The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

January 25, 2012


Cobza redux for Maria Damon


I traded back for the cobza today, and it sounds great! I'm using
techniques from pipa and oud. by the way, there are a lot of
traditional cobza solos and ensemble-playing on YouTube now; when
I started with the instrument, there was almost nothing.

cob0 is a straight recording. my cobza has ten metal strings tuned
with pegs; towards the very end, you can hear one of the courses
has gone out of tune. I've learned to avoid them; I finish on the
other three. (here, the cobza's tuning is eee' aa dd gg; the 2nd
a went out, so I ended up on eee' dd and gg. note that the tuning
is 3 4ths; it's not actually tuned to eee' etc. pitch.)

cob1 is recorded with highly altered echo and post-production
with high hiss-elimination. I had to play slowly, in order that
the harmonic 'bell-tones' come through.

http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/cob0.mp3
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/cob1.mp3

playing the cobza:

cobza http://www.alansondheim.org/alan1.jpg

(if the files don't open properly, go to
http://lounge.espdisk.com/archives/776 - thanks, Alan)

Millimeters to go before I sleep


"Hi,

I have checked the stats of your account and can found that there is no
hacking issues with your account. But the majority of the bandwidth was
used by downloading the mp4/mp3/mov and jpg files on your account - along
with spiders/bots used 112 GB of the bandwidth for this month so far. And
of course, you are getting hits to those media files from almost around
the world including the regions you specified on the tickets.

You can either use hot link protection for the media files - to deny
hotlinking of files and can use robots.txt file to deny unwanted bots from
accessing your account."

China continues to grow, but Poland has greater bandwidth. China wins on
the number of hits. The US is pathetic, way behind; European Countries
have a greater bandwidth than the US has pages. Germany and Great Britain
are "looking around." Everything else is miniscule; except for slight
blips from Germany and the Russian Federation, the world is quiet. So many
others register close to emptiness! Indonesia has zero pages but two
hundred hits; a huge 2.32 gigabytes were downloaded. Thailand comes in for
661.83 megabytes and 57 hits, not a page among them. The haven of Estonia
registers a full 1.45 gigabytes, 73 hits, and zero pages. I wonder what
they're enjoying. Ethiopia - one page, one hit, 7.13 kilobytes, oddly
matched by Croatia - 1, 1, 7.13. Under "others" - i.e. "not countries" -
there are 0 pages, 0 hits, and a mysterious 88 gigabytes.

NO ONE SPENT OVER AN HOUR AT THE SITE, and only ONE PERSON 30-60 min, TWO
PEOPLE 15-30 min. Ah how beautiful it would be to have copies of my site,
like flowers, everywhere! But most of my visits - 592 in fact - dashed in
and out, under 30 seconds, nothing there but a directory. Only 14 spent
over five minutes, which means just about no one looked at the .mp4s for
any length of time, much less downloaded any of them. My work must count
for something, but it truly strikes out: it's the robots and spiders who
absorb my silliness and will soon take over the world...

Generated by Mnemosyne 0.12.