Hello Ardith,   
      
      
   On Sat 2039-Jun-04 23:56, Ardith Hinton (1:153/716) wrote to Richard Webb:   
      
   RW>  AS I'm wrapping some hardware to   
   RW>  silence its rattles he hits a rack tom right next to   
   RW>  my right ear.     
      
      
   AH>           To the ears & the brain focused on subtle nuances the   
   AH> effect is like that of dropping a load of bricks on a scale intended   
   AH> for measuring the weight of a SnailMail letter or a fistful of   
   AH> granola.  Not everyone understands.  :-(    
      
    indeed.   
      
      
   RW>  HE asked me why I didn't work in the   
   RW>  industry, and I told him that when I did I found out I   
   RW>  didn't like 7 day weeks, sometimes 12 hour days.  tHen   
   RW>  I pointed it out to him as I'm selling his cashier $100   
   RW>  worth of small bills one night during Mardi Gras, which   
   RW>  came from my tip jug .   
      
      
   AH>           Nice work, if you can get it!  Your comments have brought   
   AH> up so many memories of various catering managers etc. I hardly know   
   AH> where to start.  :-))    
      
   INdeed, wish those kind of nights would have been all year   
   round, but Mardi Gras, etc. were sure great for the tip jug. We did a lot of   
   restaurant dining whenever the tips were   
   good, because I didn't have to cook, and didn't feel like   
   it, nor did she.  AT times during the day I'd do things such as pots of chili,   
   or bean soup, etc. that we'd both eat   
   during the day though.  I'd send part of it to work with her where we'd put it   
   in the freezer over there and she could   
   nuke a dish for her lunch.   
    WHen the stretch between either of us getting a paycheck   
   became too long for the amount of dollars a few times I   
   offered up prayers for a busy night with a good jug,   
   especially when we started payng for Kathy's prescription   
   meds ourselves plus her cobra payment as she lost her job   
   with the good insurance coverage.   
      
      
   AH>           Same here.  I might even have realized I liked it sooner   
   AH> if I hadn't been surrounded by people who complained about how   
   AH> they'd had a miserable time at the symphony concert because Bobby   
   AH> Corno played a wrong note in the twelfth bar of the third movement &   
   AH> by people who apparently used AM radio to fill the empty space   
   AH> inside their heads.  I couldn't relate to either or to the general   
   AH> music teacher I had in junior high school, the one who introduced   
   AH> her class to the MOONLIGHT SONATA with the expectation that we'd   
   AH> imagine a bunch of fairies dancing around & draw a picture.  It   
   AH> wasn't until much later that I understood the technical distinctions   
   AH> between absolute music & program music.  But I know now that I'm not   
   AH> alone in enjoying a sonata differently from a ballet....  :-)    
      
   INdeed, that's one of the big problems I had with the hip   
   hop stuff back when I'd have to handle a couple of them as   
   clients, I really couldn't appreciate the words, and the   
   person acting as producer didn't have interesting musical   
   ideas.  I had more fun with the young kids in the   
   alternative band who wanted to experiment with strange   
   tonalities and things one normally wouldn't associate with   
   musical instruments, and those you would used in different   
   ways.  Kathy arrived home from work one afternoon to find   
   one kid beating on some full paint cans with some   
   drumsticks, and other stuff going on.  When we took a break   
   and decided to go back to the drawing board with an   
   auxillary weird percussion track Kathy showed the drummer of the group her   
   African signal drums.  HE was hooked, played   
   them with his hands and soft mallets.  I was overall   
   dsiappointed with the track I got on them but the kids liked it.  Those things   
   being AFrican signal or war drums require   
   a whole lot of space to capture, and the stereo pair of   
   cardioid condensers I put over them acted more like close   
   microphones isntead of far field pickup, as those drums are   
   designed to be heard.  I would have liked to record them in   
   a large space such as a gymnasium or something.   
   Even if the space was too big I could do things with movable partitions, etc.   
   to build a microclimate for them   
   acoustically.  .   
      
      
   AH>           Seems to me you & your parents had very clear goals in   
   AH> mind.  That's important when you're dealing with others who have   
   AH> different priorities and/or who think they know better regardless of   
   AH> what's going on in your life....  ;-)    
      
   THat it is, and their goal was to raise a self sufficient   
   citizen above all else.   
      
      
   RW>  a lot of experimentation going on, not all of it for   
   RW>  the better for the children.  That's another story,   
   RW>  and another thread if anybody's interested >   
      
      
   AH>           Yeah.  The idea of the least restrictive environment has   
   AH> its merits, but what often happens is that the school for the blind   
   AH> (e.g.) is closed & the support system we were assured of never   
   AH> materializes... or if it does it's one of the first things to be   
   AH> axed as soon as there's another budget cut.  I could go on at length   
   AH> about that too.  But IMHO there's more to be gained by putting the   
   AH> emphasis on where we've succeeded, despite forces beyond our   
   AH> control.  :-)    
      
   Indeed, and at that time became the beginning of the big   
   slide down the slope of braille illiteracy, which is a   
   crying shame.  THey were doing experiments with kids reading large print, even   
   with desktop magnifiers, etc.  I'm sure in Canada as well, from stats I"ve   
   seen, but there is currently a worldwide braille literacy crisis among blind   
   children.   
   YEs part of that is the mistaken belief that synthesized   
   speech, etc. can supplant braille.  DUring the formative   
   years especially it's good for children to actually "see"   
   written language, even if they "see" it with their fingers,   
   and audio doesn't quite make the same connection to the   
   brain.  Then consider yourself unable to make a quite note   
   with a pencil if you have no technology tools available.   
   That ability to be able to independently write something   
   down can be a killer in the work world.   
      
      
      
   AH>           I imagine as a blind person you would have had to develop   
   AH> your other senses more than sighted people generally do.  When I was   
   AH> growing up it seemed to be taken for granted that Mother Nature   
   AH> endows blind people with supersonic hearing... but you worked at it,   
   AH> just as I did.  By the time our daughter came along I was ready,   
   AH> willing, and able to learn that a 20% elevation in the rate of a   
   AH> child's breathing may... in the absence of any obvious reason...   
   AH> indicate s/he has a fever.  To a musician a 20% increase in tempo is   
   AH> quite significant. To a lot of non-musicians, however, it seems like   
   AH> a black art even if they can see the wall clock nearby measuring the   
   AH> elapsed time in seconds... [wry grin].    
      
      
   Indeed, it's learning to interpret what you hear.  I can   
   teach an adult to interpret traffic sounds to determine when it's safe to   
   cross a busy intersection, i.e. when he has the signal, etc.  But, ear   
   training was something I just picked   
   up and did without realizing that's what I was doing.  I   
   came to the realization as a young man I was doing a lot of   
   that when I read an article in some magazine which was   
   debunking the myth that perfect pitch can't be taught.   I   
   had the luck of going to a school where every piano in every practice room was   
   always properly tuned, because the school   
   taught piano tuning, and the instructor was a very expert   
   tuner and passed that on to his students.  A few of those   
   students have made good livings tuning pianos, and a couple   
   still do today iirc.   
   I tell people who want their children to learn an instrument that being sure   
   it's tuned to standard pitch at all times   
   when the child is playing it is important.  tHis way, when   
   the kid plays the c below a 440 he hears that note, at the   
   proper frequency, and the two gel in his/her head.   
      
      
   Regards,   
              Richard   
   ---   
    * Origin:  (1:116/901)