tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:238292 Lethargic Man (anag.) Lethargic Man (anag.) 2020-02-07T09:34:23Z tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:238292:548805 2020-02-07T09:34:23Z 2020-02-07T09:34:23Z public 1 When I was a teenager, way back in the middle of the last century, I used to dabble in musical composition, as well as writing fiction, despite the fact I didn't study music at school beyond the age of fourteen, and my lack of qualifications in composition beyond Grade 5 Theory of Music.<br /><br />This, dating from about 1990, is the best of what I turned out. It's pretty derivative, but then all my creative endeavours were then. (My writing would eventually evolve past that; my composition petered out before it got to that point.)<br /><br />It's also badly named; the "blues" in the title refers to the mood, but in the title of a piece of music one would expect it to indicate the genre, which it doesn't.<br /><br />It is programmed and played on the Hybrid Music System for the BBC Microcomputer, which I think I might have got as a barmitzvah present from my parents. It sounds pretty crude and electronic today, but back in the eighties, you couldn't get a more powerful system for programming and playing music for anything near like the price.<br /><br />The language the Hybrid Music System used, AMPLE, was, so my more musical brother told me, the best one around for encapsulating musical notation in a text-based form, to the extent that to this day, if I have to jot down music, I'm more likely to do it in AMPLE than go to the bother of scrawling down a stave. In AMPLE one extends a note, or a rest, by whatever the current unit of time is set to with a slash, a.k.a. solidus ("/"); this actually works by moving the current pointer in time forward by this much. One can also move the pointer back by that much with a backslash (a.k.a. reverse solidus), so take that, Omar Khayyam! *ahem* I mean, hence the subtitle of the piece. This functionality is useful when a phrase or longer section is repeated except for the last few notes.<br /><br /> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/l5KoaDRcdcM" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe> <br />Don't ask me why I am posting this here now; a critique from my musical friends would probably be humiliating. But OTOH they're my friends so I'm hopeful they're not going to humiliate me.<br /><br />And if you're not one of my friends, then all I can say is well done for reading this far. <tt>;^)</tt><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lethargic_man&ditemid=548805" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments