I still don't like the crawling though. But what can one do when one is using a ``free'' almost-always available tool for blogging?
Anyway, it's finally November. NaNoWriMo the organisation has imploded, so NaNoWriMo the event is kind of dead, at least officially. Personally, I probably should continue with the whole ``writing a novel in a month'' deal, but realistically, it's a nice change to do something a little different.
Last month was a doozy. Much happened at work (I won't talk about it other than pointing out that all the waiting for details is exhausting), and even more happened in not-work. The Great Yamaha has arrived! It's a maple great bass recorder from Yamaha (YRGB-61), and according to Wee Aik, it's the first time he's ever heard/seen anyone order it. Mind you, he's a Yamaha products veteran for nearly two decades, so that statement has way more heft to it than expected.
First impressions of The Great Yamaha are good---the tone is sweet, the range is similar to that of the bass flute. I had a brain fart in my excitement at receiving The Great Yamaha that I forgot that the recorder is tuned by moving the headjoint away from the body---we were trying to tune by adjusting the adjustable boccal.
🤦♂️
There is a minor issue that I'll need Sean to help remedy---the felt on one of the bumpers seemed to be a little too thin, making it a little harder to hold down the lever that ought to cover the two linked holes. But that's something for the upcoming Friday.
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I went and played with Atelier Flute Ensemble (AFE) JB over the previous weekend at the auditorium of Afiniti Medini in Medini Iskandar (it's ``across the road'' from Malaysia's Legoland). It's a nice space, but as an auditorium, it meant that it was better at absorbing sound than acoustically bouncing stuff nicely the way some recital spaces do. I spent two nights over at Yong Kang's mum's place, with Friday and Saturday almost fully locked in on the rehearsal and performance respectively. Yong Kang was a good host, but I think that my ``rock bottom'' expectations from living a mostly monk-ish lifestyle probably threw him off by a lot, giving him some serious anxiety of whether his hosting was adequate.
It was more than adequate, for sure. But let's be real:
- I sleep on a mattress on a floor at home;
- The apartment I live in has no air-conditioner;
- I average about one-and-change meals a day;
- My philosophy to food is usually ``eat to live'';
- Armed with Eirian-VI, I can kill time better than most people; and
- I don't really have this urge to buy random junk.
I think it really throws people off because there really isn't any other obvious indicator that in addition to acting like a weirdo, I actually do live like one [apparently].
Ah well.
The concert itself was fun---I thoroughly enjoyed playing the repertoire that was put together. Going nuts on the articulation with Davie was something that I had not expected myself to do, but considering some of the crazier dynamics that are written for the low flutes, I think it fully justified. One interesting thing to note was the use of direct amplification on the contrabass flute, as well as us bass flutes---it served as a good alternative to the KFC way of having another friendly low instrument player (contrabass or bass clarinet) to join in. They even had me play something for the demo when they were introducing the flute family---I started with a fragment from 《平湖秋月》 to feature the low-B at the penultimate rehearsal but was told it was too short, so I switched to a transposed version of 《瑶族舞曲》, but then someone made a comment about it being played in an orchestra, so I finally just played a transposed version of 《草原的思念》, all to show off that low-B on the bass flute. I think they liked it.
At the end of the concert was a whole series of photo-taking sessions. I was a part of the main groups, but as everyone else had their friends and families coming up to them for a photo in memory of the event, hardly anyone came to me, and I just sat there and absorbed the environment.
It felt a little melancholic, but it was fine---I felt contented from having played more [bass] flute. The location was not in SIN city, and therefore I never really felt comfortable trying to get folks from within SIN city to get tickets to travel waaaaaaaaaaay out of the way just to hear me play the bass line. No matter how I swing it, it just sounds ludicrous.
That said, if AFE JB were to have another concert, I would happily join in and play with them, should they still want me.
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In other news, Ball x Pit is taking time from Silksong, Persona 5, and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles 2.
It's Arkanoid combined with Vampire Survivors for the action part, and then there's a bit of Tetris with Plinko for the city-building part (which is a slightly more convoluted mechanism for unlocking new characters and get bonus stat increases---now they involve skill, and feature additional resource gathering/management).
It's fun, and I'm still really new in it. Stay tuned for more information as I [slowly] unlock stuff.
If there's a reason to get a portable hand-held, it might be this one.
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I've restarted on some digital signal processing work involving the FFT once again. Reason: I needed a better way to extract the chords from sample music files, and I didn't want to rely on some dodgy third party website to do that.
The last time I was experimenting with FFT, I ended up needing
scipy and other random-ass Python packages to install. On a Cygwin set up, this is a royal pain in the ass.The solution is to grab FFTW and libsndfile, and write my own C++ program to do the expensive part of running the FFT, before using Python to do the processing after.
The FFT part is done, and I'm now working on the bucketing of the resultant Discrete Fourier Transform to propose the associated pitches for examination.
But Ball x Pit awaits me!
I think that's about it for now. Till the next update then.
