The Whys of Music Re-engraving

I know it's the weekend, and I had just taken leave on Friday, but I'm still exhausted. Part of the problem is the relative heat/humidity and haze combination, part of it is self-identified burn out. But a large portion of it for this weekend is the need to rewrite lots of music to make it easier to execute as a musician. So this is where this post is going---pet peeves with respect to scores.

There are two big camps here, of which I think I'm probably belonging to the fast-diminishing one. There's the hard copy gang, where we either print the digital copies, or have the hard copies directly. Most of the time, we are looking at the music in terms of how many two-spreads there are, and more importantly, how the page turns work. Most music stands can handle three A4-width scores, but it's really uncommon, hence the two-spread set up. Then there's the soft copy gang, where they get a large-ish Android tablet or Apple iPad, and then use some wireless foot-operated page turner to advance the score forwards or backwards. In this set up, the scores are shown as a single page, and the page turns that the soft copy gang works with is at the single page level, which means that two-page spreads are actually antithetical at some level.

I prefer hard copies for music because I don't trust the music stands to be stable/steady enough to not drop the thousand-dollar digital device some 1.3 m to the floor. It also allows easier annotation with a pencil (never a pen, especially if working with rented music).

Regardless of preference, page turns can make/break proper execution of the music. Part of the reason why I learnt how to do engraving using a tool like Lilypond is to give myself a lot more options to tweaking the scores into ways that make it much easier for me to work with when trying to perform off them. The most obvious use of it is when I compactify hymn scores from however many pages there are into a single [A4] page---for the type of hymns that we play at PPCC, most can fit into a single A4 page, and that's with the lyrics. The hymns are generally short with high repetition, which allows the high compression.

So when composers/arrangers present scores that are ``bad'' for execution, I get exasperated. Because having the original digital source allows for typographic adjustments to make the parts easier for the musicians to work from. As an example, I just spent yesterday reworking a 4-page medley (more like 3 1/4-page) into just 2 pages---I didn't even have to change any of the default size of what Lilypond provides. Not to mention that I even managed to salvage some weirdly non-fitting section names from the original score in the reworked one. And I just spent earlier this morning sorting out a 5-page part to fit into 3-pages, with a page turn after the first page where there is actual time to do the turn.

Most of the time though, I do not resort to reworking the music via Lilypond, mostly because the initial data entry is the most time-consuming---I take about an hour per piece, depending on complexity/length. Good old fashioned photo-editing skills to reduce the white-spaces between rows of staff music to reduce something that takes 3 pages into 2 are used more often than rewriting. Recently for the jianpu stuff, I tried something a bit different---I stacked up the three pages into a single image, and then sliced it into half, after altering the aspect ratio to fit nicely into A3 (slicing in the middle yields 2×A4). It worked well without the same time-consuming nature of trying to squish whitespace. But I've not tried it for staff music---I don't think it can work that well. Besides, I can use Lilypond to do something more sophisticated as compared to jianpu, and at that point, it probably makes more sense to eat the cost of the data entry and then auto-tweak it.

I think most people that I know don't really bother going through the effort to do any of these things to make performing the pieces easier for them. I think the first time I allowed myself to do such drastic modifications [on copies of the original] was about 10 years ago during a Dicapella 50-50 project, where an original medley was deconstructed and reconstructed to fit some new criteria. Ever since then, I had less stomach to trying to ``remember'' how to execute, and just do the computer-equivalent of cut-and-paste to remaster the scores to what I need.

Apart from dealing with bad page turns, sometimes when the score is too damn impossible to read fast enough for playing due to legibility reasons, I'd also go down the re-engraving path. And that was what I did for one piece yesterday also. For some reason, the original piece was just a pain in the ass to read. It wasn't the size---even after blowing up the original to make it larger, it still read really bad. I gave up trying to read it, and just re-engraved it. Both still took up only one page, but it was so much easier to read the Lilypond output in comparison. After staring at both scores pretty hard, the conclusion I had in terms of illegibility of the original was that the staff lines were too damn thin, and the vertical aspect ratio of the staff was just off by enough that the note heads were blending into the lines/spaces, making it stupid hard to tell apart.

