Wednesday, September 4, 2019

HOAX! The musical fossil that fooled the world





Blogger's note. For a couple of decades now, there has been a rumor, theory, whatever, that SOMEONE out there owns an actual recording of Frederic Chopin playing his famous Minute Waltz. This was supposedly recorded in 1845, decades before the first commercial music recordings in the 1880s, and well before the famous Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville phonoautogram transcriptions of Au Claire de la Lune.  I actually remember hearing the Chopin recording on the radio some 30 years ago, and the announcer was skeptical, comparing it to the world's most famous anthropological hoax, Piltdown Man. This consisted of a human skull made to look old with sandpaper, with an ape jaw wired on to it. It sat in a museum case unchallenged for 10 years, while anthropologists scrambled to make their theories fit the "evidence". 








































The recording, as I remember (it was played twice) did have that garbled, distant, deeply distorted quality of very early, primitive sound recording. It was also very noisy, with irregular thuds like dead bodies hitting the floor. The piano playing was barely audible, and the piece was played at a clip even more absurd than the inane "minute" that pianists still strive for. (The title of Chopin's famous waltz, by the way, translates as Petite Waltz or Little Waltz, and has NOTHING to do with playing it in under a minute. The spirit of Piltdown Man lives.) At the end, it was as if you could hear someone shouting something. George Sand yelling "bravo!", maybe?






The truth about the Minute Waltz recording came out when someone exposed a classical music magazine for perpetrating the hoax to titillate their readers (the CD recording was included in every issue, which is strange because none of them seem to exist any more). The issue was released on April 1, which gives us a clue - but does that mean anything?  Was it really a case of time travel? And what about those Leon Scott de-Whatever (God, his name is so long I have to look it up EVERY time) recordings made out of smoke on paper? We're supposed to believe THAT? 

To be honest, for a long time I did not believe any of it and just assumed those thin, wavery, creepy sounds I heard were just another Chopin/Piltdown flimflam. The article below (circa late '80s) is taken from a Polish music newsletter, and it is the only reference I can find anywhere on the internet to the reported Chopin recording. Strangely enough, though the article seems to be confirming the veracity of Hippolyte Sot's pioneering work, I can find no reference to him either. None whatsoever. It's as if he never existed.





A CHOPIN RECORDING?

While doing construction work in France, the workers dug up an old metal box. Inside the box they found a near faded letter and a glass cylinder. Not knowing what they had found, they turned it over to a local historian who was able to make out the writing. What he discovered was


THE FIRST KNOWN AUDIO RECORDING !!


The letter was written by one Hippolyte Sot, resident of the area in the 1840s. The letter described the techniques he had devised to record audio sounds using a glass cylinder. It went on to say that despite his efforts he was unable to obtain any interest nor recognition for his work. He therefore buried the details of this invention in the metal box along with one sample recording. The recording was none other than


FREDERICK CHOPIN playing his own Waltz in D flat major!






The magazine says that the recording was made about 20 years earlier the those created by Leon Scott, the person normally attributed with the invention of audio recording. It also gives additional detail about the inventor and how the information was retrieved from the glass cylinder. And what's particularly interesting is that H. Sot had NOT invented a playback technique, and it took 20th century technology to recover the audio information recorded on the cylinder.


To get all the details, get a copy of the latest issue of CLASSIC CD magazine. And yes, the CD included with the magazine includes the recording. Its the only recording of Frederich Chopin, and he displays some pretty fantastic playing ability.






That the text above is a hoax you may find out from the following rebuttal:


"The recording of Chopin performing the "Minute Waltz" is a now world-famous musical hoax that was exquisitely executed by the editors of a music magazine devoted to reviews of classical CD's about four-or-five years ago. To be precise, the hoax appeared on a CD that was sent as a free gift to all subscribers of the magazine, arriving with the April issue on April 1.


Now in hindsight, it is easy for those who never heard the CD or read the accompanying "historical" material to laugh at the obvious falsity of the "discovery." However, this hoax was so meticulously researched (it was based on a great deal of esoteric historical evidence that was in fact true)--and the recording itself was so brilliantly faked--that many musicians and musical experts were taken in, at least initially. I first heard the recording broadcast on the radio on the day it appeared. It introduced with great fanfare by an announcer who read about 15 minutes worth of the liner notes, and who called the recording "the musical equivalent of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankamen." Was I fooled? Absolutely!







