User talk:Treedesigner

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Preschool project help

Hi there,

I was wondering if you were still interested in the Preschool project. It looks like you've already started a few pages on your own, and it would be great if we could leverage our work in a co operative way. Thanks! Historybuff 22:44, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Preschool Project

Thanks HB for contacting me and apologies that I was away until now. My additions to the article were mainly those concerning even very young children learning what most adults don't know, which is that you can read music while listening (let alone while singing, which is offered in a more unconscious way in schools and churches). To get the conductor's eye view, encompassing the entire work (or process) is what I'm referencing. (For whatever reasons-- he published the Violinschule in 1756 and wanted his son to be a great violinist-- Leopold Mozart pioneered and proved the proposition that a 3-year-old can read scores, and by age 5 Wolfgang could write them too.)

I am an overage undertrained computerperson and therefore don't know much about what may be available on the Web now by way of music which one can hear and read simultaneously. Perhaps someone will turn up who is more competent at searching down things of the sort.

In my opinion, to a 3-year-old there is no such thing as a musical tradition or idiom which would be so foreign or repellent that the youngster could not catch on how to read/hear it audiovisually-- that is to reassure anyone who is concerned about which kind of music to use. However, the canon of Great Works throughout the period of common practice (say, 1500 to present) has this going for it, that the creators known to us as Composers not only designed events in sound/time that interest many today hundreds of years later but, also, the graphic road-map or guide known to us as a Score should be expected to be of great interest also-- i.e Mozart or Beethoven was not only a tunesmith but an exceptionally brilliant cartoonist whose shapes on the page are creations worthy of study (especially simultaneous with their correlevant soundscrape).

Big city libraries have a number of scores which one can borrow just like any book-- something I didn't know till I was in my teens and probably a majority of the public doesn't know. Beyond whatever selection they may have, there are problems. For example, I was looking at some listings of new works by Charles Wuorinen (1938-) and saw an Eighth Symphony listed. At 30 minutes, this may soon be half or less of a CD selling for, say, #17, but the score itself was available for $175!

That is an extreme example. A complete set of 14 symphonies by Vagn Holmboe (1909-96) available on CD for about $100, but ONE symphony in score for $45 is typical.

I remember reading that Charles Ives would send a photocopy of his music to anyone who asked. But the majority of composers and /or their publishers keep scores locked away under the barrier of this high price. I frankly don't understand it-- aren't they disappointed at the failure of their music to get heard, let alone looked at? Simultaneous read/hear guarantees outstanding progress toward learning the music-- i.e. learning to empathize with it etc.

The library I an writing this from has four copies of Roussel's 3rd symphony but no copies of any others. It has the 8th but no other Glazunov symphony. It has the 5th but no other Martinu symphony. I could go on. Is there an affordable resource on the Internet which can address this dilemma? The IMSLP International Music Scores Library Project has nothing to offer that is still in copyright-- nothing written in the last 80 years by and large, due to being sued by publishers-- though a commendable collection of earlier material.

Anyway, in terms of something to start with, one company has dedicated itself to making scores available relatively affordably in the US, i.e. Dover. One could also mention Eulenburg, somewhat smaller and more expensive but a large selection. Tax payers can request their libraries to buy things of this nature.

Eco-Toys

In Essential Preschool Part I I have written up a line of (mainly noise-making) toys which aim at an even earlier stage in a child's maturation. Here technological failure so far to make the technological arrangements to use a scanner has delayed adding a series of illustrations. Ideally, the article will describe and depict each toy and show anyone down to maybe age 6 how to make it (for even younger users) right in one's own garage or basement from materials found in the same neighborhood.

Contributions to such an article might result from just taking a walk outside and seeing what dead branches may have broken down in the last storm near your house.