And I wasn't the only one who found it difficult to read---someone else actually blew up the score too, except it was closer to blowing it up 4× than the more modest 10% that I initially did. Absolutely bonkers.

Anyway, that's about all I have for today. The upcoming week is an exciting one---I get to watch IRyS in concert on Tuesday via live viewing in the cinema at Suntec City. I don't have her merch, but that's not going to stop me to go see YabaIRyS do her singing thing.

And I got Monster Hunter Rise for a steal at 90% off from the Steam Sale, in order to play on Evie-II. I don't know if I'll like it, but I'm off to a slow start. If it's going to play like Elden Ring, then I'd be happy if I can get like ten to twenty hours of fun out of it. Evie-II is starting to have more and more interesting stuff being run on her, and I am excited.

Truly now, that's about it. Till the next update.

Freestylin' dizi

Wow. I've not had that much fun at a performance for a long time.

Yesterday, I was part of the TGCO crew playing at a wushu/taiji exhibition event organised by Hui Taiji Training Centre out at Heartbeat@Bedok. The main event was 《师傅出马》, where different taiji masters went on stage to demonstrate their kata (yes, I'm mixing terminology). Our role from TGCO was to play accompaniment music so that their demonstration wouldn't be too dry.

Traditionally, I think they would be playing some pre-selected music over the PA system like some kind of dance set up, with the sound engineer doing the necessary fade out at the end.

This time round though, we had quite a few pieces (several brand new!) prepared beforehand. We had roughly six weeks or so to get ready, and even then, the process was more harrowing than normal, mostly because of the need to match the durations of the pieces that we were playing against the estimated time of the kata for each of the twenty or so masters. It was pretty messy as the original score had to be deconstructed into parts that could be repeated ad nauseam in case of overruns, and even with all the preparatory work, we still ended up being lost in the woods for some of the pieces, with just the bass and rhythm marching forward while all the melodists were confused. That wasn't helped with confusing signals put forth by the conductor during the actual run itself, since even she sometimes messed up where we were repeating from, due to having to actually pay attention to the goings-on of the kata on stage in order to control both the beat as well as when to do a roll cut off.

Overall, we did fine.

While much of all the preparatory work wasn't surprising to me, having done project-based performances before, it was something that the rest of the orchestra were not used to. The cadence in which the piece needed to be quickly understood and rehearsed, lots of adjustments as the pieces were recorded, timed, and reworked to figure out how to match the actual kata durations, and not to mention the even more pressing need for folks to actually pay close attention to the conductor for once---these were definitely new for many of the players because they were used to a more social-style rehearsal, where we'd spend the 2 hours of rehearsals going through just one or two pieces. I have nothing against that social-style rehearsal, but having the orchestra stretch their experiences through this more frenetic pace was definitely a good plus for them. Maybe this might inspire them to actually pay more attention to the conductor, and to perhaps build up their foundational musicianship skills.

The actual fun part of the performance that I had was the execution. It was messy, it was hilarious broken with us being lost in the woods, but it all worked out well. There were three points in the performance where there was nothing but the on-stage overseas master whom we never really interacted with doing his kata, then Justinn on the drums, and me on some dizi. And that was it---the master did his thing, Justinn kept time and rhythm on the drums, while I freestyled on the dizi based on what I was seeing on stage, and what Justinn was providing as the beat. I was so locked in that the 3 minutes, and later on 4 minutes simply passed on by in a blink. I think it was the first time that the orchestra witnessed one of us (me in this case) actually freestyling at a performance ``live'', and they were impressed. Someone even made a wry comment on how ``it was obvious who had been practising and who hadn't''.

Just don't ask me to re-play what I played---I have absolutely no idea. All I remembered was the first piece was an energtic and fast piece in F-minor for the halberd demonstration, while the second is in C-minor with lower and longer notes for the fists demonstration, all improvised on an E♭ bangdi, with the first using C-major fingering, and the second using G-major fingering (flute fingering nomenclature).

``But MT, you said three? There were only two being mentioned!''

The last one was sort of a scam. The item was definitely on the schedule, and it involved ``chi sau'' or ``kokyu ho'' for two people, but there was no indication of what music to play. Then Justinn jumped in to drum, and then she started staring at me from her vantage point in front.

