The Blogg

September 29, 2009

My Vocal Range

Filed under: Music,Personal — chadhogg @ 12:41 pm

In a stunning display of procrastination, I answered a question today that I have wondered about for some time. Frustrated at my inability to sing along comfortably with “Redemption Song”, I tuned up my bass and started matching pitches to determine what my exact vocal range is.


Modal range from F#2 - F4, with G2 - D4 comfortable

The first image shows my modal register, which extends from F#2 through F4, although I can only comfortably produce G2 through D4. According to Wikipedia, a bass’s range should be F2 through E4, so I cannot quite sing low enough or comfortably high enough to be classically a bass. The baritone range is G2 through F4, which fits me if you include those notes that I can hit but not necessarily hold. I find this somewhat surprising, because when I sang in a chorus during high school I had many more problems with the upper notes written for the basses than the lower notes. Classical composers typically respected the edges of the staff, but the music we had from contemporary composers often reached several ledger lines above. Musical theater was the worst, in which I was often forced to sing in the falsetto register as the men’s parts were written in the middle of the treble clef.


Falsetto range from F3 - G5, with G#3 - C#5 comfortable

Fortunately, my falsetto range (pictured above) extends from F3 through G5, with G#3 through D5 comfortable. Unfortunately, I think falsetto sounds at best strange and at worst awful, and have almost never used it since those days when I was forced to do so.


Vocal fry range from C2 - G2, with D2 - G2 comfortable

The final image is of my range in the vocal fry register. I had known for some time that I could produce low pitches with a very gravelly sort of timbre, but did not actually know that it had a name until I started doing some research for this post. While I sound bad in the falsetto register, the sounds I make in the vocal fry register cannot be described as musical at all. Apparently there is also a whistle register, but I do not know how to access it if I am even capable of doing so.

Since high school the only non-pop singing that I have done is singing hymns in churches with traditional music. Although these are typically arranged for four-part harmony (and very accessible bass ranges), basically everyone sings the soprano line and I tend to join along. Given enough time to work on it I could sing the bass parts, but I lack perfect pitch and cannot find relative pitch quickly enough for sight-reading (up a fourth, that’s “Here Comes The Bride”, now down a sixth, that is “N – B – C”, etc). Thus, I usually end up singing the soprano part transposed down an octave. Then when the melody line rises above D5 I have to drop down another octave, then return to a single-octave transposition when the melody comes back down. If I start down two octaves, then I have to jump up when the melody goes below G4. Almost every melody extends below G4, and a great many extend higher than D5, which makes it impossible for me to sing them in the modal register with a fixed transposition. As you can imagine, this is quite annoying, which is why I expected my range to be significantly less than that of the average untrained vocalist.

September 19, 2009

Book Review: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 8:14 pm

First and foremost, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is a chronicle of persons. There are certainly events, some quite shocking in their significance, but they are important only in what they reveal about the characters and their relationships and are too episodic to form a significant plot. This sounds like it would be a great challenge, but I never had any difficulty finding a desire to continue onward.

The most important features of each character could probably be summed up in a few sentences, but they are far from one-dimensional. Rather, this may have the deepest, most mysterious cast of characters of anything I have ever read. McCullers tells us a great deal about Singer, Mick, and the like, but nearly every passage creates more questions than answers. I tend to think that their pasts and personalities are intentionally left vague so that we will read into them what we wish to see, just as the other central characters do to Singer in the book.

There is no indication of any physical attraction between them, but John Singer’s love for his friend Antonapoulos is surely romantic in nature. I can only hope that I love my wife so passionately. Even to the end I could not tell whether Biff Brannon wishes Mick were his daughter or lover; my best guess is both. There are further questions about Biff’s femininity, the rigor with which he keeps useless records, the reckless generosity he shows toward patrons of his cafe, and other unusual aspects of his personality. Blount raves about the evils of capitalism, yet his job seems to be one of few places where he can keep himself together. The righteous anger, shame, and disappointment that burn in Doctor Copeland are clear, but not the darkness that sometimes clouds his mind or how he intends to fulfill his one true purpose. Autobiographical Mick may be the saddest character of all, even if she is the only one with a shred of hope at the end.

Beyond the characters themselves, the book is about their relationships, chiefly each with Singer. Each feels that he can talk to Singer (who is a deaf/mute) about anything, and that Singer understands and agrees with them completely. From Singer’s point of view we find that he rarely feels that he knows anything about what they discuss, and the rare responses that he gives are always very simple. The other characters’ relationships with Singer are in a sense illusory, although he appreciates their company. How often do we hear that someone simply wants someone to listen to them? It appears McCullers believes this applies much more broadly to all of our relationships.