An artist who developed a unique way of using grotesque branches is Susan Clinard, formerly of Chicago now I think Connecticut. In her monumental pieces at the end of a gnarled "limb" one finds a plaster "hand" or "foot", carefully grafted on so one does not notice the transition from wood to ceramic. Our uses are simpler and cheaper, still artistic but emphasizing safe playhandling and education, such as the swing-ball-in-the-cup Clwnky, where a plastic bottle part (cup) rests on the flattened and sanded end of a branch with grotesque breakoff at the other end a few inches away.

Further discussion about score-reading (and projection)

For convenience I have added more discussion on this to the Treedesigner page. Thanks for your interest.Treedesigner 22:29, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Ecoversity

To this article (which again I found already in progress) I have been adding a section "Eco-carpentry", eventually showing how to make thriftstore shelving and other useful products from scrap boards etc. Again, illustrations remain to be added.Treedesigner 01:25, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

No worries about not contacting me sooner -- I've been running around for a bit, just settling back into stuff now in any case.

I think the gist of what you are saying on my user page is that young children would benefit from exposure to music -- even in written form? Just want to clarify that, it's been a long day and I'm not sure I'm clicking into it.

As for getting illustrations scanned, sometimes print shops or even libraries have the facilities to do this, and if you let them know it's for a nonprofit project, they might waive any fee that is associated.

When I'm more lucid, I'll revisit your comments and I'm sure I'll have a bit more to say. Thanks. Historybuff 05:10, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Music scores

Hi Treedesigner, I just saw your comment on Historybuff's talk page. On music scores, I always knew it was problematic to get some, but I hadn't realised until I read your comment how expensive they can be. I was sure I had read about an initiative to make classical scores publicly available, so went searching and found the International Music Score Library Project (or at least the Wikipedia article on it). Seems like we've just missed it - it was taken down following an order from a musical publishing company in Vienna. Reading the post-mortem comments from the guy who set up the site (who was just a student, with few resources to hand) makes for pretty depressing reading - but he does say he will be making efforts to revive it somehow. If you like, you can sign up on the wiki to receive email notifications of any changes. In any case, we can continue working - and I think it would be a most worthwhile project for us to learn about copyright law and its relation to classical music... Cormaggio ^talk 11:49, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

• Looking up the cited IMSLP and post-mortem forum, I think that website primarily provided sheet music content which could be projected on your screen-- analog to the actual pages on a music stand in front of you-- so you could take your instrument and play the piece in the time-honored way. A representative of the Universal Edition company dismissed that as a "free lunch"-- after all, the publisher must meet the costs of shelving the paper somewhere and having it available when someone finally wants it, or the on-line equivalent as the case may be. That dispute is beyond my depth.

Simultaneous (synchronized) (audio-visual) textfeed

I am concerning myself, by contrast, with the situation of / similar to borrowing a score from a city library and reading it, page after page, start to finish, while listening to a CD (or a scheduled presentation of the work in question over a radio station, having the score ready at the appointed starting minute). Instrumentalists from Indonesia and other countries on the IMSLP forum appeared to be complaining that this kind of free text supply was less available to them than in some more developed countries with better supplied libraries. I guess their only options would be to purchase from the main cheap option, Dover Scores (USA), the somewhat more expensive Eulenburg (Germany) or others like Universal Edition.

I have bought a few scores but generally I've been less interested in owning a few favorites than in having access, for just a few readings each, to a wide range of symphony and chamber literature. Mostly I watched the radio station schedule and borrowed scores at the right time to match with the broadcast. I found that there is almost no public awareness of this way of using music literature, for I almost never had trouble finding a copy of the scheduled work even if the library had only one or two copies-- despite the fact that tens of thousands were listening to the station (usually WFMT).

Conversations with a range of individuals over a period of time have yielded the finding that a large majority say, "Oh, but I can't/don't read music." They seem to be unaware that reading a score while listening, just as the conductor does (again, different from a player who is concentrating on one part) is worth while for anyone but a few elite professionals, or is something anyone can learn to do easily. (Schools and churches have taught most children exclusively the read-and-sing-single-part concentration approach, dominated by an all-important word-track reducing the amount of attention left over to notice what the music as-a-whole is doing. (See about opera, below. This may be a left-brain-right-brain issue, I don't know the particulars.)

