The Open Rights Group today asked me to block Phorm from my website. As I hate the intrusion into people’s privacy that the Phorm system represents, I was happy to do so. Follow the link to see how to block Phorm/Webwise from your own sites, and to find other suggestions about how you too can express your displeasure to BT and Phorm/Webwise.
Porta-booth
As requested, here is a picture of my porta-booth.
I have been using it for most of my recordings recently, which I do in the larder. It’s not a great room for recording, as it has far too many hard, reflective surfaces in it, but the porta-booth does a good job of damping down the echoes and liveliness of the room.
Why do I use the larder? It’s the only room in the house where the (loud) sounds of the passing traffic don’t penetrate (very much). I still have to contend with the fridge and the boiler, but Noise Removal in Audacity does a fair job of dealing with those. And it’ll only be the fridge in summer.
A compromise, but one I can live with for the moment.
Spectra of plain vs. porta-booth recordings
I built a porta-booth the other day, and was agog to test it out. I made two recordings in very similar, horribly challenging, conditions. For both of the recordings I was within 10 feet of a fridge whose motor was running, and I could hear vehicles passing outside the house. Each recording has a maximum (peak) level of -3.1 dB. Although I didn’t use exactly the same text for each recording, I did say roughly similar things, and I did try to keep my speaking voice about the same for both recordings.
I listened to both recordings, and I was surprised by how “dead” the porta-booth version sounded compared to the other recording. I wanted to see whether I could understand what was happening, so I made a graph of the spectrum of each recording. The blue line in the graph represents the spectrum with the microphone placed outside the porta-booth, while the red line represents the microphone in the porta-booth.
I can see three distinct areas in each curve. The first area, on the left up to about 700 Hz, is the highestand has a sharp peak. The second area, 700-9100 Hz, wiggles around a very gently falling line. The final area, from 9100 Hz on the right, falls faster, but more smoothly.
I don’t really know how to interpret this pair of curves, or whether they even explain the differences in the qualities of the two recordings. Let’s look at the differences in each area, and see whether I can make anything of them.
In the first area, the porta-booth recording peaks much higher than the plain one. That means its lower frequencies are stronger than those in the plain recording. Certainly, the porta-booth recording sounds deeper overall. Wikipedia says that the typical adult male’s fundamental voice frequency is between 85-155 Hz, which falls well within this area. I don’t have an especially high nor an especially deep voice, so I’ll assume that my fundamental vocal frequency is about 120 Hz. I can easily cover two octaves, probably more. 2.5 octaves is equivalent to multiplying by 2×2x1.4=5.6. 5.6×120=768. I’m going to guess that this first area represents the fundamental frequencies of my voice. The fridge might well operate in this area too, however, but I’ve just checked the spectrum for a section of audio in which I’m not speaking, and it’s nowhere near as high as the parts where I am speaking, even in this area of the spectrum. I think that rules out any fridge theory.
Next I’ll look at the area on the right, from 9100 Hz up. I think that represents mostly noise. Looking closely, the smoother lines here fall at two different rates, changing at about 16400 Hz. I suspect that the microphone responds less to these higher frequencies, hence the faster fall-off. The porta-booth is much quieter than the plain recording in this region, probably contributing quite a lot to the deadness of the sound.
Finally, the middle region probably represents the harmonics of the voice, which gives it its unique colour. Again the porta-booth version is lower than the plain one, meaning that the plain one has a higher proportion of high frequencies, contributing this time I think to the difference in the timbre of my voice between the two recordings.
The upshot is, I think, that I can recover some of the brightness of tone that I think has gone by boosting some of the middle frequencies using EQ. Time for some experimentation, I think…
I have just finished the recording of Tom Brown’s School Days that I have been doing for LibriVox. This is my first solo project, and I’m very pleased with it. Now that I’ve finished, though, perhaps it’s time to think about what the book meant to me.
I remembered the book from the 1970’s BBC TV series that I watched as a child. I particularly remembered the scene where Flashman, the school bully, roasts Tom in front of an open fire. But although the struggle against a bullying culture is a large part of the book’s message, I was surprised to realize that it’s main message was the growth of a normal, English boy into an English man.
The opening chapters deal with Tom’s early childhood, and describe country life in the Vale of the White Horse. The people we see there are held up as examples of good, honest working folk, the best that England can produce. The author certainly does not approve of modern customs.
Tom is sent to Rugby, a public school, and we find that he is no better than average at his lessons, but masterful at getting into and out of trouble: he comes home late after a long run; he falls foul of a gamekeeper and a local farmer; and he is involved in a famous fight. The School’s headmaster despairs of him, but he hatches a plan to pair Tom with a “good” boy who will need his protection, and so we meet George Arthur.
For me, this is where the book loses a great deal of its fun. It becomes a catalogue of virtuous behaviour as Tom learns to try properly at his lessons instead of using a crib, to pray nightly as he was taught, and to value honesty and “Christian” manliness. My strong impression is that this second part of the book represents the meat of what Thomas Hughes has to say to us. I found it more than a little priggish and proselytising, and was made distinctly uncomfortable by the overtly Christian message. For instance, one of the scenes that had the greatest effect on Tom was talking with Arthur , who had narrowly survived a bout of fever. The dream that Arthur recounts isn’t at all subtle in its portrayal of Christian ideals, and yet it strongly affected Tom. It would have had me sticking two fingers down my throat if I’d been in Tom’s position.
