Category: Music

The Secret Behind the Iconic MacOS Sound “Sosumi” | June 12 2026, 11:47

Did you know that the MacOS notification sound had a name, and it was Sosumi? It was used from 1991 to 2020, then replaced by Sonumi. It has an author. It’s Jim Reeks — an Apple sound designer, and there’s a secret that wasn’t disclosed until 10 years after he left the company.

So, there was Beatles’ Apple Corps. The logo — also an apple. They had a lawsuit with Apple Inc. => Apple Inc. could use the name, but with no right to enter the music industry. When it came to creating OS sounds, lawyers got tense: Reeks, no names like “Chime” or anything, no melodies in the sounds. As a result, in OS appeared sounds like Frog, Funk, Glass, Hero.

Reeks worked long on the boot sound and created a C major chord 🙂 He writes that while creating the C major chord he was inspired by The Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life.” (I don’t know why I’m laughing here). He then jokingly suggested the name “Let it Beep” in the style of The Beatles song. It didn’t fly. Someone said it would lead to a lawsuit. Reeks: “So sue me”! He claims he sold it to the management as a “Japanese word, having nothing to do with music.”

In macOS Big Sur, the sound is now different — Sonumi. The sound file itself in /System/Library/Sounds/ is still called Sosumi.aiff.

Exploring Meta Oculus Quest: A Gamified Fitness Revolution | June 10 2026, 19:27

I finally got to the Meta Oculus Quest and it’s really something! FitXR (that’s a fitness game) is particularly sweaty. Objects of various shapes fly at you to the beat of the music and you have to punch them with different movements, using hands, legs, and torso; the pace is high, almost no time to think, and after 10 minutes, you’re totally worn out. That’s the kind of gaming I like!

Pianos for Small Hands: A New Trend in Keyboard Design | May 23 2026, 18:04

WOW, there are and are sold pianos with narrower keys for small hands. I play the piano a bit, so the topic is close and clear to me. But my hands are not small, yet now I’m studying Chopin’s Nocturne in C# minor and I understand the pain 🙂 So, I learned that the modern “gold standard” for key width was established in the late 19th century under the pressure of large factories and exclusively for large male hands of European virtuoso pianists. It is believed that because of this, almost all female pianists suffer, plus a quarter of men, and it is physically uncomfortable for them to play complex repertoires, constantly risking chronic tendon injuries. It would seem, well… oops. What else can you say here.

However, as it turns out, there is a solution and it’s actively being sold — these are so-called Stretto pianos or instruments of the DS Standard with slightly reduced keys. These are two new sizes: DS6.0 (universal reduced) and DS5.5 (for very small hands).

Manufacturers have learned how to make interchangeable keyboard blocks, which can be installed into a regular piano in just 5 minutes. Interestingly, a pianist’s muscle memory adjusts to the new size in just half an hour. Honestly, I can’t imagine it. But the fact is – the International Stretto Piano Festival is already taking place worldwide, where they play only on narrow keys.

Such pianos are produced by many,

On the other hand, Martha Argerich, for instance, with her small hands does the impossible (she’s about to turn 85 and she survived fourth stage cancer in her youth; she’s a very cool lady)

Mastering Cross-Posting: From Facebook Frustrations to Dual Blogging Excellence | May 23 2026, 14:28

I have perfected the cross-posting from Facebook to my two blog sites [which almost no one visits] – beinginamerica.com and raufaliev.com. When a new post is published on Facebook, a mechanism is triggered to translate the post into English, process attached images, generate descriptions for them, create a title based on the text of the post and descriptions of the images, generate tags from the same basis, record the post in turso db – this is a cloud database, free up to certain limits, create embeddings via openai, record in qdrant cloud – this is also a cloud database, but vector-based, and finally, upload images to wordpress via API, and publish the post in English and Russian via API.

All would be well, but of all the APIs, the silliest one is Facebook’s. Firstly, for pages like mine, transitioned to New Experience, it’s almost impossible to use most of this API. Well, it’s possible, but you have to spend a long time proving to Facebook that you really need it, by showing startup documents, demonstrating the application, etc. Obviously, they are reluctant to deal with something that takes content out of their system. In addition, the token that gives access to the latest messages is relatively short-lived (possibly a few weeks), and it needs to be obtained anew through a browser only. So, any automation requires regular attention, otherwise it breaks.

If you mess up and don’t offload the latest posts through this Facebook Graph API in time, they just disappear from the list of recent ones and that’s it, no more API access to them. The only way is to request an archive download from Facebook. This download is also rather silly – it requires a lot of transformations and removing unnecessary stuff. For example, in the file containing posts, which I process, for some reason there are links that I sent in comments without accompanying text. And the comments are in a separate file!

To assign tags, I had to solve a separate challenge. Here’s the thing: there are about 10,000 posts over all time. That’s a big chunk, and you can’t build tags from it because it doesn’t fit into the contextual window of the LLM. But you need to. So, I did this: a script takes random posts from the 10,000 in such a volume that their total size is just below the specified limit in tokens, and at the end of this block, it adds the prompt “generate the most common tags for me, 30 pieces” (I simplify the prompt used). In the end, I ran this 10 times and got 10 sets of tags with 30 pieces each, generated for different slices of the database. That made 300 tags, some of which are complete duplicates, while others are synonyms and closely related in meaning. All this is fed into the LLM, and we get a list of tags and a hierarchy of tags. Now we have a limited set of tags that reflect the 10,000 posts as closely as possible. Turns out, that in almost 20 years on Facebook, my breakdown is as follows:

Tag Posts

==================================================

#Russia 3412

#Thoughts 3146

#Tech 3105

#Culture 2765

#Hobbies 2726

#AI 1603

#Science 1367

#Software 1358

#Travel 1298

#Learning 1138

#Society 1050

#Nature 958

#Education 915

#Business 902

#Art 894

#Programming 889

#Humor 840

#History 807

#Gadgets 750

#Moscow 713

#USA 614

#Cinema 567

#Webdev 493

#Music 476

#Sports 473

#Mindset 443

#Auto 400

#Books 386

…

and so on. This list includes both tags from the limited list and tags that the LLM appointed to content simply because it didn’t find anything suitable in the limited one.