Cue-finger, alias cursor

One of the most important helpful things I have found out about (physical pages) score-reading is that you can secure yourself very effectively against attention-wandering, getting lost, etc., simply by keeping a finger pointing to where the music is on the page, and moving that finger along in a smoothly rhythmic way from the left side (or upper left corner) of each page to the far right side (or lower right corner) at which point it is page-turning time. Once you get in the rhythm this is easy to keep up and can be done without conscious thought. (Watch for tempo changes, accelerandoes and rallentandoes written in by the composer to let you know when to speed up or slow down the cue-finger.)

Note that today in the computer age we recognize this finger is basically "imitating" what a cursor would do for us on a website. Even fifty years ago there used to be a series of movies featuring familiar songs (Home on the Range etc.) with a "bouncing ball" moving along left-to-right above or near the words to be sung. The computer challenge might be to provide this cursor function, plus timely page-"turning", to readers of complete works-- from single staff to symphony orchestra.

"Riding the finger" -- for infants and toddlers

Now imagine you are seated with a child on your lap, and you group one of your hands around one of the child's hands so that a single finger is pointing out, and you gently push this finger along, left-to-right, at the bottom of the page in synch with heard music. (How early can youngsters "catch on" to the A/V relationship?) In the course of events the youngster also learns how to use the spare hand for incidental services such as helping hold the book, turn a page etc.

(There's a double payoff here, in that both read-partners are getting a chance to experience the music, each in their own wholistic head in their own wholistic way as the case may be.)

The 90° turn approach-- at least at the beginning

Arrange the score so that the left side of each page is at the top and the right side is at the bottom. Move two inpointing childfingers gradually from far to near, one under (to left) and the other over (to right of) the staff system, or entire page, as applicable. When both (i.e. all four) hands reach right margin (i.e. our tummy) they are ready to cooperate in a quick smooth page-turn (up and away), leaving fingers positioned afterwards to start "reading"/riding the next page. This makes the whole process easier technically and maybe it doesn't matter until age three or so whether kids learn to read "right side up".

The sad tale of the adult concertgoers

Imagine paying more for a ticket than to buy a complete score, and receiving a right to sit quietly staring at the well-dressed musicians or gesticulative conductor (no jumping or bellowing). Compared to reading a score, there's nothing in this "standard" concert procedure to serve as an anchor keeping your attention on track, and the daily load of short-term appointment-memories stuffed in your brain over the past day or two will keep intruding with ill-timed "reminders" from that other world of, like, "the paper must be turned in by 9 tomorrow", "the door key is in the left shirt pocket" etc.) disrupting the thread of attention to the music so the concertgoer may suddenly find he has totally "missed" the last 5, 10 minutes and it's too late to restore the context in which what he's hearing now would have full meaning. There's no one to admit his disappointment to, the whole thing is filed away with other "repressed" memories and guilt feelings, and the victim files out at the end of the concert , looking safely well-educated in his nice clothing but hiding a wound in his soul. Well, if the fabric of attention to the story line of the music is broken, what's the value of drowning oneself in all that expensive high fidelity concerthouse sound (let alone the cost of gas and parking)?

By contrast, with a $10 radio and a borrowed library score one can get 100% integrity of the heginning-to-end experience and, consequently, highest rote-learning efficiency (this is precisely where that has its place). Degree of memorization left over from a previous hearing is the supreme predictor for how well, while listening to the same work later, you can anticipate passages of interest and, as they arrive, harvest the "joy" or "gratification" promised by the passages that preceded them (and by the program notes. By the way, reading the damned program notes has distracted me from hearing millions of real music notes). Such "emotion" which develops as a result of learning in turn facilitates further learning, including the spill-over beyond music.

