Music and Maths...

So, an interesting week ahead... Netherlands is had a recommendation a couple of weeks ago to cut back on social interactions for Coronavirus. The infections were starting to get really out of control again, and the ICUs were starting to reach capacity... people were starting to be diverted to Germany for treatment. This means that other non-coronavirus patients would have treatments cancelled or deferred resulting in some less than ideal medical outcomes for them...

Anyway, the side effect of all of this... all my concerts have pretty much keeled over again! Plus, my wife's choirs have got online... which means that they need to have some recordings to help them practice at home, as it becomes harder to rehearse efficiently in a group Zoom call. My wife has recorded some piano accompaniment for her choirs already... and I will be adding in the various voice parts on Violin and Viola, so that the different timbre of the instruments will make it easier for amateur singers to pick out their own parts from the piano lines.

First off the shelf this week will be a medley of songs from the hit musical, Miss Saigon! I hope to have it completed by the end of the week... it's really a different musical style to what I'm used to playing... different expected rhythms and harmony, so it takes a little bit of time for me to understand it. I managed the complete parts for the first major song and solo this afternoon... and I will hope to start stitching it together tomorrow morning... and then recording the next batch in the afternoon again.

Part of the slow start is getting back into the routine of recording slices and parts again... once you have a sort of routine it gets to be quite quick! However, getting it going takes a bit to get the muscle memory trained!

Start recording machine, write the take number, start piano backing over the headphones, play the excerpt, stop the recording, stop the piano backing, write the result (good, bad, usable or not)... rinse and repeat!

Meanwhile, I have to prepare a Statistics lesson for a student in her last year of school. I always hate doing this particular topic, I am much more at home in Pure Maths than this sort of thing. However, Statistics (NOT POLLING.... people get the two mixed up because there are numbers and percentage signs... Polling is marketing crap that people think is statistics, and is mostly junk...)...

... start again, Statistics is an incredibly useful mathematical tool for finding signals in noise. Humans brains think in terms of direct cause and effect, and are thus thrown by anecdotal evidence and are incredibly gullible and suggestible to correlation. The Universe is a bastard, and hides signals in noise... making it hard to discern cause from correlation. We humans like to make up spurious connections interesting stories that just aren't backed up by fact...

Statistics is a way of testing your results against random chance. In effect, you will have a null hypothesis that is either accepted or rejected based upon your data being tested against random chance, however, the Universe is STILL a BASTARD and random chance might have the effect of you making the correct or incorrect analysis of the null hypothesis with no DEFINITIVE way of knowing whether you chose correctly or NOT!

I should write a post about this one day... it is really important. If more people learnt Mathematical Statistics properly, we would be less prone to manipulation by "interesting" ideas....