In spite of the theme of crushing loneliness and despair, I found reading this novel to be a joy. McCullers seems to have understood humanity quite deeply even at this young age, and she expresses herself quite aptly as long as you do not expect to have everything handed to you. If you want something to speak to your soul and make you wonder, I recommend it.

Thoughts On Civilization IV

Filed under: Computing,Personal — chadhogg @ 3:10 pm

Since completing my general exam last week I’ve been slacking off from work a bit and getting back to one of my favorite computer games: Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. It is unquestionably a great game, possibly as good now as Civilization II was back in its heyday. Still, there are a number of things that I find very annoying about it:

  • The notification system fails in significant ways. If I have discovered the location of a resource, lost a unit in a defensive fight, or sighted an enemy unit within my cultural borders, I want to know exactly where it is and be sure that I have dealt with it before ending my turn. A message that scrolls over the map and disappears is not sufficient for this purpose. Many previous incarnations of the series have solved this problem better, but my favorite implementation was in the Civilization: Call To Power game, which was in many other ways rather bad. An area of the screen was dedicated for a list of messages that you could read at your leisure and dismiss as you desired. Clicking on one of these messages would point you directly to the location on the map from which it was generated. The types of messages deemed significant enough to appear in this list was highly customizable.
  • I like the gameplay elements added by religion quite a bit, and in fact my strategy in most games revolves around founding as many as possible and using them for their revenue generation and cultural dominance advantages. Spreading religions, especially in a large number of newly captured cities, is unfortunately very cumbersome. As you can automate workers to improve land in whatever way the AI thinks is best, I would love to have automated missionaries with a button that sends them to any city in your empire in which the religion is not present and to which no other missionaries are automatically on their way. If I could set a city to keep building missionaries of a particular religion until it has spread everywhere in my empire, that would be even better.
  • The game does not automatically adjust the distribution of specialists intelligently. If I set the output of my city to Research, then any engineers would be more effective if made scientists instead. I suppose you might not necessarily want this if your purpose in having engineers is to increase the probability of eventually generating a Great Engineer, but if the AI automatically decided to create the engineers in the first place, there would be no harm in moving them.
  • Running wars is still very long and time consuming. Again, I liked what Civilization: Call To Power did to solve this. You could create groups of units that would attack and defend as a group, so that an assault on a city would consist of a single battle instead of perhaps a dozen. There was also more strategy since units in a group could complement each other, which could mesh very nicely with the promotions tree in Civ IV.
  • It would be nice if the Shuffle option for land mass type actually selected from all of the options instead of just four. I have been using it because I do not want to tailor my strategies to a specific game type and then have them be completely unsuitable on the rare occasion that I get to play multiplayer.
  • Another automation issues deals with air units. I always thought they were much less useful than in real life in Civ II because you would have to manually move them around each turn in order to see where there might be enemy units. Civ IV improves on this dramatically by making air units have air-specific actions, such as performing a reconnaissance sweep of an area. It would have been much better still, however, if there were a way to set a unit to automatically sweep an area at the beginning of every turn.
  • Diplomacy is much improved over earlier games, but there are still holes. When someone asks me for a trade that I find not in my best interests, I decline it without worry that it will substantially hurt my image with the other country. When they ask for something for free, however, I usually give it to them because I do not want to anger them. Do the mechanics actually work this way? I do not know. I think there are still a few things that the AI players can do diplomatically that you cannot, although I cannot think of a specific example at the moment.
  • Diplomatic victory makes no sense. In that vote, no player who is not in the running has any incentive to not abstain. If the AI players understood the mechanics, they would never vote for anyone other than themselves. In the real world it might make a big difference to you who gets elected supreme leader of the world, but in the game there are only three outcomes: you are elected and win the game, no one is elected and the game continues, and someone else is elected and you lose.

I am thinking about buying the Beyond The Sword expansion. I do not expect that it actually fixes any of the issues above, but it sounds like it would add some other very interesting features and keep me enjoying the game. Unfortunately, it looks like I cannot buy the expansion on Steam and use my physical copy of the original game. If I do this, I will probably bite the bullet and pay $39.99 for Civ IV, both expansions, and the updated Colonization on Steam. Then again, I now have a system with a modern graphics card, and if I am going to spend time playing games there are many, many others that have been released in the last five years or so that I have missed. Among those that sounded like something I would want to play eventually are Far Cry, Doom 3, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, BioShock, Mass Effect, Portal, Crysis, Left 4 Dead, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein, Age Of Empires III, … and those are just the ones I have heard enough about to know I want to play them, and can think of them at the moment. Chances that I play through even a quarter of them in the next several years are low. Should I go for it, or move on?