Ah hell, I had to play. So I just grabbed my D beidadi and improvised something in B-minor, with lots of low and long notes.

Successful performance aside, the location was hot and humid being located outdoors. I was sweating like crazy, and thankfully I always had my trusty 1/2-inch Micropore surgical tape. The Micropore tape is carefully stuck near the embouchure hole of the dizi where the upper chin/bottom of the lower lip rests to reduce slippage that can happen due to excessive amounts of sweat. This is an old trick I learnt from working with concert flutes.

All in all, I had a lot of fun at this performance. All I could remember in the build up to the event while travelling there on the chartered bus was this exchange in one of the John Wick movies:

John: Last words, Winston?
Winston: Just have fun out there.

And yes, I had fun out there.

Till the next update.

Keeping EOL Python3.9 Alive in Vim for Black

I'm a bit torn about this entry. Is it considered ``retro'' if we're talking about a system that is on the edge of being abandoned but not wholly yet?

Leaving that thought aside for the moment, let's jump in.

For autoformatting Python source code, my autoformatter of choice is Black, with the only modification of setting the maximum width to 80 instead of whatever number they set.

My text editor of choice is vim, which is Vi Improved.

My POSIX-y environment of choice on Windows is Cygwin.

The problem is that Cygwin has been odiously slow in updating packages. Perhaps it is due to a lack of maintainers, or a maybe a lack of interest ever since Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) became a more reliable thing.

For instance, the system-Python version is more or less stuck at 3.9, which resulted in my Python on Cygwin patches list to bring in later versions of Python 3 to allow more modern tooling to run. This remains true even when the Cygwin installer is now attempting to auto-install Python 3.12.

Moving backwards, due to the end-of-life of Python 3.9, Black has moved on too, which made my favourite text editor in Cygwin (i.e. vim) flip out when it tries to run Black.

There are several steps to the fix.

1. Use only the vim scripts available for 25.11.0;
2. Ensure that pip is around 25.3;
3. Update .vimrc to have the line let g:black_use_virtualenv=0;
4. Do a pip install black using that version and then run Black in vim for the first time.

Once all those are done, the pip version can be safely updated to whatever may work.

The reasons are multi-fold. vim for Cygwin is compiled with the Python 3.9 ABI in place, which means that changing the default Python 3 environment leads to nothing but crashes. pip beyond version 26 drops support for Python 3.9 too, and that crash is even more ridiculous---dataclass suddenly appears with the slots named argument, which doesn't exist in Python 3.9.

So that's about it.

What a bloody mess...

``Do Not Outthink the Room''

``Do not outthink the room.''

I have been feeding a controlled GPT-5.5 model with all kinds of writings that I have done, and despite the rather stochastic and sycophantic nature, one thing that stood out to me was the phrase that I started this post on. The context here is about me floating the thought of seeking therapy as a way of making sense of some of the nonsense in my head, and asking the model what are some things that I should be paying attention to.

Do I really think that much?

Maybe it's just one of those over-correction things, where ``I feel'' is considered less rational than ``I think'', and it has become some kind of core mantra that powers how I operate, at least in the perception of others.

The truth is, I don't think that I'm defaulting to thinking these days. Many times, I actually rely a little more heavily on my ``feelings'', especially the times when I start going ``My inner-Cassandra says...''. It is not an abandonment of thought process, but a manifestation of internalised experience and thinking that ends up as an intuition-driven process instead.

But that's just the side topic that I found interesting to share here. The real meat and potatoes on why I was even contemplating therapy is what the stupid GPT-5.5 has helped me to finally articulate it better: am I at peace, or am I resigned?

In the old days where I was still part of an active care group in church, there was always a sharing session once a month. I always felt bad during those times; while everyone was sharing about how their lives were getting wrecked by one calamity or another, I just had nothing to share. It felt embarrassing. Folks were thinking that I was lying or hiding something, a type of emotion vampire that sucked out everyone's vulnerabilities, and returned nothing.

