I’m in Nova Scotia for a few days, but it seems not a whit further away from everything. Example: I’m sitting in a friend’s house recovering from the 9-hour drive, and Skype goes off –my octogenarian friend Max (in Arkansas), calling to find out if I know how he can find a Mike Seeger project called Talking Feet, a film about Appalachian dance traditions. As it happens, Betsy is in Virginia for 10 days, and she’s staying at Mike and Alexia’s house, so I email her to ask her to ask Mike, and while waiting for her reply I do a quick Google search and what do I find but the whole film in streaming video (choose between QuickTime and RealPlayer)… and Betsy writes back to say that Mike and Alexia’s current project is updating the 1987 project… It’s a wonderful film, the sort of thing that’ll make you think differently about the pedagogical possibilities of the YouTube revolution.

Kieran Healy stabs to the quick with this posting from Crooked Timber, which references Clifford Johnson’s pointer to NPR’s (well, WNYC’s) April 21 2006 RadioLab show, which starts out with Diana Deutsch. To hear why you should care, listen to this 53 second outtake.

Years ago (1989-90 as I remember) Betsy was using a Mac-based sonographic tool to do analysis of pauses and other waveform phenomena in speech. I used it to explore a lot of samples of singers, as a part of the Cross-Cultural Studies in Music course that I was teaching at the time. I ran across those file folders the other day, while sorting through the academic legacy remains in the barn, and was diverted into an hour or so of what-if (paths not taken, that sort of thing). And then this morning I find Mark Liberman’s Poem in the Key of What posting at Language Log, illustrating some work he’s done with a new generation of sound analysis software (it’s FREE too: Praat and WaveSurfer). I’m tempted to reopen that frontier. For a bit of a teaser, consider this representation of Bessie Smith’s 1927 “Send me to the ‘lectric chair“:

ADDENDUM: I did some experimenting with Praat, and here’s an extract of pitch contour. Not sure just what it all means, but it sure is fun.

I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.
—Charles Pooter

• Cyanotypes
  “super easy photo prints at home”
  (tags: photography)

Douglas Adams’ 1990 BBC documentary Hyperland (see Wikipedia entry for background) will eat almost an hour of your day. Let it. I promise you won’t regret the investment.

• Pictopia: large prints
  “You email them a digital image file; in a few days they mail back a magnificently large, utterly crisp, remarkably stable, frameable print.”
  (tags: photography)

• Widget Supply
  “Hard to find hobby & craft tools”
  (tags: tools)

Two bits encountered this morning, about as unrelated as can be I think (or perhaps hope…), though both have to do with savor: Robyn Eckhardt’s utterly delicious essay on Bplaa Raa, and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Going East”, a rumination on Napoleon at the Dahesh in the August 28 New Yorker (alas, not available online). One lovely definition from the latter:

Camp –the savoring of unintended ironies [pg. 80]

…and it was enlightening to learn a bit about Dr. Dahesh (“Dr. Wonder”).

• Bogosity
  adumbrated at Language Log
  (tags: language)