I Turned Round... And There Was This (Hanworth Air Park)

I was walking round my Air Park, turned round, and there was this. The best camera is the one you have with you, and it was the iPhone. Photography is magic-by-selection.

Stereo At The Festival Hall w/ Iveta Apkalna

The Royal Festival Hall was infamous for having the driest sound of any concert hall ever anywhere. Musicians would enter it and instantly be de-hydrated. Bass notes would set off from the stage and fail to make it past Row H. It was just dandy for string quartets, folk singers, jazz bands, and electronic music, but nineteenth-century symphonies just shrivelled. (This sounds a lot like much modern hi-fi equipment, a lot of which is also fine for string quartets, folk singers, jazz bands, and electronic music, but gets confused by a 90-piece orchestra blasting out Bruckner.) The Hall was re-furbished in the Oughties, and the organ was re-furbished over a period of years, ending in 2013. There are larger organs in the world, but mostly in America and mostly for show. In practical terms, the Festival Hall organ is as good as it gets.

The range of this (and any other) organ is two octaves below middle C, and three octaves above. An 88-key piano goes a tenth below and another octave above. The lowest notes are just above the point where hi-fi speakers and the human ear start to roll-off on the bass, so there's no need for a sub-woofer, and that extra octave on the piano is mostly a plink sound. The organ has all the notes the human ear needs.

At first sight the layout of the pipes look like a mirror image. Look at this guide and especially pages 8-9, for the layout of the pipes. This is really four organs in one: a solo organ (top far right), a Swell organ (top far left), a Great organ on the rest of the left and upper near right, and a Positive organ on the rest of the right(*). There are four keyboards: Solo, Swell, Great and Positive, plus pedals for the bass notes.

As a result, if you are sitting in the equivalent of the Hi-Fi Sweet Spot, listening to the organ should feel stereo-ish - if the music is written to use the different sections one at a time. When the big pipes kick in, and the Swell gets going, it's just one vast splendid noise, and the sustained notes bounce off the diagonal reflecting boards at either side of the stage.

Some hi-fi reviewers talk about the way some gear will make the transients (that happen when a string is struck, for instance) clearer, and also make the way a note fades clearer. They are not listening to recordings of large organs when they hear those things. Live, there are no "transients" or "fades" when a large organ is even at half-steam. Subtlety is not a thing with big organs: go to recitals in small churches on one- or two-manual instruments for that.

It's also loud. I'm not going to be playing my Buxtehude or Messian CDs at that volume at home.

The organist was Iveta Apkalna. Organists can move all three of their hands and both their feet independently, and tap their head at the same time. They are not as other musicians, let alone as other mortals. There are no "bad" organists - it's one of those things that has to be done well or it can't be done at all.

She played a short piece by Philip Glass, an extract from the Musical Offering by Bach, and Widor's Fifth Symphony for Organ. All of it was enjoyable and fascinating, especially the more playful parts of the Widor (I know, not the adjective you were expecting for an organ symphony).

Maybe a couple of those Wilson tower speakers with a £150,000 pre-amp + monoblock set up could get something like the live sound. My kit won't. People forget that "classical" music can be VERY LOUD at times, way too loud to play with the neighbours in.



(*) I have no idea what those mean. There's a limit to how much research I'm prepared to do!

Welcome To Barking Riverside

I go to all the glamorous places.

The first trip earlier this year was on a sunny day, which was marred by my awful handling of my camera. I had jogged the exposure compensation dial something nasty and all the shots came out too dark. I vowed to go again, now that I knew better. Except I didn't, and it's a good thing I looked at some shots in the screen, and sorted out the problem. In my head, the X-E4 is still an OM-10. My head is not always a sensible place.

This time the sky was grey, which at least removed any chance of the bright blue bits making the other bits too dark. Here's the obligatory shot of the Emirates ski-lift (all of these can be clicked for an even larger view)

And here's the almost obligatory Manhattan-on-Thames view...

One or too shots are perhaps almost worthy of the Bernd and Hilda Becher, except I don't fade my skies a uniform dull white like they did.

One question asks itself every time I see these riverside tower blocks....



.... who on earth would live here? I'm kinda parochial about London: if it isn't on a line to Waterloo, I'm not going to even discuss it. But these flats are miles from anywhere. Okay, now two shots of a commercial cargo boat at the Tate and Lyle moorings.