But... I just didn't have bad things happen to me. I was so embarrassed by the whole affair that eventually I just let everything else overwhelm me and just withdraw from the care group. Sure, some part of me was always wary of talking about myself, but in earnestness, I didn't face any of the troubles that the rest of the care group was facing. I wasn't suffering from some incurable disease, my parents were doing okay, job was fine for the most part, I had no relationships to have problems with, and since I liked lots of solitary activities like reading, writing, and playing some single player video games, I lived in a very ``safe'' way with literally nothing to talk about, or at least, nothing of the ``human interest'' nature to talk about.

Deviation aside, the question of whether I was being at peace, or being resigned is an interesting question that the GPT-5.5 brought up. At some fundamental level, I have a type of contentment with how life has turned out, more or less. The ``deep wound'' that GPT-5.5 suggested I have revolved around my re-building of high and deep defences against being open to anybody ever since the break up of more than half a decade ago? It claims that I was being resigned rather than being at peace, since apparently I'm still talking about that shit some donkey years later.

This is where I scratch my head and seriously consider if therapy is the right approach. (It's a rhetorical question---it should be the right approach, if I can find the right therapist, and more importantly, not outthink the room, i.e. unconciously evading questions through seemingly generating piles of insights through sheer brute force thinking without internalising.)

But is it really a problem? Granted, the GPT-5.5 model sees nothing other than the writing that I have done, and even then, it is likely to be an abysmally small subset of all the writing I've done. It knows nothing about the actual life I'm living (yes, I do have some friends whom I meet up here and there, and yes I do spontaneous shit ever so often, and yes I actively partake in creative endeavours instead of just doing ``doom and gloom'' writing in this bloody vent/rant blog of mine).

Ah... to be forced to reconsider strange positions due to the musings of a statistically trained machine model. I'm still trying to figure out how much of the generated stuff I should accept as good analysis, and how much of it is just bullshit sycophancy; hard to tell these days, and it is getting ever so much harder. The irony is that now, I am starting to find understanding people to be much easier than understanding what the heck these generative AI models mean.

In some loose sense, I think that all these uncertainty is the price to pay for eschewing the opinion of the majority, and to live as free as one can within the confines of the society that one is embedded in. As long as I don't feel any of the social pressures, I think it is fine to be the way I am. After rall, something is abnormal/requires ``correction'' if there is a corresponding decreased quality of life from the particular characteristic/activity. Yes, I get damned tired most of the time, but such is life---while most people run on tracks that others have already set for them, I'm literally carving my own path among the unknown forests that few tread; par for the course.

That said, I should still be careful that I don't end up going astray. I'm not too fearful for that because my old Super-Ego was never too weak to begin with, and ever since I've been a believer, knowing that God is there for me through Jesus his Son just gives me a certain kind of inexplicable comfort, even though I'm not the ``Jesus adventures hug everyone in sight!'' type of Christian. Did that old relationship that went away hurt me badly? Now, many donkey years later, I'll say, yes, it did hurt me pretty badly. It hurt me badly enough that it turned me into a completely different person. I know I'm not as hurt now as I was a few years ago, because I'm not falling as deeply into that limerance. That phase of my life has closed, and I should really let sleeping dogs lie.

The real question for me now is, what counts as ``moving on''? Jryy fbzrbar unf boivbhfyl zbirq ba ol orvat gur frys-fnpevsvpvat zvffvbanel va n sbervta ynaq, qvgpuvat nyzbfg rirel bgure pbaarpgvba gung pbhyq unir orra unq. Naq gur rkphfr jbhyq or gung vg jnf ubj gurl jrer oebhtug hc, naq gurersber gurer jnf ab fhecevfr gung vg jbhyq or gurve jnl bs yvsr, ``Tbq yrnqvat gur jnl'' ernfbaf abgjvgufgnaqvat. Nz V ovggre ng gung? Bs pbhefr V nz---gurl zbirq ba, naq yrsg zr va gur shpxvat qvgpu nyy uheg. Rnpu gvzr gurl ernpu bhg, V unir nyjnlf unir n zvaq gb whfg gryy gurz gb shpx bss... ohg V pnaabg sbe fbzr ernfba. Pnyy vg jrnxarff, pnyy vg sbetvirarff, pnyy vg jungrire---gur jbeqf qb abg zrna nf zhpu nf bar zvtug guvax.

