At this time of the year it is light way before 6:15 am when I arose this morning for my barefoot constitutional with the dog. The weather has been glorious and the destination was the "shorter lake run" and swim. Without doubt this is the best part of the day, quiet and fresh. You don't see many others running around the lake shore at this time, in fact... And the water is so warm. Naked, one slips into the water like a spoon into tea - none of this agony as one's costume gets wet around the midriff. Of course I cannot condone swimming in the lake as it is strictly taboo: there have been too many fatal drownings over the years. However there are places that I have charted when the lake has been very low and I therefore know to be relatively safe - but I do not go out of my depth even so.
I've been doing this barefoot running lark consistently for several years, and now find myself increasingly going around barefoot for normal activities too. Ali and others (even myself) are still a bit embarrassed about me going around unshod so sometimes I don shoes just in order not to cause offence. And of course I wear shoes when necessary for protection. But I am more and more convinced that the main reason people wear shoes is cultural. And what a poor reason given all the disadvantages of wearing shoes see here or here or here.
As an example, in church I feel at liberty to remove my shoes when sitting in the congregation (and I note that others do) but apparently I have to wear them if I go to the front to lead a song or whatever. Whereas with Moses it was the other way about. Strange.
I've noticed that more people in the community here are going around barefoot, albeit mostly only indoors, doubtless feeling freer to do so following my example - help! - what have I started?
Once I thought it might be dangerous to drive barefoot. But I now find I have much better control when barefoot. Try driving whilst wearing gum-boots, or operating delicate machinery whilst wearing heavy gloves, as an indication of the antithesis.
So maybe I had better make it clear - I am not going barefoot in order to be rebellious or to start a trend. I am doing it because I want to and because it is good for me, same reason as I eat ice cream or read a book or go for a bike ride. Whilst I feel sorry for folk that are enslaved by shoes and I try to keep away from their consequential smelly feet, I have no intention to proselytize. Why should I? - they seem to be happy with their lot.
I suppose my mother must have ingrained in me the need to wear shoes. Back in those days maybe it was only paupers that went barefoot. My mother also taught me to dry myself most completely after taking a bath or a swim and to take great care to clothe wisely when in the rain for fear of contracting some terrible disease. But I have found that being out in a rainstorm is actually pleasurable and the less I wear the better, that the killer is getting cold not getting wet. So now I rarely use a towel after swimming. And how good it is to swim when it is raining!
I wonder how many other things I continue to do - preconceptions - for no better reason that because I was taught to? Not that this is necessarily a bad reason for doing stuff.
I must try to be focused. My purpose in these posts on music is to try to answer the question of "what sort of music should be acceptable in church?". Clearly lots of people have already got strong opinions on this - witness the diversity of musical expression in churches - and who am I to gainsay them? But you can hardly fail to have noticed the prevalence of what has become known as CCM or Christian Contemporary Music.You may also have noticed that some CCM is a major money-making industry.
To be proper and legal our church is a member of CCLI and, when we project lyrics, we duly display the copyright owner if known. Our annual dues to CCLI are based on how many times we have sung particular songs and thus the copyright owners get paid. We pay the Christian music industry so that we can worship God. Really? Yes really.
We are privileged to have several anointed songwriters in our small congregation. I do not think that they get paid by CCLI when we sing their songs!
I don't have any problem with people being enterprising about making money. People have to live. I don't have any problem with Christian song-writers selling their wares to help make a living or at least cover expenses. But I do have a problem with people charging for the "Christian" ministry they claim to be providing. Jesus paid the taxes due and Judas carried the purse so they must have had something in the way of finances, but I cannot imagine Jesus charging for his ministry. Somehow it just doesn't fit. To the twelve Jesus instructed "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. You have received freely, freely give."
I would like to tease out, in these posts, whether the nature or suitability of the artist's music is affected by their financial inclinations.
With this in mind I have started to take more attention of who the artist is of the songs we sing in worship. Apart from our own songs (which make up a major proportion) I see that we sing a lot of songs by Chris Bowater. So I checked out his web site - it is refreshing that you can freely download sheet music for many of his songs there. This is unprecedented - it is unusual to find free sheet music for current musicians. He also has some good things to say on the CCM debate. And he is also a mature pastor of what looks like a lively church in the UK. All this bodes well for my theory...
