Harmony Now

I'm going to talk about music this week. I like music. I tend to start singing to just about any music I hear, whether or not I even know all the words. Actually, to my sister's chagrin, I tend to attempt to harmonize, which (considering my limited choral and musical theory experience) tends to not always be successful. Sometimes it's really cool, though...my roommate and I can sing harmony on "Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, for instance, so when her computer starts playing it we tend to stop doing our homework and to start singing instead.

I used to listen to music a lot while working on homework. Somewhere along the line, my tendency to do that has diminished...I think I know the music too well, because I tend to just sing along. I tried to get some programming done the other night and mistakenly set my computer to play not one, but both recordings of Sweeney Todd on my computer...the rough product of the ensuing 2 hours was about 5 lines of code, but the singing was fun.

Mainly, though, listening to music while doing homework has been replaced with bringing my laptop to lab classes so I can turn on some music while we're working. I've been waiting to see if someone would complain, but actually, everyone in general seems pretty cool about it - my Chem lab prof came over the other day to inspect what artist was playing. There was an incident with the TA for a Chemistry workshop asked after about an hour "Just checking, because sometimes I just hear things...is there music playing?" But over all, it seems to go over well. It makes the classroom a little less quiet and the 15-minutes-of-stirring periods a little less dull.

Of course, the taste in music varies around here. If you walk past West, there's anything from country music to metal to smooth jazz playing; North can have daft punk or rock. Professor Van Ryswyck starts every class with some of his music - it's usually acapella covers of various classic (in the sense of the 1960's, not the 1760's) songs, but we've also hears some Firefly soundtrack and some Cake.

The music love around here gets expressed in a variety of ways. There are many people with minor-to-major Rock Band/Guitar Hero addictions, as that game seems to have both good music and strongly addictive properties in that it remains fun after extended playing. We have lots of people in the Concert Choir and Chamber Choir and various orchestras and acapella groups...there are people with guitars they take out on sunny days and violin music occasionally wafting down the hallways and just some pretty cool stuff.

A little over a decade ago, some of the musical energies of the college were directed to producing some very...intriguing parodies of Beatles songs and the like in order to describe the core curriculum at Mudd. The albums "FroshChem", "Mortal Kalculus" and "Stems Test" are the ones I have on my computer, which include such hits as "Puff, The Magic Rhino" (who ran at 4/5 c), "You Don't Need Sunscreen" (which describes all the basic truths we need to understand to survive at Mudd), and the favorite of all upperclassmen who like to annoy the frosh by blasting things over the speakers while we're studying for our first Chem tests, "I Love Frosh Chem" (one of the most repetitive and least melodic songs in existence - if you've ever heard "I Like Traffic Lights" from Monty Python, it's that with different lyrics).

I've actually been working on writing a song in my spare time lately. It hasn't been going spectacularly, but it's starting to actually working, and ducking in to the piano practice rooms late at night on weekends seems to be helping somewhat. We'll see whether that will get in better shape this weekend. Right now the melody seems pretty solid, but the lyrics are of fail. We'll see if there's any time to spare.