But what about me? What is ``moving on''? Climbing the dumb-as-rocks corporate ladder based on whatever ``skills'' that I have amassed through both formal training, and work experience of being a manager? Branch out into the land of the non-profit where the intentions are great but the governance are at times sketchy, and the pay is non-commensurate to the market rate in the emotional blackmail? Get deeper into church work when my personality is that of an aloof loner who left his care group because he couldn't feel like he connected with them due to his apparent ``no issues in life'' outlook? Joining a political party to help make the change that he has always been bitching about, even though he knows full well that he'll never be electable due to his aloof and potentially acerbic nature that screams elitism even though he is really none of those things?

Maybe talking to a therapist might be the best answer after all. I don't think I have enough information to break through this stale mate, and a new perspective might be what is needed. Therapists are nothing to be fearful of after all---I had gone to them to set my head straight before when I was still studying as a means of coping with all the new stressors that I had never dealt with.

Time to go hunt me a therapist then. Till the next update.

P.S.: I don't even know if anyone else other than bot-scrapers are reading this blog nowadays. It's been 20 years man...

Funereal #4

Ahem.

I'm lying in a donated coffin. There's hardly anyone else who is there in the small viewing gallery, again donated. The donors are the church that I have spent most of my adult life in since I was saved. Many know of me, but hardly anyone knows me, because I had never really tried to reach out---the pastor once told me how, and it was easy, but I never knew what to do after that because there was always a wall of intellectual nonsense that separated me from them. God knows I could care and love, but not in the way that any normal person would recognise---maybe it was better called service than love. I was always at church, serving quietly in a not-so-quiet way as a musician in the music ministry. But no one ever knew me, and perhaps even myself as well. The pastor is there, maybe out of obligation, maybe out of pity. He says a few unimportant words, and I get cremated. And that was all there was with my earthly body.

Eileen-III is Back, and Evie-II is Here!

Thank the LORD.

Eileen-III was finally fixed. Motherboard, RAM, LCD panel---all replaced at once. An additional amount of nail-biting time later, she POST-ed, and finally booted into Windows 11.

The path to get here took quite a while. Like before, the parts took a while to show up, but after it did, the installation was more tedious than difficult for the technician, who had to come down for the third time.

When the display finally showed some life, I just went ``hallelujah!''. But at that point, we were close to disaster as the technician was of the opinion that due to Eileen-III's storage set up is a RAID 0, the SSDs will be corrupt and needed to be reformatted.

I didn't think it was the case, and was adamant to not have the two SSDs taken as two separate disks instead of the original single striped drive.

The Intel Rapid Storage tool showed that it could detect the RAID-array, and that it was failing. A quick look at the UEFI data showed that the second SSD was not detected. I managed to convince the technician to reseat the second SSD, and et voila, the RAID 0 worked, Windows booted, and everything was well.

At least from the hardware perspective.

There were some minor software issues, but that was quite straightforward to settle.

And thus, Eileen-III is back.

------

After three years, I succumbed to the temptation and bought a new Steam Deck OLED from Shopitree. I first learnt of this from the iShop Changi website, where I actually was thinking of buying the Steam Deck from. But then I realised it was being fulfilled by Shopitree, and then realised that Shopitree was the industrial arm of GameMartz, a store that I had seen in Plaza Singapura that carried the Steam Deck. The delivery was supposed to be today, but they delivered it one day early, which is fantastic.

And I'm out of just a bit north of fifteen hundred dollars. Oh, the tempered glass protection? Best done just after unboxing, and before doing anything to avoid all the inevitable lint and what-not.

So now, I finally have a Steam Deck. She's called Evie-II. She's not the first portable hand-held gaming device---the old Dingoo A330 from 2010-08 is. So I'm retro-calling the Dingoo A330 as Evie.

``Evie'' means ``life'', an apt description for a handheld gaming device.

The case that Evie-II comes in can be split up into a harder inner lining that reduces the amount of space taken up by the entire case, while still providing protection for the protuding parts. The case itself is roughly the same size as the case for my HHKB2, which is an interesting coincidence.

