Sebastian Abbott

Swimming in the rain

This morning, another relaxed, family- and work-free morning, I pottered about getting up, making breakfast and checking the weather. Finally, the rain was due - but only later in the afternoon.

So, I packed my bag, plopped in my contact lenses, had a cup of tea, read more of “Teach us to sit still” by Tim Parks - an amazing account of his battle to find his balance, in order to alleviate his pain - and then finally hopped on my bike to the Tiergarten swimming pool.

It was the perfect time to go. I was ready to swim at 11:45 and there were three people in the play pool (the readout showed that was 22 °C - and it really took my breath away when I plunged in), though there was a flurry of wet-suited triathletes taking up a third of the olympic pool (which was a balmy 24 °C). The rest of the place was practically deserted, and I had a lane to myself.

Without the stress of having to watch out for other swimmers, I realised what really stresses me about swimming - it’s bloody noisy! Whether swimming breast stroke or crawl, breathing out under water creates a barrage of bubbles streaming past my face and my ears. It’s not a dainty little “bubble bubble” - goodness me, no - it’s a cacophony of cavitation, each bubble shrieking and shouting as loudly as possible “BANG! BLUB! BUBBLE!” as each CO2-filled echo chamber flops and gloops its way on by.

Once I realised that the noise was a key contributor to my emfrazzlement, I couldn’t ignore it, but I could work around it. I started to swim more slowly, more efficiently. I started to glide with each kick, only sweeping with my arms when I felt the legs float up in the stream behind me. Finally, I felt that I had arrived at an acceptable breast stroke style.

Hopefully this will mean that I’ll be able to move on from the second perennial stress-factor of swimming, which is that I think about it too much, from an engineering perspective: which angle should my hands have? Where is the most effective point to impart the largest impulse with either hands or feet? How’s my streamline angle in the water? And so on ad infinitum, for each swimming style that I try to take on.

After about half an hour, it started raining. The triathletes all left (to give them credit, I think that was more for lunch than to escape the rain), and slowly and surely the pool emptied. Finally, for a glorious couple of lengths, I was the only person in the pool.

I finished off with a victorious fast crawl - then topped that by finally trying out the water slide into the play pool.

→ 2:11 PM, Aug 13

Rosetta and her multifaceted stone

Comet on 3rd August 2014 - ESA via Ars Technica

Well, it's a stone of a few kilometers girth - but compared to the vastness of space, it's a stone, alright. And somehow, humans have managed to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with it. Incredible when you think about it - and almost incomprehensible!

Here's a great article from Ars Technica summarising the rendezvous. Looking forward to the news in November, when the lander should tether Rosetta to the comet!

→ 10:00 PM, Aug 6

Danzemos! (and the other, upside-down exclamation mark before it): a rhythmical, lyrical semester of music

This has been an interesting semester of music with the Musikfreunde Heidelberg Symphony Orchesta. When I first came across the programme, my heart sank a little: we were in for a crowd-pleasing semester of cheesy dancy Latin American stuff with minimal musical merit.

Well, it certainly pleased the crowds - and, I am glad to say, it won me over, too.

We played seven pieces in all, ranging from Ravel's contemplative Pavane pour un enfant défunt (a Pavane being a dance), through to the highlight of the evening, Danzon 2 by Arthuro Marquéz, all kicked off by Gershwin's inimitable Cuban Overture.

As you might guess, there was a lot of rhythm to play, with all the precision and control that that implies. It's very easy to think too much about rhythm, but I certainly had to clarify things in my own mind about how long to play a note, how loudly and with which accents - along, of course, with the basic question of when to play each note.

There was a section in Danzon 2, for example, that required the trombones to play syncopated stabs against the trumpet melody. A 4/4 bar was followed by 6/8, then 7/8 and then we had to come in on the first quaver offbeat of the next 4/4 bar. Whilst we certainly needed to figure out what we should be playing (and when), it soon became a question of feeling the rhythm, not counting it - and certainly not thinking about it.

All the while, confidence grew and I worked on improving my openness of sound as the necessary base.

The trombone writing in this programme was all about presence and poise. As I mentioned above, it was about precision accompanied by the ability to give each note, no matter how short, its best. For me, this was another semester of rediscovery of coolness whilst playing. I am slowly learning to relax whilst playing - especially in the throat, which I have always tended to tense up, thereby constricting the flow of air, and wasting energy. The concert was certainly energetic, but I feel I succeeded in playing with a rounder tone than before, and with a more relaxed concentration than I would have achieved in the past.

