[for Jack]
Sam's life had settled into a kind of pleasant--if boring--routine. In some ways she was fine with this, because boring meant that while things weren't getting any closer to being fixed, they also weren't getting any worse. But mostly, she was bored, and bored did not sit well with someone like Sam, who was always thinking.
Part of her daily routine now involved the cello she had found with her name on it. She had always wanted to learn to play, but had never had the time for it. Well, now she had nothing but time, so it was the perfect opportunity. Sam was already familiar with the fundamentals of music notation--pitch, duration, dynamics, and so forth--so she had skipped those parts of the book and got straight to the part where she figured out how to make the thing work.
She was quickly learning that this was not nearly as easy as Yo-Yo Ma made it look and sound. You couldn't just pick it up and make it work, unlike Sam's experience with pretty much any alien tech ever. There were certain places for the left-hand fingers to go, but they were not marked. She was just supposed to know where her fingers were supposed to fall on the smooth black fingerboard to produce the specific pitch; even a fraction off would result in an out-of-tune note, which only made sense as that changed the frequency with which the string vibrated. That was just plain mathematical ratios. Sam figured out from the get-go that a lot of this involved a careful ear and a lot of tactile repetition, and that combined with her incessant perfectionism meant that she felt the need to practice each piece over and over and over again before moving on to the next, even the simplest ones.
If she was going to learn to play this thing, she was going to do it right.
That was why she was sitting in her hut, door and windows open to let in lots of light, playing a very simple exercise for the fifteenth time. She was chewing on her bottom lip and concentrating on getting the angle of the bow just right.
Part of her daily routine now involved the cello she had found with her name on it. She had always wanted to learn to play, but had never had the time for it. Well, now she had nothing but time, so it was the perfect opportunity. Sam was already familiar with the fundamentals of music notation--pitch, duration, dynamics, and so forth--so she had skipped those parts of the book and got straight to the part where she figured out how to make the thing work.
She was quickly learning that this was not nearly as easy as Yo-Yo Ma made it look and sound. You couldn't just pick it up and make it work, unlike Sam's experience with pretty much any alien tech ever. There were certain places for the left-hand fingers to go, but they were not marked. She was just supposed to know where her fingers were supposed to fall on the smooth black fingerboard to produce the specific pitch; even a fraction off would result in an out-of-tune note, which only made sense as that changed the frequency with which the string vibrated. That was just plain mathematical ratios. Sam figured out from the get-go that a lot of this involved a careful ear and a lot of tactile repetition, and that combined with her incessant perfectionism meant that she felt the need to practice each piece over and over and over again before moving on to the next, even the simplest ones.
If she was going to learn to play this thing, she was going to do it right.
That was why she was sitting in her hut, door and windows open to let in lots of light, playing a very simple exercise for the fifteenth time. She was chewing on her bottom lip and concentrating on getting the angle of the bow just right.