From Machaut to Micro SD

The picture above shows a micro SD card on my fingertip.  It is the size of the fingernail of my smallest finger.

It holds my entire digitized music library, classical and pop, with room to spare.  This is a 128 gigabyte card, but these cards also come in the “supersized” 256 gigabyte variety (and higher), also the size of a fingernail.

You can install a card like this in a smartphone (except iPhones) or tablet.  I was going to say “easily install” but they are tiny and easy to fumble, not to mention the fact that the slots into which they are installed are frequently spring-loaded.  Which means, if you don’t click it in completely, your device may shoot the card across the room like a watermelon seed (about the same size and color).  I strongly suggest installation in an obstacle-free environment, preferably with a light-colored floor.  With an adapter, you can also plug it into the USB port of a computer, DVD player, or television.

I’m currently pairing this card with a FiiO X1 portable MP3 player, which is about the size of a deck of cards.  I chose it because at the time it was one of the only players that handled the FLAC format (a lossless form of MP3—if this terminology is unfamiliar to you, you might want to take a look at my post on digital music formats).  It also can transmit music wirelessly via Bluetooth or be plugged directly into a stereo receiver as an audio input.  It can accommodate a micro SD card of up to 256 gigabytes.

This all means that I can walk around with a representative sample of 1000 years of music in my pocket and play it even when there is no internet connection or electricity (at least until the battery runs out; solar rechargers exist though).

I can’t help but find this amazing.  My mother had a Steelman blonde-wood console stereo record player (to which you could also connect other devices—revolutionary!) that, with the speakers, was slightly smaller than a Fiat 500.  It did make a mighty sound though–I’ve written about it before.

But to make music, you also needed vinyl records, which took up a sizeable amount of shelf space.  My computer’s music library currently contains something like 1000 albums from physical CDs, LPs, or born digital files.  This would, I estimate, require about 15 linear feet of shelving for vinyl.  Oddly, the width of a standard CD case is equivalent to 2 LPs, so they would actually take up more linear feet; but due to their shorter height, they can be arranged more densely.

All of this now fits on a fingernail.  This blows my mind.

I can’t conclude without some music for you.  So, I think I’ll reach way back into the archives, and give you music that I carry around on my little card.  Here is the Kyrie from Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame, written before 1365.

From the Depths

Hello, dear readers, I apologize for the long absence.  Thank you for still being here.

Sometimes life gets like this: you find yourself facing a series of challenging situations, one after another, that need handling Right Now.  It’s exhausting.  And all that handling doesn’t leave time for music, whether it’s listening to it, reading about it, or writing about it.  Music went away for a while.

But music is a lot like water.  Somehow water has a way of getting in, no matter what.  Water wins, eventually, even when we try to keep it out.  Music has a way of seeping in and finding its way to you.

One day I had coffee with a friend whose husband has a very low voice, and we had been talking about the lowest note he could sing.  That night, after sinking, exhausted, into my favorite armchair, I thought of a musical phrase, and how well it would suit his voice.  And then another phrase came.   And then another.  Eventually, I went over to my computer and started transcribing notes.  I was hearing a chorus of voices together sometimes.  I was also hearing separate lines.  I transcribed them all, not knowing if they would clash, crash, cross over one another, or be a dissonant mess.

I pressed play.  Here’s a snippet.

Stunningly, the lines mostly worked together.  Technically, there are egregious errors that need to be fixed, and I should be able to address them Sometime Real Soon Now.  The “voices” you hear are MuseScore’s pseudo-human choir.  I need to fix the individual lines before actual humans attempt them.

And since the probability of actual humans singing this is low, I decided then to create a piano reduction.  This too is MuseScore’s piano rendering, lacking the nuances that a skilled human pianist would introduce.  This version is still in an evolutionary stage, and has taken some turns away from my original concept.  I would describe it as complete, but not finished, that is, it sounds like a complete thought, but I expect it will undergo extreme editing before I call it done.

Here’s the piano reduction.

More blog posts soon!  Promise!

I also promise to write something in a major key before the end of the year.  Really.