The original recording was not claimed to have been made on a cylinder. The basis of the hoax was Sot's experiments in recording sound on disks of glass covered with smoke. His experiments were amazing for their time. He understood the relationship of sound to the wavy lines traced on smoked glass with a diaphragm and a cactus needle. And evidently it was he who first came up with the idea of inscribing sound on a rotating disc--decades before Emil Berliner and Charles Cros were to patent their techniques. However, Sot never got beyond the inscribing stage; he could not figure out a way to play back the vibrations he had inscribed on the smoked glass disks.


The magazine's hoax took it from there, claiming that Sot had buried one of his smoke-covered disks in a sealed glass container in the hope that some day in the future science would have by then figured out a way to play back his precious vibrations. They claimed that the container had been recovered during a subway excavation at Nohant-sur-Seine (near Georges Sand's chateau), and that the sound had been reproduced and transferred by a prestigious French national scientific laboratory using optical lasers and digital conversion techniques.






Moreover, Sot was indeed a neighbor and acquaintance of Georges Sand during the period of her long affair (menage) with Chopin. What could be more natural than for him to have prevailed upon one of the world's two most famous living pianists who just happened to be living next door to play a little something for posterity?


The recording is absolutely fabulous!. First, what little musical sound that is audible is almost entirely covered by a loud continual banging, crashing, gritty surface noise of a kind one has never heard before--ostensibly the pits in the surface of the glass disk. Far in the distance, one can barely hear the tiny but very clear sound of a piano, playing the Minute Waltz from start to finish (in the correct key, of course.)






The most amazing thing about the performance is the tempo--which is insanely fast. Indeed, the piece is played in less than a minute. (BTW, I have read-- elsewhere--that the only pianist to have ever recorded the Minute Waltz in a minute was Liberace--even though the French word "Minute" did not here refer to a minute, but rather 'minute' as in small.) In any event, it is indeed humanly possible to play the piece at that speed. And if not Chopin, who then?"


NOTE: This news item was submitted to us by Dr. Barbara Milewski, a noted Chopin specialist, in response to a request from one of our readers who thought that an original chopin CD may actually exist.






POST-BLOG CONFESSIONS. I cannot find one thing about this story now, even though it's described here as a "world-famous" classical music hoax. But it explains why my first reaction to the Leon Scott recording of Au Claire de la Lune was a dead-certain disbelief. That distant, creepy nasal voice gargled a "tune" featuring only three notes, and could easily have been autotuned from ONE note (and who knows where that might have come from). Not only that,
it was sung at a dragged-out graveyard tempo, so that you wouldn't know it was a "tune", let alone a famous one, unless someone told you. So much was made of it, so many people presented papers and gave press conferences and received prestigious awards that it all smacked of scientific opportunism, not to mention jumping the gun on something very dicey indeed.





I guess I sort of believe it now, but they've mucked around so much with those three suspicious notes that they have been rendered unrecognizable as anything human. There wasn't much follow-up after the initial frenzy, and in fact the First Sounds.org website now looks as dated as anything set up in 2008. I did note that they seem to be backpedalling a bit on the veracity of the technology and how this "music" could possibly have been retrieved:





The Phonautograms of
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville

The sound files of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograms released during 2008 by the First Sounds collaborative were created using the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's virtual stylus technology, which sought to track the wavy lines scratched on soot-covered paper as though they were standard record grooves. However, Scott did not intend his phonautograms to be played back, and from a modern perspective his tracings are often malformed: the recording stylus sometimes left the paper and sometimes moved backwards along the time axis, violating basic assumptions of the “virtual stylus” approach and—for that matter—of sound recording in general. For this reason, we supposed at first that many of Scott ’s phonautograms—particularly the earliest ones—might remain permanently mute.






In late 2008, First Sounds cofounder Patrick Feaster devised an alternate playback approach, graphically converting phonautographic wavy lines into bands of variable width and playing these back using software designed to handle optical film sound track formats. This approach can’t correct serious malformations in Scott’s phonautograms any more than the “virtual stylus” approach can, but it is sufficiently robust to let us hear something from phonautograms that are otherwise too compromised to process. Many phonautograms from 1857 also survive, but they lack the tuning-fork timecode, so in these cases we have no objective means of correcting for speed fluctuations, which are generally great enough to render sung melodies utterly unrecognizable (emphasis mine).







So is First Sounds offering all this explanation as a sort of embarrassed postscript to all the initial huff and puff? I STILL believe this thing will eventually be found out as a total fraud, so that Eduarde-de-Whatsisname will have to join Hippolyte the Sot in the remainder bin of posterity.

Along with. . . 





