Tag Archives: Music

This Moment…

I’m sitting here at home at the end of a Sunday doing nothing, listening to Glen Hansard’s Falling Slowly and I feel oddly satis­fied, as if I could lay claim to being the happiest person in the world in this one moment. There’s that feeling in the air that you get when you’re on a swing in the playground and you’re gradu­ally slowing down to a stop on the way up.

It’s all very irrational; I don’t under­stand it.

That Ol’ Touch

I confess I am a fan of old Hindi music, the good ones at least. Even those in the audience who are indif­ferent to such music will find much to appre­ciate in the wonderful melodies that they present to us. Certainly, the fact that they have remained popular to this day is indica­tive of their quality.

EDIT: YouTube removed the video. How lame.…

The music is not all though; there is much that we can learn by watching the actors and actresses play out their parts in their signa­ture styles, and under­standing the dynamics of old-style courtship.

The video above is a classic case-study in romance. Notice the remote serenade — maintaining a comfort­able distance is the first step towards securing your loved one. The theory behind this is that close proximity exposes your loved one to your human imperfections…that are best hidden at the start of a relation­ship. Do you see how the actors are never close enough to be seen together?

The next useful technique is that effort­less trans­mis­sion of sound across the forest that the actor achieves, even when he’s barely moving his lips. This is a classic ninja technique, improved over the ages. The key to this technique is the (appar­ently) casual manner in which he strokes his guitar and the (appar­ently) out-of-sync foot movements. With practice, you can generate the right frequen­cies of vibra­tions to carry the slightest whisper across the forests and plains, across the oceans if need be.

Finally, notice the effect that the serenade has on the lady, and her orgasmic convul­sions. This technique was invented by our ances­tors who travelled distant places with no good means of commu­ni­ca­tion, and were forced to come up with something to keep their wives happy remotely. Unfor­tu­nately, with the passage of time and the devel­op­ment of modern means of commu­ni­ca­tion and trans­port, this technique has become an extinct, forgotten art.

Discover mpd

I’m probably obsessed with this music player called mpd, but what the heck. I’ve good reason to be, especially since I listen to music for the greater part of the day. Having a good music player is like having a good chair to sit on. Sure, no one thinks it’s that big a deal, but paying atten­tion to posture helps your health in the long run.

To clarify, I’m not obsessed with mpd per se, just the concept of a modular­ized client-server archi­tec­ture for playing music. mpd is the server, gmpc is the client that I’ve chosen to use, along with a couple of other compo­nents such as scmpc to scrobble my tracks and music­tracker to update my Pidgin status. I also found an XFCE applet that can control mpd. As an added bonus, it turns out that I can adjust the master volume by scrolling my mouse-wheel over the applet, something I’ve wanted for a long time. Sweet.

Lil’ Monsta

I knew I had to do it someday — and I finally did it yesterday. What did I do, you ask? Why, bought a little MP3 player of course.

No, it is not an iPod.

The strange thing is, I don’t even know what exactly it should be called. Sure, I could call it an MP3 player, but it does play WMA too. (Regret­tably, it doesn’t seem to play OGG files.) I could call it a music player, but it does play videos too. If I called it a media player…would anyone know what I was talking about? When I say ‘media player’ the first thing that pops into my head is Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. Not the same thing.

Well, on to the details: it’s a 4GB, shiny black thing with USB 2.0 connec­tivity and recharge­able batteries. Hmmm…why am I telling you all this? Just do a quick search on Google for Sansa e260, and you can get the full story.

In case you are wondering, I don’t plan to use it myself. I had a $50 RadioShack gift card, and a 10% discount coupon, and besides, it was already discounted by 16%, so I decided to splurge. Do the reckoning yourself.

Music From Schindler’s List

Drop whatever you are doing (including reading this blog) and watch this video on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueWVV_GnRIA

This is the score from Schindler’s List, composed by John Williams, and performed by Itzhak Perlman (violin). Look at the way Perlman caresses the violin…amazing.…

In case you didn’t know this already, John Williams has composed several of the finest pieces of music that you could ever hope to listen to.