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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Ambient Noise

On the plane to Spain I saw a movie called "The Sound of Silence." The premise is that there is "house tuner" with obsessive personality who solves people's living discomfort by correcting the ambient tuning of their apartments, including the hum of appliances and such. It has some of the typical drawbacks of indie films: it is underlit (I could hardly see some scenes), without a strong narrative arc, and the main character is a bit passive. There is supposed to be some romance / sexual tension with the woman who's apartment he is tuning, but this doesn't get very far. But some of the screenwriting, sound design, and acting is excellent. I really bought into the premise, though it is the kind of movie that doesn't get much beyond its brilliant premise. The main character assigns a specific key to each neighborhood in Manhattan, so that Central Park is G Major. I loved that so much I wished it could be true.  

In my hotel I put on some stupid gossip show on the tv in the background. The voices had that very identifiable Spanish intonation, so different from the Mexican soap opera I turned on later. A dubbed show in Spain will have very stylized intonational patterns, idiomatically correct but still unnatural sounding. I am wondering what the exact pitch relations were in these different dialects.

In a bookstore later in the day I saw a book called "Bird Therapy," by Joe Harkness. (The book was in English). He talked about stepping outside and listening to the birds.  Everything in my day made me tune into sound in new ways. I bought a book in French by Michel Serres on music.

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