Beethoven piano sonata in E-flat major, Op. 7

I write this as I listen to the piece shown in the title. As you can tell by the title of this post I want to talk about classical music. Specifically I want to talk about my thoughts on classical music from the background of knowing nothing about it. I should also mention that I’ve had two roommates that are piano performance majors so I have had a reasonable amount of exposure to the music and have had several conversations about it with them. The definition of classical music is intellectual music from what I know. Now from my understanding this means that classical music is music that is composed with music theory concepts in mind and with a good deal of thought going into what goes where and when. We all know what classical music sounds like. For people like me most classical music sounds fairly similar.

I want to talk about how or if classical music can become more popular with the general public. The main drawback is that most people cannot appreciate the music for the full value. We can appreciate it for how it sounds and if we like it or not but that’s pretty much it. We cannot understand why it sounds like something or why this sound follows the next one. So we can never fully understand the full picture. How would this become more popular? One answer for me is for classical music to be taught in the k-12 school system. So by the time a student becomes of college age they could listen to a piece of music and point out some of the basic concepts and maybe ideas of the piece. If it is not taught to kids then I personally cannot see how this will become more popular other then maybe hipsters will make it popular for a time.

Comparing Two Paintings

I wanted to discuss and compare two paintings that my girlfriend has done. At the moment I cannot think of a way to show you them because she does not want them out on the Internet where the image could be stolen. I will describe them. The first is a painting of an alligator smashing a violin, just the head of the alligator and the violin smashing into a bunch of pieces.  The style is realistic looking. The second painting is a mix of abstract ideas and concrete images. It has a really cool and colorful background using a bunch of different methods for applying the paint. For the actual image she has a bunch of animal figures based on cave paintings. When I saw both of these paintings side by side something interesting that I thought of was bipolar quality of these two paintings. The alligator one is painted to look realist. You can see the weight and you could imagine it in a 3D space very easily, but it is smashing a violin. This is not something that happens in real life. It is realism in a fiction setting. The other painting is not very realistic looking with all the crazy colors and abstract shapes, the cave painting of the animal figures looks like it could be something that is on a cave somewhere in the real world. One painting is realistic with a fictional scene and the other is abstract looking but with a scene that looks like it could be realistic.

Personal Art Experience

I would like this blog post to be about my personal experience with Art. Growing up I was exposed to art but just the technical side of art. I toke art classes and learned how to draw and basic things of this nature, like most kids. But it wasn’t until college that I started to understand more of what Art is and why it is important to us. I took an art education course here more sophomore year and that was really interesting to me. It was cool learning about a lot of the influential pieces of art and what they meant and how they changed how others did and thought about things. It was a new experience for me thinking about art theory and the more academic and intellectual side of art. Also my girlfriend that I got in college is an Art major. I’ve learned a lot about how to think about art from her and how art can depict our emotions. She has told me stories about students starting to cry as they present their piece. She did a painting about her grandparents dying and I got to see all the emotion behind the painting and how the painting helped her express it and be able to move on. I’ve heard the question quite a few times in college, “why is art important?”. Before college I'm not sure I would have had a very good answer. I probably would have said just for ascetic value and bland things like that. Now I would say art is a way for humans to express things that we cannot say with words and to get people to communicate and interact. I think most people would agree that personal relationships and interacting with other people is one of the most important things of our lives. I would agree with this. So if art gets people to have this interaction then I would say that art is incredibly important to us as humans.

Video Games: Single player vs. Multiplayer

I want to compare how a single player experience in video games is different to a multiplayer game experience. In a single player game the focus tends to be more on a good story line and good visuals and nice looking cut scenes. In a multiplayer game the focus is more on the game play and how the different players can interact with each other. Single player is more ascetics based and multiplayer is more functionality based. Of course both need good ascetics and good game play but this is a way to separate them.  I want to compare these types of games to artistic minded people and computational minded people. Single player games need more artists to design the story and how to make the game convey certain feel through the visuals. Multiplayer games need more computational thinkers to design how you play the game and then how to implement it. So with regards to video games being art, one might say single player games are more likely to be art than multiplayer games. In my own experience player both of these types of games, I would say obviously this question depends on one’s definition of art. If you consider sports to be art then you might say multiplayer games are also art but if you say purely interacting with other people is not art then you might say single player games are the only type of video games that are art.

