A Name-That-Tune website! / Holiday Music

I had just got this brilliant idea for a website that would do online what the fabulous book by Barlow and Morgenstern (now selling on Amazon for $185) did for music lovers: enable you to look up the composer and name of a tune that you can write out using the names of the piano keys, e.g. CDE-EGF- and so on.  I was just about to contact all my computer geek buddies to see if we could put such a site together.

Unfortunately, I have just this minute discovered that the concept has already been implemented on the Web.  The site is called Musipedia, a very simple and effective tool to identify classical music themes.  Here's how you use it.

At the website (and why am I wasting your time and mine describing all this?  You could easily discover the routine by going to the site) they give you a choice of methods of putting in the tune.  There is a Flash-based keyboard that you can "play" with a mouse, which transcribes the tune (not too accurately, since the rhythm you enter is at the mercy of how good you are with a mouse), and then, when you click the Search button, the site looks up the closest match to your tune in its database, and gives you the half-dozen top matches.

I tried to match a certain tune that my mother used to sing around the house, but the words to which I could not remember.  (My mother used to sing lots of goofy songs from the thirties and forties, when she was growing up.)  Here's the tune, if you're interested:

The software suggested a string quartet by Mozart, and a variety of other losing matches.  I wonder whether there is a way of adding entries to their database once you discover the name of the tune and its composer. . .  I suppose there must be; there is a disclaimer that suggests that they really can't take responsibility for contributed information, just like Wikipedia.

An interesting problem that crops up is the following: if there is no exact match (and there generally will not be one), how does it measure how close an approximate match is?  In other words, every tune --at least conceptually-- can be imagined as being surrounded by other tunes that are close to it.  This is the idea of Topology: in a collection of objects, what objects are a given object close to?  In fact, topology addresses the idea of what points are next to each other.  For instance, if you take a rectangle, and consider the points at the left edge to be right next to the points are the right edge, you turn the rectangle into a cylinder, because you have glued the left edge to the right edge topologically.

By changing the gluing procedure slightly, you can make a Möbius strip.  Just consider the points at the left edge near the top be "next to" the points at the right edge near the bottom, and vice versa.  This way, it is as if you have glued the two edges after twisting them.  (If you give the paper two twists, it may as well be a cylinder, mathematically, which you can appreciate by thinking about who is "next to" whom!)

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

One thing I'm pretty vague about is non-sacred music for the Holidays.  At one time I scorned the usual "secular" Christmas tunes, because basically I knew so many carols that I just didn't have time for Jingle Bells, and that ilk.  But, over the years, there were a goodly number of holiday favorites that I missed if I didn't hear them once the weather got cold.

The rather small list of songs that I grudgingly got to like are, in addition to Jingle Bells: Winter Wonderland (ugh), Let It Snow, The Christmas Song ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."), Need a little Christmas, Sleigh Ride by Leroy Anderson, Silver Bells, Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and a few others that elude me at the moment.  Oh; John Lennon's Merry Christmas, War is Over; and So this is Christmas.  (The Beatles, evidently, enjoyed Christmas hugely, judging from the many gems they dreamed up for the members of their Fan Club.  In their Messages, of course, they affected a Tired Of It All attitude, but you can see through it.)

I would like to get myself a CD that has most of the better-known (non-sacred) Christmas and Holiday songs and tunes, but I don't know which one to get.  It is actually possible to sing these songs badly; I really prefer not to get get Perry Como singing them all, or even Julie Andrews, though the latter comes closest to the artist who can sing almost anything beautifully.  Deck the Halls, We Wish you a Merry Christmas, and a few other songs are really secular carols, even if they are placed in a Christian context.  So this is an invitation for anyone reading this to send in their nominations for best Christmas CD (non-sacred)!

Is Bill Maher Predicting The End Of The World?

