The sound of the 1980s

I wrote this little reflection for The Facebook this morning. I'm copying it here in case I ever needed to find it again. It's not likely, but hey, one never knows.

Do you have a moment to talk about Kajagoogoo?

I enjoy playing bass guitar from time to time, though I'm not as good at it as I'd like to be. Sometimes I watch bass-related videos on YouTube, which of course means that YouTube tries to give me more bass-related videos. Last week, I watched one about Nick Beggs, bass player for the band Kajagoogoo.

I had never heard of Kajagoogoo before. Keep in mind that in the actual 1980s, I really only listened to Weird Al. I recognized the catchy pop song being discussed in the video, though. "Too Shy." Sing along with me: You're too shy shy, hush-hush, eye-to-eye. That's the one.

Unexpected to me was that this song has an absolutely killer bassline. It's wildly complicated, deploying a host of techniques that are beyond my skill. Listening to the song again with the ears of a bass guitarist, I was blown away. This inspired me to put on a Kajagoogoo album while cleaning up the kitchen the other day.

Now, we have to turn to the other important part of the story: I love bad 1980s movies. Give me MST3K or Rifftrax and a movie like Miami Connection or Pumaman, and I'm a happy camper. Part of what makes these movies so iconic is the sound of them: they sound like the 1980s.

Putting on Kajagoogoo's second album while cleaning up the kitchen made me feel like I was in one of these bad movies. I had never heard any of the songs before, but each was poppy and catchy and could have been used in the Mac and Me soundtrack. Turns out, there's a good reason for this: the lead singer from Kajagoogoo sang "The Neverending Story." That basically *is* the sound of the 1980s. Well, that and the screaming of "Atreyu!" and "Falcor!" but that just goes to show why my generation is the way we are.

Typesetting music with mup after a 20-year hiatus

Back around 1999-2002, I was composing and performing music pretty regularly as a stress-relief from graduate studies. This got me looking into creating printer-friendly versions of a few of my songs. I came across mup—a tool that takes plain text sheet music descriptions and creates snazzy postscript output. Mup supported Linux, where I was doing all of my serious work, and it allowed for a LaTeX-style separation of document content from document format. It was not free software, but I was happy to pay for a license to this excellent tool.

Fast-forward to today, when I was struck by the desire to typeset "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" for my kids. I introduced them to this song via the classic video some time in November, and of course they loved it. I picked out the chords on the piano, and it's become a fun song for me to sit at the piano and sing with them. Three of my boys are taking piano lessons, and so I thought it might be fun for them to see it written out. It's much more syncopated than what they are playing in their lessons, but I thought the oldest in particular might enjoy the rhythmic challenge.

I did a little Googling and found what appeared to be viable options, but I stopped when I saw that mup is still around. Not only that: the authors made it free software back in 2012! Right on, gentlemen!

It was fun to re-learn mup's syntax after twenty years or so. Here's a quick example from the bridge:

1: 4c#;;;8;8~;
rom chord above 1: 1 "A";
lyrics 1: "Why they changed it, I_";
bar

1: 8c;8~;8;8~;2;
lyrics 1: "can't say.";
bar

The lines starting with "1:" are specifying the notes to go on the first staff—in my case, the first and only one. The "4c#;" means quarter note C#, and each empty semicolon after means to repeat that note. The "8" switches to an eighth note without changing the pitch, and the tilde is a tie to the next measure. The "rom chord above" is placing a chord above the staff at that location. The real killer feature, in my opinion, is the typesetting of the lyrics: the lyrics are automatically bound to the rhythm of the line.

The resulting typeset music looks like this:

I've put my whole arrangement up as a gist on GitHub in case you want to see all the source, and I've put the resulting PDF online as well.

Thanks to John and Bill at Arkkra Enterprises for this amazing piece of software. On the project's main page, they introduce themselves as "musicians and computer programmers," and mup is a great example of how computational thinking can lead to productive tools. It's a shade of the same point I made in my reflection about my November game design project, and it echoes my recent frustrations at work with having to use Box, Microsoft Word, and emailing files around for collaboration when LaTeX and GitHub would have been the perfect tools. In any case, if you're a programmer and a musician, make sure you at least take a look at mup.