Jue's Blog

Today was my first day of grad school (orientation). What was it like? Imagine a lanky, stubbled, Englishman declaiming the following:

Here’s the difference between your undergrad studies and what you are about to embark on for your PhD. Undergrad is like being in a hurdles race. It’s 4 years, you know how many hurdles you have to jump over and how high they are, and the goal is to clear them as quickly and as well as you can, while knocking down as few as possible.

Grad school is more like a one-way plane ticket to a Transylvanian castle, and when you get inside the doors shut behind you and you’re left in total darkness holding onto nothing but a single matchbook. You light the first match and discover that you are in a room full of objects covered by white sheets. Before the light from your match goes out you have time to uncover only one object. If you’re lucky, before you run out of matches you’ll uncover a sheet that has another box of matches under it. If you’re really lucky eventually you’ll find the key to the door so you can get out of the damn place.

…to which a fellow grad student responded, can’t we just set fire to all the sheets?

In my previous post I showed you a piece of piano music based on a Shepard Scale–it seems to go up and up forever. Listen to it (it’s at the bottom on this link), and then ask yourself: 1. Was that interesting? 2. Was that aesthetically pleasing or beautiful? 3. Was that music?

Most people would probably answer “no” to questions 2 and 3 after listening to that. It actually sounds stressful, even unpleasant. This, incidentally, is the general response of most people when they encounter contemporary classical music, especially the avant-garde stuff. However, if you are a modern composer, you are not most people.

Some people might ask, in response to question 1, what’s so interesting about a piece that sounds like it’s going up/down forever? It’s a cheap trick for nerds. To these people, if you are a modern composer, you should say “Uh, no!” after stammering a little. Then walk away, knowing in your heart that your tricks actually rather expensive, which is why you’re unemployed.

Part 2: Overtone Series

Now listen to this »

Modern classical music, a.k.a. “art music,” often gets a bad rap for being impossible to listen to. In fact, this is completely true. Since you’re probably very busy at work, allow me to take you on a stroll through Youtube and Wikipedia to see why.

Part 1: The Shepard Scale

First you need to understand some abstract, completely useless concepts. Imagine playing an ascending scale or a note that slowly slides upward in pitch. When you get higher and higher, you slowly fade out–get softer and softer–but you fade in with the same scale several octaves below, which goes up a while but then also fades out. Keep repeating, and you end up with a scale, actually 2 or more overlapping scales, that seems to go up forever. This is called a Shepard scale. Home exercise: try playing a Shepard scale. Home exercise: try doing that forever.

Let’s say you are a composer and instead of contributing something of tangible value to society, you want to write a piece of music using a Shepard Scale. If you have a good grad student stipend, or if that’s impossible, if you have a good faculty salary and have paid off your student loans but haven’t died of old age, you can buy an electronic “instrument” called a tone generator, and make this composition in 5 minutes–it sounds like this. It’s kind of lame, but you get the idea.

Fortunately, if you know how to click randomly on Youtube, the best kind of concept music is at your fingertips. For example, in the following video you’ll notice the hallmarks of a contemporary composition: lots of black ink, pages that don’t look like they have any notes on them and were drawn by babies, notes that require breaking appendages to play. (more…)

from Dave’s Flickr

I just discovered the joy of marinating meat. This first attempt is inspired by the motherland, although the real Chinese would never cook chicken this way. Same goes for the Thai-style stir-fry, which is Thai only in style.

Be assured, though, that both came out tasty. (more…)