Nevertheless, I am glad I did re-visit this book. I now have a much deeper appreciation of what it really is. And most importantly, I have a deep pride in what I have made.
Via Conscientious I saw this poster. I can’t imagine what good the police think it will do. The number of false positives alone is likely to use up a huge amount of time. Perhaps the perpetrator of the campaign should be indicted for wasting police time.
Allow me to clarify. How many terrorists are there in Great Britain? One hundred? One thousand? I don’t know, but 1000 seems on the high side. How many of them would be stupid enough to use a camera suspiciously and openly? Now ask yourself how many busybodies, or even public spirited citizens who have been scared by the Government’s misguided demonization of Muslims, will think they have seen something suspicious that should be reported. Every day. It’ll be chaos. I give it a month for the problems to become evident, and six months before they abandon the campaign. It’ll only be that long to save someone’s face.
What a farce!
Fanny Hill is a famous, nay notorious, novel by John Cleland, whose heroine is a self-described woman of pleasure. The edition I read was the LibriVox audio version, recorded by multiple readers in the early part of 2006. It is the story of a young girl (she is no more than 20 years old at the end of the novel) who falls into “bad” ways. She tells her tale very explicitly, and it seems that the novel was the first widely read book in the English Language that was labelled erotica. At the end of the story, however, Fanny chooses the path of virtue, citing her pleasure in her vices as a measure of how good it is to be virtuous!
Erotica, my arse! This is pornography plain and simple. The characters barely attain two dimensions, even Fanny herself. Most are thin and sketchy, and little more than caricatures. Good characters are all uniformly good looking, and give Fanny a good time sexually, while bad characters are ugly, and they bore and pain her. Worst of all, to my mind, is Fanny’s intolerance of male homosexuality, even though she is thwarted in her attempts to have the only two men she ever sees together arrested for their “crime”.
I didn’t like this book at all. I finished it, just. I made the effort to finish it in tribute to the LibriVox readers who volunteered their time, and partly also because it is so well known that there must be something to it. I kept hoping that there would be more to the book than mere titillation, but the story finished before the quality arrived. My loss. Don’t let it be yours. This book is a warning that notoriety is not a good reason to read a book.
Verdict: no (and only just escaped being a NO).
Graham Masterton’s novel Chaos Theory is a thriller whose protagonist, stunt man Noah Flynn, becomes caught up in a puzzling series of murders that appear to be related to a medallion he found while diving. With the aid of a female colleague, whose skills seem frankly improbable, and a privately funded peace envoy and her staff, he tracks down the murderers and tackles them in his own unique way.
This is a pot-boiler, as you might guess from my synopsis. It was a lot of fun, and kept me turning the page, but it certainly wasn’t very substantial fare. The plot went slightly beyond the line of credibility, the characters weren’t caricatures but neither were they fully rounded, but the situations were amusing. I’m glad I borrowed it from the library rather than buying it, but I don’t regret the short time I spent reading it.
Verdict: yes.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight is the fortnightly poem at the moment on LibriVox. It forms a circular journey of linked thoughts, starting with the frost on the window and moving through the writer’s own thoughts, to contemplations about his baby, sleeping in his arms. Next the fluttering flame in the grate reminds him of his school days when he would day-dream while watching a similar flame. Thinking about his own past, and its hardships prompts thoughts about his baby’s future, and his determination that the infant’s future will be as good as his own past was hard, good in all seasons, including winter. And so we return to the quiet frost.
The poem is written in iambic pentameters. A long time ago I learned to scan Latin poetry, so I thought I knew about this: mixtures of spondees (DUM DUM) and dactyls (DUM DI-DI). I was stunned to find that almost every foot was a spondee or a trochee (DUM DI). When I thought about English doggerel, however, with its characteristic dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum rhythm (recall Hiawatha!) I realized that my preconceptions were just that, and that I should discard them.
But I did look through the poem, just to be sure I knew how to read it, and I found a couple of lines where an odd or archaic pronunciation would be necessary to keep the meter. For example the first two lines are
The frost performs its secret ministry
Unhelped by an wind. The owlet’s cry …
in which the word unhelped must be pronounced with three syllables instead of two to keep the meter of the line intact. Interspersed was similar, requiring four, not three syllables. Imagine me now muttering the poem with my fingers beating on the desk in time with each syllable, as I checked every single word to see whether I should say any more of them in that odd way. I found these: populous, numberless, fluttering, and articulate I said with only two syllables each; tower had only one syllable. There were a few others, but you get the picture.
The other challenge in reading the poem was to prevent myself from reading it line by line instead of in meaningful phrases.
