Tag: musicrauflikesart

Exploring Piano Mastery: The Benefits of an Amateur Approach | November 20 2024, 15:53

For those who play the piano — there’s a very interesting channel by Mikhail Proshin. I’ve been subscribed to it for a long time and have watched it for a while. Just to illustrate, here’s the latest from it. It has a good thought, very applicable to my case.

He talks about the trap of professional musicians (I am not professional). They often perceive music “top-down”– as a finished product that must be reproduced. This results in them giving equal attention to both fundamental and minor elements, which can hinder development and prevent enjoyment of the process. Amateurs, lacking high technical skill, simplify compositions, accompany themselves, and focus attention on the basic structures of music. This allows them to quickly understand and internalize musical basics, such as chords and harmonies, and use this experience in other songs. A professional might learn 100 songs without truly understanding them, and quickly forget many — this is just my case. An amateur, by simplifying 100 songs, can extract fundamental knowledge and build their own style on this basis, experiencing 100 situations of success.

The idea is that playing “from the bottom up” is not just simplification, but a conscious process that helps better understand music and enjoy performing it. A very good thought, indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs6Q25xIBBU

MRI Musings and Magnetic Mysteries | November 13 2024, 21:50

Today I found myself in an MRI machine, where they scanned my brain. I hope the brain is still there, and I hope the MRI operators didn’t find anything interesting in there.

What else to think about for 45 minutes in this buzzing machine, where you can’t move, but thinking isn’t forbidden?

Right, I wondered how headphones could work in an MRI machine, the ones they put on me. Music was playing from them, and occasionally—the voice of the MRI operator. Think about it—in any headphones, there should be diaphragms and magnetic coils, yet inside an MRI coil, none of this can exist. I started to ponder, and if my implants are in order, maybe the headphones could be made from special materials like titanium. In general, I lay there and racked my brain. Eventually, I came to a solution, which turned out to be just that.

A thick hose stretched from the headphones to the machine, and that explained everything. The headphones are just cups with tubes stretching from the headphones to another room where the speakers are located. The sound travels through the tube via air—a very simple solution.

Neil Carroll | October 12 2024, 22:01

Today, I’m sharing these thematically simple paintings by British artist Neil Carroll. All of them depict everyday kitchen objects against a dark background. Many of them are quick sketches that likely didn’t take more than a few hours to complete (most canvases are about 6″ wide, give or take). Carroll has turned this into a steady output, and online, you can find hundreds of similar yet distinct paintings, all in a consistent style.

But what’s so special about a painting of an apple or a lemon with side lighting on a dark background? It’s practically a student sketch—art school students have piles of these gathering dust in the back of their closets. Yet once you gather at least a dozen of these uniform paintings, completed in a consistent style, suddenly it becomes “real” art, and the artist is lauded for carving out their niche. The more they create, the more firmly they establish themselves in that niche.

It’s a straightforward formula: do what you enjoy and remain consistent in your style and approach.

What’s also captivating about such simple objects is observing how the artist distinguishes between what’s significant and what’s not. I’ve gleaned a lot of intriguing insights and now I’m eager to try my hand at it having studied Carroll’s techniques. So, expect some ketchup paintings from me soon.

Posts like this are grouped under the hashtag #artrauflikes, and all 117 of them can be found on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes” section (unlike Facebook, which forgets—or neglects—almost half).

Sosumi: The Playful Sound of Apple’s Legal Battles with The Beatles | October 06 2024, 17:59

1) It turns out the MacOS notification sound had a name, and it was Sosumi. It was used from 1991 to 2020, after which it was replaced with Sonumi. There’s a funny story behind the name.

2) These sounds have a creator. It’s Jim Reekes—Apple’s sound designer, and there’s a secret that wasn’t disclosed for about 10 years after his departure from the company.

3) The Beatles are partly the authors of the MacOS startup sound.

Now for the full story. There was a company called Apple Corps, organized by the Beatles. Its logo was also an apple (of course), hence there was a legal dispute with Apple, which ended, as the joke goes, with the agreement “I don’t give loans, and the bank doesn’t sell seeds.” Apple Inc. could use its name but was not allowed to venture into the music industry and use music-related names in its products.

Accordingly, any Apple ventures into music immediately alarmed lawyers from both sides. When it came to creating system sounds, the lawyers tensed up and asked Reekes to first, not use the name “Chime,” and second, please no melodies in the sounds. As a result, operating system sounds like Frog, Funk, Glass, and Hero appeared.

Eventually, Reekes worked hard on the startup sound and created a C major chord.

Reekes assures 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.

Returning to notifications. After much deliberation and attempts to find a neutral name, Reekes proposed the playful name “Let it Beep” in the style of The Beatles’ song “Let it Be”, but his colleagues thought it would be hard to accept. When someone suggested such a name would lead to legal disputes, Reekes jokingly replied: “So sue me,” and suddenly realized that this phrase would be perfect for the sound name. Eventually, they decided to rename the sound to “Sosumi. He told his bosses it was a Japanese word having nothing to do with music.

In macOS Big Sur, the original chime was replaced with another, which was named Sonumi. The original name was retained in the first public version of the OS, but later changed to “Sonumi. The sound file itself /System/Library/Sounds/ is still named Sosumi.aiff.

Now, the OS startup sound is completely removed. It seems you can enable it in the settings.

Maria Zeldis | July 09 2024, 01:00

Maria Zeldis, an artist, was born exactly 69 years ago on July 8, 1955, in Kyiv, where she received her professional musical education. She is a pianist, and her husband, who was once her father’s student, is a violinist. One day, he was offered a job with the symphony orchestra in Mexico City, and since then, Maria and her husband have lived and worked in the “land of cacti.” She never studied painting and only picked up a pencil for the first time after the age of forty. Drawing for her is a hobby she has been pursuing for just over 10 years. However, her twin sister, a nun at the Kyiv Frolovsky Monastery, is a professional icon painter.

Maria created her works using simple pencil, ink, and pastel.

In 2018, she passed away in a car accident. She left a portfolio on DeviantArt under the nickname zeldis.

I remind you that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and all 94 can be found in the “Art Rauf Likes” section on beinginamerica.com (unlike Facebook, which forgets (neglects) nearly half of them).