We had some personnel difficulties within the section, with the second trombone not really fitting in. He's a young guy and could very well learn the lessons that I've been learning myself - but he didn't manage to give the impression that he was aware of any lessons needing to be learned at all. In addition, he missed both rehearsal weekends, without giving any notice to us at all. That was the final straw. Our conductor and I took the decision to ask him not to play - and, despite my own need to try and avoid conflict, our relief at the decision having been taken was palpable.

Once that was cleared up, it was a case of hiring a pro to get us through the concerts - and what a pleasure it was, having him and the student tubist on board (our own tame tubist having had to skip this semester). We organised a sectional rehearsal on the Saturday before our set of concerts, and it was a revelation. Suddenly, we were all in tune, suddenly I felt that the musical messages that the conductor had spent the semester of rehearsals trying to get across, got across - albeit through my imperfect translations. Suddenly, we were a low brass section. Suddenly, it felt great to play in an orchestra again.

As always with the Musikfreunde, the orchestra got tighter and more lyrical over the course of the three concerts. The first was - as usual - a blast, as we hacked our way through most of the repertoire at a school concert, where we had to finish on time so that everybody could get home in time to watch the Germany - Brazil semi-final at the world cup.

The concert in Neustadt an der Weinstraße was better - less raucous, more controlled, but still somewhat overexcited. Finally, the Stadthalle concert went better than I had hoped for. My Mum, who also came along, noted the ultimate praise: nobody around her in the audience could keep still.

We had them dancing, and that's what it was all about.

→ 9:08 PM, Jul 22

On finding my voice

A short and not excessively dramatic story of loss and gain

Some seemingly random and certainly uninvited bugs ganged up to cause me quite a hefty a throat infection this week, with the usual range of symptoms that such an ailment entails: difficulty in swallowing, running a temperature, lethargy - and more or less losing my voice.

That I could still just about speak made things interesting to observe on one front. Since I've been having to speak “around” the swelling, I have automatically reverted to my most relaxed, my most sonorous voice - but for some reason not my most natural.

I’ve been noticing of late how I have developed, especially at work, a sharp-edged “scratch” to my voice. It's almost certainly a subconscious attempt to project my voice through the hubbub and grandstanding of the office environment, in a similar way to how city birds have increased their pitch and volume to overcome the ever louder traffic and general background noise of the city. This may even be resulting in damage to their vocal chords and additional stress as a result. Fortunately, I don’t think that I’m that far gone yet, but this throat infection has made me realise that I could try to relax things once more.
My most relaxed voice is a fairly mellow baritone - but it is quiet. The “scratch” that I have induced, adding almost a "hiss" or distortion to my voice allows it to penetrate the room more effectively (a piping flute was better suited to stroke keeping on rowed ships such as triremes than the archetypal bass drum beat).

So to keep the soft voice, yet get it heard, I need to raise the overall volume - hopefully without it becoming too boomy (as I'm simply not that type of person).

Theoretically, I should have no problem with volume control - I do sing, too, after all. Opening and relaxing the throat cavity to give the sound room to develop is a key part of projection in singing. But speaking seems to a different mode altogether, at least to my instincts. This means that raising the volume whilst maintaining the mellifluous tone requires something of a mental shift, too - in one sense it’s modifying my personality, the way that I come across to others.

The present limitations on my throat with the infection do however mean that I’m not able to modulate my voice as much as I’d like. Whilst reading a bed-time story to my daughter last night, I could hardly differentiate the characters as I normally do (Piglet really shouldn't sound the same as Pooh!). Indeed, the addition of a “grating” tone to the voice does give it greater flexibility as well as help it to carry. I recently listened to a short story read by Benedict Cumberbatch, who also has this more modern element of scratch to his voice in contrast, say, to Richard Burton reading “Under Milk Wood”, which is to my ears plummy beyond belief, if lovely in its own, classical way).

So - my challenge is to figure out a way of improving my voice, to make it carry more without the “artificial” distortion or equalisation - but also without it becoming some boorish, booming tool to hammer others with. It will be an interesting project!

As for the birds, well let’s hope that, for their sakes, we all end up driving electric cars (without excess anti-silence regulations) - but without increasing the number of wind turbines that do put paid to the occasional bird before it dies from voice-stress... But that's another theme altogether...

→ 1:35 PM, Mar 20

Musikfreunde: Russian Romantics without a hint of snow

Another semester of orchestral music has drawn to a close with Saturday night's concert of the Musikfreunde Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra in the Stadthalle. The hall was packed, we played with passion and precision (though not always both at the same time), and the audience was by all accounts happy.

