

Zed Shaw: What I Been Up To Lately - twampss
http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-12-21.html

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stcredzero
Knowing where the One is.

Easy for 2 3 and 4 beats. In most styles of music, more than that is treated
as a compound of 2 and 3 beats. So 5 is 1-2-1-2-3 1-2-1-2-3 or 1-2-3-1-2
1-2-3-1-2. There is one Middle Eastern 9/8 rhythm which is 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-3.
There is the obvious and symmetric 9/8 that Irish trad enthusiasts are
familiar with: 1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3.

By treating things as compound rhythms, you never have to remember where the
one is. One is one. You just have to remember how many beats there are this
time around.

I think this comes from the way humans walk. Since we are bipedal, we
naturally fall into gaits with 2 or 3 beats. (Skipping is based on 3. Waltz
step is another one based on 3. Since we have two legs, we have to repeat on
one foot to get 3. 4 is really just a smoothed over 1-2-1-2.)

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wglb
I don't quite parse "Take Five" that way, but I will give it another listen.

So is any music influenced by the various gaits of a horse?

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stcredzero
Old Time, Bluegrass, and French Canadian trad fiddle.

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neilk
A browser for music, isn't that what Songbird was supposed to do? The idea was
that it was a web browser / RSS reader optimized for acquiring linked media
files. A similar attempt to break out of the iTunes walled garden.

Although Zed seems to be talking about making some internet-friendly format
for describing the band and their albums and other works. That's an
interesting idea, although such formats don't seem to take off in practice.

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wglb
The pain of doing something new: "Me: Never mind, I guess I have to make it
first."

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blueben
The pain of not knowing what you're doing, such that you can't even explain it
to a willing listener.

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wglb
Interesting--I read it as being a new concept that people didn't immediately
get. I felt that way the first time I heard about the Smalltalk IDE. It wasn't
until I tried it that I understood it. I had no previous frame of reference
for it.

