chandra

I am curious if the Jazz musicians here will take this up. I have two small south indian classical instrumental pieces. I attached the zip file to this message but I am not sure if that worked. I have uploaded them here as well. http://rapidshare.de/files/15843554/SouthI...mental.zip.html If you can download, listen and comment on how this can be covered by a Jazz musician, I am all ears. In a south indian classical music forum we occasionally talk about such stuff without really any knowledge in Jazz. I chose these two because I felt this may be the right kind of material for a Jazz artist to interpret it in a Jazz idiom ( I may be completely offbase here ). Even better, if you can record your interpretation and share the recording here, that would be an order of magnitude more wonderful... Thanks.

Mark, can you summarize the info? I think I can some education on that front.

It's not an insistence, it's a rhetorical ploy. Understood. You made me think in that outside-in manner. So, what is not music? Something that is not auditory stimulus. That was easy until I stumbled on silence. But then complete silence is not music, it has to be juxtaposed with auditory stimulus. How do you feed that in to a definition? Quoting Rosco "Auditory stimulus that produces emotional response in the listener". I liked that first. But then speech, and even montotone speech, can produce an emotional reaction. So, this definition seems to include monotone speech in the music umbrella. One can argue that is still music, but the problem is if the definition is so wide that it includes a lot, it may lose the meaning that people normally associate with it. I do not have the answer...

Thinking about JSngry's insistence on defining what it is not, I just realized that even 'silence' is not in the 'NOT' category. I am reminded of a quote. It is often recalled among Indian classical music fans that in the 1930s a famous musician mused in a tone of half sarcasm and half bewilderment 'Hmmm, I heard they are going to talk about music'. ( much is lost in translation ). I have a feeling that the final answer is going to be Zen like: Student: What is music? JSngry: What is not music? Zen Master: MU Everyone: What? Zen Master: Just kidding. I always wanted to do that. Zen masters are known for that, that is what my western friends tell me. Student: Now be serious and answer the question Zen Master: I play the sound; the sound plays me. Hearer and heard are one. Then for the next thousand years numerous Phd thesis were written explaining what the Zen master really meant.

15 years back, I was part of a team that developed software for these MRI machines. Usually we test with dummies of various shapes, sizes and internal structures but once in a while we will hop in there as well just for the heck of it ( though it is frowned upon ). I have never gotten comfortable there even after numerous attempts. The thought that my own software is controlling the darn thing does not help either The confined space and the thumping noise is just too wierd. On a lighter vein, there is a method to the noise that it creates and one can load different 'programs' to it ( which are all medically significant ) which will vary that noise pattern. But you can also feed in 'programs' that are not medically relevant but have it make sounds of different frequencies. On a couple of occasions, we had the perverse pleasure of having this multi million dollar beast play 'twinke twinkle little star'

The Grammy is still fresh in my mind.... They have an award for 'spoken word' ( most probably because it is a recorded item rather than for music ). So, is a mono tone spoken word music? On the other extreme, if someone plays 1200 sequential tones each separated by 1 cent, is that music? Music as 'organized sound' seems to include both of the above.

Yeah, thanks for posting. I had read about Woz and quite taken by his humility. Quite a contrast with Jobs. The story had a vibe towards a bad ending 'Woz lost all his money and he is now homeless' ;-) Hope not, that would indeed be sad. I want good people to do well.

We have been using the Emerson DVD-VHS recorder. It is easy to dub VHS tapes to DVD with this machine. The price has come down to below $200 at Walmart. If you just want a DVD recorder, the price has come down to below $100 on some models ( e.g. http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=3610576 ). These dubbing machines give you various modes to record in: 2x, 4x, 6x, 8x. We experimented with really crappy quality VHS tapes. The quality is pretty much the same as VHS even at 8x for those tapes. For TV shows recorded to VHS, we can't tell the difference if it is recorded at 2x or 4x. With respect to durability, definitely the digital recording is more durable than the magnetic tape. But I have reservations about the physical media itself. The VHS magnetic tape is encased in that hard shell so it tolerates physical abuse a lot better. DVD disks are easy to break, easy to scratch. If there is a small crack near the center hole, even if the crack does not reach the recorded area, many DVD players will have difficulty playing the media. So, exercise a lot of care with those disks after dubbing. We decided to transfer around 500+ tapes to DVD mainly for space reasons. The DVD media prices have come down a lot. CompUSA sells their store brand, which they claim are made by Fuji, sometimes on sale at less than $10 for a 50 pack.

With a bit of google search I found this site where doctors answer questions. http://www.flora.org/ask-doctor/ http://www.medhelp.org/ At the first one, I searched for 'carotid' and found this. Any similarities? Even if so, there is no definite treatment options mentioned there. http://www.flora.org/ask-doctor/answers/7039 The second one seems to have a better database of information. It may be worth a shot to post the question there.

All this leads me to wonder... Do doctors have an online professional forum or network where they post or seek help for tough to diagnose and treat situations? Not ncessarily something that the patients can tap into to but more at a shop talk level? I have a feeling that if 20 or so experienced doctors brainstorming over such cases may create some ideas....

I am hearing more and more about this as a field which is seeing a dramatic rejenuvation in the internet age. Some subfields with in computer science is merging with this.. It looks like you are entering this at a great time. Good luck and all the best.

Dvorak is a good writer and can put together a cogent argument but I don't think the central thesis holds here. From what I can tell, the skewed positive coverage of Apple is only during the post iPod period but the tech writers and journalists were using Macs forever. Microsoft releases so many products and releases over the course of the year, the coverage gets diluted on a per product basis.. That does not mean they don't get positive coverage, it is just spread out. Microsoft also has this habit of releasing something not so excelletn first and then incrementally improve it over the years. Apple on the other hand is good at 'wow'ing the industry in the first release. Case in point: Media center PC from microsoft. It is a fairly good product now but not necessarily when it was originally released a few years back. (But from what I see and hear, that is beginning to change at Microsoft.) Finally, I think Dvorak has forgotten the hype and free advertisement Microsoft got during the Windows '95 launch. I did not even have a windows computer then, I almost bought Windows '95

I listened to it again today at the NPR site http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4837922 . Herbie's intro few seconds sounded Bach like to me ( before it transitioned into the Jazz sound with the accompaniments ). Did anyone else get that impression?

Is that what it is? I thought that is part of her act. *LOL* I could not make any reasonable opinion on how good she was singing. But I remember one impression I had about her. "Wow, what a personality. She did not give a hoot about all the people there. She just came in, sort of looked at everyone as if she owned that place, just had that look of indifference or confidence, sang, and walked off". Since the announcer said she is a legend, I thought to myself "Hmmm.. that personality fits that legend status'. May be 'endearing' is the word for that 'personality', her age and the legendary status.

I thought Fishbourne was OK but he could have toned down the 'chip on his shoulder' demeaner a bit. I agree there was also way too much of him. But he is a good orator especially when he narrated the New Orleans history. I thought his best moment was, in the early part of the show, he was talking about the New Orleans' 'gumbo' of cultures and it being the most integrated city in America and without missing a beat, 'and now, my sister Diana' and transitioned to Diana Krall. I think his emphasis on 'sister' was cleverly played given the subject of his monologue. On the subject of Wynton, the gushing over him had two manifestations. One, the PBS announcer and Travis kept dropping Winton name way too many times. Once, his name was mentioned two or three times in one breath!! Second, he got to play multiple times when everyone had only one chance. James Taylor sort of took a dig at that humorously "They told me I get only one song, so I picked the longest song".