Like a dog chasing cars

I should be writing and practising a German oral (good grief, YES, Firefox, "practise" is a word), but I need me some procrastination. And I can hear the groans already. Yeah, Batman.

So, last Saturday, I saw The Dark Knight with Jordan and Pris before Rice Rally. (She has a brief recount here.) And for some reason, the thing that stuck with me most was The Note. Y'know, that one distorted note which yells "the Joker is in control here"? So the day after, I fired up BitTorrent and nabbed the soundtracks of both Chris Nolan Batman films. Awesome, awesome listening. So much so, that when Pris said to me on Friday that she'd be going to the city tomorrow, and was I looking for any music in particular?, I asked if she could find either of those CDs. (Basically, I download CDs to see if they're worth buying.)

So, I now own two film soundtracks, both of which Hans Zimmer has contributed to in some degree: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and The Dark Knight (incidentally, the former is another great CD); And am hunting around for the soundtrack of Batman Begins. I'd say "dang, I feel geeky", but that's better saved for a recount further down the page.

It's weird, given the degree to which the two Batman soundtracks are ... atmospheric (rather than melodic), that they've been sitting in my various Now Playing displays almost exclusively for the past week. Took a while to get used to, and tracks like "Why so serious" are probably never going to make it into my main rotation - have a listen and you'll see why - but I'm still not sick of the music. I should mention here that I typically tire of an album within a week, due in part to a good ear and musical memory, so I guess the lack of prominent themes (the pointed near-total absence of a heroic I'M BATMAN theme, for instance) has been challenging for my ... learning, I guess, of the tracks. Although that said, the motifs of the scores are extrordinarily brief. The main theme (if you can call it that) of the films is just a drawn out minor third (D... F...), Gotham's theme (which I initially thought was Batman's theme, then Harvey Dent's theme... but I digress) is a six-note progression (F E D G, F E), and then there's of course the Joker's one Note. The slightly more lengthy piano motifs (in particular, Begins' Wayne theme, and what I think are Rachel's theme and a passage denoting death) are beautiful, but almost frustratingly short. Either way, it's a far cry from Pirates of the Caribbean's (at least) twenty-seven-note main theme.

I was going to mention an incident which makes me feel ridiculously geeky, but couldn't find anywhere in the admittedly nonexistent flow of this post, so it gets stuck here. I was rewatching Batman Begins last night, trying to pinpoint tracks on the soundtrack, identify musical themes, and so on. And got annoyed about the fact that the music which plays in the credits isn't on the soundtrack. Long story short, I eventually got hold of an .MP3 of said music, given the title "End Credits". Now, the track names of the Batman Begins soundtrack follow an odd naming convention - bat genera. Eptesicus, Myotis, Corynorhinus, Molossus, and so on. My inner neatness freak (which manifests when it comes to file organisation, particularly music, but not the state of my room) found this intolerable, so I looked up bat genera and eventually settled on Scotoecus. A friend I mentioned this to probably puts it best:

(0231) Barnabas: Hmm. Geekiness is finding a name for a rip of the ending credits music which fits in with the rest of the album's naming scheme. Especially if said naming scheme is "bat genera". ¬¬
(0232) Gobolt: >_>

Just felt like musing on that topic. Hopefully no brains have been liquidated by the inanity. If you have time, some awesome tracks off these two soundtracks:

 Like a dog chasing cars - action track off The Dark Knight.
 Corynorhinus - soft track from the very end of Batman Begins.
 A dark knight - sixteen-minute epic. Looks like the Youtubers had to split it in two.

I'd better get back to my discussion of globale Erwärmung. Joy!

Piano reductions!

An unproductive night and morning, coupled with my discovery that Finale needs a .PDF writer in order to export to .PDF, has yielded a piano reduction, and allowed me to save it and an older one in a file format that a regular computer can actually read. Hooray!

So, without further ado, the two pieces. Also links to Youtube, so if you don't know the song, you can have a listen, and a .MID taken from the musical score, if you want to know how I arranged it. And apologies for any Skydrive popups that bug you (but if they do, you need to get Firefox. Srsly.) Huh, I guess there was further ado. Never mind.

 Kamelot - Epilogue [ YOUTUBE / MIDI / PDF ]
Bonus track from their 2005 album, The black halo. Note Finale Notepad (ie. the free version) doesn't allow for ritardandos, acciacaturae, or changes in tempo - I had to enter them as text - so the .MID doesn't reflect that. My workaround for a similar limitation can be seen on the last page. Bleh.

The song closes with variations on a repeated musical theme (original, four slight variations, original), and begins to fade out on the fifth iteration (or final variation). Obviously, you can't do this in real life, and it does get kind of boring about halfway in (for me as the pianist, anyway), so you might want to consider cutting it down to two iterations or so, then jumping straight to my tacked-on ending. Or something. I dunno.

 Trading Yesterday - For You only [ YOUTUBE / MIDI / PDF ]
Yeah, that band. I find this reduction pretty boring, myself, but you might disagree with me (although the song sure isn't). The outro is taken pretty much note-for-note from the song (barring the fact that I had to insert the string melodies somewhere), which I am happy with.

I'm not sure if CutePDF Writer embeds fonts into its output files; if it doesn't, the .PDFs will look like gibberish. If they do, comment and I'll upload the fonts, and the .TIF export if anyone doesn't have privileges to install them.

Also, the folder on Skydrive does have an RSS feed, but I'll post all my reductions here, so there shouldn't be any point in subscribing to it.

End transmission. Or something.

Of musical taste, causal inferences and bad handwriting

So I was woken (in typical B-style, at 1100 or so) by the sound of some very familiar lines on Saturday.

"Anakin is the father, isn't he? I'm so sorry."

