Proof of Concept - Cheapo Helmet Cam

Using some industrial strength velcro, I managed to mount my cheapo digital camera pretty securely in a cutout area of an old helmet. I think it'll work. Granted, I've reduced the structural integrity of the helmet to a point where it may not provide any support at all, but.... something.

Thanksgiving is a happy time

Cranksgiving

So, Kyle, Mike and I raced in Cranksgiving III today. It was an alleycat all around the city, where the goal was to purchase a certain assortment of foodstuffs from a certain set of grocery stores. Any route, but you had to hit all the stores. Buy anything you want at any store, but you had to end up with all the things. In the end, all the food was donated to charity. Good cause, fun race. At least 83 people signed up to do it, maybe more (I only know that number because I heard #83 called at the raffle at the end). This was the route we ended up taking.

View Larger Map
That's at least about as close as I can get it on Google Maps. 22.3 miles, as plotted. Pretty efficient, all things considered. We rode extremely, extremely hard, but were still beat to the finish line by a few people. However, I was probably the first fixed gear to finish, so that's pretty cool. A guy was taking pictures of the after-party, including some of the skid contest, so I tried to do that in true alleycat style with bandana covering the face and all. I'll post a link when I see them on Flickr. Also, I won the skid contest, which was kinda cool.

Also, I don't think I ever posted about it, but Kyle/Mike/Brian/Stuart/I (as team "The Hapkeyers") won the Pub'N'Pedal alleycat last weekend, by biking to 29 bars all over the city in ~3 hrs).

BT Communications, how may I help you?

So, tonight, after I won poker at DB Cooper's, a guy comes into the bar with a bunch of old issues of Rolling Stone and Premiere magazine from 1990. So, naturally, Alex and I start going through trying to sign up for free CD's, etc., from these surely-defunct advertisements. Then, we stumble upon a veritable goldmine: classified ads with telephone numbers.

After a number of disconnected numbers, answering machines, etc., at about midnight (central time) I finally end up getting through to a real person in response to an ad for "Movie Posters 1930-1955." The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, I'm calling about the ad I saw in the October issue of Rolling Stone magazine for Movie paraphernalia from the 1940's?
Him: Uh.... I'm sorry you must have the wrong number.
Me: Is this ***-***-*****?
Him: Yes....
Me: Oh well... I mean it says "Movie Posters 1930-1955," and had this number... I just thought...
Him: Well...
Me: So you don't have any movie posters for sale?
Him: No, I do.
Me: So did you post the ad?
Him: Yea, I did, but this was..... When's the date on this magazine?
Me: Rolling Stone, the October 18th issue... let me check the year here............ Oh. Oh wow. Yea, so this was a few years ago, 1990, huh?
Him: Yea.
Me: So we're talking like, 3-4 years ago huh? Man.... what is it, like '93, '94 now?
Him: No, that was like, 18 years ago. It's 2008.
Me: What? Hahaha, I mean, I appreciate a joke like anyone else, but, c'mon.... you're screwing with me man.
Him: Uh....
Me: It's been a really crazy time for me recently, I mean, I've been in and out of a few institutions, hospitalized for a while, but I'm really starting to get back into collecting now so...
Him: Well what were you looking for?
Me: I'm, well, I'm looking for some Wizard of Oz stuff.... I'm really into Technicolor, so I'm into the Wizard of Oz for obvious reasons...
Him: Well, anything Wizard of Oz I have is going to be very limited....
Me: Oh....
Him: Yea....
Me: Well, what do you have?
Him: I've probably got a few production stills....
Me: Oh great, do you have the one where the munchkin's cutting his own head off?
Him: No.
Me: Oh. That's a shame.
Him: Yea.... and you know, it's really late here.
Me: Oh wow, yea, I'm sorry, it's gotta be like, what, 10:30 there?
Him: No, it's going on 1 am.
Me: Oh wow. Yea, I'm sorry. Yea like I said, no clocks around here, it's been really crazy....
Him:....
Me: Well, I mean, maybe I'll be able to get in touch with another collector that has something more in line with what I'm looking for... and maybe... again, I'm really sorry, I don't mean to bother, I know it's late....
Him: *hangs up*

Yes. That actually happened. I am so, so happy with that.

Skoney making a grumpy old man face

Throat Singing Instructions

So, since I like teaching people things, and a few people have expressed an interest in some of the throat singing I've been doing, I figured I'd write out a tutorial explaining how to learn to throat sing and achieve the various styles. There are lotsa instructions online, and some of the YouTube demonstrations are pretty good, but I feel like I can explain things a bit better than the ways I've seen them described. A lot of these tips were gleaned (or stolen) from others, but re-explained or modified from my perspective.

1. Khoomei:
You should start by learning Khoomei. Khoomei is the most basic style of throat singing, and is a necessary component of Sygyt. Khoomei was pretty simple for me to learn, but for others, it's very non-intuitive. I'm not trying to brag, I'm merely saying that it may make sense immediately, or it may not. Just stick with it.

