![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI do not recall the last time both Drew and Natalie called me on the same day (where said day was an ordinary day), but that happened today. And I got a call from Mike up in Parker, Colorado, too. (I'm not complaining, mind you, about the phone calls, just noticing them...)
The calls punctuated a day filled with emails containing documents to translate and messages reprioritizing the order in which those translations were to be done.
When—after my t'ai chi class—I finally got an opportunity to check in on LJ, it turns out that Exhibit B (slots still available as I type this) is starting out with a Week 0 assignment to introduce someone else. This is not exactly a full strength someone-wants-a-piece-of-you event, but I'm going to stuff it in the bag anyway, with everything else.
In other news, I spent a little time looking around at some of the new "course" offerings on Memrise and ran across an interesting music-related course. The idea is apparently to learn to associate actual audio snippets of music (of what is typically called "classical" music, as far as I can tell at this point) with the names of their respective composers, and although I've only scratched the surface of the course so far, it has already occurred to me that there are significant challenges to doing so, beyond the immediately obvious, despite the simplifying condition that only snippets from the beginnings of the highlighted works are used.
The main issue, as far as I can tell, is simply this: how do you remember a phrase or two of music? (More precisely, how does one construct a system to mnemonically aid in recalling music?)
A secondary issue has to do with the fact that virtually every composer in the course wrote dozens, if not hundreds of works, while (as far as I can tell) the course only attempts to create an association between a composer and one work. The broader issue appears to be this: While it may seem straightforward to link a work to a composer, how does one go about constructing a system to mnemonically aid in building a many-to-one network of works to composers?
I'm thinking that what needs to come into play here is the same kind of "trick" that came into play to memorize a deck of cards (i.e., creating an intermediary mnemonic—the image of a person, as far as cards are concerned—to expedite memorization). The key, however, is determining what form that trick might take.
Off the top of the head, it might take the form of Morse code (where the opening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony might be represented by the letter "V": di-di-di-dah), but then I think of the opening to his Für Elise, which sort of "morses" like di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di-dah, (e.g., "5V," "SSU," or various other combinations of characters run together), but that approach doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless pitch changes are somehow encoded as well.
In any event, it's an interesting problem, and not one I should plan on solving tonight.
What I am planning is to get some sleep. All that reprioritization has left me with unfinished work for tomorrow morning.
The calls punctuated a day filled with emails containing documents to translate and messages reprioritizing the order in which those translations were to be done.
When—after my t'ai chi class—I finally got an opportunity to check in on LJ, it turns out that Exhibit B (slots still available as I type this) is starting out with a Week 0 assignment to introduce someone else. This is not exactly a full strength someone-wants-a-piece-of-you event, but I'm going to stuff it in the bag anyway, with everything else.
In other news, I spent a little time looking around at some of the new "course" offerings on Memrise and ran across an interesting music-related course. The idea is apparently to learn to associate actual audio snippets of music (of what is typically called "classical" music, as far as I can tell at this point) with the names of their respective composers, and although I've only scratched the surface of the course so far, it has already occurred to me that there are significant challenges to doing so, beyond the immediately obvious, despite the simplifying condition that only snippets from the beginnings of the highlighted works are used.
The main issue, as far as I can tell, is simply this: how do you remember a phrase or two of music? (More precisely, how does one construct a system to mnemonically aid in recalling music?)
A secondary issue has to do with the fact that virtually every composer in the course wrote dozens, if not hundreds of works, while (as far as I can tell) the course only attempts to create an association between a composer and one work. The broader issue appears to be this: While it may seem straightforward to link a work to a composer, how does one go about constructing a system to mnemonically aid in building a many-to-one network of works to composers?
I'm thinking that what needs to come into play here is the same kind of "trick" that came into play to memorize a deck of cards (i.e., creating an intermediary mnemonic—the image of a person, as far as cards are concerned—to expedite memorization). The key, however, is determining what form that trick might take.
Off the top of the head, it might take the form of Morse code (where the opening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony might be represented by the letter "V": di-di-di-dah), but then I think of the opening to his Für Elise, which sort of "morses" like di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di-dah, (e.g., "5V," "SSU," or various other combinations of characters run together), but that approach doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless pitch changes are somehow encoded as well.
In any event, it's an interesting problem, and not one I should plan on solving tonight.
What I am planning is to get some sleep. All that reprioritization has left me with unfinished work for tomorrow morning.
