Category Archives: music+verse

ringy-dingy

My new telephone has dozens of ringtones and I hate them all: Newagey lo-fi orchestral crap, mostly laden with snare drums for some reason. My last phone played the sound of an old-fashioned mechanical bell; the one before that, a … Continue reading

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need a pun here about music and cryptography

Given a piece of music written for just intonation, clearly you could derive another piece by replacing all factors of 3 with factors of 5 and vice versa (or pick some other pair of primes). Sometimes the result might even … Continue reading

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the tantalizing tune

I used to have a ringtone that, pardon the pun, rang a bell: I was sure it was from some modern string quartet, but couldn’t find it in my collection. Years go by. Today I get in the car, turn … Continue reading

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signal interference

I tried to remember the title theme of Dexter and all I could summon was that of The Odd Couple. Hmm.

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“So you want to write a fugue”

(by Glenn Gould) 2016: The embedding doesn’t work anymore, presumably because it used Flash; so here’s a link.

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I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived

Today’s Straight Dope responds to this inquiry: Everyone is familiar with the song that goes, “There’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance.” What’s the origin of this mysterious song and its seemingly Egyptian melody? So naturally I’m … Continue reading

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beauty’s where you find it

I mis-heard some trivial question as “What is Hamming music?” For some of us, the name Hamming is strongly associated with information theory, and so I imagined that “Hamming music” must be algorithmic composition using error-correcting principles. And that got … Continue reading

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