Strings and Beeps

[ateolf]

Mary Beth and I went to the Memphis Symphony Orchestra yesterday. First they did Wynton Marsalis's Violin Concerto. I was a bit skeptical going in as I'm not a fan of Wynton Marsalis (I mean, he's probably better than Branford but they're of a piece, I guess his stuff tends to be more bland and derivative) but it ended up being good. The soloist was Kelly Hall-Tompkins and aside from being driven by virtuosic violin playing of like shredding it up, it does of a lot of getting every kind of tone and sound out of the violin as possible. It was a bit frenetic in jumping around into every kind of style it could conceive of cramming in, though in a way that was pretty cool. Then after that they did Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and that was good. I did pick up a little merch by getting Kelly's cd In My Own Voice as well as her dvd Imagination. After that, we ordered some pizza from Jet's which we'd never had before (never had Detroit style at all). So we picked that up and brought it back home and it was good (though I ated too much). We ate it while watching Beep: a Documentary of Video Game Sound. It was pretty good. I was especially into the early side of video game sound, of course, though some of the stuff about later sound design in games was interesting. They had the guy who did the sound in Q*bert, which I'm obsessed over. He likes to talk about how after being frustrated by the voice chip he fed random numbers into it to get the classic Q*bert voice sound, but he never seems to talk about how on top of that he had to change the external clock speed going into the chip to change the pitch and vary it even more (I watched a little video about recreating that sound once, I find this subject infinitely fascinating!). I think that's about it for now.