September 15, 2009

Michael Moore On Leno

Filed under: Politics — chadhogg @ 10:57 pm

What I am proposing is not socialism. I am saying we should go back to our roots of democracy. Why shouldn’t we the people have a say in our economy? [paraphrasing slightly from my memory of what I heard]

Whether or not what Mr. Moore wants is wise, what he describes is *exactly* socialism. If the general populace is determining the nation’s financial affairs, that is a planned economy. I have become very sick of Obama and others emphatically declaring that their proposals are not socialist when in fact they are. Instead of a useful term describing how economies are run, it has become a meaningless slur. Democratic leaders do want to move the country in a socialist direction, and the last several elections have given them a fairly clear mandate that the general populace wants this as well (although recent town meetings and “tea parties” call this into question). If they really believe this, they should be standing up and proudly saying that it is a moral imperative to put the needs and rights of society at large over those of individuals and that the current economic system does not work for the majority of Americans.

Also, I have only seen one episode so far, but I have to say that I am not enjoying the Jay Leno Show nearly as much as I did the Tonight Show while he was fronting it.

September 14, 2009

NFL Week 1 Notes

Filed under: Sports — chadhogg @ 11:27 pm

First, a short rundown of my fantasy teams. I did not write my usual recap this year because I was quite busy two weeks ago. (For those who are interested, I now have an approved plan that projects me finishing my degree next summer.) In our long-running 12 team league I drew draft position 12. This is my second 12, and in 5 seasons in this league I have never drafted earlier than 6. Prior to the draft I looked at what players I could expect to be available in the 12-13 and 36-37 ranges and decided I basically had to take running backs with my first two picks; there would be good receivers left later but no good backs. I ended up taking the following players in order: Frank Gore, Brandon Jacobs, Wes Welker, T. J. Houshmandzadeh, Matt Schaub, Dallas Clark, Jamal Lewis, Bernard Berrian, Devin Hester, Chicago Bears Defense, Chad Pennington, Fred Taylor, Edgerrin James, Chris Henry, and Jeff Reed. I was not necessarily wanting to take a quarterback so early, but the pool of ones that I liked was shrinking very rapidly. So far Matt Schaub does not look like my trust is justified, but I’ll give him a few weeks to prove himself. I should not have taken a tight end so early with such a deep talent pool this year, but I was pleased to see someone I really liked there after I had filled out most of the rest of my roster.

We also have a 10 team keeper league that I started last year, so this was the first year in which the keeper rules actually applied. I thought the system we had was elegant, and after some initial resistance our owners seemed to enjoy it. Our rules were that you could keep up to three players that were on your roster at the end of the previous season. To do so, you needed to give up a pick in the round before they were drafted the year before (although a 1st round pick could be kept with a 1st round pick). It was not necessary to declare that you were keeping a player until someone else tried to draft him or it came to the pick that you were giving up. Last year I had taken Adrian Peterson in the first and Maurice Jones-Drew in the second and wanted to hold on to both of them if possible. I was able to swing a trade of my 2nd and 4th round picks for another player’s 1st and 10th. This only resulted in moving up a few spots, but gave me the two 1st rounders I needed to keep my two players. My other keeper was Ray Rice in the 8th. My full roster in draft order was Adrian Peterson, Maurice Jones-Drew, T. J. Houshmandzadeh, Kurt Warner, Hines Ward, Joseph Addai, Ray Rice, Chester Taylor, Jerricho Cotchery, Kellen Winslow, Laveraneus Coles, Matt Hasselbeck, Chicago Bears Defense, Fred Jackson, Jeremy Maclin. Once again I took a tight end far too early; guys I would have been just as happy with were available rounds later.

It seemed like an eternity between the end of last season and the opener between the Steelers and Titans on Thursday night. Fortunately, it was a great, hard-fought game between two serious defenses. It is almost impossible to overstate the talent of Troy Polamalu. I believe he had 4 tackles and a pass defensed in the first 5 defensive snaps for Pittsburgh, then later a circus catch of an interception. This defense is still very good without him, but this is going to be a tough 2-6 weeks. I find it infathomable that the Steelers had the league worst rushing attack last year, even with Parker and Mendenhall injured. While the Titans run defense is much better than average, Mike Tomlin has to be worried that things are no better this year. I loved “Fast Willie” Parker in his first two years, but he does not have that same speed anymore.