Now, who doesn't like a photograph of some containers? This is landscape in these parts...

As the river gets wider, the view gets bleaker. And I think 'bleak' is a fair word here. I think those wind generators actually make it look even more empty somehow...



And then, finally....

Defining The Seasons

Did you know there are official seasons? In fact two sets, one for the meteorologists and one for the astronomers. These are for the Northern Hemisphere.

Meteorologists:
Winter: December, January, February 

Spring: March, April, May 

Summer: June, July, August 

Autumn: September, October, November

Astronomers:
Winter: 22nd December (Winter Solstice) to March 20

Spring: March 21 (Spring Equinox) to June 20 

Summer: June 21 (Summer Solstice) to September 21 

Autumn: September 22 (Autumn Equinox) to 21 December

I offer instead, the Phenomenological Seasons:
Winter: when it starts to be cold all the time to when it stops being cold all the time, and there are no leaves except on evergreens 

Spring: when it's cold in the morning and evening, but warm-ish during the day, and the leaves appear

Summer: when I can wear a tee-shirt all day, and the leaves are all the same shade of green 

Autumn: see Spring, but the leaves are falling

Hence in the UK...
Winter is the five months from November to March (or, from when the clocks go back, to when the clocks go forward)

Spring is about eight weeks from April to May

Summer is the three months plus a week or so from June to sometime in September

Autumn is about six weeks from September to end-October

Brentano Quartet at the Wigmore Hall

I booked a number of concerts for this autumn, to hear live music again, to go to evening concerts for the first time in a decade or so, and to compare the listening experience with my hi-fi.

The first of those concerts was the Brentano Quartet at the Wigmore Hall.

The Wigmore Hall is a niche institution: amongst chamber musicians it is one of the foremost venues in the world. Superstars play there, and not at Royal Opera House prices either. The next evening, you might have a quartet of recent graduates from the Royal College of Music, even cheaper. It's a long rectangular room with a high ceiling

There are no visible signs of acoustic treatment, though the semi-circle behind the stage doubtless reflects and focuses the sound. I could not hear any reflections, and I was sitting far enough back for any reflected sounds to be heard separately.

The Brentano Quartet had the two violins sitting almost one behind the other on the left of the stage (audience's left), with the viola (front) and cello (behind) on the right. Everyone was about two metres from everyone else.

These guys play loud. I sneaked the phone out: between about 55dB-A when quiet and 80dB-A when loud. (And I was two-thirds of the way back: it must have been a good few dB louder down front.) Modern concert instruments are made to be heard at the back without amplification. Except acoustic guitars.

I listen between 55-70 db-A at home.

The soundstage is mono. Close your eyes and you can't point to the instrument as you should be able to with a hi-fi system and a decent stereo mix. I think the mono sound is intentional: a string quartet is intended to be heard as if it were one instrument. (Not to say that some pieces don't exploit a left-right effect, but it's not common.) I had to watch the players' fingers to be able to pick out the individual parts.

The soundstage of a string quartet on my stereo is pretty mono-ish, but the separation of instruments is a bit better, but that varies with the recording.

The music was arrangements for string quartet of pieces for voice by Renaissance composers - Lassus, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Ockeghem, Wuorinen - with some pieces for strings by Richard Mico (1590-1661) in between. (I'm a sucker for a bit of Early Music, and have some Lassus, Gesualdo and Monteverdi on CD.) Transferring the voice pieces to strings brought out just how darn weird Renaissance harmony is, in comparison with Bach, Mozart and the rest of the gang. There were times it felt as if we could have been listening to a twentieth-century piece.

Definitely checking out some Richard Mico on CD or stream as well.

Parkland Walk, Highgate: Street and Landscape Photography

 Both photographs taken on the Parkland Walk between Finsbury Park and Highgate.

This is a landscape photograph. Also it doesn't show that the rain was pouring down.

The next photograph is street photography (but just not on an actual street).

If there's a jogger in a pink top, it's street photography.

Also, it's a more interesting picture. If I had tried to frame a good landscape shot, the camera would have drowned.

Outside a Cafe in Finsbury Park

Street photography isn't really my thing, but I was sitting outside a cafe in Finsbury Park the other day, before taking a stroll along the Parkland Walk, and snapped a number of people walking by. This one came out well: she's greeting a woman who works at the restaurant next to the cafe, hence the smile.

