1. In lieu of being able to sing together with people this winter, I transcribed Thomas Ravenscroft’s “Remember, O Thou Man” carol (from Melismata, 1611) into 4-shape notation.

    I left in most of the notational oddities and old spelling, although I did fill in the missing bar in the alto part with what seems to be the generally accepted version. The empty bar at the beginning is necessary to persuade Musescore to let me notate a dorian piece in 4-shape notation — that’s also why the second system has the wrong key signature (it doesn’t look like that in the editor, only the export.) Hopefully they will either fix that soon, or I’ll find a good way of getting ABC notation typeset in shapes.

    Anyway, here’s the score. Enjoy!

    Remember, O Thou Man.pdf

  2. Experimenting with some computational musicology on a vast corpus of traditional music compiled by a friend. Extrapolating from the last few hours, I anticipate the first complete analysis will take 2.5 days to complete on my macbook. Plenty of time to research how to build a raspberry pi parallel computing cluster…

  3. I engraved a rat on my DIY rat pedal, first time laser engraving aluminium. Filling the engraving with paint makes a huge difference, definitely worth the extra step.

  4. Sacred Harp is some of the most exciting music I’ve come across in years, but, being polyphony, you need a group of people to properly enjoy it. Sometimes, once a week really isn’t enough, and an evening in front of a multitrack recorder has to suffice…

    EDIT: I couldn’t resist also recording this parody version. 50% of Sacred Harp is a bunch of biblical and religious stuff but most of the rest, including 209, is pure, unadultered memento mori.

  5. Found this nice ISMLP category page while starting research for a new project, containing enough baroque French gurdy scores to keep anyone busy for a while imslp.org/wiki/Category:Scores_featuring_the_vielle

    There’s all sorts of interesting stuff if you poke around a bit — for example, in Bordet’s Méthode raisonnée pour apprendre la musique there’s a summary of the hurdy gurdy which suggests that extended keyboards beyond the usual two-octaves-minus-high-F# existed, but were “extraordinaire, et peu usité:”

  6. After missing the crowdfunding campaign, I was happy to finally be able to buy a copy of Tobie Miller’s excellent Bach solo hurdy gurdy CD at Chateau d’Ars last week. I couldn’t find any official album artwork on the web yet, so here is a quick scan of the cover, for anyone else who got a copy already.

  7. It is possible, if somewhat awkward, to update the Mooer Ocean Machine firmware on a mac using Wine and a cheap USB MIDI cable.

    WARNING: if the firmware update doesn’t complete successfully, it will not permanently brick your unit (as the update can always be attempted again) but the pedal will not work until a firmware is successfully installed! Attempt at your own risk, and definitely not 10 minutes before a gig.

    First, download the update from the Mooer website. The update and update software comes in a .rar archive, so you’ll need something like The Unarchiver to unpack it.

    You’ll need the latest version of Wine for Mac from winehq.org. I successfully installed the firmware update using 3.0.2. Using version 2.0 consistently failed.

    Power on the Ocean Machine in firmware update mode and plug in your USB MIDI cable as specified by the update readme. Check in Audio MIDI Setup that it’s working and recognised. Then, launch the updater using Wine. Select the firmware update file, then click “Update”. You might get a popup window helpfully saying “MIDI Device Error!!”. Try pressing Update again, if you’re lucky it will work. If not, open Terminal and try the following solution.

    The problem with (old versions of) Windows, Wine and this updater program is that they rely on the “MIDI device mapper” utility to decide which MIDI device to use. This would be fine, but under Wine for Mac there’s no easy way of seeing a list of devices or configuring which device to use.

    It is possible to change the default MIDI device used by the MIDI mapper, by creating a text file with the following code:

    REGEDIT4
    
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\MIDIMap]
    "CurrentInstrument"="#1"
    

    #0 is the default device, so start at #1.

    I saved mine in MMap.ini. Then, run the following command:

    wine regedit MMap.ini
    

    and re-open the update app. If after two presses of Update you still get “MIDI Device Error!!”, then quit the updater, change #1 to #2, run wine regedit MMap.ini and try again. Repeat until successful. Yes, the update process sucks.

  8. Recently scanned some album covers I couldn’t find on the web. Here they are, to save the work for any other fans of similarly obscure music:

    Seitti, Brelo

    Tanz', Duo Haertel Wascher

    Eetu Klemetti - Kampi-Klemetin nuottikirja

    Gregory Jolivet - Alt'o solo

    Marylin Tucker & Paul Wilson - On The Tide

    Marylin Tucker & Paul Wilson and friends - Dead Maid’s Land

    The Cornwall Songwriters - The Cry of Tin

  9. I built an Ambika to join my family of Walnut Mutables!

    I messed up the LED holes in this one, but the laser engraved front panel graphics and text came out really well. The back panel is acrylic so I can admire my electronics handiwork and Emilie’s amazing design any time.

    I took the opportunity to give my Shruthi a knob upgrade, too.

  10. ♫ Folded Peaks

    beneath every surface the gnarls of a
        biological
            geological
    lifetime, revealed in passing by passing surfaces
    sudden depths, a scream erupting
    unexpectedly, harmony

    Walnut Ambika + Colorsound Overdriver

  11. Put my Shruthi XT back together after the final missing piece for the 4PM filter board upgrade arrived, complete with its fancy new laser cut walnut panel! The whole case is now solid walnut.

  12. Noticed that, having learned to use the beating effect to tell when two pitches are slightly out of tune, I now can trick myself into thinking that in-tune sounds are out of tune by applying light sine-shaped tremolo to them. Wonder if this works for people who haven’t learned to tune using beats?

  13. ✅ improved gurdy MIDI system
    ✅ improved 3 channel gurdy preamplifier
    ✅ DIY hybrid digital+analogue synthesizer

    After a year of work on the hardware and software, finally all the pieces are in place to start composing!