To start at the beginning of this series of posts on music click here. The title "Song of Albion" in an allusion to Stephen Lawhead's trilogy - chosen because his concept echoes some of my own thoughts.
Have you noticed how, in community singing, people rarely give the last note of a phrase its full musical measure? To the point that, if you do, you feel totally out on a limb? You may also have noticed that kid's recorder playing can be painful? And yet a recorder consort can make a surprisingly beautiful noise, for example:
In a recent post I pointed out that you can get away with low resolution colour in video provided outlines in the picture portrayed are sharply defined. Edges, boundaries, have great importance. "Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set". Children, indeed all of us, need clear boundaries for living. In science at least (what do I know of other subjects?) concise definitions are essential for the development of argument, and a definition limits a concept within a boundary. So it is with music. Without boundaries to say how long a note should be played, or at what pitch or intensity, music would be chaos. "If even lifeless instruments, such as the flute or the harp, do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played?" Correct intonation is what differentiates the good musician from the masses. "Correct", of course, does not necessarily imply rigid time or even perfect pitch because music is not mechanical - it breathes life from its creator.
Boundaries and edges imply variation. If all parts of a picture were the same colour then there would be no edges and it could hardly be called a picture. The amount of variation will of course vary according to mood. Turner (one of my favourite artists) uses this to great effect by exaggerating lack of definition to emphasise the edges of his subject. Presented with chaos the eye tries to find definition. That's how my mother reckoned she could see all many of shapes in cloud formations, shapes that I could never see.
"Rain, Steam and Speed", J. M. W. Turner
The "Fighting Temeraire", J. M. W. Turner
The master knows just where to place an edge to full effect. I used to teach people to drive. When sitting in the passenger seat it becomes quickly obvious whether the student has good control of the car or not. The car obeys a good driver and one feels safe. Conversely the car seems to have a mind of its own and takes the bad driver by surprise: it is uncontrolled, no edges. I know when my piano playing is good because, at those (rather rare) times, I find the sound it makes is exactly what I want.
In community singing (for example praise and worship in church) we may not be wanting a "performance" but I see no reason why the music should not be "good". Why should our singing always be as loud as possible but the last notes of each phrase be curtailed, why not embrace more variety in rhythm and style, and in instrumental accompaniment? Should we not strive to increase the beauty in all that we do?
Mind you, I remember a man in the church my grandparents went to - Smee was his name I think - he sang the hymns with a loud and raucous voice hopelessly out of tune and, when challenged on the subject, I remember him saying that he knew he couldn't sing well but his over-riding desire was to use whatever he had, voice included, to give glory to his God and no-one was going to stop him. And at the time I bought that argument, and I still do. Nevertheless I long for something better...
I am using an Active-X control within Visual Basic. The control takes a string input and outputs a barcode image. The barcode is capable of encoding binary data. The literature that comes with the control says "The data to be encoded must be represented in the form of a string and it is impossible to represent binary data in a string." Clearly they are using the 'C' language or a derivative, how else could they state such utter nonsense? Why else would they come up with such a contrived and convoluted arrangement of escape characters to send the dreaded-in-'C' null character? Why make the world more complicated than it already is? Why refute occam's razor?
Thankfully Visual Basic is relatively sane when it comes to data storage. It offers a choice of fixed length strings (in which n bytes of arbitrary binary data include null aka 'chr(0)' occupy exactly n bytes of memory - how can you do better than that?) or variable length strings, and a wealth of string functions which accept either variant.
So - yesterday I cycled some 40 miles to the coast, had a quick bite to eat, then met up at Brittas Bay with the youngsters who had come by car. Their first action was to jump in the sea. After resting for 5 minutes or so I thought I would join them and show some solidarity. The sea at Brittas bay gets deep slowly and they were far out by this time - I supposed on a sand bank. Oh, and I forgot to say, I have hurt my chest - maybe a bruised rib or wot-not, it is better than it was but still not 100%. I found I was up to my shoulders on my way out and still no sign of a sand-bank. Anyway I got to where they were, almost out of my depth, and swam around a bit like one does, then decided it was too cold and made for the shore (the others soon followed, it having started to rain). But it seemed like it was only getting deeper. I could not swim well because of my chest and I am not a strong swimmer anyway, and I could not propel myself by foot and, worse still, I was getting cramp. And I now know that the tide was coming in, so I guess it really was getting deeper. I have to admit that I started to panic. But the others were nearby and one had a float which I requisitioned and another helped tow me back until I was well within my depth. By the time I got to the shore my cramp was so bad in both legs that I could not stand. So what would have happened had I not had friends around? Of course it is unlikely that I would have gone so deep on my own, I am that frightened of water, but I might have.