What I’ve described makes it seem as though reading the poem was quite an effort, and you’d be right, it was. But I actually found the effort well worth it. By spending so much time on it, and thinking about how I was going to read it aloud, I found that I understood it so much better than I did on first reading. I thought at first it was a little rambling and pointless; by the end I appreciated the circular route the poet had taken, and understood his desire for his child to have a better life than he had had.
It was definitely a positive experience for me, one I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t decided to volunteer at LibriVox. In fact, even when I did volunteer I never imagined I would read poetry, and still less did I imagine that I would enjoy it. Thanks Hugh.
Nathan Lowell’s South Coast is the fourth of his tales of the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper that he has podcast at Podiobooks. Unlike the others, this one is set on a single planet, and is subtitled A Shaman’s Tale. It follows Otto Krugg, only son of Richard, who is the Shaman of his village. As Richard is, so must Otto be, and at first the inevitability rankles. But while the commercial fishing industry tries to get through a crisis time, which involves Otto’s parents being out fishing all day, Otto comes first to terms with his destiny, and then embraces it.
In a parallel thread, we follow Jimmy Pirano, the Company representative on the planet, and incidentally son of the CEO of the company. Jimmy is given the job of increasing the planet’s catch of fish by an impossible amount, and a good deal of the book is devoted to his struggles to do so.
A third thread follows Richard, who has never really been a proper Shaman. He has simply gone through the motions. When he is bitten by a dangerously venomous fish, he experiences an internal change so great that it allows him finally to become a real Shaman. Richard’s and Jimmy’s stories cross and are resolved in the final scenes of the book.
The fundamental driver of the first half of the book is the impossible demand to increase the quota of fish caught. The characters expend a lot of energy trying to find out what subtle and devious plans have resulted in the unexpected and unreasonable demand. When the reason for the impossible demand became clear, I was distinctly disappointed by a turn of events I thought unlikely to happen in real life. Without spoiling the plot, I can’t say much more than that I would have thought such momentous issues would have been more widely discussed than they were.
My favourite parts of the book were the mystical sections where Otto is discovering his vocation as a Shaman. He discovers his ability to carve whelkies, spirit guides in the form of animals carved from driftwood, that are given by Shamans to people who need help. The carving process is referred to as freeing the animal from the wood. Otto also discovers how to bless boats, and that it involves a small sacrifice of his own blood. It is the difference between Otto’s form of blessing and Richard’s that lets us know that Otto is the real deal and Richard is the fake. My enjoyment of the slow discovery of a personal vocation continues a trend for me with Lowell, as I also enjoyed those parts of his other books where Ish was discovering his own vocation.
On the whole, however, I don’t think South Coast worked as well as the Trader’s Tales, nor did I feel the need to devour it in a single day, as I did with them, and so I rate this book yes.
There are three novels so far in Nathan Lowell’s Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series. I started listening to the first of them, Quarter Share just before Christmas on Podiobooks, and liked it so much I went back to the second (Half Share) and third (Full Share) earlier this month.
I’ll get the rating out of the way first: I loved these books. I couldn’t stop listening. I managed to discipline myself enough that I subscribed to the chapter-a-day feed on Podiobooks for Quarter Share, but about four episodes into Half Share I just released all the episodes and listened to them over the next two days. Full Share was downloaded during one night and listened to completely the following day, a week day! It’s clear that I found all the books very compelling, and I liked them very much, so I rate them YES!
The books follow Ishmael Horatio Wang, a teenager who has to learn to find his own way through life after his Ancient Literature professor mother is killed in an accident. Finding his way involves both seeking his vocation and replacing his family. He finds his vocation in space, and his family on board the ship he joined. It is these parallel searches that are the strongest part of the books for me. Ish’s searches resonated strongly and were probably the main reason I was so drawn in by the story.
There are, however, weaknesses in the writing. Lowell has written that he wanted to create a hero who wasn’t born heroic. Indeed Ish starts out right at the bottom of the ladder, and is in no way anything more than a commoner with no heritage to sustain or drive him. But Ish excels in everything he tries: he is literate and perceptive; he is a studying and test-passing machine; he is a great lover he can do any job he turns his hand to; he is good looking and sexy; he is fit; and he even makes superb coffee. He has no failings or weaknesses at all, which does tend to reduce the level of tension for me.
There is an element of mystery – almost magic – through the novels, which is odd to find in science fiction. Make no mistake, this is science fiction, not fantasy. The ship that Ish joins, the Lois McKendrick, has a ship’s spirit whom Ish trusts implicitly, and who is almost a full character in her own right. Another character, Sarah Krugg, is a shaman, and is credited with uncanny powers. I found the idea of magic in a science fiction novel strangely compelling, but I imagine that it might put some hard core SF fans off.
No review of these books would be complete without commenting on the reading. Nathan Lowell reads his stories with a warm, intimate voice that draws you in. The characters all have their own voices, each subtly drawn and distinct from the others. I found the reading excellent.
I would be surprised if Lowell could find a publisher for these books, because of the weaknesses I mentioned. I enjoyed them immensely, despite the weaknesses, but I think that it is because their plot and characters seemed designed to appeal especially to someone like me. I’ll certainly listen to anything else that Lowell writes and podcasts.