Start by just "singing" a simple tone like "Ah" somewhere in the middle of your range (not too high, not too low). Then try to constrict the back of your throat to make it sound tighter and a bit grittier, while at the same time flexing your abs and really pushing the air up from your abdomen. It's very much a valsalva maneuver, like you're trying to have a bowel movement. The transition should sound like this.

It should not hurt to do this. When I was learning, I found my throat was a bit sore for a few days, but once I learned how to do it correctly, it didn't hurt at all. Take it slow. A little bit of practice, and a long break.

Alright that's Khoomei. That's it. A Tuvan throat song may have a melody sung in Khoomei with some minimal changes in pitch. I don't really know any true Tuvan songs, as I can't find any lyrics online... But here's a comically ridiculous "melody" line in Khoomei, consisting entirely of gibberish.


2. Ok, now Sygyt. Sygyt means "whistle," and is characterized by high flute-like overtones that sound on top of a lower bagpipe like drone. You're shooting for this.

Alright, now here's how you do it. First off, you HAVE to be able to do Khoomei before you do this. If you haven't got Khoomei yet, go back to part 1 and learn that. Then come back to here.

Ok, so say "her." Take note of your tongue position. It should be curved up a bit with the tip a bit behind your front teeth. Now sing "her," kind of high in your range. Now, trying to keep the tip of your tongue where it is, try to move the BACK part of your tongue up and down a bit. This is tricky. Try saying "yuhree," while keeping the tip of your tongue where it is. Realistically the tip will move back a bit while you say the "yuhr" part, and forward a bit when you say the "ree" part, but focus on keeping it stationary. It should sound like this.

What you're doing is creating a second reasonating chamber in your mouth, above your tongue, so that you've got some air vibrating from your vocal cords, and some air above your tongue vibrating too. Note that there needs to be a way for the air to "escape" from the upper resonating chamber; if you had made a perfect seal with your tongue against your hard palate, the air wouldn't be able to resonate and escape properly. If I think about it, I can ALMOST feel the tip of my tongue vibrating a little bit against my hard palate behind my teeth, but this is very subtle, it shouldn't be like you're rolling your R's like in Spanish. Your lips and jaw should NOT move much at all while you're doing this, they should remain in a loose "ooh" shape.

Now if you listen carefully while you're doing this "yuhree" thing, you might hear some hints of overtones, which will sound like higher pitched variations on top of the "body" of the sound. Here's where the Khoomei comes in. When you do exactly what was described in the paragraph above USING A KHOOMEI VOICE, you'll selectively filter out some sounds, producing clearer overtones.

Now do the "yuhree" thing, while siging in Khoomei. Your overtones will probably appear and disappear kind of randomly, and I bet you'll feel your tongue hit the right frequency and then get "out of phase" while this is occuring. With time, you'll get better at localizing the tongue positions necessary to produce the overtones. Here's a sample of me performing some pseudo-Sygyt WITHOUT the Khoomei voice, and then adding in the constriction to produce true Sygyt.

You'll hear the overtones get alot clearer in the sample.

This takes practice, practice, practice. Learning where the overtones are is like learning where the notes are on a trombone. Practice your Khoomei too, as the more constriction you can get, the easier it is to find overtones.

3. Kargyraa.
This is much simpler than Sygyt, in that there aren't tricky tongue positions to master or anything. Basically, once you can get the initial Kargyraa sound, all you do is mouth exaggerated vowel shapes to get overtones. The hard part though is figuring out how the hell to get that distinctive low sound of Kargyraa.

Once you do though, it's extremely rewarding. It literally will just click into place, and then you'll think "OH, THAT'S how you do it."

Alright so what you need to do is get a part of your voice-box vibrating that you probably don't even know you have, the vestibular folds (or false vocal cords).

When you make a growling noice with your mouth closed, or clear your throat, you're vibrating these. As much as I hate the show Home Improvement, the man-grunt that the dad in that show does is a pretty good example. So here's the kind of closed-mouth growl/throat clearing that I'm talking about.

Now Kargyraa is singing a tone while vibrating this same area. HOWEVER, you don't want to just try to perpetually growl while singing, this will really hurt. The best way I've found to make this happen is as follows. Sing "Ho" relatively low in your range. Now, sing "Hoden", with a very short "den." It's almost just like "Ho-dn." It should sound like this.

Alright, so when you're singing that "den" part, you should be able to feel some pressure or vibration on your palate / the back part of your nasal cavity, and if you put your finger under your nostrils, you should feel a bit of air coming out your nose at this point. My point is you're producing some backpressure in your mouth/throat by blocking with your tongue to say the "n" sound. Now is the really tricky part. This backpressure can be increased by pushing hard from your abdomen, and then you can get your false vocal cords vibrating. Try to visualize the part of your voice box that you want to get moving; again, it's the part that moves when you growl or clear your throat. Increase the force with which your singing "den," and try to visualize directing the pressure back down your throat. It will probably take a number of tries, but eventually you'll feel part of your larynx just leap into vibration. When this happens to me, I can feel my nasal cavity vibrate really hard too... it tickles the inside of my nose. Now the first time you get this vibration, it will probably hurt a bit, and will feel like you just cleared your throat really really hard. This is where you need to take it slow. DO NOT PRACTICE THIS TOO MUCH AT ONE SITTING. Only a few minutes day until you can get the vibration without much effort. When you're really trying hard to GET the vibration, it hurts. When you're actually vibrating, it's painless.

