The Other Shoe Has Dropped

Document Elmo Camera.

KG replies: Mm? Oh, oh, oh, I see, that's the name of the hard copy projector. It looked like some kind of automatic dadaist reply thing. Thank you. Now, what are the chances I could get my department to order one?

The next step is to distribute your course material PDFs on USB memory sticks to students.

At recent computer conferences I've attended, we no longer have to drag our laptops up to the podium and hope we can connect with the projector being used (Mac vs PC wars). Just plug your memory stick into the laptop controlling the projector and you're running.

Definitely makes things much easier.

The device you're asking about is a "document camera." It's a small video camera and light source mounted on an arm that shines down and views whatever is placed below it.

If you web search for document cameras you'll come up with a list of online purchasing options. Bard may have some in lecture halls that serve other subjects, or so-called designated smart classrooms. Then again, maybe not. If no one has ever asked for one, they might not have seen a need.

cheers!

It may interest you to know that when Harvard University decided, in 1957, to create a Statistics department, they poached the people in the Stats department at MIT. What clinched the transfer deal for the profs involved was that Harvard promised to put an overhead-projector in every lecture room!

KG replies: If Harvard could promise me that, I'd go too.

Any chance of uploading some of those ultra-rare unpublished postminimalist and totalist scores to your site? (with the composers' permission of course...) I would think that many scholars would appreciate having easier access to this repertoire.

KG replies: A very good question indeed. Access *is* the number one problem holding up the musicological study of this repertoire. Personally I would love to see composers come up with some kind of collective web site where their PDFs could be stored and downloaded, somewhat along the lines of www.imslp.org. I would be happy to upload the PDF scores I have to imslp.org myself, but I'm not eager to confront all the permission issues involved. For instance, I'm scanning all the Nancarrow scores for my research and lectures, but Schott owns the copyrights of even the unpublished ones, which seems criminal to me.

One of the problems is that scores made by scanning (as opposed to made directly from Sibelius files) take up a tremendous amount of space - about half a MB per page, at the dpi I'm using, which means a 120-page score ends up at something just over 60 MB, which takes (on my setup) about an hour to upload. I'd appreciate some advice about programs that squeeze scanned PDFs down to a smaller size, which I understand is possible. I'm not technologically savvy enough to take the lead on this.

But I am something of a fanatic about getting new-music information distributed as widely as possible. And if, say, you and I were to run into each other someday, and you had your laptop with you, and maybe a nice Cuban cigar you could spare, I might conceivably turn the other way to smoke the latter while you took a look through the contents of my hard drive....

Meanwhile, most of *my* scores are available at http://www.kylegann.com/Gannscores.html , no cigar necessary.