------

This evening, I'm heading out to audit a masterclass in dizi---the first time that I am auditing any masterclasses. Should be interesting. But first, I will get some mala-hotpot for today's OMAD meal.

And that's about the update I have for today. The off-in-lieu is going to go away soon, and from tomorrow, it is back to the regular grind.

Till the next update.

Misery Loves Company

Ah. Now Eileen-II is starting to show weird symptoms. For instance, this strange blank horizontal line of dead pixels. Really starting to make the Steam Deck enticing, even though its price of nearly SGD1500 is really painful to look at. I really hope that the fix for Eileen-III will be successful, and that I can put away Eileen-II. What I don't want to do is to keep travelling back in time, from Windows 10 that is on Eileen-II now, to Windows 8 on Edythe-III---that would be even more terrifying.

------

A thought came to mind recently as I was just riding the bus between points. If I claim that the two biggest super powers of humanity over everything else is the amount of [self-]discipline that we can muster, and the fact that we can figure out how to transfer knowledge at a rate faster than one life-time's worth in one-life time, then by extension, anything that can emulate those two properties will therefore give humanity a run for their money at being the apex.

Guess what is currently being trained on the carefully (and not-so-carefully) curated knowledge created by people at a pace that will make the puritan blush and claim the need to respect the Sabbath.

That's right---all these so-called ``large language models''. We train them with copious amounts of written material, and the training proceeds without stop for months at a stretch using hardware that may fail but definitely does not sleep.

So now, I am at a cross roads of reasoning.

If the two biggest super powers I claim are all there is that makes humanity superior, then I think we may be doomed a little as we are naively building our replacement at best, and superior at worst.

If the two biggest super powers I claim are not all there is that makes humanity superior, then I need to start thinking about what other super powers are there that sets us apart from fellow creations of God.

Modern philosophers have come up with the notion that what counts as something with a consciousness is one that has a certain aspect of embodiment, which is the idea of an integration of a vast variety of sensory information. More importantly, the claim is that intelligence that arises from the integration of this vast variety of sensory information is the definition of consiousness.

Now, we have two different problems here, most literally. These philosophers are arguing that humanity is not the only example of a conscious being, and that any other creature that does integration of large amounts of sensory information is also conscious. In other words, spiders are also conscious beings.

And if one starts instrumenting a trained large language model with all kinds of sensors (CPU temperature sensors of all contributing chips, fan speed sensors... you get the idea), then the large language model itself is also conscious.

Oh and that J-space thing from Anthropic that seemed to be very related to the ``global workspace'' concept? Totally related then.

And that's the first problem---we effectively found some kind of equivalence relation between humanity, animals, and large language models residing in their natural ``body'' of a data centre in terms of consciousness.

The second problem then is that the next super power I claim that sets humanity apart from all therefore cannot be that of embodiment. Perhaps the true super power here is the depth of care and cooperation that many clearly not-the-same-individuals are willing to have together, to form a self-supporting society.

``But MT, what about the whole `agentic framework' use case of the large language models?''

If you think carefully, the ``agentic framework'' is less of a cooperation of not-the-same-individuals, and more of a self-consistent role-play attempt borne by the same large language model, but under different prescribed roles. In some fundamental sense, the same large language model shares the same foundation from which all inference is formed, but the same cannot be said of humanity given our current understanding.

The equivalent approach in the world of the large language model might be to have different large language models self-organising to work towards a common goal, instead of relying on a strictly hierarchical or even [externally] orchestrated approach.

That said, I've not really thought much about this whole gotong royong aspect of humanity as a major super power, primarily because it seems like something that is trite---many animals help each other, so what makes humanity different through possessing this power? At this point, it seems more like what the modern philosophers are trying to do---separate humanity from the so-called artificial intelligences.

But I don't want to just do that. I want an answer that separates humanity from both artificial intelligences, and the rest of the animals. ``Just because God created us in His image'' is great for a faith-based explanation, but that's a cop out in this case, because it is reality that we are the apex of the world right now.

If we knew why and how, maybe we can have a more rational response to the rise of the AI.

Till the next update.