Joyce Hatto (2007)

Joyce Hatto was an English pianist who rose to prominence in the year preceding her death. Her talent had only been discovered very late in her life, when she was in her seventies. She was noted for being able to masterfully play a wide variety of works, including compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. However, she never played in public. Recordings of her performances were produced by her husband from a private studio. But in 2007, a few months after her death, a critic for Gramophone magazine discovered that none of the recordings attributed to Hatto were actually performed by her. Her husband had been taking recordings of other pianists and claiming they were recordings of his wife.




For a feast of incomprehensibility, I welcome you to sample sound expert Patrick Feaster's bizarre blog, Griffonage: 

Griffonage.com


Sunday, September 1, 2019

This is the best thing I've ever SEEN!





This is just one of those things that I need to watch. Really, what good does it do if I "keep up" with all the wretchedness of the world? What particle of difference does it make? Well, I'll tell you. It makes me feel hopeless and powerless. But hey, isn't that something we simply can't do without? Watch the cats. Just watch them.


Friday, August 30, 2019

Sweet taste of Spam!




Rare pearls of Spam found during late-night  trawl of a Facebook page called Weird History:




Gift Pearl i want to share my amazing experience with the greatest spell caster Dr Harry my husband was cheating on me and when i found out we had a fight which lead to him filling for a divorce i cried and fell sick when i was searching about love quotes online i saw people talking about him and his great work whose case was similar to mine they left his contact info i contacted him and he told me not to worry that after 24hrs he will cancel the divorce and be back to me after i did everything he asked me to do to my greatest surprise the next day evening it was my husband he knelt down begging me to accept him back,thank you once again Dr harry you are indeed a blessing. You can email him on drharryken555@gmail. Com WhatsApp +2348105326853.




Gift Pearl I was going crazy when my husband left me and my two kids for another woman 2 weeks ago after 17years of marriage. We had a lovely marriage but he started a relationship with a co worker who chased after him. He is living away OUR home and refuses to talk to me or to come home. I was devastated and am finding it hard to cope . I wish I did not love him and that I could move on but I can't. I starting to feel ill. I have begged him to come home all to no avail. I became very worried and needed help. As I was browsing through the internet one day, I came across a website that suggested that Dr harry can help solve marital problems, restore broken relationships and so on. So, I felt I should give him a try. I contacted him and he did a spell for me. 4days later, my husband came to me and apologized for the wrongs he did and promise never to do it again. Ever since then, everything has returned back to normal. I and my family are living together happily again.. All thanks to Dr harry. If you need a spell caster that can cast a spell that truly works, I suggest you contact him. He will not disappoint you. if you have any problem contact him, I give you 100% guarantee that he will help you, Email him at: drharryken555@gmail. com, you can call or Add him on Whatsapp +2348105326853




Gift Pearl I am from sweden, I have great joy in me as i am writing this testimony about the great man called Dr harry When my lover left me i never taught that i will be able to get her back after all she has put me through, But i am so happy that after the interference of Dr harry i was able to get my lover back after 48hours and i can proudly to say, that who ever need help in getting there lover back should contact Dr harry on these contact details below for proper understanding of what i have just witness. And i promise that he will help you as he help me.
YOU ALSO NEED SOLUTION IN THE FOLLOWING PROBLEM,CONTACT HIM AS WELL.
1) If you want your EX back.
(2) if you always have bad dreams.
(3) You want to be promoted in your office.
(4) You want women/men to run after you.
(5) If you want a CHILD.
(6) You want to be RICH.
(7) You want to tie your husband/wife to be yours forever.
(8) If you need financial assistance.
(9) How you been SCAMMED and you want to recover you lost money.
once again the email is:drharryken555@. com or WhatsApp:+2348105326853





Thursday, August 29, 2019

Why is it still OK to mock mental illness?




This is extremely painful for me to write, but I’ll try. Today I saw a YouTube video by a very entertaining duo of filmmakers who make videos of things and show them in extreme slow motion. They often use the word “crazy” to describe them, which is a loose term that can mean practically anything (including mental illness), but they also frequently use the term “mental”. “Look at that! That is totally mental.”






I hear this kind of expression daily, and if I say anything about it I’m pretty much attacked for being oversensitive or having “no sense of humor”. But this casually-used slur against hurting, needing people is done without any thought that it might be disrespectful, let alone abusive.






Can I explain? Daily, I hear people react to news items of over-the-top behaviour with “oh, he’s just a whack job.” “She’s a nut bar, what can you expect?” Then, cheek-by-jowl, we see news items about the rising tide of suicides and “mental breakdowns” and PTSD and being “triggered” and society's noble attempt at “reducing the stigma” (never getting rid of it – that’s too much to ask).