Alright, so the "Hoden" --> vibration should sound like this.

Now, you have to open your lips and tongue while keeping your false vocal cords vibrating, so that you can shape your mouth into other vowel shapes (other than the "den" you are pronouncing). It's a bit tricky to open your mouth without losing the vibration at first. Try saying "Hoden-Ay." When you can get your mouth open into the "ay" position and still have the vibrating going on, you're 90% there. It should sound like this.

Once you get better that vibration, you'll find out you can drop into the vibration without having to do the backpressure method. This isn't a crucial step though, at this point, so just stick with the Hoden-Ay approach for now.

Now you've just got to move your mouth into shapes like "A E I O U," and you'll get different overtones to sound. They're alot more subtle than the piercing Sygyt ones, and they're hard to record on a crappy microphone, but it will sound something like this.

There you go. The three main styles of throat singing. Take it slow and be patient. I think my instructions are pretty good, and I think if you follow them, you could learn this all in a week.

Good luck : )

Cute.

This is a really cute video of a little french girl telling a crazy story that she apparently made up.

kargyraa.....!

My throat hurts today. I practiced too much yesterday. Will take it easy for a while. But listen to my sample from yesterday!

Kargyraa!

WOOHOO!

Had a huge breakthrough in throat singing today, and actually discovered the unique feeling of vibration required for Kargyrra.
Quick and very dirty sample. Not at all elegant, but just to demonstrate the different tonalities while I could keep it going.


Goal: 1 week from today, Kargyrra with overtones. Like this:

Today

Picked up the fleece for my cold weather lounging / camping kilt. 7 yards (I might trim it down to ~6) that then is pleated up and bound about the waist, with the top part thrown over the shoulder. Can serve as a regular old leg-only garment, a block, and a very warm sleeping bag. I sat outside in only boxers and a t-shirt in 44 degree weather today wrapped up in it, and it was plenty warm. One day I hope to camp with only the kilt for clothing and shelter.
No pictures of me wearing it because, as much as I respect the kilt and am excited about it, a picture on the internet of a random American guy proudly standing there in his homemade kilt is just a little pathetic.

Then, we hypothetically went back to an old abandoned factory that I've never been too before, and hypothetically I found a "human nest" filled with dolls and teddy bears. Really, really creepy. In the picture, you can even see a large human-shaped bundle of blankets... which is why I hypothetically didn't explore the room, as I hypothetically was concerned their might've been a living person under those blankets (and, in hypothetical retrospect, a non-living person could've been under there too). I also hypothetically found what I first thought might've been some hobo-gin, but it turned out to be a really old oil lamp (still filled with pungent black oil, nonetheless). Pretty rockin.

Dream

I had a dream last night (or, this morning between 8 and 9:30, more precisely), that my dad had found an old leather bound bible at a garage sale, and picked it up cause it was really unique looking. Turns out it was colonized by bees, and they had somehow turned the entire inside of the book into a huge glowing supernatural honeycomb, dripping with glowing honey. Also turns out that this was some sort of magical key to the underworld, with the power to call forth Satan. Also, turns out that my grandmother (who really was my cousin's Grandma D.... but for some reason in this dream she was my grandmother) was possessed or something, and so was clearly going to try to use this to bring Beelzebub onto the earth, if she found out what I had wrapped up in a plastic bag in my room. So, I was going to try to climb out on some scaffolding into an old abandoned building that was connected to my house somehow (again, exploring old abandoned places is such a recurrent theme in my dreams, and always has been even before I started urban exploring), and go hide the honey-bible there. Then, I almost got attacked by a dog somehow, and then woke up. Weird dream.

New Belt Buckle

I made one similar to this back in Boston once, but it broke.

So I made this one (w/ Superglue, instead of the JB Weld I used the first time).

Didj

So I recorded a demonstration of circular breathing to get a bonus point from my anatomy professor, who lectured on circular breathing but had no demonstration of it to show to the class.

I haven't ever really posted a didgeridoo sample, so figured I'd post this one.

For Posterity...

...and for the sake of completeness, I'd like to go on record by saying that tonight, I saw Barack Obama elected President of the United States of America. And I was mighty happy about it : )

Meh...

Well, the test was trickier than I expected, and I was less prepared than I expected. I got a 87%... But with my previous grade, I am still sitting OK. If I get a 89% on both the Anatomy Final and the Neuro Shelf, I can still get a Superior. If I get a 65% on both, I can still get a High-Satisfactory. So, whatsnever.