Procrastination

 I have reached peaks of procrastination that even I might once have thought were too great, too high. I've done it with the help of 'working from home', this monstrous situation that allows me to practice the piano, play video games, read nonsense, and any other disastrous activity, any time I like.

Back when I worked at the lab, in an office, I could only procrastinate for so long before I was cornered and had no choice but to do-the-thing. I couldn't play the piano or watch Netflix on a Tuesday afternoon in the lab. I might avoid work for a while by reading internet garbage, but eventually that runs out - it really does, it just takes a few days - and I have to do-the-thing.

But this...

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I've learned a Chopin nocturne - pretty well - laid groundwork for several Rachmaninoff preludes, memorized the 3rd movement of Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata (biggest thing I've memorized in.. decades, probably?), and now I'm getting the hang of the awesome last movement of his first Sonata. I'm getting pretty good at improvising random lines over 9 chords! It's great! 

And it's worthless and stupid and dangerous, since I'm not a pianist and I'm not getting paid to play the piano. I have papers to write, finish, revise; experiments to plan; blah blah blah.

Perfect Cadence

Just a few days ago, I realized something about my simple mind. It had been bubbling up for a few months, but suddenly it's crystallized:

Start your melody with the dominant tone on the upbeat, then down on the tonic ("5-1"), and I will love your melody and it will stick in my mind forever. Apparently.

I am a lifelong piano player, but I've only recently really started to get acquainted with the general classical piano repertoire. So while I've been playing everything by Erik Satie since I was a teenager, only in the last 5-6 years have I started to play a lot of Chopin, Scriabin, Grieg, etc. Only a 2-3 years ago did I first start to learn Chopin's etudes.

One of the etudes I played for a while, maybe the most beautiful one and one of the most famous, is the Op.10 no.3 in E-major. It starts on the 5, then to the 1:



That is a nice melody! Happy but a little sad, reflective, contemplative. Then this summer, I start looking for Schumann pieces to play, and of course I rediscover his "Traumerei" in F:



Very nice melody, easy to play, similar mood, meaning (in my mind) to the Chopin etude. And it also starts from the 5 to the 1. I notice this and think, how neat, two melodies I like that start the same way - and just a half-tone apart!

Then this summer, I start listening to Grieg's lyric pieces, and I get the book and they're all fun to play, mostly not too difficult. One of my favorites is one of the simplest, the "Watchman's song":

Now you see it again, again in E major: 5-1 to start the melody. And again, similar mood. Now I start to realize something funny is going on. I'm not just cherry-picking here: these are three of my favorite piano pieces to play or hum to myself in the hallways in the last year or so. I also realize that my favorite Grieg melody, "Solveig's Song" from Peer Gynt, starts the same way (5 up to 1 on the downbeat), though it is in A minor.

Then, well, I forget about it - and last week, not sure why, I'm thinking about it again. My favorite tune from Satie's Gnossienes: no 5, in G major.



Not just the first two notes - all four of these pieces (Chopin, Schumann, Grieg, Satie) have the same first three notes, and they're all in nearby keys (Emaj, Fmaj, Emaj, Gmaj).

Once I noticed the Gnossienne, I start finding the pattern everywhere. First, many other great classical melodies, though mostly in minor keys (the major ones apparently stand out to me), and I realize I can just sit and they're so easy to find in my brain:

Beethoven's "Marmotte"; Smetana's "Moldau"; Grieg's "Solveig's song"; Faure's Sicilienne, Scriabin's Prelude 14 (which I learned 10 years ago, one of the first of his that I learned); the 'song without words' from Holst's folk song Suite, which was always my favorite part of that tune when the band played it in high school. Those are all in minor keys, but notice this too: whereas the major key ones all go down from the tonic (to the major seven, each one), the minor key tunes all go up! And except for the Sicilienne, they all go up to the 2 (it goes up to the 3).

And what do you think has always been my favorite leitmotif from Star Wars? The "Force Theme", in C minor, which goes up from the tonic to the 2!

Then we can do folk songs and pop songs; I would have immediately have listed my childhood favorites as O Shenandoah (Major, but goes up from the tonic) and "My Grandfather's Clock" (Major, goes down to the 7 like the four initial examples). Everyone's favorite 'Simple Gifts' (the Shaker hymn used by Aaron Copland). My favorite Simon Garfunkel song: El Condor Pasa (Minor, down to the seven from the tonic); a pretty good Queen song, though not my favorite, is "Who wants to live forever", in a minor key going up to the 2 from the tonic.

My two favorite Tom Waits tunes: "Downtown train" (outside another yellow moon) and "If I have to go", though those are so similar it might be that the former is a rewrite of the latter. And what Mozart melody, that I would always have said was his most beautiful, starts in exactly the same way (same first 4 notes) as those Tom Waits melodies?

It doesn't start on the upbeat, but it's the theme from the second movement of his clarinet concerto:



***

Now, starting your melody by going from the dominant to the tonic doesn't guarantee I'll love it. I quickly thought of two examples I don't really care for - just two, while it was so easy to think of the two-dozen beloved ones above: I don't enjoy Schumann's "The Happy Farmer", maybe because my mother's a piano teacher and I've heard it way, way, way too many times in my childhood. And Wagner's wedding march ("Treulich geführt") is just clichéd to death. But then, speaking of Wagner, there is main theme of the Tannhauser overture, which I remember listening to over and over again, for its inspirational feeling, back 2-3 years ago. Easily my favorite Wagner theme, though I had not thought of it in a while (and I have never listened to the actual opera, so I don't know the source of the theme - wikipedia says it's from the "Pilgrim's Chorus").