It was an unexpectedly relaxed end to an otherwise hectic term - for me, at least. It was presumably much less relaxing for our principal conductor, who was ill over the last few weeks leading up to the main concert and is still reuperating. He had to limit himself to the concerts (in Gernsbach and Leutershausen as well as the Stadhalle itself), so a couple of final rehearsals were cancelled. With those "pre-concerts" being two weeks before the main one, the final weeks were much less packed than usual. Given that the final result was so good, perhaps the timing was just right to "depressurise" things, keeping us keen and fresh rather than jaded and exhausted.

The pressure built up before term had even started. We had struggled to find trombonists to fill one position, and the term had started badly with various of us not being able to attend rehearsals regularly. I, for example, had taken all the music home with me one week, but didn't attend the following week's rehearsal, when other players turned up. It was all a bit frustrating, especially when our conductor sent a few ratty emails to us, and to me in particular as de facto lead trombonist.

I had skipped last summer's concerts to move house, which turned out to be a welcome break from the hustle and bustle in the build up to the main concerts. With the rather stressful start to this term, I did wonder why I was putting myself through all this.

As term went on and the programme began taking shape, we uncovered some difficulties with integrating the new trombonist, a young student who tended to get overexcited and to pull us out of shape, both in terms of rhythm and tuning. We had to have a few chats - in one sense to remind him that it was he who needed to adapt to us rather than the other way around. I hadn't expected to have to use some middle-management techniques in an orchestral situation, and I was a little nervous prior to asking him aside for a portion of contructive criticism - but he took the event calmly and seemed to understand that he needed to develop. He still has a lot to learn in terms of breathing and body control: sitting next to a someone trying both to play and to nod to the beat was rather distracting, especially as the length of the trombone tends to amplify movement - but all of that can come with time.

The music itself was a very appealing mix of humour, drama, pathos and grandeur. As a result of some difficulties in ordering music from Russia (we had planned to play Khatchaturian's Triumphal Poem, but the publisher failed to collect a full orchestra's worth of notes, it had been so seldom played), we resorted to one piece that I had played with the Musikfreunde a few years previously, Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead, which I have grown to love as a piece. Its depth and the sheer skill in its composition completely knocked any anti-romantic snobbery in me.

I had never come across Glasunov before, and his 2nd Symphony was an enjoyable blast. It felt almost simple at first, but that simplicity hid a playful inventiveness that made this work much more than (for me) an unknown oddity played more for its rarity than any intrinsic value - no, it paid its way musically, too!

So, this term was one to remember as a learning as well as a musical experience. The weather was rather less memorable - Russian Romantics in the rain.

The weather in Heidelberg around concert time

→ 5:43 AM, Feb 17

Wikileaks - a history?

Staatsfeind Wikileaks - "Wikileaks - Enemy of the State" - published in January 2011 by two journalists (Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark from Der Spiegel) who followed Julian Assange during the tumultuous year of Wikileaks "revelations" and exposures throughout 2010 is one of those perplexing "history of now" books

Reading the book (a Christmas present from my brother in law) now, especially the introductory paragraphs, feels strangely hollow, as if there's a large, NSA and Edward Snowden-sized gap in the story being told. Conversely, today there seems to be a Wikileaks and Assange-sized gap in the news - though it's a gap nobody appears to miss very much.

I'm only at the beginning of Staatsfeind Wikileaks and, despite a noticeable editorial miss (unless I've missed a large Australian city called "Syndey"), it's shaping up to be an interesting read. It has flowed fairly chronologically so far, describing an unusual, unsettled and unsettling person in his youth. Assange's early life on the run - from society, from an aggressive step-father, from security administrators, from the police - and his unfurling into the world of computer geekery and hacking is efficiently told - though I'm not sure if we really needed to know the various unproven theories as to why his hair turned white in his early twenties. Assange is certainly an uncomfortable main character (but then, would a pipe-and-slippers type have set up Wikileaks and have been worthy of a mountain of journalism?). His early hacker activities, whilst no doubt skillful, an art unto themselves, come across as merely petulant. His early activism is rather teenaged - one-sided and immature.

It is this question about "maturity", "common sense", "protecting us from ourselves and other undesirables" that promises to form a large part of the book, with questions running permanently alongside Assange's actions. How much transparency can we handle? How useful is / has been / will be Wikileaks as a forerunner of a potential open-source future? Have any of the revelations from Wikileaks been of any service, other than to highlight the stinking underside of war and diplomacy which we don't really need to know about?

