- The 口笛 has no equivalent. I don't even know how to explain this other than: an open pipe either 5 to 6 cm long or 8 to 9 cm long.
- D 小笛 is traditionally the highest pitched 笛子.
- Piccolo (keyed in C) is equivalent to the G 梆笛, though it tends to be more mellow. Full metal is the closest to 梆笛 timbre, Grenaditte/wood is furthest, and hybrids are somewhere in between.
- Treble flute (keyed in G) is equivalent to D 曲笛, assuming a foot with 2 additional notes. It also tends to be more mellow.
- Concert flute (keyed in C) is equivalent to the G 大笛; this does not change even with a B foot. It is on par with the G 新笛, though it is more nimble to play.
- Flûte d'amour (keyed in A/B♭) is equivalent to the E/F 大笛, assuming a foot with 2 additional notes.
- Alto flute (keyed in G) is equivalent to the D 大笛, assuming a foot with 2 additional notes. The D 大笛 is quite rarely used in Chinese Orchestras.
- C 大笛 is traditionally the lowest pitched 笛子.
- Bass flute (keyed in C) has no equivalent in among the 笛子 family.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Flutes and 笛子
Some things to consider:
SMS Musing #7
Wide awake from perspiring too much:
Never thought I'd write an entry on my phone in an SMS-like setting, let alone at around 1am. June came and went, and it hasn't been a productive month. Lots of diversions coupled with terribly warm and humid weather meant that I was always trying to find something else to do.
Work has been alright -- I've been coasting along on auto-pilot for a while and it's about time to dig the spurs in a little to push things over the current gravity well that comes from being in limbo between funding tranches and a less-than-obvious engagement strategy with potential partners. Frankly, it's not the most ideal situation for my operational efficiency -- reminds me too much of the nebulous direction that I'd experienced in grad school, where the direction that I think I was heading was totally not where I was heading. There will come a day where that traumatic experience will be gone from me, but today is not that day.
I've been taking French lessons on and off on Duolingo, a web site built by Dr Luis von Ahn, an old teacher of mine back when I was still an undergraduate in CMU. No real reason on why, except perhaps the feeling that it is time to expand my understanding of the Romance languages. Incidentally, I've also started on Spanish, and am hoping that the similarities will help rather than hinder progress. Maybe this is my way of preparing for Finnegans Wake, to be read some time in the unknown future.
Ah well. I think I'm sick of lying prone and propping myself on my elbows to type this all out on a tiny phone. Till the next update.
Monday, June 15, 2015
Typewriterisms Part Deux
First, read typewriterisms.
So I sat down and decided to work on the second part of what I had written in that old post. For reference, here's a Courier-based (non-jitter) version:
At first, I tried to attack the problem by trying to figure out how to encode and embed a pan-unicode font, which in our case is GNU Unifont. Then I realised I had two problems: I had to vectorise the raster format of the GNU Unifont (no easy task considering the tricks used to mimic a higher resolution for the CJK ideographs via a careful play of negative spaces), and I had to somehow shove that into a dictionary in the PostScript file to be referred to by the page layout program. I spent some time looking at all that and it all seemed like too much work.
Then I discovered the image PostScript command and figured that I could just render the GNU Unifont as a monochrome bitmap instead.
I put together a database from the GNU Unifont source hex files (and the combining characters list for all the diacritics) and slowly put together an increasingly sophisticated sequence of line renderers. With that (and some numerical tweaking on the driver program to make it look like lpr-emu.py), I present the output of ulpr-emu.py, a Unicode aware monospaced font ``typewriter'' renderer. Here's the output with the same input as before:
Kind of boring, I know. Apart from the different looking glyphs, there isn't anything particularly Unicode about it. But here's a render of the lyrics to 粉雪 by レミオロメン:
That's almost pure Unicode (technically UTF-8 with CJK ideograms).
I don't think I'm going to add that jitter thing to the rendering process this time. This can be seen as the prelude towards my 简谱 rendering system. I'm still debating whether to release ulpr-emu.py, since it is using the GNU Unifont dataset. But we'll see how it all turns out.
Till the next update.
Edit: I've released the sources.
So I sat down and decided to work on the second part of what I had written in that old post. For reference, here's a Courier-based (non-jitter) version:
At first, I tried to attack the problem by trying to figure out how to encode and embed a pan-unicode font, which in our case is GNU Unifont. Then I realised I had two problems: I had to vectorise the raster format of the GNU Unifont (no easy task considering the tricks used to mimic a higher resolution for the CJK ideographs via a careful play of negative spaces), and I had to somehow shove that into a dictionary in the PostScript file to be referred to by the page layout program. I spent some time looking at all that and it all seemed like too much work.
Then I discovered the image PostScript command and figured that I could just render the GNU Unifont as a monochrome bitmap instead.