Tags from the limited list became categories on the site. The rest of the tags + these just became regular wordpress tags.

As for image search. I had two ideas on how to do it. The first – OpenCLIP. It’s pretty straightforward but requires hosting the model somewhere. Easy on my machine, but inconvenient to start it each time, plus I planned to move the migrator to a cheap server on Amazon. It’s also okay to calculate in cloud models, but you have to pay a bit, which is yet another dependency. But the main thing – it works quite well without it. I generate descriptions for images using OpenAI, which is used for translating into English anyway, and then create embeddings using a large model. So far, all search tests are a great success. Especially when there’s text on the image, and it’s a big question whether OpenCLIP would have interpreted it successfully.

In the end:

1) wordpress raufaliev.com – free

2) wordpress beinginamerica.com – free

3) turso db where all posts are stored – free

4) qdrant cloud where embeddings are stored – free

5) openai for translation and image descriptions – not free, but inexpensive (cost $30 for post processing over a year).

I attach two screenshots – how the search by images works, and by texts, as well as the migrator dashboard.

The Art of the Unresolved Finale: Viewer Frustration as a Narrative Tool | April 20 2026, 13:27

We finished watching the series “Pete”. It seems like TV directors do everything to ensure that the last episode offers no answers, resembling just a regular mid-season episode. In many TV shows, the second-to-last or third-to-last episodes answer the questions, while the final one rarely satisfies, always adding a multitude of hooks and new questions, probably serving as an invitation to a next season that may never come. Or it might, but for now the director doesn’t know what it will entail and leaves much unsaid. However, the likely goal is to irritate viewers so that they flock to Reddits and Facebooks to discuss what they’ve seen. A logical end was only seen in the series Chernobyl, it seems.

Boney M Beyond the Stage: Unveiling the Voices and Ventures | March 07 2026, 15:11

It turned out that my childhood group, Boney M,

1) is still touring. Concerts in 2026. But from the whole group it’s only

2) Maizie Williams who is lighting it up now, she’s 74 years old. But on none of the Boney M records from those times is her voice found. They let her sing in concerts, yes.

3) Frank Farian, the group’s creator, is a white guy from Germany who assembled exotics” in 1974. A couple of years ago he died in his home in Florida.

4) And “that black guy” – that’s Bobby Farrell, who was a DJ from Aruba before Farian hired him to lip-sync the male parts recorded by Farian himself in all Boney M songs. Seriously, listen to Boney M and pay attention to the male parts. Now that you know who actually sang them, you won’t be able to unhear Farian’s strong German accent 🙂

5) Boney M were the first Western group (from FRG!) to penetrate the Iron Curtain.” They had concerts as early as 1978.

6) Remember their song “Rasputin”? Bobby Farrell died on the same date (Dec 30) and in the same city (in St. Petersburg) as Rasputin. At the “Ambassador” Hotel, which is literally a few minutes’ walk from the Yusupov Palace, where Grigory was killed.

By the way, Frank Farian was the king of “lip-sync” projects. Ten years after Boney M’s success he pulled the same stunt with the duo Milli Vanilli. But in the case of Boney M, he got away with it (everyone understood that it was a show), but with Milli Vanilli, there was a huge scandal: the group’s Grammy Award was revoked when it turned out the pretty model-boys on stage hadn’t sung a single note.

Exploring the Tango Vibes: Astor Piazzolla and Beyond | February 23 2026, 06:31

A few days ago, I decided to Google whether Astor Piazzolla’s music would be performed anywhere nearby, and saw that this very weekend, close by in Strathmore, there is a Tango After Dark show featuring Piazzolla’s music, accompanied by an Argentine orchestra and Argentine tango dancers. Really cool, but I didn’t bring any recordings here.

While Googling what this exotic instrument the local soloist was playing – the bandoneon – I stumbled upon a very very very cool concert of Mario Pietrodarchi accompanied by the Minsk Orchestra. This concert occupies the top five spots in the most popular recordings of the Belarusian State Chamber Orchestra – just go to popular and listen to everything, all of it’s great. You’ve probably already heard Libertango and Oblivion without me, they are ubiquitous, so I’m attaching Angel’s Dance (Milonga del angel) in the comments.

Theremin Tones at Splean’s Concert: A Musical Blend | December 05 2025, 23:29

Thereminvox at a Splin concert yesterday. It turns out that this seemingly borrowed word doesn’t exist in English. Instead, the name of this musical instrument is theremin because the generic family name of Lev Theremin had French roots and was spelled as Theremin. The thereminvox was nicely incorporated into the arrangement, although it was played quite simply by a musician from Rostov, and the thereminvox itself had only one antenna.

Among the musicians, Meshcheryakov, the drummer, really stole the show. The most melancholic was the guitarist, Vadim Sergeyev. He just stared motionlessly into the crowd, almost immovable, but performed his part very precisely – evidently, professionalism can’t be diluted.