Tag Archives: music

the PNC Christmas Price Index

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For those who have never had an account, PNC is (or was once) the Pittsburgh National Corporation, and they are a regional bank. Anyway, they produce an annual whimsical 12 Days of Christmas price index. Ornamental/pet birds haven’t changed much in price since last year – no change for the partridge, the turtle doves, the calling birds, or the swans, and the price of french hens has only slightly outpaced inflation at 5%. Food has increased if pear trees and geese are good indicators (+15-16%). Maids a-milking are assumed to earn the federal minimum wage and have therefore not received a raise since 2009. Professional artistic performers have done pretty well, with 7-16% raises, although musicians seem to be doing better than dancers according to this index. As a family man financing a viewing of the Nutcracker next week, I can vouch for the fact that live entertainment is quite expensive. Not that music and art are not valuable – hopefully after the singularity we will spread our newfound wealth around so that all can enjoy in our newfound leisure time. Until then we will have to continue relying on some combination of government subsidies and the largesse of the wealthy, who seem willing to finance the arts because (a) this is tax exempt and (b) it benefits primarily other wealthy people.

Finally, PNC does remind us that we would have to actually buy 12 partridges in 12 pear trees 22 turtle doves, etc. if the repetition in the song is taken literally. So it would get quite pricey indeed.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Make/write/record music with R

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Move over Garage Band, there is a new musical sheriff in town. For those of us who like to mess around in R – okay, realistically this gets added to my list of retirement projects a few decades down the road, assuming my body and brain manage to stick around for the next few decades.

gm: Generate Music Easily and Show Them Anywhere

Provides a simple and intuitive high-level language, with which you can create music easily. Takes care of all the dirty technical details in converting your music to musical scores and audio files. Works in ‘R Markdown’ documents <https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/>, R ‘Jupyter Notebooks’ <https://jupyter.org/>, and ‘RStudio’ <https://www.rstudio.com/>, so you can embed generated music anywhere. Internally, uses ‘MusicXML’ <https://www.musicxml.com/> to represent musical scores, and ‘MuseScore’ <https://musescore.org/> to convert ‘MusicXML’.

CRAN

this is your brain on music, but the kind matters

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Here’s an interesting article on how jazz and classical music wire your brain differently.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences studied the brains of thirty pianists—half jazz players, half classical. They found, the Institute reports, that “different processes occur in jazz and classical pianists’ brains, even when performing the same piece…”

While jazz improvisation may better teach creativity, classical training, as neuroscientist Ardon Shorr argues in his TEDx talk above, may better train the brain in information processing. These studies show that the effect of music on the brain cannot be studied without regard for the differing neurological demands of different kinds of music, just as the study of language processing cannot be limited to just one language.

As a classically trained musician (okay, an out of practice, amateur one at best but I did put significant time and effort into it in my youth), I can vouch for taking a jazz improv class once and being completely out of my depth. But the other students were all jazz musicians and nobody was really interested in bringing me along as a beginner. I also took a class once called “far out improv” with other classical musicians and a teacher who was specifically interested in teaching classical musicians to improvise, and I remember that being very cool. I’ve never heard or experienced anything like that since so it must have been unusual.

“pro-growth education for Japan”

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I was ready to rail against this article about “pro-growth education“, thinking from the title that it would be all about STEM and teaching job skills rather than thinking skills. But it turned out to be more about thinking skills, and went over some research on early childhood education with an emphasis to music, even giving a shout out to the Suzuki and Kodaly methods of teaching music to young children.