I put together a database from the GNU Unifont source hex files (and the combining characters list for all the diacritics) and slowly put together an increasingly sophisticated sequence of line renderers. With that (and some numerical tweaking on the driver program to make it look like lpr-emu.py), I present the output of ulpr-emu.py, a Unicode aware monospaced font ``typewriter'' renderer. Here's the output with the same input as before:
Kind of boring, I know. Apart from the different looking glyphs, there isn't anything particularly Unicode about it. But here's a render of the lyrics to 粉雪 by レミオロメン:
That's almost pure Unicode (technically UTF-8 with CJK ideograms).
I don't think I'm going to add that jitter thing to the rendering process this time. This can be seen as the prelude towards my 简谱 rendering system. I'm still debating whether to release ulpr-emu.py, since it is using the GNU Unifont dataset. But we'll see how it all turns out.
Till the next update.
Edit: I've released the sources.
Friday, June 05, 2015
Pens
Ah June. The month of the hot weather. The month of the start of a really serious case of heat, haze, and humidity. The month where school-going children get their first major reprieve from the academic year. The month that... I could go on, but it's pointless.
What I mean to say is, it's 2015, and June. So, an entry is in order, and what better thing to talk about than the fountain pen and penmanship in general?
I got my first ``proper'' fountain pen back in 2009, and it has been nearly 6 years since. I never looked back---I've been using my fountain pen for almost all forms of writing, save cheque writing because fountain pens do not allow the underlying carbon copy to record the transaction correctly.
Man does it take me back to look at that writing sample from the past. I've fixed my cursive since then. Specifically, my capital `I', `F', `Q', `T', `J', `H', `A', `N', small `r', `f' have been fixed to conform to something more traditional looking. The reason for that was due to a reply from T-Mobile some time back, when I wrote a handwritten letter asking for a waiver of some fees due to me not being in the US any more and that I had already cancelled the phone account---the details didn't matter as much as what happened in my address. The first letter of my street name was misread as ``Fl'' instead of ``H'', which made me seriously reconsider how I was forming my words.
Of course, later on I adjusted my writing even more because I realised that there was a very good reason to have a ``standardised'' cursive script, and that the form that I was using was far from being standardised. In fact, it was some kind of bastardised form of pseudo-calligraphic-cursive-printed nonsense which was ugly, and more importantly, prone to misreads like the anecdote I referred to earlier. So I fixed them as best as I could, and I think that they look a little better now. Which of course segues (I adore this word---it does not sound like [SEG-ewws] but more like [SEG-ways]) into the other thing I want to talk about, that is, penmanship.
I'm not sure about the current school curriculum in SIN city, but back in the day, I remembered that we took up some form of cursive writing in class as part of English lessons. I believe it was in primary three or four that we were first introduced to cursive writing. I didn't really care for it much, ended up doing lots of printing, until I reached primary six where my awesome English teacher Mr Lin Min would basically be writing in cursive for everything. Note that these were the days where the ``word processor'' was mostly ye olde typewriter, and often times it was much faster to write notes out for the students with pen and paper instead of relying on the typewriter. The typewritten texts were reserved for the massive vocabularly lists, things that were better suited for the rigid formatting that typewriters are awesome at, but I digress.
In a world where reaching for a word processor is as convenient as coughing, it would seem that penmanship is dated at best and completely irrelevant at worst. I disagree with that thought for a variety of reasons. Logorrhea is the chief symbol of our times, as people (including me!) will happily type hundreds upon hundreds of meaningless drivel in order to convey a simple point, defenestrating conciseness of diction. Part of the reason for that is that typing on a word processor (I'm using this in the most general form of the noun) is quite effortless as compared to picking up a pen and then writing it down on a piece of paper. In the time it takes to write up this entire blog entry, I can probably write down only half of what I have typed up right here. It sounds counter-intuitive then to say that penmanship is even more needed now than before, but it is true---requiring an actual effort to put thoughts down on paper will skew the writer to actually sit down and think carefully what he/she wants to say before finding the right expressions and thus writing them down. This will naturally yield a much concise and pithy piece of writing.
Thus, it is still possible (and preferable even) that a handwritten essay of five hundred words is more worthy of reading than a thousand-word essay that was typed up in a word processor on a computer.