YouTube and Changing Entertainment Industry

I watch YouTube videos pretty much everyday and it is, for me, where I get most of my video entertainment. What I want to compare and discuss is the two mediums of video entertainment: Television and the Internet. Until the Internet came around television was pretty much the sole source for video entertainment. There was no other place to watch a video. In the beginning the technology for making videos was expensive and not available to the average person. Personal camcorders came around as early as the 50’s but it did not really explode until the digital camcorder came to be in the mid 90’s. Digital storage and technology made it very easy for the average person to experiment and mess around with what you could do with a video camera. If we look at television the viewer only has a small about of variety but high quality. And mainly is based on fictional characters that people enjoyed finding out about. Now if we look at YouTube or the Internet video world. There is an insane amount of variety and quality ranging from very high to incredible low. And is mainly based on real people and events that happen on a personal level and viewers enjoy getting to know someone that is a real living person. I do not think either style of entertainment will be going away anytime soon. But if we want to talk about television and the Internet in terms of a method of distribution of the videos then I think we can say almost certainly that the Internet is quickly taking over television. Whether or not television will ever go away completely is hard to say but I think we can see just from the current rates that Internet will soon be the very dominant form of video distribution. Just to through in a little but about art. I think that YouTube has been an amazing outlet for creativity to flourish. It’s amazing that I get to live through this very exciting time and see the huge explosion of stuff because of the Internet.

The Singularity

I wanted to discuss the idea of the Singularity, specifically technological singularity. The singularity is refereeing to a point in time where a machine or something created by humans begin to start improving themselves without human direct involvement. This is thought of as an “intellectual explosion” where no one can predict what would happen after the fact. Some people think or have reasoned that the singularity will happen in the 21^st century. Ray Kurzweil is the author of the book, “The Singularity is Near” and he predicts that it will happen in the year 2045. My personal opinion on this event is that there is not enough evidence to say we know this will happen at some point in the future or that it is even possible, but of course it is a very interesting possibility. The idea of humans writing lines of code that could then write original lines of code on its own seems very bizarre. To turn this to an artistic point of view, it would be interesting if a bunch of computer scientists and artist got together and tried to come up with how they think this super intelligent machines would create art if they would create any at all. Would they realize the need for art and expression of feeling or would they create purely based on functional needs? It would be a very interesting discussion between very computational thinkers and very artist thinkers. That would actually be a really cool thought project, to come up with an idea or prediction on how the machines would handle the idea of art.

New Game

Hello,
     I just thought I would talk a little about this game I am working on. I've been wanting to come up with a game that I could design some complex AI program for a while now. I was trying to think of one where it doesn't require a ton of complex graphics or anything like that. What I have decided upon is basically a turn based version of Age of Empires on what is kind of like a game board. For those of you who don't know what Age of Empires is I would advise you play it sometime because it's awesome. Anyways in my game the board is split up into different plots of land. Each players gets to start on one plot. The players then expand out to occupying other neighboring territories and eventually take over the other players' territories with some sort of army. Along the way the players gather resources from the land they have and can build different kinds of building on their land. Also the game is somewhat focused on trading. I want to have a open market which players can trade in their resources for money or vise versa. But the market prices would be based on the players' production of the resources and on how much is bought and sold. There might also be direct trading between players and possible treaties and alliances could be formed between players as well. As you can imagine it would seem pretty complex to write a good computer player for this game. So I'm looking forward to when I get the game working so I can start writing the computer players. I'm really enjoying working on it at the moment. Its very fun working on a big project that I've designed and thought of all on my own, as compared to doing homework programs. I even set a personal due date for a playable alpha version of the game, which is a very minimal version of the game that one could play. I couldn't quite think of what to say about my personal life at the moment so i'll leave that for another post. Feel free to let me know what you think about my game idea and if you have any suggestions or ideas for the game, I would love to hear them. Oh but one thing, I did blacksmithing for the first time ever this week and I loved it. I hope I can do it more later on in life. I made a nail by the way, it's simple but its super fun for the first thing to make. I'm pretty happy with it. If you see me, you can ask to see it, because i'll probably be caring it around with me because I like it so much. Thanks for reading my thoughts, hopefully you enjoyed them.