Hello Ardith,


On Sat 2039-Jun-04 23:56, Ardith Hinton (1:153/716) wrote to Richard Webb:

RW>  AS I'm wrapping some hardware to
RW>  silence its rattles he hits a rack tom right next to
RW>  my right ear.  


AH>           To the ears & the brain focused on subtle nuances the
AH> effect is like that of dropping a load of bricks on a scale intended
AH> for measuring the weight of a SnailMail letter or a fistful of
AH> granola.  Not everyone understands.  :-( 

 indeed.


RW>  HE asked me why I didn't work in the
RW>  industry, and I told him that when I did I found out I
RW>  didn't like 7 day weeks, sometimes 12 hour days.  tHen
RW>  I pointed it out to him as I'm selling his cashier $100
RW>  worth of small bills one night during Mardi Gras, which
RW>  came from my tip jug .


AH>           Nice work, if you can get it!  Your comments have brought
AH> up so many memories of various catering managers etc. I hardly know
AH> where to start.  :-)) 

INdeed, wish those kind of nights would have been all year
round, but Mardi Gras, etc. were sure great for the tip jug. We did a lot of
restaurant dining whenever the tips were
good, because I didn't have to cook, and didn't feel like
it, nor did she.  AT times during the day I'd do things such as pots of chili,
or bean soup, etc. that we'd both eat
during the day though.  I'd send part of it to work with her where we'd put it
in the freezer over there and she could
nuke a dish for her lunch.
 WHen the stretch between either of us getting a paycheck
became too long for the amount of dollars a few times I
offered up prayers for a busy night with a good jug,
especially when we started payng for Kathy's prescription
meds ourselves plus her cobra payment as she lost her job
with the good insurance coverage.


AH>           Same here.  I might even have realized I liked it sooner
AH> if I hadn't been surrounded by people who complained about how
AH> they'd had a miserable time at the symphony concert because Bobby
AH> Corno played a wrong note in the twelfth bar of the third movement &
AH> by people who apparently used AM radio to fill the empty space
AH> inside their heads.  I couldn't relate to either or to the general
AH> music teacher I had in junior high school, the one who introduced
AH> her class to the MOONLIGHT SONATA with the expectation that we'd
AH> imagine a bunch of fairies dancing around & draw a picture.  It
AH> wasn't until much later that I understood the technical distinctions
AH> between absolute music & program music.  But I know now that I'm not
AH> alone in enjoying a sonata differently from a ballet....  :-) 

INdeed, that's one of the big problems I had with the hip
hop stuff back when I'd have to handle a couple of them as
clients, I really couldn't appreciate the words, and the
person acting as producer didn't have interesting musical
ideas.  I had more fun with the young kids in the
alternative band who wanted to experiment with strange
tonalities and things one normally wouldn't associate with
musical instruments, and those you would used in different
ways.  Kathy arrived home from work one afternoon to find
one kid beating on some full paint cans with some
drumsticks, and other stuff going on.  When we took a break
and decided to go back to the drawing board with an
auxillary weird percussion track Kathy showed the drummer of the group her
African signal drums.  HE was hooked, played
them with his hands and soft mallets.  I was overall
dsiappointed with the track I got on them but the kids liked it.  Those things
being AFrican signal or war drums require
a whole lot of space to capture, and the stereo pair of
cardioid condensers I put over them acted more like close
microphones isntead of far field pickup, as those drums are
designed to be heard.  I would have liked to record them in
a large space such as a gymnasium or something.
Even if the space was too big I could do things with movable partitions, etc.
to build a microclimate for them
acoustically.  .


AH>           Seems to me you & your parents had very clear goals in
AH> mind.  That's important when you're dealing with others who have
AH> different priorities and/or who think they know better regardless of
AH> what's going on in your life....  ;-) 

THat it is, and their goal was to raise a self sufficient
citizen above all else.


RW>  a lot of experimentation going on, not all of it for
RW>  the better for the children.  That's another story,
RW>  and another thread if anybody's interested >


AH>           Yeah.  The idea of the least restrictive environment has
AH> its merits, but what often happens is that the school for the blind
AH> (e.g.) is closed & the support system we were assured of never
AH> materializes... or if it does it's one of the first things to be
AH> axed as soon as there's another budget cut.  I could go on at length
AH> about that too.  But IMHO there's more to be gained by putting the
AH> emphasis on where we've succeeded, despite forces beyond our
AH> control.  :-) 

Indeed, and at that time became the beginning of the big
slide down the slope of braille illiteracy, which is a
crying shame.  THey were doing experiments with kids reading large print, even
with desktop magnifiers, etc.  I'm sure in Canada as well, from stats I"ve
seen, but there is currently a worldwide braille literacy crisis among blind
children.
YEs part of that is the mistaken belief that synthesized
speech, etc. can supplant braille.  DUring the formative
years especially it's good for children to actually "see"
written language, even if they "see" it with their fingers,
and audio doesn't quite make the same connection to the
brain.  Then consider yourself unable to make a quite note
with a pencil if you have no technology tools available.
That ability to be able to independently write something
down can be a killer in the work world.



AH>           I imagine as a blind person you would have had to develop
AH> your other senses more than sighted people generally do.  When I was
AH> growing up it seemed to be taken for granted that Mother Nature
AH> endows blind people with supersonic hearing... but you worked at it,
AH> just as I did.  By the time our daughter came along I was ready,
AH> willing, and able to learn that a 20% elevation in the rate of a
AH> child's breathing may... in the absence of any obvious reason...
AH> indicate s/he has a fever.  To a musician a 20% increase in tempo is
AH> quite significant. To a lot of non-musicians, however, it seems like
AH> a black art even if they can see the wall clock nearby measuring the
AH> elapsed time in seconds... [wry grin]. 


Indeed, it's learning to interpret what you hear.  I can
teach an adult to interpret traffic sounds to determine when it's safe to
cross a busy intersection, i.e. when he has the signal, etc.  But, ear
training was something I just picked
up and did without realizing that's what I was doing.  I
came to the realization as a young man I was doing a lot of
that when I read an article in some magazine which was
debunking the myth that perfect pitch can't be taught.   I
had the luck of going to a school where every piano in every practice room was
always properly tuned, because the school
taught piano tuning, and the instructor was a very expert
tuner and passed that on to his students.  A few of those
students have made good livings tuning pianos, and a couple
still do today iirc.
I tell people who want their children to learn an instrument that being sure
it's tuned to standard pitch at all times
when the child is playing it is important.  tHis way, when
the kid plays the c below a 440 he hears that note, at the
proper frequency, and the two gel in his/her head.


Regards,
           Richard
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 * Origin:  (1:116/901)