Yeah, I don't know why I've managed to memorise those lines. Heck, I hadn't seen Revenge of the Sith since it was in cinemas! Soo, I dragged my butt out to the living room and settled on the sofa to watch the remainder of the film. (AKA the good bit. Yay fighting!) I have to say, III is definitely my favourite of the new trilogy. (YES, FLICK. NOT ONE. THREE.)

But in any case, in one of the final fights, and I won't say which, since one crazy person has yet to see III, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Duel of the Fates feature in the music as it grew increasingly epic. (Well, it phased out again, but you can't win 'em all. DotF is the main theme that plays in I when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon fight Darth Maul.) For some reason, the theme triggers an internal "SQUEE" for me. (No, I am not a lizard at heart. Most of you didn't get that. Head this-a-way.)

I didn't think much of it at the time, until I started checking to see if I could download some Star Wars soundtracks later that evening. (I was looking for the music in III that features DotF, but it's not in the soundtrack! Laaame.) Getting to the point, Duel of the Fates is the first musical theme ('track' or 'song', if you will) that I can think of that I've liked (that isn't a hymn. Because that's all the music I ever heard growing up. In retrospect, that's probably a good thing, as I outgrew the bubblegum music stage in about three months). Which made me wonder if it's the root of my love for symphonic metal. (Best. Genre. EVAR.)

Thankfully, the questionable causal inference only lasted a few minutes. (And who says Theory of Knowledge is useless?) It could be possible that I already had the taste, and DotF was one of the first pieces of music I heard which matched this palate. Which is also questionable, as this taste would have supposedly grown out of hymns. (Seriously, it is a HUGE jump from Give thanks to DotF.) Maybe it was indeed the former, helped along by how friggin' cool Darth Maul is (was?), and the fact that the fight was brilliant? (This would also explain why the original trilogy's music didn't have the same effect. Although admittedly, I grew up watching those practically like other people would've watched Disney.)

Well, here conclude the thoughts of your friendly local raving lunatic. A few links and other thoughts before concluding:

 Writing this up in Notepad++ was pretty awesome. Gotta love it highlighting your HTML for you.
 I've killed the obnoxiously long recommended listening list on the sidebar, and stuck a link to my last.fm account there instead (The comics list has exploded in its place. Woo!). Same difference. Sadly, I can't scrobble because of my non-standard use of tags, but a list of bands is still present. Also sadly, Evanescence registers the most plays in my library, because it was the first band of those I still listen to that I discovered. And my tagging things as by "Kamelot & Amanda Somerville" and the like has warped those numbers anyway. Ah, well.
 Noticed a new development in the devolution of my handwriting in my English exam this morning (Incidentally, this is the last unseen poetry commentary set by my teacher that I'll sit, and I loved every poem she chose. Heh). YES, I THOUGHT ABOUT BLOGGING IN THE MIDDLE OF AN EXAM. GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT? *ahem* Anyway, it's summarised pretty well in the image below. And yeah, my capital 'Y's have turned basically into '7's. But I cross my '7's, so all's good. Over and out!

(Translation: because everybody loves marking essays in this sort of handwriting!!!1one)

In which I write too far much about an inane thing

I get the feeling that Twitter is robbing me of blog topics. I'm also getting annoyed with Twitter's 140-character limit. Solution: long tweets come here!

Hopefully this'll help me dust the cobwebs off this place. Not to mention that I'm not going to have time to write out and proofread those page-long blaggings in the next few months. Stupid matriculation exams. In any case, the eventual plan is to mix these shorter posts (imaginatively tagged "tweet"s) with the longer essay-like posts I've written previously.

All the better to bore the pants off you people! (Should get around to writing an Ode to the Imaginary Reader some time.) In any case, onward there be random musings.

I just realised the extent to which Epica's " Another me "in lack'ech" " bores me. (Heck, I had to check the spelling. And I can spell songs like Nightwish's "Kuolema tekee taiteilijan" off by heart. Yay for Application Of German Phoenetics In Inappropriate Situations^®. Also yay for application of "correct" citations. Never going to be able to banish "short work, quotation marks; long work, italicise or underline" from my mind. The contents of these parentheses have spiralled completely out of control, therefore I am ending them now.)

...Where was I? Oh yeah. The song popped up on my main shuffled playlist a few minutes ago, and I was jarred when I heard a verse (bridge? Y'never know, with Epica) that I had absolutely no memory of hearing before. (It's near the end of the song and begins 'all that you've taken from others'. Incidentally, boring song, but the album it's from, Consign to oblivion, is pretty awesome. ...wait. I REFUSE TO LET THESE PARENTHETICAL CONTENTS MUTATE LIKE THE PREVIOUS ONE DID) It might seem like no big deal, but I memorise songs' melodies pretty easily, so it came as quite a surprise to me.

Anyway, this post brought to you by Boring Insights Into Barnabas' Life^®.

Gratuitous end-of-post linkage:

 Gunnerkrigg Court. Pretty awesome webcomic which I am failing to concoct a description for. It's plot-based, so you'll want to start from the beginning.

 Dr McNinja. Superhero-spoof sorta comic that features a doctor, who is also a ninja. Woo!

(Eh. What I was going to confine to a 140-character tweet has mutated into a 212-word, 1 229-character couple of paragraphs. In a 397-word, 1 968-character blag post. Hooray!)

Addendum: And not twenty minutes after I publish this (hey, that verb makes this sound like something worth reading!), I find a similar segment in another song. One that I like, no less. Eh. In any case, I'd never taken note of the first bit of Leaves' Eyes' "Leaves whisper" before. And I thought I couldn't pay more attention to music. Another whole level of fanaticism opens to me!