What the book certainly won't be able to answer is - is Wikileaks relevant now? With Assange trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, unwilling to face trial in Sweden for alleged sexual assault - presumably since that would be a gateway to his extradition to his bestest friends in the USA - there seems to be a hiatus in the development of this enforced openness. And there doesn't seem to be much in the way of open arms waiting for even more sordid truth to out.

The Snowden question has blown open the door to discussion about spying. The Assange question is - the way I perceive it - at least slumbering: how much do we and should we know about the political world around us?

I'll post a review once I'm through...

→ 9:05 PM, Feb 12

Spectroscopic sensibilities - The Secret of Scent and rediscovering my nose

Writing about smelling things makes me feel remarkably uneasy. It seems to be more acceptable somehow to write about music or noise, photography or fashion, even about its food and drink counterpart than it is about odour itself. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Developing the sense of smell is, after all, a skill, a talent, an art, just like learning to listen and to see. And, standing as I do at the very bottom of the olfactory learning curve, I’m very bad at it.

Unless I had a cold and I couldn’t breathe or taste properly, I took my sense of smell totally for granted. I would pay great heed to it in potentially negative scenarios, like sniffing for food or clothes that were a bit off - until recently, when a book opened my nose to that most chemical of arts, perfume.

That book was The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin. I unexpectedly found this alluring accord of olfactory geekery and scientific erudition on my bookshelf at home, where it had been left by my father who, as a consulting chemist, works with fragrance firms from time to time. His basic book on the science became my gateway to experiencing this sense afresh.

Luca Turin is a biophysicist blessed with an evident passion for perfume and a deft turn of phrase. His effervescent enthusiasm for the art is infectious, and drew me into a mysterious world of chypres, fougères, coumarin, aldehydes and patchouli, into a world of Chanel No. 5 and Poison. These strange and wondrous terms made me realise how sparse my vocabulary is for the nose. Not merely in terms of having heard of the words, but in terms of associating them with a meaning, that meaning being a smell.

Like a conjouror with a red-inlined cape, Dr. Turin suddenly yet elegantly swirls context from the artful to the scientific. He begins by describing each of the key scent types in words and with diagrams of their molecular structures, which play such a key role in the theories of scent. Then he constructs the narrative surrounding their discovery and their relationship with our brains.

How these molecules are translated into scent signals has always been something of a mystery to science, but it was always something of a brackish backwater to science, not appealing to many, being confounded as it was with biology. In the meantime everybody else continued with their business of smelling things and making things smell as nice as possible regardless, just as footballers blithely make use of some of the most complex physics imaginable without them troubling their bank balances or intellects.

The presence of unique molecular receptors in the nose was confirmed in the early 1990s, but how those receptors were activated, in what amounted to a lock and key theory remained unexplained.
Luca Turin’s idea was a synthesis and development of disparate ideas from the past, with a fine story of book shops in Moscow and in Portugal, of fundamental research made at Ford Motor Company, of all places - but in essence, it centres on the idea of the nose being an exquisitely finely tuned spectroscope operating on the principal of molecular resonance. Like odorous instruments, each molecule has its own set of harmonics, which set the timbre of that instrument, of that smell.

The theory still has its opponents and its inherent difficulties in validation - the critical tests still rely on peoples’ noses: according to the theory, two identically shaped but differently massed molecules (e.g. through isotopes) should smell different. Equally, two completely dissimilar molecules with the same frequency spectra should smell the same. The evidence seems to be stacking up in favour of this theory - but its detractors and some counterevidence remain.

But for now I personally don’t really care how the theory is getting along*. I’m too busy rediscovering my nose and the whole sensory apparatus associated with it. I want to try out some of the unique, individual scents in a fragrance. I want to know if I can “imagine” roast chicken in the same way that I can visualise a car or hear music. Can I learn to remember a smell, or a taste? That’s something that I’m remarkably poor at doing.

The main thing is that there’s a part of me that has been active only in the background for so many years - it’s time to give it some room to breathe!

*Neither, apparently, does Dr. Turin.. He does, however, care that his theory is getting results. He founded a company dedicated to designing scents based on their spectral profiles and has had some notable successes, including a replacement for the natural yet carcinogenic coumarin. This company, alongside his books, is how he makes his money...

You can find out more about Luca Turin via his 2005 TED talk and from a BBC Horizon programme from 1995 when the theory was very fresh and very controversial.

→ 11:00 PM, Feb 10