For a long time, I've been interested in finding a use for an old stenography machine discovered in a thrift store. Not knowing anything except what it was, I decided to buy it and, like most aspirational projects, it sits on a desk, unused.
Until now! Well, kinda.
Since I bought The Darn Thing™, one idea has kept up with me. If stenography represents the sounds of words, what does it mean to "sharp" or "flat" a word? Jazz musicians often talk about things like "chord voicings" (especially piano players). All musicians reckon with theory.
As it turns out, so do stenographers.
The overall dictionary behind a stenographer's style is referred to as such: a "theory." So, what would it mean to change the theory and make it (I don't know), jazzy? This project more than anything is a reminder to myself to figure this out, even if the final product of this is just a working draft of a working draft of a method.
The title of the proposed "concept for a plan" is the title of a Tommy Wolff/Fran Landesman song of the same name from 1955 which takes it's title (in turn) from a "jazzification" of the first line of T.S. Eliot's long poem "The Wasteland" ("April is the cruelest month...").
No idea how this will turn out. I'm not trying to complete the job started by Wolff/Landesman to do an english-to-english translation, but perhaps...something?
For a long time, I've been interested in finding a use for an old stenography machine discovered in a thrift store. Not knowing anything except what it was, I decided to buy it and, like most aspirational projects, it sits on a desk, unused.
Until now! Well, kinda.
Since I bought The Darn Thing™, one idea has kept up with me. If stenography represents the sounds of words, what does it mean to "sharp" or "flat" a word? Jazz musicians often talk about things like "chord voicings" (especially piano players). All musicians reckon with theory.
As it turns out, so do stenographers.
The overall dictionary behind a stenographer's style is referred to as such: a "theory." So, what would it mean to change the theory and make it (I don't know), jazzy? This project more than anything is a reminder to myself to figure this out, even if the final product of this is just a working draft of a working draft of a method.
The title of the proposed "concept for a plan" is the title of a Tommy Wolff/Fran Landesman song of the same name from 1955 which takes it's title (in turn) from a "jazzification" of the first line of T.S. Eliot's long poem "The Wasteland" ("April is the cruelest month...").
No idea how this will turn out. I'm not trying to complete the job started by Wolff/Landesman to do an english-to-english translation, but perhaps...something?