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It is still peaceful at UCA since students haven’t arrived yet. I was there close to 8pm and the evening bugs were starting their song, along with the constant drone of the huge air conditioners. In this recording the bugs and air conditioning take center stage, while the clock chimes 8pm in the background.

UCA Bells

You may have come across this at some point or another. Someone compressed the human population down to 100 peope to demonstrate ratios of white/nonwhite, christian/nonchristian, male/female, etc. I’m not sure who came up with this originally or the accuracy of the data since several sources tout different statistics, but it does serve its purpose. I found several different postings on the internet, this one being the most detailed. A typical showing:

If the world’s population were only 100:

• 57 Asians
• 21 Europeans
• 14 would be from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
• 8 Africans
• 52 would be female
• 48 would be male
• 70 would be non-white
• 30 would be white
• 70 would be non-Christian
• 30 would be Christian
• 6 people would possess 59% of the world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States
• 80 would live in substandard housing
• 70 would be unable to read
• 50 would suffer from malnutrition
• 1 would be near death
• 1 would be near birth
• 1 would have a college education
• 1 would own a computer

I found several others posted around the internet.

No tikki tikki ukulele music for you. There’s much more to Polynesian music than the typical tourist-friendly type associated with the south Pacific. Here’s an example:

Download Audio: Drum Dance Exerpt

My little brother had an organ recital recently, and since there was no recording equipment in the church he played at, I recorded it on my lil’ MD and Sony mic. My poor little mic and MD seemed way too puny to be recording such a huge instrument like a pipe organ (even if it wasn’t a huge one), but the recording really wasn’t too shabby. I recorded it from the church’s balcony since it was the only way to get the mic up to the same height as the pipes and since the church isn’t very long, it produced farily accurate sound I think. The only thing I did with this excerpt was to normalize the audio signal and encode to ogg.

Download Audio: Little mic, big instrument

One of the things I love about encoding my music into the ogg vorbis format is the use of custom tags, especially for my classical CDs. For example, this file of a movement from Mahler’s 6th symphony has tags labeling the Label of the CD, conductor, and symphony.

I just wish there were a way for Winamp, or any other player, to be able to search custom vorbis tags for things such as conductor, orchestra, or any other tag I use frequently such as violinist, pianist, etc. If I had such a program/feature, it would be easy to sort or search for all the recordings featuring the New York Philharmonic, or any pieces played by Martha Argerich for example. I guess that can be one of the disadvantages of using a less well known or used format. But at least there’s an excellent portable music player that supports ogg vorbis.