Do not play an electro-acoustic music under the sun when 36 degree! :)

By JyKang in Ji's 0 Comment

I had recently a great chance to visit Russia for the White Night Festival. I was one of the performers for the ethnical/experimental music performance, (the boss called it ‘Yellow Emperor Orchestra’) and was quite excited to visit to one of the mysterious cities in Russia.

One thing that I didn’t count was the weather and the condition of the performance. I had my laptop + percussion setup with Meiyi, the percussionist, and prepared for live processing, but in the end, I couldn’t play at all my electronics, due to the weather condition.

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I was quite upset for the situation at the moment, but I found it was quite funny to have that rare condition. So that I made the list that you should know when you perform an electro-acoustic music underneath the sun when 36 degree. This temperature is from the forecast, but I believe, since I came from also a hot city that can easily go up to 36 degree, that the temperature was much more than 36 degree on stage due to the direct sunshine.

This is a funny, yet serious list for this. Just to laugh about it. So here we go!

11 things to know when you perform an electro-acoustic music underneath the sun when 36 degree.

1. Do not use metal instruments. If you really need, use gloves, otherwise your hands will be burnt.

2. Do not use DPA microphone, it will be melting down and stop working within 10 minutes. If that happens, put it in a refrigerator for some hours and find the part that has melt and solder the part, and wish for luck.

3. Use an expensive jack -or any other- cable. Otherwise the tip and ring will be meltingTrip down and be stuck inside your sound card. (I don’t think the sound engineers realized when they disconnected their cable from my sound card, which is partly damaged now.)

4. Apparently Macbook Pro 5.1 (the old one) will still survive. Just hard to touch at the moment, and again, burning hands.

5. Prepare a handkerchief for your sweat, otherwise your precious electronic devices will have a danger. Forget about how you look on stage.

6. Do not use a mask. You can’t see anything, and you will experience a sudden rain in front of your face and soon be under hallucination.

7. Don’t even think of a glossy screen. Even with the mette screen, you can’t see anything on your screen and you will finally find your mouse cursor after 5 minutes.

8. Make sure that your performance is insured so that in such a condition, you can still perform without any worries.

9. Do not touch any cable. You will feel immediately scared by the unusual feeling of the touch, and again, burning hands.

10. Put a couple of bottles of water beside you. Without it, you will not be able to finish your performance.

11. Try to stand underneath the shadow. You can avoid half of the list above.

Still you can perform, will have an unforgettable good/bad memory, and experience quite an unusual situation to tell your friends, and learn for the next. I really think on stage it was close to 40 degree. So.. 

Sibelius Core Team Now at Steinberg, Building New Notation Tool

By JyKang in ETC 0 Comment
sibelius7_uiIn the production of printed scores and traditional notation, two tools have loomed large for over a decade: Sibelius and Finale. So, for publishers, composers, arrangers, and teachers who use scoring software, it was a big deal when it became clear over the summer that a reorganization at Avid pushed the core development team of Sibelius out of the company. That raised some protests among users, and serious doubts about Sibelius’ future.

Now, we know what became of the core team behind Sibelius. Twelve of them now work at Steinberg, the German developer of Cubase and Nuendo, and a major Avid competitor. (Steinberg is also a Yamaha subsidiary, which gives them tremendous distribution power, as @Dan_Radin notes to CDM on Twitter.)

After years of relative quiet in the notation software landscape, it appears scoring software could be in for a real shake-up if these developers can live up to their ambitious goals. The Sibelius team now are readying their own notation tool, and they’re blogging the results, starting today. (It sounds like a non-compete agreement wasn’t part of their severance, unless they’re about to hear from Avid legal.)

What matters for users: this new tool promises to be built from the ground up, and with the Sibelius creators behind it. That could actually mean this story has a happier ending. Unlike Sibelius and Finale, the new tool won’t be bound by legacy code. (Sibelius, for its part, has code and an architecture dating back to the days of the Acorn computer in the UK. Don’t remember the Acorn? Yeah, it was a while ago.)

We get an explanation of what’s going on from none other than Dan Spreadbury. (Dan was a key figure behind Sibelius’ development for many years.) The goals sound almost impossibly lofty – but they’re also the goals I know many people who care about scoring desperately want. Excerpt:

We have a vision for a flexible, powerful music notation application that is equal to the task of notating today’s most challenging art music and capable of producing graphical results of the highest quality, while providing an environment for composing and arranging that is as close as possible to the simplicity of writing music with pencil and paper, or improvising at your instrument.

The suggestion of alternative notation warms my heart; architectural considerations in the original Sibelius made some of these difficult or impossible to implement. And returning to the feel of improvisation and pencil and paper – that’s even better. How they’ll pull it off is another matter, but it’s nice to hear these goals.

Well worth reading the whole post:
Keeping Score: Welcome! [blog.steinberg.net]

We’ll be watching.

Original Post: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/02/sibelius-core-team-now-at-steinberg-building-new-notation-tool/