Pithiness aside, penmanship also trains one thing that we are sorely lacking in this day of the ``service industry''---fine motor control. Back in the manufacturing/artisan era (industrial/pre-industrial society), people did lots of fine craft work with their hands. That requires some rather exquisite fine motor control. Musicians, artists, they all have to keep the fine motor control up if they want to be successful at what they do. Even the peasant needs fine motor control to repair their own gear, weave their baskets and what not. But these days, with lots of push-button automation, we are finding that the need for such activities is gradually fading away. Writing is among the last bastions of easily accessible fine motor control activities that is left. While it doesn't necessarily mean that one ought to write lots of essays with the pen, it does mean that one should take the opportunity to write whenever they can, just so that they maintain their fine motor skills. Need a list? Don't pull up the damn word processor (or spreadsheet program; ugh) and just handwrite it. Need to inform someone something? Write a quick memo instead of sending yet another email---this is especially true when the person is like... a family member.
Anyway, I'm just ranting and losing steam. I think I'll stop here and move on. Till the next update then.
What I mean to say is, it's 2015, and June. So, an entry is in order, and what better thing to talk about than the fountain pen and penmanship in general?
I got my first ``proper'' fountain pen back in 2009, and it has been nearly 6 years since. I never looked back---I've been using my fountain pen for almost all forms of writing, save cheque writing because fountain pens do not allow the underlying carbon copy to record the transaction correctly.
Man does it take me back to look at that writing sample from the past. I've fixed my cursive since then. Specifically, my capital `I', `F', `Q', `T', `J', `H', `A', `N', small `r', `f' have been fixed to conform to something more traditional looking. The reason for that was due to a reply from T-Mobile some time back, when I wrote a handwritten letter asking for a waiver of some fees due to me not being in the US any more and that I had already cancelled the phone account---the details didn't matter as much as what happened in my address. The first letter of my street name was misread as ``Fl'' instead of ``H'', which made me seriously reconsider how I was forming my words.
Of course, later on I adjusted my writing even more because I realised that there was a very good reason to have a ``standardised'' cursive script, and that the form that I was using was far from being standardised. In fact, it was some kind of bastardised form of pseudo-calligraphic-cursive-printed nonsense which was ugly, and more importantly, prone to misreads like the anecdote I referred to earlier. So I fixed them as best as I could, and I think that they look a little better now. Which of course segues (I adore this word---it does not sound like [SEG-ewws] but more like [SEG-ways]) into the other thing I want to talk about, that is, penmanship.
I'm not sure about the current school curriculum in SIN city, but back in the day, I remembered that we took up some form of cursive writing in class as part of English lessons. I believe it was in primary three or four that we were first introduced to cursive writing. I didn't really care for it much, ended up doing lots of printing, until I reached primary six where my awesome English teacher Mr Lin Min would basically be writing in cursive for everything. Note that these were the days where the ``word processor'' was mostly ye olde typewriter, and often times it was much faster to write notes out for the students with pen and paper instead of relying on the typewriter. The typewritten texts were reserved for the massive vocabularly lists, things that were better suited for the rigid formatting that typewriters are awesome at, but I digress.
In a world where reaching for a word processor is as convenient as coughing, it would seem that penmanship is dated at best and completely irrelevant at worst. I disagree with that thought for a variety of reasons. Logorrhea is the chief symbol of our times, as people (including me!) will happily type hundreds upon hundreds of meaningless drivel in order to convey a simple point, defenestrating conciseness of diction. Part of the reason for that is that typing on a word processor (I'm using this in the most general form of the noun) is quite effortless as compared to picking up a pen and then writing it down on a piece of paper. In the time it takes to write up this entire blog entry, I can probably write down only half of what I have typed up right here. It sounds counter-intuitive then to say that penmanship is even more needed now than before, but it is true---requiring an actual effort to put thoughts down on paper will skew the writer to actually sit down and think carefully what he/she wants to say before finding the right expressions and thus writing them down. This will naturally yield a much concise and pithy piece of writing.
Thus, it is still possible (and preferable even) that a handwritten essay of five hundred words is more worthy of reading than a thousand-word essay that was typed up in a word processor on a computer.
Pithiness aside, penmanship also trains one thing that we are sorely lacking in this day of the ``service industry''---fine motor control. Back in the manufacturing/artisan era (industrial/pre-industrial society), people did lots of fine craft work with their hands. That requires some rather exquisite fine motor control. Musicians, artists, they all have to keep the fine motor control up if they want to be successful at what they do. Even the peasant needs fine motor control to repair their own gear, weave their baskets and what not. But these days, with lots of push-button automation, we are finding that the need for such activities is gradually fading away. Writing is among the last bastions of easily accessible fine motor control activities that is left. While it doesn't necessarily mean that one ought to write lots of essays with the pen, it does mean that one should take the opportunity to write whenever they can, just so that they maintain their fine motor skills. Need a list? Don't pull up the damn word processor (or spreadsheet program; ugh) and just handwrite it. Need to inform someone something? Write a quick memo instead of sending yet another email---this is especially true when the person is like... a family member.
Anyway, I'm just ranting and losing steam. I think I'll stop here and move on. Till the next update then.
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