In sum it seems that there is a key in my brain, shaped like "5-1", and it lets you right into my eternal musical memory.

boiling

1. Standing by the stove the other night, waiting for a kettle of water to boil - as it does, starting from the near-silent rattle through the increasing racket, and the whistle starting, and all the other noises that accompany that moment, I had the distinct feeling that I was hearing the big chromatic crescendo at the end of Prokofiev's great D-minor Toccata, one of my favorite piano pieces. It's not that I was fooled - this was not an auditory deja trompé, but something similar - but I've never felt a piece of familiar music so strongly evoked by some random physical event. It was definitely primed by having listened to that piece something like 10 times in the past week. Now whenever I hear that piece, when it gets to the silence at the end before the crescendo, I will think of a boiling kettle.

2. Horrible problems with the paper I've been working on and hoping to have submitted in a matter of days. A big part of the paper - the way that I interpret the data, basically - is a set of relatively simple contrast perception models which I run through the experiment as tests of different hypotheses. I had calibrated these to a set of human thresholds, which I was never quite comfortable with for various reasons, but that's the way I had done it; as a final touch to a figure, I decide to go and generate thresholds estimates for the 'best' model, to plot against the human data, just to show how similar they are, and when I go to do this, the model starts giving me imaginary numbers, which is bad.

By the time I figured out what was wrong - it wasn't really a problem, I was just not using my code properly - I had decided that calibrating the model to the thresholds for my humans was probably a bad idea, because the way I measured the human thresholds was kind of weird, and I could be sure of simulating these properly, so I should just use some standard thresholds. Why not? Nobody is going to argue with a standard CSF. So I plug a standard in and - and I'm going to note here that every time I do something with this model, I have to go and recompute the simulations, which takes hours - and it all goes haywire. The model that 'works', and that's consistent with all these nice facts that I've lined up and made a nice case out of, still works, but depending on how I implement the change in sensitivity, the alternatives either perform horribly - which you'd think is okay, but really doesn't look plausible, just makes it look like I haven't given them a fair chance - or they come out reasonably similar to the favored model.

So, I have to be fair, at the same time that I don't want everything to fall apart. I am certain that things work the way I think they do, and I'm prepared to be wrong, but if I'm wrong then I don't understand how I'm wrong. And building evidence either way progresses in these multi-hour steps in between which I'm sitting here with a stomach ache because I'm afraid that I'm going to wind up with evidence that my experiment isn't actually that good at discriminating these different models.

The problem seems to be in the low-frequency filters; the lowest frequency filter is basically four points in the Fourier domain, and it happens to take up a disproportionately huge amount of image contrast, so the 'not working' models tend to be uniformly low-pass in the simulation, which I know is not fair, because it's all because of that low frequency channel. So I figured that, since these are 'sustained' stimuli, I would be justified in just taking out the lowest few channels and leaving the top 5 or 6 band-pass channels - one thing here being that I'm not willing to go back and redesign everything to the point where we have low-frequency DC-sensitive channels. But then when I just have the mid-to-high frequency channels, the three models are too similar, which I don't like either, and which I know is just because I'm now allowing the low s.f. to get through. And I also know that this version, even though it has the 'standard' CSF, doesn't really because the lowest channels are shut off. So I turned them back on and changed the gain to the CSF, which I realized I had wrong the first time because....

Anyways, you see what I'm doing - changing more than one thing at a time, and making mistakes because I'm rushing it. This just prolongs everything, because every change, or every attempt to figure out what the effects of a change are, and every mistake, takes many hours to evaluate.

Anyways, high irritation and anxiety.

update march '13

nothing in particular to write about here, just an update on current events:

work
1. blur adapt paper is back in review; i want this one to be over.
2. classification spectrum paper nearing completion; i really like this one.
other work in progress (paper with SM et al, they seem receptive to my suggestions).
3. still need to discuss new experiment with CPT, putting that off; boss suggests writing up a paper on it to figure out which data needs replication the most.
4. started low-level talks with potential collaborators on the migraine-mapping stuff.
5. haven't applied for new jobs yet, NECO seems unlikely to respond.

other
6. reading a new book, "history of tennessee" by James Phelan, written in the 1880's (it's not tacitus, but it's free). he has a habit, sometimes interesting sometimes irritating, of making close analogies between seemingly asymmetric historical events, usually tennessee vs. england, and is fixated on 'anglo saxons'. interesting going at any rate--
7. on piano, mainly trying to master chopin's "minute waltz" over the past few weeks, if i can play it straight through in 2.5 minutes i'll be happy; also on music, greatly enjoying a 2 year old album of french electropop; the songs 'civilization' and 'ohio' are great background when your daydreaming about the colonization of america.
8. this paper on a rogue study using a research botnet to scan pretty much the entire internet is one of the most interesting things i've seen in a while. there's an awesome .gif figure in there, basically showing the earth's rotation in the average number of pingable public IP addresses plotted across the globe.
9. way too much time wasted on reddit, which i only just discovered lucky for me, and playing MH2.
10. i have a horrible, horrible urge to write a longer historical narrative centered around the life of Gideon Morgan. trying my best to resist...

musical optimization

i never write about music, although i listen to and think about and play it a lot. i hereby inaugurate a new journal tag: music. i'll start with a simple observation: Hindemith is the Nelder-Meade algorithm of music. he starts in what seems like a random place, with chaos and dissonance, and gradually winds inward to a tight, crystalline, consonant solution. supposedly he had a System, an algorithm for generating this kind of music, so i think the optimization problem analogy is apt.