Listener benefits compared to performer benefits

There has been little attention to this issue of listener benefits and how to obtain them through the audio-visual method described above. They are more than just a substitute for the benefits of learning to be a performing musician. It is considered a statistical fact that orchestra conductors, who experience this pattern of mind-behavior on a routine basis, are the longest-living occupational group in western society. On the other hand, note that just about every famous conductor or composer was also a competent pianist or (Nielsen and Sibelius for example) violinist. In fact, I think experience in score-reading contributes to developing the music executant skills, and also to forms of education outside the music domain such as visual art ability, or the design of manufacturable products.

Most dramatically, score-reading at age 3 may turn out to be a major enabling factor in learning to "read", in the conventional word-sense, a year or two later. Needless to say, the scores of Beethoven also offer a different order of moral truth compared to the Dick-and-Jane story lines used to spoonfeed the reading function to children conventionally up till now. (Sorry, this just might make 12% or more of all professional teaching obsolete, so if you need advice on finding a real job let me know.)

Synchronized website score presentation with radio broadcast

I have been wondering if a radio station would not be in the best position to furnish a cued score-reading service-- for example WFMT has a website wfmt.com, which presently contains scheduling information and articles about the music, but so far to my knowledge has not presented any synchronized score-pages matching what is playing on the radio.

While the dream of every minute of music broadcast on a station like WFMT being accompanied on the station's website by the equivalent left-right inches of score probably runs up against financial barriers, meanwhile maybe certain programs could introduce this function first as a pilot project.

• "Exploring Music" with Bill McGlaughlin, which runs at 7 p.m. weekdays (Central Time), is a didactic program (in the tradition of Karl Haas and Peter Schickele), where offering the score would be particularly important. On this program there may be over a half hour of music, the rest of the hour being observations by the host, many of which would gain in relevance if the listeners could immediately see the score while hearing the next audio example. I think the host of this show sits in St. Paul and has helpers in Chicago and New York, so maybe there is a wiki person somewhere on the globe who can step in and help set up the computerage for score-simulcasting.

• "Collector's Corner" with Henry Fogel, Sunday evenings 9-11 p.m., might be my favorite program. Fogel sometimes offers a series lasting several weeks, such as all the recorded symphonies (total 27) of Nikolai Miaskovsky. Unfortunately our big city library doesn't have a single symphony score by Miaskovsky. How much would it cost WFMT (partly funded by listener subscriptions?) to obtain one-time presentation licenses for scores of this degree of rarity, which most listeners can't even consider buying?

• WFMT also presents the Saturday Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, a Tuesday night vintage opera recordings series, and Andy Karzas's "From the Recording Horn" (old vocal records). In this literature maybe it would be o.k. to save some money and present only the vocal text; or check out these choices:

• For large print, original-only, press 1.
• Vocal text, original and English, press 2.
• Same as above, original and Spanish, press 3. (etc.)
• Piano-vocal reduction (as of opera, etc.), original-English - 4
• Same for original and Spanish - 5
• Full orchestra/vocal score (in the case of Meistersinger, this runs over 1000 pages) - press 6 (etc.)

Admittedly the radio station would have to hire some more staff to provide all those new subdivisions of the website service (our wiki guy?), and correspond with the score music publishers all over the globe about the fees, etc. but I think this represents a fabulous education opportunity and so maybe the right place to sketch it out is right here, before lobbying the bigshots at WFMT and forming a partnership in audio-visuals as described in Preschool Project.Treedesigner 22:16, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, just because the Universal Edition representative dismissed making content open as a "free lunch", does not mean there can be a valid, concerted effort to making content (such as scores) free. I'll fully admit that this is out of my depth, but I'm sure there is a discussion about this to be had within the Wikimedia community and wider free culture movement. Broadcasting scores simultaneously to music might indeed be helpful - though it wouldn't do much for the long-term picture (except to be used as a 'wedge' to coerce publishers or content owners to relinquish their control). If this is a discussion you feel like having, I could point you to a number of people in Wikimedia who might be knowledgeable on this. As for the technical side, there may be some Java or Flash interface that does something like what you propose - though nothing that is fully compatible what what Wikimedia currently allows by way of file formats). Likewise, this is another discussion that may be worthwhile. Cormaggio ^talk 15:29, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Free scores moot, maybe the broadcast licenses would be cheap enough

