A collection of unreliable memoirs and jottings written at haphazard times with questionable logic, bordering on the pointless
21st March 2009.
That heading above is correct. 'Haphazard' and 'unreliable' are two relevant words for this Faux Blog. My birthday and I'm helping the plumber move our laundry from inside the house to a position outside the house. Isn't that where laundries are supposed to be? However, later we'll take in an evening concert at the new Melbourne Recital Centre. With its world class acoustics it will provide the perfect auditorium for La Compania, a baroque ensemble playing original, or copies of original, baroque instruments. As it's an early concert we'll head to Southbank for a quiet celebratory dinner and raise a glass to loved ones round the world.
...momentary pause to slip into political mode...
On the Federal Government front, I'm ruminating on whether the Hon Tony Abbott or the Hon Peter Costello will win the Mr Irrelevant 2009 title. However there is a certain ring to the possibility that it will be a dead heat and that Abbott and Costello will once again be at the top of their tree.
15th, 16th and 17th September
Day One: I take our little Milou for an ablution walk to the park by the river in Melbourne. About 50 metres away I see a lady rise from a bench near the edge of the river and walk away. Nothing unusual about that, but when I get closer I see she has left a little white clay statue, about 25cms high, on a metal plate left over from the days of river barges just in front of the bench. It's of two children, a boy holding a book open and a girl looking over his shoulder at the book. I turn to watch this well dressed lady walking purposefully out of the park. Doggy distractions prevail so Milou and I wander along to finish our walk and I tell Nicola about this action when we get home.
Day Three: Milou and I walk by the bench and I see that the little statue has been smashed into a hundred pieces, its base still securely glued to the metal plate by the river bank. Humans are unusual creatures.
14th September
During my performances I wonder about the origins of the various speeds at which phonograph records rotated.
I have since heard that the original speed of 78rpm was derived by the
simple fact that the inventor of the successor to the cylinder disc,
Richard Ignatius Parlophone, had a daughter whose birthday was the 7th
of August, 1878, that is, 7.8.78. He felt compelled to celebrate her
birthdate by exploring the possibility of making his new invention spin
at 78rpm. To his chagrin the device became airborne and shattered
against his laboratory wall. On picking up the pieces, he discovered
that they numbered in total 78. He considered this to be an
extraordinary omen and proceeded to his nearest liquor shop where he
spent $78 on Jack Daniels at a dollar a bottle, consuming each bottle
in exactly 78 minutes. He was 78 years old at the time and passed away
in a drunken stupor. There were 78 people at his funeral, the service
lasting 1 hour 18 minutes. An addendum to the contemporary reporting of
this event is that his tombstone carried only two lines of letters:
R.I.P., under which was the line R.I.P. His name has been commemorated
in the long-running annual award to recording device inventors: THE
RICHARDS, unkindly referred to by some disrespectful critics of his
work as THE DICKS. To me, this is the most plausible of all
explanations and I will upload it to Wikipedia if it is not already
logged there.
However I thought I'd better do some real research and came across the following three explanations, from a site called Web Archives, duly credited. Frankly I think my version has about the same plausibility but please judge for yourself, dear reader.
PETER COPELAND
British Library National Sound Archive, London , writes
It was Emil Berliner, the inventor of the gramophone, who
determined roughly how fast old disc records should spin. He
avoided Edison's need for a stylus made from precious jewels
by using points which could be made from steel sewing
needles and pins. The size of the stylus effectively
determined the size of the grooves in a record and the
recordable frequency range limited by this groove size
determined a speed between 70 and 90 rpm.
Standardisation did not begin until 1912, when the British
Gramophone Company conducted listening tests on their back
catalogue. They settled on the average (or possibly the
median) of these tests, which turned out to be 78 rpm. Other
companies adopted this, but the process was not complete
until the early 1930s. Even after this date rogue rpm
records still appeared. After standardisation problems still
occurred. Because of electrical mains frequencies
differences on opposite sides of the Atlantic, stroboscopic
speed testers and synchronous motors meant a nominal speed
of 77.922 rpm in countries that used 50 hertz and 78.261 in
countries that used 60 hertz. These were later fixed in
national (but not international) standards.
Records of 33 1/3 rpm were developed in conjunction with
films. A 12-inch 78 with Berliner-type grooves could hold
between 4 and 5 minutes per side. The first practical sound
films produced in the US in the late 1920s had their sound
on separate disc records and it was more important for the
sound to be continuous. A reel of film might run for 11
minutes, so a rotational speed of about 32 rpm was required
to make the sound match the picture. History doesn't tell us
why precisely 33 1/3 was chosen, but in retrospect it was a
very good choice because stroboscopic speed testers can be
made for this speed which will work on both sides of the
Atlantic.
It seems CBS engineers (who developed the first LPs in
1948), simply experimented with one of the old machines
hanging around in their workshop. They then developed new
groove dimensions which gave an acceptable signal-to-noise
ratio with the new plastic material "vinyl".
