A whole lotta hoot, and just a little bit of nanny

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

I’ve recently had the misfortune of having had to sit through a series of classes on Western Music History that managed to make just about every form of music prior to 1900 seem deathly dull, irrelevant, and inaccessible. It amazes me how they can do this. I mean, it’s not hard to find some truly amazing stuff even within the confines of “Western Art Music”, and present it in a way that’s engaging. So why don’t they? Do they not know? Are they just teaching it out of a sense of obligation? Did they sit through dull music history classes back in the day and figure that we have to suck it up just like they did?

The Medieval period. What we learnt in class: there was Gregorian chant, which was basically monophonic vocals without much rhythm or melody to speak of, and then mumble mumble something happened and there was polyphony, SURPRISE! RENAISSANCE!

Yeah right. As if that’s all that was going on musically in the middle ages. We’re talking about an era that gave you St Vitus’ Dance, an uncontrollable urge to dance all over the place as if possessed by the devil. You think they did that to Gregorian chant? Of course not.

Here’s Corvus Corax with a little something to show you how it’s done:

Yeah, those dudes have a lightshow and moshpit. Their interpretive choices for this Saltarello (a 13th century number, if I recall correctly) are, ahem, somewhat non-standard, but no more ridiculous than the early music ensembles that play medieval dance tunes as if they were lullabies and dirges. No self-respecting medieval musician would’ve been able to earn his or her living unless they could get the village green jumping.

Corvus Corax use a range of medieval instruments including medieval-style bagpipes, ear-shattering shawms (clocked at 98dB!), and of course a buttload of percussion. But if you really want to appreciate the full ridiculous awesomeness of medieval instruments, you need to check out some of these Youtube videos:

The krumhorn, which is what you’d get if you crossed a kazoo with an old-fashioned walking stick turned upside down.

The hurdy-gurdy, which would be the medieval answer to the keytar, except you have to wind a handle to play it.

The portative organ, which is basically the bastard child of a pipe organ and bellows, giving you a kind of early accordion. There are quite a few home-made portative organs on the tubes — looks like they’re a great hacker project.

My mostly-mobile Internet workflow

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

One of the biggest changes to my Internet use over the last year is that I no longer spend all day in the office sitting in front of a computer. It used to be that if something interesting caught my attention, I’d open it in a browser tab and in the next slow patch — perhaps over lunch, or during that long dark teatime of the soul that happens around 4:30pm when you’re watching the clock, or the far more pleasant beer-time of the soul that happens when you stay at the office after everyone’s gone and actually get some productive stuff done — somewhere in one of those times, if I felt the urge, I could easily whack out a blog post if I felt the urge.

These days, I mostly check Twitter on my phone, and just reading links that get posted there turns out to be a bit fraught, let alone actually doing anything with them. All too often, when I click on a Twitter link, I wind up on a page that’s been “helpfully” (please visualise my sarcastic airquotes) “optimised” for mobile users, which means I have to click through a suggestion that I install their special app (no thanks!) before winding up on a dumbed-down version of the site’s front page. Any link to the actual article I wanted to read in the first place is, of course, absent.

Assuming I can get to the article, what I can do with it is more limited, too. My Twitter client of choice includes a cut-down browser which is great for quickly checking out ephemeral links, but opening in “real” Safari requires a couple of clicks. (You can do it by default, but that is overkill for most links, so I choose not to.) Once in Safari… well, a mobile browser is no place to get real work done. Nevertheless, I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to bash my newly-mobile-centric Internet workflow into shape, and since I’m rather proud of it, I thought I’d post it here.

The key parts are:

• Pinboard — a bookmarking service which I started using as replacement for Delicious, and which has the feel that Delicious did back in the good old days, before anyone invented the term “folksonomy”.
  
• Instapaper — one of several “read later” apps (the main other contenders are Pocket and Readability); one of the features that endears it is that it integrates well with Pinboard and with other apps I use.
  
• WordPress — this blog runs on it, and I’ve got a bunch of handy plugins installed (and wow, sometime when I wasn’t looking, WordPress plugins got really useful).
  
• ifttt — “If this, then that”, a glue application that connects various online services based on triggers.
  

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