What is going on here? Many think it’s “progress” and enlightenment, but as someone who has lost several dear ones to suicide, I don’t think so. “Reach out for help” is the new “thoughts and prayers”, and it means almost nothing because in most cases the “help” just isn’t there. The most that desperate families can expect for their suicidal teen is a wait list or a misdiagnosis (and people with mental illness are misdiagnosed an average of FIVE TIMES before the medical community gets it right), or poor treatment or mismedication, or even moralizing, while at the same time they have to endure the “whack job” mentality, the daily heedless slurs that still prevail in a culture that only poses as compassionate.







The “reach out for help” isn’t a bad thing, and I’m not saying “don’t do it”. But it is a bandaid solution and a way of dismissing an uncomfortable topic, so you can entertain the illusion that you have "raised awareness", and thus done something important. But it gets worse. "Reach out for help" completely puts the onus on the sufferer to make themselves better. Depression is immobilizing by nature, and perhaps you’d be surprise to learn that the heavy stigma and general contempt for mental illness that still lurks under all the trite phrases causes people to try to hide it.






I am sure no one will be too interested in reading this, as it will be seen as “negative” and not acknowledging the great strides society has recently made. "Brave" celebrities come forward and "admit" they have suffered from depression (admission being a form of confession). This does not help the cause and only helps us distance ourselves. It is only very recently that anyone even thought of having a walk or fund-raising for “mental health”. Ten years ago the very idea would have caused bafflement, even a bit of embarrassment. Why are we just now beginning to look at an “issue” which has ALWAYS affected the human race throughout its history? Why does mental illness still represent the last target of acceptable abuse?






Wednesday, August 28, 2019

GLEEP GLEEP






FUN FACTS from Wikipedia: Like other jays, the Steller's jay has numerous and variable vocalizations. One common call is a harsh SHACK-Sheck-sheck-sheck-sheck-sheck series; another skreeka! skreeka! call sounds almost exactly like an old-fashioned pump handle; yet another is a soft, breathy hoodle hoodle whistle. Its alarm call is a harsh, nasal wah. Some calls are sex-specific: females produce a rattling sound, while males make a high-pitched gleep gleep.



Saturday, August 24, 2019

"Can I leave the house like this?" A fat-shamed woman speaks




Older age brings with it some very strange goals, things you wouldn't ever have considered or even thought about before. Right now I am trying to train myself to go out of the house wearing shorts. I have lots and lots of pairs of shorts in all different sizes, left over from all my "thin periods" and "fat periods", though I always felt deep shame that I had to keep such a range of clothing and often just threw the fat clothes out.


I want to be able to go out, at least out of the house, with jelly-looking jiggly thighs, not that anyone cares in this age of 300-pound women in crop-tops with spaghetti straps and short-shorts that ride way up because of the fat. You see it every day, along with fat men whose entire bellies show because their shirts won’t stay down. The only alternative are “curtain” shirts like Daryll wears on those Save-on ads, the enormous tent-like shirt falling straight down from the fattest point of the belly.  To say the least, it is not a pretty sight, and life-threatening to boot (with people in their teens and 20s alarming me the most, 3-year-old children in tow and babies in the shopping cart). But no one cares or even thinks anything of it now. 






It has become such a new normal that, like texting while driving (or walking or getting married or having sex or giving birth, or attending a funeral), no one pays any attention to it any more. No one even sees it, because it's what people do now. If you're weird like me and don't even use a phone for anything except phoning, you are so far out of the orbit of the human condition that you often feel marooned in a kind of strange outworld of obsolescence. And God forbid you should say anything about any of this to upset the status quo, or you will be accused of being a hater or a "troll". 

But no one seems to know or remember what it was like to be fat-shamed at 132 pounds.

When I was growing up, being 10 pounds overweight was disgraceful, almost a crime, and you had to "go on Atkins” (now called “keto”, though it is the exact same thing. Last year it was "paleo", and no one knows yet what it will be next year). 





EVERYONE was obsessed with dieting and losing weight, and in high school I was stigmatized for being "too fat". I even overheard disparaging remarks about me, which people felt perfectly free to make because I was a sort of non-entity. When I was 16, my parents sent me to the doctor because I wouldn't come out of my room, and the doctor told me I needed to lose 30 pounds and "dress like the other girls do" (in miniskirts and hot pants) in order to attract a boy friend. I weighed somewhere around 140 pounds, which today I would just LOVE to weigh.





Throughout my teens, twenties, thirties, even forties, there were weight charts everywhere, in doctor’s offices, in women’s mags, in diet and exercise books and at every turn, and they were all the same: a rigid weight range according to height and frame size. My range was 120 – 135 pounds, with the implication that 135 was "too fat”. I dieted and dieted and dieted. The diets were ridiculous and often included alcohol, I guess to make them bearable. 






