blog.humaneguitarist.org

Monster Serials: listening to old radio plays while working on music notation

[Sat, 04 Jan 2014 18:06:00 +0000]
There are a lot of things I can do while having music, mostly classical, on in the background. Working on music notation is not one of them. I don't mean composing the notes themselves - for that I need silence, but rather entering notes and performance indications into notation software. So instead I like to listen to old time radio plays. Lately, I've had one of the following two playing in the background while I work: * Frankenstein: Old Time Radio Classics [https://archive.org/details/FrankensteinOldTimeRadioClassics] * Dracula: A Radio Play [https://archive.org/details/DraculaARadioPlay] Both are hosted on Archive.org [http://archive.org/]. Interestingly, the actor who portrays the monster in the Frankenstein piece mispronounces "Frankenstein" as "Franken-steen" initially, it seems. I had thought this was a subtle way of showing the monster getting smarter as he later learns to pronounce it correctly, but I believe some of the other actors made the same error here and there. So it might likely be just from the reality of reading a script and recording with limited time for checking for continuity errors. I'll also mention that in trying to come up with a clever title (a play on Monster Cereals [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mills_monster-themed_breakfast_cereals] - get it?) I learned about Franken Berry Stool [http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2013/10/franken-berry-the-beloved-halloween-cereal-was-once-medically-found-to-cause-pink-poop/]. That is all.