 

Science, Scientists, and the Pandemic

here's a video by UpAndAtom about why the scientists seemed to make such a hash of dealing with Covid.



It's good stuff, until the end, when she lets them all off the hook. (See point Seven about this.)

With my former-philospher hat on, I want to add a few points.

First. Making policy decisions is not something that science can do. Facts can inform policy decisions, but not constrain them. This is Hume: facts cannot entail policies. Scientists and historians can dig out what studies there may be, what happened last time, and figure out if any of it is relevant to whatever they are dealing with. Those are facts. The leap to e.g. locking children up at home for months on end can only be made by a judgement that the bad effects of doing that are worth whatever the bad effects of letting them stay at school might be. That's not a "scientific" decision. It's a flat-out political one.

Second. Mathematical models are guesswork unless they are based on well-confirmed physical theories of the phenomenon. There is a textbook model of infection spread, based on a pair of coupled partial differential equations. It relies on some parameters that are specific to the disease, and if the disease is new, nobody will know what those parameters are until it has spread, and they have had time to collect and analyse the data. Which is already too late.

Third. Scientists are human, and some are more human than others. Neil Ferguson had long been known as the go-to forecaster for Government departments wanting to justify slaughtering vast herds of animals. That's how he keeps his job at Imperial. Nobody who knew about forecasting and Ferguson put any credibility in his announcements. Treating his forecasts as credible was either incredibly naive or incredibly cynical.

Fourth. When Governments quote a known scienziati di comodo, you know the decisions sono state fissate(*). Politicians and corporate managers decide what they are going to do first, and back-fill the facts and business plans to fit the decision. There is a very brief period between a problem appearing and the bad decision about handling it being made, when facts can sway the managers and politicians, and then only if the facts are presented by people they trust. And sometimes even the consiglieri has to accept that the wrong thing is going to be done. Because politics.

Fifth. There are no experts on pandemics. There haven't been enough pandemics to produce the conditions for expertise. See a very good video by Veristatium about this.



Sixth. Medicine and Public Health are not sciences, but technologies. Both make use of the products of scientific theories as filtered through technology and pharmaceutical companies. Doctors used leeches when that was the best theory, and they prescribe statins now that's the best theory. Most doctors have no idea about how PET scanners work (or Ibuprofen, for that matter), but they can follow the operating instructions and interpret the results. This is okay until something goes wrong or the results are atypical, when nobody can do anything about it. When diagnosing, if the symptoms don't add up to something they have a cure for, they tend to tell the patient there's nothing wrong with them, or resort to the current all-purpose explanation (diabetes, obesity, long Covid, and so on). Public health is even worse. It hasn't had another success on the scale of public sewers and water treatment plants, and that was nearly 170 years ago. See Ben Goldacre's Bad Science if you want to know just how dreadful pharmaceutical industry research is, and Dr James Le Fanu's The Rise And Fall Of Modern Medicine if you want to know just how medicine has stagnated in the past decades. (Unless it benefits from technological advances elsewhere, such as keyhole surgery.)

Seventh. Using extra-scientific criteria to justify one's decision to pursue one theory rather than another is okay, though you may risk being thought a little eccentric if the facts just aren't with you. Deciding on your personal line of research is not the same as deciding on public health policies that will mess up the lives of millions of children and young people, or consign a million or so vulnerable people to living in one room of their family home and avoiding everyone for months on end. It is not okay for scientists to add extra-scientific arguments to make life easier for the politicians. If the scientists have no relevant facts, they should say so and leave the room. I know they aren't going to, because holding an establishment post (Chief Medical Officer, say) means they are ambitious, and ambitious people please their political patrons. That's why, if you ever get to be a Minister, you should not listen too closely to the official experts.(**)

Eighth. The last of the old-fashioned experts died a while ago. What we have instead are true-believer activists. Whereas the old-fashioned experts said that they didn't know when they didn't, and weren't pushing any explicit agendas, activists know already what is wrong and what must be done, and facts are merely rhetorical devices. This is especially so in the fact-lite, speculation-heavy subjects where the systems, from the weather to the human body, are way more complex than any bunch of equations could describe. Major organisations from the Met Office to Public Health England facts are run by people who are pushing socio-economic agendas that are defended by repeated cries that "the science is in" or "the consensus is overwhelming". Facts can be publicised when it helps The Cause, and kept quiet otherwise. Which is why you never hear anything about climate change during a long spell of dull, mild weather.

