by Christopher Sutton | Oct 30, 2012 | General
Ever since joining the Accelerator Academy programme, my life has been a bit of a whirlwind.
So while I have a chance, here’s a celebration of the little things.
New Oats Day!
Groats and steel-cut oats, via Amazon Prime.
When 5kg of steel-cut oats and 5kg of groats arrive in the mail, you know you’re well prepared for the coming winter.
Secret Pianos
A secret piano among the rooftops
Along with the awesome Street Pianos at St. Pancras (which I played each time I passed through this summer) this was an extra special secret keyboard which someone painted among the rooftops at Loughborough Junction.
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by Christopher Sutton | Dec 23, 2011 | Ear Training
There’s no such thing as not playing. Music has rests in it. So, you’re on a rest and the music will begin shortly.
If you’re interested in musicianship, aural skills, and ear training, most of the practice you do probably revolves around listening to sounds. Whether you use individual notes, chords, rhythmic parts, complex timbres, or practise active listening in real music, you probably spend your training time listening. As well you should!
But perhaps we’re forgetting a complementary part of developing our ears for music?
Claude Debussy said that music is in the space between the notes, and it’s important to remember that silence can be just as important as music.
Silent Adoration
In the midst of a week filled with all kinds of exciting music, most of it new to me, I went for the first time to an “adoration of the blessed sacrament” service. Though I was raised Catholic, this is a part of the Catholic tradition I’d never really come into contact with before. The service started with some prayers spoken together, the sacrament was presented at the altar, and then for the rest of about an hour we simply knelt and prayed. In silence.
This was a marked change from the rest of the services during the week which were lively, musical and generally full of youthful exuberance. We simply knelt, and prayed, in silence.
That’s not to say that the world was silent around us.
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by Christopher Sutton | Aug 8, 2011 | Music
The startup world loves “bootstrapping”: the idea that you get a business off the ground not by seeking investment and outside funding, but by starting to sell products or services and then gradually growing the business using your own income. It comes from the expression “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and just means that you’re using whatever resources you have to hand to get yourself going. I’m a bootstrapping fan myself; it’s how I’m running Easy Ear Training so far.
Lately I’ve been thinking about bootstrapping in music learning, and specifically ear training.
There may not be an obvious connection to you, but if you’re a musician you’re probably doing this to some extent already – just without realising it!
There’s a huge wealth of history to music tuition, and no shortage of teachers to tell you “this is how you learn X”, “this is how you practise Y”. And I wouldn’t for a second want to dismiss the value there.
But there’s another way too. This is the attitude of bootstrapping. Of “do whatever works”.
Bootstrapping your music education
If you want to be a concert pianist or reach the top of the profession in your chosen instrument or talent, you need to be careful. You don’t want to learn the wrong fingering for a scale, or develop poor embouchure early on – because the more you practise the wrong method, the more ingrained it becomes, and the harder you have to work later on to fix it. As a saying I recently came across puts it: “Practise makes permanent”.
That suggests that a “do whatever works” mentality is wrong-headed, and will only cause you pain later on.
But I think that attitude is far too motivated by fear. (more…)
by Christopher Sutton | Apr 12, 2011 | Ear Training
It’s often been said that birds are nature’s musicians. They have an incredible variety of sounds and songs, and each species has its own distinctive calls. An experienced bird-listener can identify the type of bird just by its song. And from Vaughan Williams to Olivier Messiaen to Bob Marley, the music of birdsong has long inspired composers in their creations.
One of the wonderful things about developing your ears is that the more you learn about the sounds you hear, the richer the world around you becomes.
Just as a capable musician will hear riches and depths in a piece of music far beyond what the regular man in the street hears, somebody who has taken a bit of time to understand the sounds of nature will experience the world around them in a fuller, more inspiring and ultimately far more enjoyable way.
I recently enjoyed this kind of transformation with sounds from an unexpected source: birds.
The bird-watcher’s bind
If you grow up in England, taking an interest in birds is something of a social faux pas. There is a long-standing stereotype of the bird watcher as a sad obsessed nerd who has no ‘real life’. Like the train spotter, he suffers prejudice as someone who lacks friends, or any appreciation of ‘cool’ stuff. Cool stuff like football, chasing girls, drinking too much… and whatever else the current prevailing social conventions happen to be.
Of course, as they grow up, most people realise how silly and arbitrary the cool/sad distinction is – and how anybody with a passion or a hobby they’re enthused about is a deeply lucky individual. You begin to see that somebody with a specialised knowledge of an intricate subject is to be admired, not stigmatised or ostracised.
Although I have yet to be won over by bird watching, I have had my mind (and ears) opened to the wonders of bird listening.
The Dawn Cacaphony Gradually Resolves
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by Christopher Sutton | Oct 4, 2010 | Ear Training, Music Theory, Technology
Being an Apple App Store developer is really a mixed bag. While it is streets ahead of other mobile platforms’ app stores in terms of platform consistency (which developers love), the market size, and audience for your apps, there are some deeply frustrating issues as well.
I want to briefly discuss one: the lack of two-way communication with users.
I’ll also look at some particular issues one user had with the RelativePitch app my company developed, around learning relative pitch with or without a harmonic context.
The App Store Review System
Users are free to write reviews of apps they download – and in my experience user reviews make an enormous difference to app sales. The App Store interface shows the most recent reviews of an app prominently, and having a negative review visible there can really impact sales.
A recent 1-star review can strongly influence App Store shoppers
What’s truly frustrating though is that developers have no way to respond to reviews, either publically or privately. We can’t email the users, and we can’t post a reply to their review. Some developers will respond within the app description text, but this isn’t scalable or particularly beneficial.
Sometimes a user will have misunderstood something, or somehow missed out on a large part of the app’s functionality. In a lot of cases this can be useful information: you can improve the app to aid the user’s understanding more in future. In other cases you just have to throw up your hands in the air and wonder what went wrong and whether the user spent even a couple of minutes trying to resolve their issue or looking at the help screens!
Once in a while there will be a review which puts me in a bad mood. Normally this is because they’re flaming the app without real justification – this inevitably affects the impression other potential customers get of the app, despite lacking substance.
And sometimes the reviewer raises interesting points which I disagree with, and I’m simply frustrated not to be able to respond.
Harmonic Context in Interval Training
One such reviewer appeared this week. They were kind enough to review both of our paid apps, leaving a 1-star rating and a strongly worded negative review for each. They raised some interesting points though, which I’d like to respond to here.
I’ve included the whole review below, and then again with my comments in-line.
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My name's Christopher Sutton and this is my personal blog. You can learn more about me