The feeling of panic was scary because it reversed all the self-preservation adrenalin reactions that should have kicked in. It was as if something was telling me "that's it, chum" and was urging me to agree.
And the succession of circumstances - I should not have gone into cold water so deep, so soon after strenuous cycling, or so soon after eating - I was in fact not being careful. That's how accidents happen.
First whole day bike ride this year and I ache! One of my favourite routes: Blessington, Manor Kilbride, Sally Gap, Roundwood, Wicklow town (a brief swim), Brittas Bay where I met up with my daughter (who drove there) and had a longer swim and suffered bad cramp, Rathdrum, Larragh, Wicklow Gap and home again. Distance 81.9 miles, Maximum speed 43.3 mph (descent from Sally Gap - awesome and scary), average speed 11.5 mph, total ride time just over 7 hours.
As I get older I find my piano repertoire fossilising - I play or think the same pieces over and over again. Those who listen to me have doubtless noticed but are too polite to say. One such tune that goes around in my head is Telstar named after a communications satellite launched in 1962 which relayed the first live analogue TV broadcast from the US to the UK.
Broadcast TV was started in earnest in the UK in 1936 using the 405 line system which ended in 1985. The higher resolution 625 line system was started in 1964 initially monochrome, colour being introduced in 1967. Broadcast analogue TV was finally switched off in the UK in October 2012 giving way to digital TV. The analogue video system still persists in older equipment but will soon be a relic of the past. But it is a relic worth paying homage to because of the way it makes good use of the technology available which to do is, of course, the remit of every good engineer.
NTSC-PAL-SECAM distribution
The main colour TV systems were the American NTSC, the French SECAM, and PAL. PAL is technically more elegant and gives a higher resolution and better colour rendition than NTSC. I have no experience of SECAM.
Young electronic engineers today, who work with digital video and flat screens in which a pixel is a well defined physical element, and who have access to software libraries like MPEG, may find it hard to grasp the difficulties in designing an analogue system for a severely limited physical medium. But even today the best engineers deal with cutting edge technology that pushes the very bounds of quantum physics.
Here are some of the clever aspects of analogue colour TV. Check out here for more detail.
Vestigial sideband modulation enables 625 line video (which needs about 6MHz of bandwidth) and sound to be transmitted within an 8MHz channel and yet is low cost to demodulate in the receiver.
The frame rate is locked to mains frequency (60Hz in USA, 50Hz in Europe) to reduce the effect of mains interference which otherwise would appear as a slowly moving band across the picture
25 frames of 625 lines are transmitted every second, but the lines are interlaced in two "fields" giving a field rate of 50Hz to reduce flicker yet giving full 625 line resolution for pictures with less movement.
Initially the 625 line system was designed for monochrome. Colour was added several years later and the extra information had to be squeezed into the same 6MHz bandwidth without compromising monochrome reception. The colour information is divided into YUV components. Y is the luminance and is transmitted at full resolution in place of the monochrome signal. Successive frames of video generally differ little and this translates, in the frequency domain, to most of the spectral energy being near harmonics of the field rate.
U and V are the second and third signals necessary to define tristimulus colour. These two signals are modulated in quadrature onto a sub-carrier at a carefully chosen frequency of 283.75 × line rate + 25 Hz. The 25Hz offset places the harmonics of the colour signal in the gaps between the harmonics of the luminance signal. Only the two can still get mixed up sometimes e.g. cross-colour.
The trick here is that the eye does not demand as high resolution for colour as for luminance - which perhaps is why tinted water colours work so well.
Colour tinted monochrome photograph
Water colour tinted line drawing
In the PAL system the colour phase is reversed with each line, which automatically corrects phase errors in the transmission of the signal by cancelling them out, at the expense of vertical frame colour resolution. The colour signals are also severely band-limited thus reducing horizontal resolution.
Transmitted PAL spectrum
After all that... the point of this post was actually not so much to pay homage to PAL or to recall fond memories of the BBC Research Department but as a kind of precursor maybe to my next post on music.