When I was nearer 120, I got masses of compliments from everyone, particularly from my older siblings' male friends, and was told I looked absolutely beautiful, totally transformed from the mess I used to be, and when I gained it all back – which I now know that 95% of people do after crash dieting, as your body clamours to pull itself out of an engineered famine – all the compliments just stopped. There was an embarrassed silence, and I felt drenched in shame. I had to get back on the dieting treadmill and try to beat my body back down again so I could be acceptable. I was sure I was the only person on earth who had ever had this problem, mainly because no one ever talked about it (because each person thought they were the only person on earth who had ever had this problem).

So is it any better now that fat is (supposedly) much more OK? What the hell happened to all those weight charts, and those ubiquitous booklets with those evil 10BX exercises, and measuring every morsel that went in your mouth and taking a tape measure to every conceivable body part and getting on the scale (and writing the number down) every single day? Even worse than that, looking in the mirror nude and concluding you were "fat" even at that magic number of 120 pounds.






The women's magazines were the worst: outlandish diets which told you exactly what to eat meal-by-meal each day of the week, so that you HAD to have exactly one half-scoop of low-fat cottage cheese, a canned peach half rinsed under the tap to remove all syrup, and a slice of dry melba toast for dinner, but ONLY on Saturday, to a total of maybe 300 calories. The diet would be followed on the next page with a recipe for a gooey, 3-layer, buttercream-frosted chocolate fudge cake. A recipe for bulimia, which fortunately I did not have (but could have - I believe society created that particular disease, which practically did not exist until the '70s).



I remember, almost with a sense of trauma, a horrible article featuring the model Cheryl Tiegs. This woman had the usual model's body type of 5"11" and perhaps 105 or 110 pounds. Though she reassured us that "not every woman can attain my weight level," she nonetheless provided a healthy weight-reduction diet (and a weight chart with height and frame size. She had no frame, so it was easy for her.) She talked about how important it was to enjoy your meals every day, and that food was important because it represented a "warm connection to life". (This is just one of those things I vividly remember, for some reason.) She then laid out what you should weigh (or COULD weigh if you were halfway serious about looking good). At five feet you should weigh no more than 100 pounds, and for every inch over five feet, you were allowed to add three pounds. This meant that my "acceptable" weight was 112. I hadn't weighed 112 since I was 14 years old.






The battle for me, right now, is “can I wear shorts outside?” Just that. Can I go out of the house in them? A huge step further: can I wear them to Walmart? Walmart is Fat City, as nasty people take surreptitious photos with their phones of fat, ill-dressed people, likely poor, that end up splattered all over social media. Though I am the only person who has ever mentioned this, or even noticed it, TV documentaries about obesity ALWAYS show very fat people waddling along the street without showing their faces. No one thinks this exploits anyone because they are, of course, "anonymous" and have no power of veto, so can freely be used as examples of "what not to be". What if you saw yourself being held up for such contemptuous (and potentially worldwide) ridicule? 





But the issue for me is: can I allow myself to show jiggly legs that are the product of losing and gaining and losing and gaining and losing and gaining? The emotional scarring has gone very deep from literal decades of damage, of hating myself because society told me I'd better hate myself until I lose that weight once and for all, keep it off forever without deviating a pound, and make myself acceptable to the world. 

I still feel funny and sort of uneasy putting on shorts, though I can now fit into the mid-range that every yo-yo dieter has in her wardrobe, along with unrealistically tiny things that I couldn't get my leg into all the way up to "size elephant". Sometimes, like the morbidly obese ladies sporting spaghetti strap tops, short-shorts and bare midriff, I just tell myself not to give a rip. Nobody else does. Nobody's looking, which is probably true (and a relief, actually, though older women often complain that they have become "invisible". Nothing would make me happier than to BE invisible.) 




It's the new normal, so I’m doing it anyway, and carrying myself as well as I can. I never really thought about how sad it is that a woman who may be overweight but isn't obese by any medical standard can't wear shorts. She just can't. You don't, when your legs aren't thin or firm, or if they feel jiggly when you walk. If you do wear them because it is insufferably hot, you stay in the house. 

I'm going out of the house in shorts now, realizing that no one really looked at me in the first place. Though I hated how I looked when I was young, I now see that - oh, I can't say it, so I will let the photos of my younger self tell the story. Do I really look fat in any of them?





EAT PIE




Thursday, August 22, 2019

We are the World! (excerpt)




The earnestness with which people sang this lame little ditty is lamentable, but it's kind of an artifact of its times. Even Bob Dylan stood there, not really singing but looking very uncomfortable.