The 45 rpm speed was the only one to be decided by a precise
optimisation procedure (by RCA Victor in 1948). Calculus was
used to show that the optimum use of a disc record of
constant rotational speed occurs when the innermost recorded
diameter is half the outermost recorded diameter. That's why
a 7-inch single has a label 3 1/2 inches in diameter. Given
the CBS vinyl groove dimensions and certain assumptions
about the bandwidth and tolerable distortion, a speed of 45
rpm comes out of the formula.
GEORGE BROCK-NANNESTAD
Copenhagen, Denmark, writes
From 1894 to around 1930, there were many different
record speeds ranging from 65 to 90 rpm, each case being a
compromise between playing time and the need for a clean cut
in the original wax. The Victor company used 76 rpm for many
years for its recordings but instructed buyers to reproduce
at 78 rpm, the record's durability was improved that way.
The standard of 78 rpm arrived by default, although the
actual speed depended on the electrical mains frequency.
Constant linear speed, or varying the rpm, was
commercialised but did not prove to be a success (until the
arrival of the CD).
The speed of 33 1/3 was introduced in 1927 after theoretical
analysis of the compromise between signal-to-noise ratio and
playing time (3 minutes per radial inch) by J. P. Maxfield
of Bell Laboratories for sound films produced on the
Vitaphone system. And it was a professional de facto
standard before it became commercialised by CBS in 1948. It
has been suggested that 78 minus 33 equals 45 was the reason
for the emergence of 45 rpm records but, in fact, Maxfield's
analysis still applies: the 45 "single" was RCA's equivalent
to a 10-inch, 78 rpm record, only smaller.
ROGER WORSLEY
Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire , writes
Emil Berliner's first disc gramophones were wound by hand
at somewhere between 60 and 100 rpm. The 7-inch discs lasted
a minute or so and had low sound quality. Berliner and his
assistant Fred Gaisberg realised that unless the speed was
governed, the gramophone would never be more than a novelty.
Gaisberg visited a young mechanic who was making clockwork
machinery, hoping to use it for sewing machines. This
machinery was never successful in sewing machines, but was
ideal for gramophones, and it rotated at 78 rpm. The
mechanic, Eldridge Johnson, became a millionaire. Columbia
made all its discs to run at 80 and HMV had its pioneer
recordings produced between 68 and 92 rpm with the key of
the piece marked on the label. You then tuned it on your own
piano, using the gramophone's governor. These speeds all
gradually settled into the standard of 78.
When talking pictures first arrived in the late 1920s, the
sound was recorded separated on discs and had to be
synchronised by the projectionist at each showing. Every
cinema projection room had a pair of projectors, each taking
1000-feet reels of film, whose running time was about 10
minutes. The projectionist switched projectors after each
reel. Ideally, this meant that the sound should last 10
minutes as well, as it would be impossible to synchronise a
sound changeover in midreel. At the time, however, a 12 inch
78 rpm record lasted for only about 4 minutes, so the
Vitagraph company simply slowed down the 78 until it lasted
10 minutes and recorded all their masters on that, starting
each disc in the middle, as it was easier to drop a needle
there than the outer edge. This new speed was 33 1/3 rpm,
adopted for other records in the late 1940s when Columbia
introduced its first vinyl, long-play discs with
microgrooves, giving a play time of about 30 minutes on each
side.
However, the long-play disc wasn't particularly suitable to
popular music, as the public wanted its records as singles
with good sound quality even at high volumes. RCA Victor
came up with a 7-inch vinyl disc with microgrooves, rotating
at 45 rpm, a speed chosen specifically to make the most of
the music, unlike 78s or 33 1/3s. And does no one remember
the 16s?
© Copyright New Scientist, IPC Magazines Limited 1997
30th February or 1st March
I have been noticing over the past six months the use of the word "oversight" to imply examination or overview, eg the OPI will have oversight of the police force. I am aware of oversight, or an oversight, to imply that something has been overlooked or not noticed,eg "...that was an oversight missing that street sign..." This is almost the opposite of the way this word is being used currently. Similarly, the word "fulsome", so often used in a positive fashion such as fulsome praise, is from the word foulsome, a pejorative.
27th February 2008
Getting quite excited now, as you probably can feel through cyberspace, because this is a leap year. However, for me it is not just any old leap year. On Friday 29th February 2008, an intercalary day, it will be the 60th anniversary of my arrival from Ceylon (Sri Lanka nowadays). Being the pedant I am, it is actually only 15 years since I arrived in leap year terms. I plan to do some leaping to celebrate. I didn't realise at my then tender age of 7 that I would be given the mnemonic of having an Olympic Games happening on each leap year to remind me of my arrival at Princes Pier in Port Melbourne on the P&O ship "Strathaird". I accompanied my mother, her parents and my brother Nigel. My father had come to Melbourne the previous year to set up a home for us and one of my strongest memories of that arrival morning was waking in the cabin to the sound of my father's voice when he met us and leaping off the top bunk to greet him.