Science, as the search for a better theory, did not fail us during the pandemic. If anything, the political establishment failed science, trying to impose a consensus that had no basis in fact.

Many scientists failed in their role as citizens, from the crowd that covered up the Wuhan Lab leak, to the deceitful and panic-mongering briefings of Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and others. They went along with policies, especially mask-wearing, that they knew had no basis in fact, and were proposed for political reasons. It doesn't matter why they did it, or even if they were sincere. They should have stayed out of the policy debate, and they should not have been on the rostrum in Press Briefings. As for Anthony Fauci, he has a special circle of Hell being dug for him even now.

The failings of some scientists were compounded by the failure of the mainstream and social media, most of which obligingly spewed out a stream of poisonous and misleading propaganda about the threat posed by Covid, and did everything they could to suppress dissent about Government policy, and to create an illusion that there was a factual basis for any of it. The real failures were and still are in Broadcasting House.

They created the panic in the first place.

Roon and Lightroom - as Distractions

Every now and then I get the feeling that I just don't take music seriously enough if I don't have Roon, and I don't take photography seriously if I don't have Lightroom. I'm sure Roon Labs and Adobe will be pleased to hear that their PR is working.

Lightroom first.

There was an analogue equivalent of Lightroom. It was called 'the darkroom', and in it the professionals did things like cross-process, experiment with paper stock, dodge-and-shade, and many other things. Photoshop was developed so professional photographers could futz with digital photographs the same way they had been doing with film. We amateurs accepted that was for professionals: there was no shame in not knowing your way round a darkroom.

Lightroom is software, it doesn't need a dedicated room. There's no excuse for not learning the basics and beyond. It's a real tool used by serious hobbyists and professionals - and real pros use Capture One Pro (as well) to tether their camera to a Mac with a big screen. If you think the basic Lightroom + Photoshop subscription is expensive, wait until you see how much the monthly subscription to Capture One Pro is. (The commercial portrait photography pros will tell you it pays for itself in extra sales in no time.)

Photos is good enough to do the basic changes I need to make: a tweak to the alignment here, maybe a little touch on the colours, brightness and contrast. DxO Perspective if the angles are really off. We snap-shooters don't do filters and pre-sets. Those are for pros, and the pre-sets in Photos are, well, just not for me.

Adobe have got their hooks into me with Lightroom. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I feel I'm not taking my photography seriously if I don't have it. On the other days of the week, I know that the first thing I need to do to take photography seriously is a) travel more, b) do still lives. Using Lightroom for the occasional snaps I take at the moment would be close to "all the gear and no idea".

Now Roon.

I'll admit it, the only reason I want Roon is so I can stop feeling inferior every time John Darko or someone of that ilk mentions it. I said I get the feeling that I'm not taking music seriously enough if I don't have Roon, but that's not correct.

You're reading the gibberish of a man who has read Burkholder's History of Western Music, and the Oxford History of Music, plus a few more. I can read music (just) and play guitar and piano (after a fashion). My collection runs from Coltrane to Corelli. I have attended a performance of Opus Calivcumbalisticum and sat through the Ring Cycle. I saw Elton John before he had his first hit, and Miles Davis when he played the Festival Hall. I have been to Proms and the Wigmore Hall. I'm as serious about music as anyone can be who doesn't do it for a living, and still has a sense of proportion.

What I'm not so serious about is hi-fi aka "the hobby". I like my music to sound good. I've always had decent entry-level gear, and the step up to the next-level set-up I have now was well-worth it. I'm not a gear-head or a collector. I'm the guy who buys gear because it does a good job, not because I want to "own the brand". I have, however, read the Master Handbook of Acoustics, so I guess that counts.

I did try Roon, and wrote about it. It's a resource hog: you will not be rendering video and running Roon at the same time. I was impressed by its speed and ability to find album art when Apple Music couldn't. In the end it didn't make enough of a difference for the price. I can't help feeling that to some extent Roon is a status symbol: I have Roon, I'm a real audiophile with lots of spare cash (or do all audiophiles have spare cash?). I don't have a huge digital library: I rip music to transfer it to my phone for travelling. That's it.

What's really happening is that I feel I'm not taking something I'm doing seriously enough, and the part of the brain that is responsible for distraction and short-cuts throws this chaff about Lightroom, Roon or anything else out.

It's never about gear - except on the very rare occasions when it actually is.