Posts by J. Simon van der Walt 9 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2008
I'm a professional music educator, and I see students make errors based on mistaken transcriptions all the time. Not just internet transcriptions, though: sometimes they transcribe something themselves and don't quite get it right. Often the problems are in the piano reductions put out by the publishers. I found my first mistaken time signature years ago in the sheet music for Sky's first album, and there is what seems to me a very questionable transcription of the rhythm of 'Recorda Me' in one of the Real Books.
As far as the internet goes, I seem to remember a while back looking at online tabs for 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree', and I couldn't find a single one where I could agree with the chords given.
I have a dream that one day someone will open source the entire history of recorded music – the origial stems, that is – so that we can go back and listen exactly what the keyboard player was playing in bar 7 that day. Oh, plus the original autograph scores to every movie ever made :)
My flatmate had one, let me use it. Loads of fun, somewhere I've still got Forth code written out by hand for a drum machine: actually, the Forth stuff was just to programme the rhythms, there was some sort of serial interface I seem to recall, which I used to drive some homemade analog drum sounds.
Speed: yeah, I remember writing a ball-bouncing-around-the-screen program. Couldn't understand where I had gone wrong: no ball?!? Then I realised the thing was going *so fast* the ball didn't have time to display!
And of course, the added joy of working through Leo Brodie's 'Starting Forth', the most entertaining programming book I've ever read :) http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/
I let it run through my hard drive, and although I freely confess to having been all over the dark and dodgy corners of the internet downloading dodgy stuff, and letting my students plug their PC-infested USB sticks into my machine… nothing. No malware at all, not even so much as a Word macro virus.
Ho. Hum.
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