How much will Universal Edition charge for 5 minutes here, 30 minutes there, on this-or-that score or libretto? Do they have a rate-per-minute? Can a bunch of subscribers help the radio station afford it?

Maybe protections for the publisher can be built in, for example, make each score appearance be on a one-time basis, coded so listeners can't download it but only view it in passing, etc.

Naxos.com music website

This large low-price record company provides a subscription service where listeners can pay a yearly fee and have access to hear any entire record in a large catalog, and alongside it another subscription service where members can hear the first quarter of any cut free. To help keep track,they provide a digital clock (00:00:01 and up) and a ittle cursor-like device which crawls slowly across a span showing where you are in your two minutes (from an eight-minute movement, etc.).

Because they are now positioned to charge for the sound service and also to offer a free fraction as a teaser to increase the business, perhaps they can afford to take on the new administrative burden of contacting publishers all over the globe, renting the appearance of the paperwork, to present simutaneously with the soundtrack they now provide. (Pioneer territory?)

About toddler computer use, and protective education carpentry

Taking to heart some of the points made on the Preschool Project Talk Page, I am aware that excessive computer time, at least in today's almost 99% "normalized" upright siterect posture, is widely considered dangerous. (Computers, especially the more engrossing games, contribute to obesification worse than old-time t.v. did, because much of the time while the t.v. blared on, the children were ignoring it and running around the room getting their exercise, whereas today they are sitting up close staring at the screen, trying to be ready to respond to this or that cue or prompt etc.)

SLABTOP

One way to shift much computer time from siterect to lyingdown posture (saving your up-time for healthful loosening-up exercises and honest work, like at a table saw) is to construct a frame (from old wood lying around in your garage) on which a 18" x 12" piece of plexiglass can be suspended at a visually appropriate height, on which in turn a book, page or SLABTOP (i.e. computer) can look down at you while you lie face up looking up at it.

Or lie between two shelving units, with the two boards that support the plexiglass crossing from a shelf on one side to a shelf on the other.

With toddler

Now remembering the image proposed earlier, with the toddler on your lap fingerpointing the same score together, imagine instead lying face up, with the toddler lying face up on top of you, head to chin, the computer screen arranged on the slab so both partners can read it easily, and maybe the keyboard tied in safely to the structure conveniently near our tummy. Imagine the partners just watching a cursor move across the music, or moving a touchscreen finger as described above. More discussion of this and other carpentry will be developed at Essential Preschool Part I and Ecoversity (Carpentry) articles. Eventually photos and documents of the carpentry will be needed, and added as soon as I am scanner-literate.Treedesigner 20:11, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Smoking/Cigarettes kill trees 19 ways worldwide

Hi Treedesigner!

Your health and forestry resource Cigarettes kill trees 19 ways worldwide appears to be well-developed and ready for learners! Would you like to have it announced on our Main Page News? --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 18:41, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

• Thanks @Marsh, go ahead with that, and your suggestion put me on the spot so I worked on the article some more. There'sa a way to go, the challenging title might get some readers to supply more of the 19 "Ways" that I haven't thought of yet. Sorry I'm forgetful and didn't do the categorizing yet, health and forestry are good.
• More questions regarding the title: I thought the change another editor made takes away some of the drama; on the other hand maybe it should be changed to "Smoking cigarettes kills..."-- if nobody smoked 'em, tree killers wouldn't make money.Treedesigner (discuss • contribs) 00:15, 12 September 2017 (UTC)