Smoke signals from that September
It was back in 2001, and I was worried about the state of the world, and of this country in particular. We had a president who I’d never liked (and who publicly had stated more than mere dislike of my religion), who had paid millions to hide his abysmal environmental record and other aspects of his tenure as governor of Texas; a president who many
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I had not thought of singing the antiphony; mostly I sing at SF cons, and it’s too easy to get burnt-out on songs about stuff like the Challenger disaster when lots of people want to sing their new songs, all in the same weekend.
I’m dyslexic, but the only problem I have noticed with reading music is lack of practice. Of course, at this point the only problems I normally note are with numbers; I’ve trained so much on writing that I regularly spell things for non-dyslexic people, something that I would not have predicted back in grade school. And I do music “by ear”, really, not by reading staff paper. The staff paper, when I have it, is more of a reminder than “reading”.
But I do like this thought of color music notation.
I have long thought that it should be possible to have a computer program that, with a hearing operator/composer/translator, could translate music into color-patterns. I think I’ve had this image in my head, to some extent at least, because I experienc music, especially when I’m deeply listening, on a seat-of-the-pants level, as movement and volume. Although there is more texture and taste than color in my internal experience, color would be much easier to do as a translation element than those other senses, though vibration could also be possible, with newer technology, now that I think of it in the context of the drums I was relating above. Ideally, this “translation” could be enjoyed by both hearing and non-hearing people. Hmm…for lyrics, one could either work written words into the translation or images of a sign language interpreter.
Did you know that even when translating for a band, sign language interpreters are supposed to be formal and not move around much? They are trained to try to be invisible, to not attract attention away from the speaker or singer. But, it seems to me that that leaves the music invisible, untranslated, and incomplete.
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I've seen her dancing to Kathy Mar's Edward (it has a line "Edward, I am dancing in your snow"); she explained that the first time, she got up to sign and tripped, and so turned it into a dance step and incorporated it into the translation of the whole song rather than admit it was accidental.
I understand (also from Judy) that The Wiggles put it in their contract for sign language interpreters that their interpreters must wiggle to the music...but that is very unusual.
As to the stuff on computers today, it seems to be a combination of computer- or pre-generated effects/images that the imaging program has canned regardless of the album/song playing, combined with something like an oscilliscope, connected to volume only, from what I've seen. Though I can't claim to have seen everything out there (at least I hope I can't).
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