selle, of Florissant. "It was a like a green ball falling from the sky. It wasn't real fast. You know how a falling star falls, like boom, boom, then, it is gone."

I missed it. Which is a bummer, I’d like to see a meteorite. Up in Minnesota, where I vacation each year, we always look for shooting stars and a long time resident always claimed that a meteor fell to earth on his property. He’s long dead but if you know where to look you can see the big rock that he claimed was from a meteor. It seems unlikely. Anything that big that survived entry through the atmosphere probably would have created a crater. Maybe wiped out the dinosaurs.

I wish I had seen the show here in St. Louis. A police camera in Iowa caught one on film and it looks amazing:

According to the Science Center here, people go out searching for what is left of these meteors that fall to earth. Via Bad Astronomy, I learned that a piece of the Wisconsin meteor was found. Here was a photo they used to show the size and scale:

As he says:

It certainly looks like a meteorite … the outer blackened fusion crust is from passing through the air, and the interior has the gray, grainy structure in common chondrites. The cube is one centimeter in size and is used in photos like this to give scale.

And here is video of a man who hunts for pieces and found a piece of that meteor:

It certainly looks smaller than The Meteorite we picnic next to in Minnesota.

Experience Points

I found this interesting video at the TED site even though it wasn’t a TED lecture. It’s about online gaming, which I mostly don’t do. I sometimes play the Facebook word games but I don’t play Mafia Wars or that Farm game (although I have FB friends who play and despite my best efforts to block updates it seems a few always sneak through). I’ve played Guitar Hero and Rock Band on the Wii but I’m really bad and generally get booed off the stage. I’ve recently started playing Scrabble over an iphone app and that’s fun. But that’s about it. So it’s not like I’m an expert at games.

Nevertheless, despite my lack of gaming knowledge, I found this presentation interesting. It’s about how games used to always be fantasy worlds but now they are creeping into real life. For instance, to play Guitar Hero you need more than a screen and a mouse, you get an actual prop that looks like a Guitar that you have to manipulate similar to a guitar. The thesis of this talk is that the logic of games and the competitiveness of accumulating points will become more and more part of daily life. In fact, one of his examples is about school. What are grades, he asks, but points similar to what you get in a game.

Lee Sheldon at Indiana University has in fact abandoned grades. Students in his class, instead, earn Experience Points.

Lee Sheldon is an accomplished screenwriter and game writer, having worked on TV shows like ST:TNG and Charlie’s Angels as well as the Agatha Christie series of games from The Adventure Company. He now teaches game design courses for Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications. Instead of assigning his students a grade at the end of the course, he instead starts every student at 0 xp and they earn points through completing quests like solo projects and quizzes in addition to grouping up for guild projects and pick up groups. How many points they have at the end of the course determines their actual “grade.”

Maybe it wouldn’t work in every class but I think it is an interesting experiment.

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Catch a Wave and You’re Sitting on Top of the World

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction was recently awarded to Tinkers, by Paul Harding.  Via Like Fire, I learned this:

Tinkers, especially, flew in under the radar. It came out as a paperback original, with hardcover copies printed only after Powell’s Books requested a hardcover run for its Indiespensable subscription club.

And that’s pretty much what I expect in the future.  Books will come out in paperback and digital versions.  If someone needs them in hardback for some reason, a limited run of hardbacks will be done.

It’s the wave of the future. 

Now, does anyone KNOW anything about this book?  Have you read it?  I’ve never heard of it before this.

Reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño – Week 12

We are in week 12 of the Group Read of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666.  After finishing The Part About the Crimes we have now moved into The Part About Archimboldi. 

My thoughts:

1.  What to say?   I’m really at a loss.  I expected to like this section if only because I read, in multiple places, that the last Part was the best.  But after the spareness of The Part About the Crimes we are now back to what I consider the “normal” Bolaño style in this novel and I’m finding myself unable to concentrate.  I’ll read a couple of paragraphs and realize that my eyes have been moving across the page but I’ve taken nothing in.  All these words.  Ugh.  ( I feel like the Emperor in Amadeus:  “too many words!”).  But all these words and nothing to show for it.  Just like the first three parts.   I find myself thinking “this BETTER be going somewhere” which isn’t at all the attitude to take with a novel.

2.  This Part reminds me a bit of The Part About the Critics because it is a chronological telling of every minute detail of the life of a character.   But at least in The Part About the Critics we didn’t start with the birth of any character; we started with their introduction to the work of Archimboldi and progressed from there.  Here we are learning about the entire life of Hans Dieter in all of its incredible minutiae.  Assuming that Dieter really is Archimboldi, maybe Bolaño is trying to tell readers not to get to interested in the lives of novelists because you’ll be disappointed at how boring they are.  

3.  Again, no good women characters.  A teutonic baroness who has a lot of sex in Dracula’s castle which other characters watch through peepholes. Really.  I’m not making that up.  Another woman who likes bathtubs.   A one eyed mother (that’s the only thing of interest about her, that she’s blind in one eye).   Maybe she’s supposed to be some symbol of mythic fate?   I think it was the fates who only had one eye between them and they passed it around.  But if she is, it isn’t apparent to me. 

By the end of this section of reading I decided that I am never reading another Bolaño novel based solely on his inability to write credible woman characters. Which may not actually be completely fair because he doesn’t always write credible male characters.  I’m certainly not finding Hans Dieter credible.  A small child who wants to stay underwater all the time?  But at least Bolaño writes a few male characters in a way that makes them seem like fully developed characters and not caricatures.  His women characters are atrocious.  It’s not just that the men treat them like one dimensional beings – THAT may be a point of the novel that is worth considering – but that Bolaño doesn’t write them in any way that makes them more than caricatures.

I do keep coming back in my mind to the first part in which Bolaño had the woman critic, Norton, end up with the one man who actually listened to her and their relationship was not solely about sex.  I didn’t think Norton was a well written, well developed character.  But she’s the only woman in this entire novel who seems to have ended up with a man who tried to understand her and not have her fit into his own idea of what she was.

4.  Lots and lots of words.  Words that seem completely superfluous.  Descriptions of underwater plant life that go on and on.   And on and on.   Why?   Because Hans Dieter’s favorite book is a book about underwater plant life and he can’t stop himself from swimming around underwater.

5.  Now that the Part About the Crimes is over I find myself trying to construct the timeline of the novel in my mind and going back in time to the 1920’s just makes me frustrated.  But since Norton is the only character that ends well, I find myself hoping that her story is the end of the timeline.  This is probably a false hope since this is, so far, not a very hopeful novel.  But since some of the other readers have compared it to Pulp Fiction that is what comes to mind for me.  A lot of violence and death but some hope at the end.  If you can figure out where the end really is.

But on the whole I really can’t think of anything good to say about this particular week’s reading.  Except that it’s finished. 

I think part of the problem is that I liked The Part About the Crimes.  I didn’t love it.  It was horrific in some ways.  But despite the constant, repetitive descriptions of the murdered women it had a force, an energy about it.   It felt like Bolaño was excited to be writing it.   That he was trying things.  That he was trying something different.  I don’t think he succeeded, but he tried.  There is no way that The Part About the Crimes could be published by itself as a solo novel and be successful.  Most people wouldn’t get past the first 10 pages.  In some ways it is the contrast of the style of The Part About the Crimes with the style of the rest of the novel that gives it context, that makes it work to the extent that it works. But now we’re back to the same old thing.

The plain fact is that I just don’t get this book.  And I don’t like it enough to try to get it.  

I feel particularly whiny this week but I thought maybe the last Part would make it all come together and so far I’m not seeing that.  I feel … disappointed.