Monday January 6, 2003 6:56:21 PM Joe Coluccio

MIDI on our life’s journey, I went astray...

It is a new year. In three or so months, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, spring and renewal will awaken. Chaucer sings of April’s sweet showers and T.S. Eliot is more pleased with breeding Lilacs out of the dead land. And Holmes returns from his plunge from the Rickenback Falls and, of course, Jesus is resurrected from the dead. With all that going on how can I not sit here and wonder what direction I will take. I come up every year with the same answers.

Please don’t mistake this for some vapid New Year’s Vision. Those piles of stock resolutions are easily broken. Nope, I’m damn serious about this business. Just look at the pages of my journals...on second consideration, I’ll just tell you about them.

First and foremost there is the “I will write more and actually finish something soon.” preamble That’s the most risible of all. I’m laughing out loud right this instant in scathing skepticism. How presumptuous, I guffaw. How impertinent, I chortle. How particularly peculiar, I chuckle. And how preposterous, I snicker. Go ahead, I direct my now smaller self, give it a try. Put yourself on the line. You’ll just be even sillier.

Second there is the “I will learn to speak a foreign language.” gambit. Followed by a fitful frenzy of search for audio tapes, complete sets of French in a Minute less the volume two cassette, “Getting along at the train station and cafeteria.” Voulez-vous une tasse de Cognac avec du crème fraîche , monsieur?” Along the way I find a battered copy of Wheelock’s Latin and Workbook, Agricolae in puella est! Hmmm there seems something solemnly salacious about this sentence that I have long ago penned in a ecstatic frenzy on Page Thirteen just above the Title - Syntax. Ah, bene, cogito ergo amo. Then the unending word drills in Danish and Italian and even an occasional smattering of German. Ich est uno polyglot!

And forget about the Greek in the Attic, Aristotelian or otherwise, ‘cause I really can’t figure how to get it to print in a post to the internet. Which reminds me of the promise of those Learn in 21 days, C++, Java, CGI, Visual Basic, Perl, VBA, XML and LSMFT manuals, that sit snarling at me about the fact that their time on this programming world is perishing apace.

Consider my real world work with me a moment. I look longingly at Will Stoecker’s book on Industrial Refrigeration and I stubbornly won’t compel myself to use the SI (Système International, AKA, Metric) instead of the IP (Inch Pound, AKA, the measuring system we recalcitrant dumb Americans use). Kilopascals to you, psig to me. And I can’t possibly, old man, consider Watts a proper measure of British Thermal Units. Tut! The Empire and all that, you know!

Down the shelf a click, intrepid we go. Calculus for Dummies, the Utterly Confused, People who Hate Calculus, Pilgrims Who Have Forgotten Calculus, abandoned, closed, integrated and differentiated covered in dust, remain unused.

And Oh The Music, the Guitar, The Keyboard. This year I have torn it a deeper rip with the procurement of a Guitar Synthesizer and piece of software, called Sibelius, designed to help with music composition and manuscript preparation. (I know, Beethoven is decomposing in my basement as well,)

What in the world, you say, does a guitar synthesizer do. Well..ahh...it can make my guitar sound like a piano and.. Uh, it can play a nifty rhythm accompaniment on the Low E String while I pick a mean lick of the High E String...and ...well c’mon what does it matter what it can do, lotsa stuff, including connect to the MIDI Port of my computer and print those luscious notes on the staff of a piece of virtual paper on the screen provided by Sibelius (The Program not the Swede) as my guitar softly weeps.
See, I get there eventually. MIDI Stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. And it is a dance of signal that lets a MIDI Prepared Musical Instrument Interface with some Digital Device or other. My Keyboard is MIDI, my cheap Stratocaster Guitar now has a pick-up that sends separate string signal to a MIDI device that connects to a Synthesizer and my computer’s sound card has a MIDI Port. I connect them together. Power up Keyboard, Synthesizer and Guitar, boot the computer, start the Sibelius Program. And.

Nothing happens!
(other than some sixty cycle hum and the susurration of a few air cooling equipment fans)

It isn’t intelligence. It just helps amplify ours. (At some later date I will pommel you with my ideas about IA and not IA)

Oh, did I mention that I was going to look very seriously into composing music this year. Let’s see! Start with a very soft CMaj7 Chord played in Third Position, slowly on Staff Two after a bar or so a cushion of tin whistle about a third higher, while the Tambora beats a slow sad rhythm on Staff Six....

..and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.