For Sunday’s early game I watched my team, the Eagles against Carolina. The only thing better than watching your team dismantle their opponent after a long football drought would be if that opponent were Dallas. I had been seriously concerned about this defense without Johnson, Dawkins, and Bradley, but they sure surprised me. I can’t get too carried away because this *is* Jake Delhomme, but they looked fantastic. Sheldon Brown’s first interception plucked from an inch off the turf with one hand was practically Polamalu-esque. I was not so excited by what I saw on offense. They certainly did what was necessary to win the game, but almost always had the benefit of a short field and a big lead. It will be much more informative to see what we do against the Saints next week. Maybe Peters and company can at least avoid multiple false starts. Kevin Kolb looked as uncomfortable as always, so it should be interesting probably not having McNabb next week. I honestly think Garcia would give them the better chance to win, but expect to see more of Kolb.

In other 1:00 action, who knew Denver’s defense could almost pitch a shutout? The Bengals offense was not good last year, but I expected them to be competitive this year. The Jets defense was also a surprise. For the sake of my Schaub pick, I am hoping they just played very well in Rex Ryan’s scheme. New Orleans tromping all over Detroit was pretty much expected, but hated Dallas over Tampa Bay is troubling. I knew that getting rid of Owens would be a good thing for that offense, but we can probably still count on them to fall apart by the end of the season.

In the late afternoon I watched the other NFC East teams square off. Hunter Smith’s nifty run on a fake field goal was fun to watch, but I did not see much to convince me Washington will not be last in the division again this year. I also saw most of the fourth quarter of the San Francisco – Arizona game. What happened to the Cardinals passing game? It isn’t like the 49ers secondary is anything to write home about. With not much else working, you would think they might have given Beanie Wells more of a chance. I did not see any of the other 4:00 game, but it sounds like not much has changed in St. Louis.

The Sunday night game was another great divisional matchup. I was very high on the Chicago defense this year with Urlacher being healthy again, as you could probably tell from my selecting them in both fantasy leagues. Now that Urlacher is out for the season, I think I’ll be looking for a replacement. Although he is not as dominant as Polamalu, I think he might be missed more because he does not have such an outstanding cast around him. Both times when I took Chicago the Eagles defense was still available and I was staying away for the reasons mentioned above. I sure would like them now. I thought Cutler’s production would drop off significantly after leaving the talented defense in San Diego, but I did not expect him to look worse than Kyle Orton. Props to Michaluk for predicting that Earl Bennett would become the go-to receiver in this offense. I do not understand why the Bears did not go for two after scoring a touchdown when down 10-2. The difference between a 10-8 and a 10-9 game is very little, while tying the game would have been very nice. I did understand the fake punt call later in the game, even if the announcers did not seem to. The five yards had nothing to do with it; that call is about the very useful free play. If you are going to do that, however, you have to actually be quick enough to catch the 12th man on the field.

Watching the Patriots on Monday night I was struck by how well their scheme fits the model of the West Coast offense, although I’ve never heard them listed among its adherents. They do run the ball and throw bombs every now and again, but the staple of that offense is Brady throwing a high-percentage 7 yard pass to one of his receivers or backs running a slant, drag, or curl. I am not a Bills fan, but it is a shame to see the underdog in position to win a game and losing it because of one stupid play by a kick returner. (Not that we saw something similar at the beginning of the Eagles season last year, or anything.) My impression of the Raiders is that they are perpetually awful and so I expected this last game of the week to be uncompetitive. With four minutes left in the first half, however, they are tied against the very good Chargers, and convincingly marched down the field on their first possession. Maybe this will be worth watching after all.

I generally do not like obnoxious wide receivers in the Owens – Marshall mold, but I have to admit I am very high on Chad Ochocinco nee Johnson this year. He may be an attention whore, but I think he is good for the league. Too many players see this only as a business, but Ochocinco actually plays like it is a game. The league should certainly fine him for his celebrations, signs, tweets, and whatever else he does that is against the rules, but I would be more concerned about the players who act violently and dangerously than the ones trying to inject a little levity into the game. It would be different if Ochocinco were not trying to be the best player he can be. You don’t split the uprights and then drill a kickoff down the field based on athletic ability alone; he has to have actually worked on it quite a bit. Kicking the ball is not part of his job description, but he loves the game enough to work on it on his own just because he wants to see if he can. We will see if he is actually productive and a good teammate through the season, but so far I like what I see.

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