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Bill Maher, the comedian and abrasive political satirist, wrote a book earlier this year: New New Rules (How everybody but me has their head up their ass).  The link takes you to a Amazon Kindle application that lets you read the foreword.  This post is more about the review of the book by one Herbert Calhoun.

Mr Calhoun appears to take the view that Bill Maher is a prophet foretelling the doom of America as we know it.

Trying to describe America, in my very humble opinion, is like the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant.  I have been for thirty years decrying the fact that there is no national health care system, but for thirty years my friends have told me that it would never work.  Why?  After all, they have it in Britain, and in Asian countries, and it works, despite the rampant corruption in those countries.  Because America, they say, is too big.

Well, America is hardly bigger than India, with close to half a trillion souls (half of them as sick as dogs).  But, as far as I can tell, in India there is still a sense of national identity.  (Those of us who live outside India can't really analyze that phenomenon, but I suspect that it is waning, and only survives in part because of the presence of America on the one hand, and Pakistan and China on the other.)  In the USA, national identity is entirely different, and corruption is also entirely different than it is elsewhere in the world.  This is an important point, which many Americans will grant right away, without quite understanding the actual differences.  Our national identity is bigger and better than any other national identity, we will say, thinking that we have fought harder for it, and we have forged it in the face of massive waves of immigration for several centuries.  Well, at least two.  (Our corruption, we will be thinking, is also bigger and better than you'll find anywhere else.)

Many liberals --among them Bill Maher-- as well as many conservatives are gazing on current events with horror.  If you read Maher's book (which I haven't) you will probably see the reasons why both sides of the political divide are horrified.  It appears that many American institutions are being subverted.  It used to be that you could depend on real estate investments.  No longer.  It used to be that a new President could solve at least some of the problems identified by one party or the other.  No longer.  It used to be that new technologies would reliably result in jobs in America.  No longer.  It used to be that if you were educated enough, you could always find a job.  No longer.  It used to be that in both parties, at least one of the candidates was someone whose ideals you could identify with.  It used to be that every spring you could depend on a flood of young people flooding the employment market with high idealism.  We could depend on Europe as a market for our high-tech exports.  We could depend on snow every winter.  We could safely take a vacation in Mexico.  We could board a plane flight in 2 hours.

Some of us have obviously been taken by surprise.  We are better than this, they cry, thinking of the conditions that have changed due to shenanigans on Wall Street and in Washington.  It has been a long process, but some of us are just beginning to realize that the murder and mayhem in Mexico is driven by the huge drug profits in America.  But wait; can a few little black kids skulking in parking lots account for all that drug money?  No; it's wealthy folks whose drug habits are never in the news.  Rich Americans are spending more money on drugs than ever before.  They're just a lot better at not getting caught.

Lots of things are alarmingly different.  Health care is gradually getting worse in the USA.  For the very rich, it is true that more diseases can be cured today that in earlier decades.  But it is useless for us middle class folks, because inexplicably our deductibles are going up, and our treatment limits are going down.  Education is worse, because teachers increasingly have to cope with students who don't really do any work at home, so that the few who do their homework feel that they may as well stop doing it.  It's a vicious spiral based on a weird understanding of "fairness".  Teacher, be fair: kids who don't do their homework are people too.  Dean, be fair: kids who don't study deserved to pass, too.  They did pay their fees, after all.  We didn't pay $200K to your school just to flunk out, you know.

But it is not the end of the world; things will keep spiraling towards chaos, but we will keep inventing ways of avoiding total disaster.  But we're going to see a sequence of disasters that are just a little this side of total.

Is it fair that a few of us should keep our fingers in the dikes, while the rest of us just use our indignation to march around doing nothing?  Well, it's always been that way.  The average citizen has always been noisy about his or her rights, but not about his or her responsibilities.  A few have always gone about cleaning up everybody else's hamburger wrappers and cigarette butts.  A few of us have always organized those study groups at the end of the semester, and helped our dysfunctional buddies to learn their periodic freaking tables.  Is it fair?  It's just what makes us us.

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