Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Moving on...

It's Wednesday, halfway through the week, and things are starting to be much more palatable than 2 days ago. Am I still hurt? Yes, in a way. Am I still sad? Yes, in a way. Am I wallowing in self-pity? No. Not anymore. It is time to move on.

If I were to stop in my tracks each time something bad happens, where will I end up if not at the same place? It is not the end of the world until I draw my last breath and am declared clinically and legally dead. So, life must move on. Things like this occurs to everyone, not just me. Hence, there is no reason why I might want to wallow and start cursing and swearing on how the world is being unfair to me and so on.

In other news, I realise that I cannot stand the Nescafé-styled coffee. There is always this strange sour-ish after taste that spoils the rich flavour of the coffee bean. I'm not sure if this is innate to Nescafé, or if there is something wrong with the way that I taste things. Normal brewed coffee tastes so much better; I love the rich and strong aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Now I remember why I don't really like to drink the coffee that I have at home (it is Nescafé hahaha). Even the coffee-shop/hawker centre's coffee tastes much better.

lilypond is one amazing music annotation system. The way that things are structured just makes it fairly painless to typeset music scores using the usual staff notation. The only complaint that I have about this system is that (you guessed it) it cannot handle the generation of simplified notation scores. One possible thing that I can do is to write add-ons in Scheme to allow the automatic generation of the music score (annotated in standard form) into the simplified form. It shouldn't be too complicated, things like accents, crescendos, bar-lines are all the same in the two systems; the only thing that is different is the removal of the 5-line staff, and replacing all the notes and stems with numbers with the correct notation form. This should be fairly easy to pull off; need to check if the default font in lilypond can handle it or not. In fact, it is probably possible to hack lilypond such that it will generate the usual stuff necessary for simplified notation. Ooo... deep concept.

Meanwhile, I think I will hack some sound file analysers that will generate syntactically correct lilypond source files given some sound recording. This is going to be a really useful tool because as a musician, I often find it easier to actually play the tune on an instrument (particularly for improvisation) than to try to annotate it directly on paper. The last time I tried to write down the score for some pieces, I ended up using only the pentatonic scale instead of the diatonic scale or the chromatic scale. But these are minor projects compared to one that I think I must do: I need to record sound samples of some of the Chinese instruments so that I can loop them into virtual instruments in case I want to compose stuff in the spirit of Chinese orchestral music.

Meanwhile, I will try to see if I can figure out how to do remixes using FL Studio. It would be quite cool to try to let Teresa Teng sing to a beat... hmmm...

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