After talking about the Shepard Tone, an audio illusion that can create an endlessly rising or falling scale, with my friend Ben Pender, I decided to try to create one using Lilypond. The result is quite interesting:
The Lilypond file used to render the above midi file: shepard_tone.ly
An mp3 file generated from the midi file above:
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I was at home with my parents and my girlfriend Chelsea, and my dad was singing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” off by one word. He then proceed to sing it again off by TWO words. Eventually the evening was reduced to repeating the song over and over and trying to shift the words one note back each time. We soon realized that this was a sort of phase music. If the number of words is one fewer than the number of notes, the words shift father and farther from their original position in the melody creating various interesting word stresses and pairings.
I decided to take this idea to it’s logical extreme and found a short enough song that, within a reasonable period of time, it can be repeated enough times that the words eventually make the full journey back to their original position. Here is a video of me singing “Row Row Your Boat”:
In order to actually sing this, I had to create sheet music for it.
Here it is: row_row.pdf
My birthday was a few days ago, and two different people, knowing my love of barbershop, sent me a Youtube video of a quartet singing “Happy Birthday”. This got me thinking about barbershop arrangments of the song.
Today is my friend Amanda Ortmayer’s birthday and I wanted to give her something, so I decided to arrange and multitrack “Happy Birthday” for her in the barbershop style.
Happy birthday Amanda, thanks for being such a constant, caring friend.
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