So leaping has been part of my activities for as long as I can remember. I've leapt impetuously into all sorts of things, some of which I've managed to get out of (or, more correctly, some out of which I have managed to get). As my syntax teacher used to say, a preposition is not a word one should end a sentence with.
I had a wonderful time in Phuket staying with my daughter Cassi, son-in-law Phil and grandkids Pascal and Indigo. The two weeks whizzed by, specially as Patong beckoned a couple of times and memory banks tend to take on sub-prime lending meltdowns in that part of the island. Took the 12 string and did a little concert at the British International School just to check that the pupils had indeed learned all four verses of Morningtown Ride.
Also caught up with dear friend David Groom, with whom I had written several songs during our time together in England, a couple covered by The New Seekers. He has lived in Thailand over 17 years and we have communicated only sporadically but, as with such friends, the years matter little. There is one particular song we wrote, "Sad Elena" that I am working on to include in the new CD.
The Barham Country Music Stampede last weekend was great fun. Met lots of country music folk as well as getting together with school friends from 50 years ago who suddenly materialised in the crowd. I was able to draw on some of my repertoire from the days of producing Leapy Lee (there's that word "leap" again "creaping" in) most written with Barry Mason in the early 1970s. One of them was the single I produced for Leapy, EVERY ROAD LEADS BACK TO YOU. I had just logged on after getting back from Barham when I received an email from Geoff P to say that he and his wife had recorded the song for their new CD. 'Twas in the ether doubtless. May even do this one for my new CD.
Talking of new CDs, I am running seriously behind time with my recording plans. However, as running and leaping are Olympic sports I am keeping focussed in a manner of speaking, this being a leap year if you hadn't realised. Need new spikes.
Word of the month: incorrigible. If you're going to be in anything it may as well be a corrigible. I have recently been in tuk-tuks but a corrigible, well tuned and with a hardtop, beats them any day.
Thought for the month: What we have today is all we have until tomorrow
Have been asked by readers about adding comments to this rant. Because it is a "faux" blog, that is not immediately possible but if anyone wishes to contribute, please use the "Contact Us" page and I will make sure the contribution is inserted where it needs to be. Would love to get feedback on anything or even break new ground on any topic so write away. Your emails come directly to me.
30th December 2007
Was hoping to make this at least a monthly jotting but anyway for those who read this please accept my best wishes for a happy and healthy new year. January will be a time for getting new stuff together for my third CD, entitled TRAVELING AND NOT. Unsurprisingly, this will be a collection of traveling-type songs and non traveling-type songs.
Thought for the new year: We live and die as a result of our own decisions
Word for the month: MACULATE (adv) describing someone not very tidy eg His clothes were maculate, hence he was not allowed into the Executive Lounge Bar of the Crown Casino
24th September 2007
Geelong, Hamilton and Wyndham dates just gone by featured four wonderful musicians: Michael Harding on keyboards, Mick Hamilton on electric and acoustic guitars, Paul Gadsby on bass and John Creech on drums. 'Twas great to work with them all and I look forward to the next time whenever that may be...
Gary Ablett is hot favourite to win the 2007 Brownlow Medal, announced tonight. This award honours the memory of that famous Australian Rules Football legend, Horace Medal, who thrilled crowds with his high marks. However he didn't matriculate because his marks were not high enough. This is a little known fact about the great man and is likely to remain that way judging by the paucity of visitors to this web site.
Grand Final Fever is gripping Melbourne and Port Adelaide. Equine Influenza is gripping the whole of Australia. Vaccines for both will be available by Sunday 30th September.
Gee, all the paragraphs so far have begun with the letter G.
Goodbye for now.
28th August 2007
Well here are the first words. There is a proverb (Chinese, I think) that states: a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. If that is the case, does a journey of two thousand miles begin with a two step? And what of the Fox Trot? Consigned to the sprung floors of decaying dance halls, I venture. And what of The Ventures? Walk Don't Run, they opined. I hope they took their own advice and started their journey without jogging. And what of The Journeymen? Contemporaries (or forerunners) of The Kingston Trio, they too had motion in their name. I wonder if there was a group called Motion...
The moon is red as I write but this will not be read as I write, which I think is not quite right.
So you get a hole in one. What if you get a hole in the other one as well?
I reminisced tonight with Nicola about our respective early childhoods. My memory of that time in Ceylon is hazy but I think I can visualise Nigel and me being looked after by the servants: career carers who were our keepers and tended us tenderly. They left little bowls of milk on the wide verandahs each night for the cobras.
Nicola's upbringing didn't have cobras, otherwise there were similarities. We will reminisce again soon. It was fun.
Early start for me tomorrow because of first gig with Michael, Mick, Paul and John. Sounds like part of a gospel group in a way. Folk mixed with country rock, pop and inanity is probably nearer the truth.