Posts Tagged MathsJam
Collaborations: All on My Own (among others)
Posted by Angela Brett in News on March 17, 2021
This year’s MathsJam Annual Gathering was virtual, and rather than singing maths-related parody songs together at the MathsJam Jam, we were encouraged to send videos of ourselves singing them. Sam Hartburn, who has written many lyrics for MathsJam Jam songs, offered to write custom song lyrics for one of the participants. I don’t recall whether this was for the best submission or one chosen at random, but in any case, Joey Marianer got the prize for a cover of Jonathan Coulton’s Mandelbrot Set.
Joey considered giving the prize away, since I already sometimes write lyrics that Joey sings, but instead decided to commission a variation on They Might Not Be Giants, a poem I wrote about science education which Joey set to music. The new version is about someone who has many offers of help to solve a puzzle, but finds satisfaction in solving it on their own.
A while later, TikTok was awash with collaborations on the Wellerman sea shanty, and Daniel Litt wrote a parody of it about elliptic curves. 〈 Berger | Dillon 〉 did a duet with it, and Joey then sang harmony. My only contribution to this one was editing Joey’s video into the others’, since we don’t have TikTok to do it for us. Neither of us knows much about what it’s about, but I bet many of the Wellerman singers don’t know much about the Weller brothers or tonguing either.
We won’t be putting to sea this year, of course, but the 2021 JoCo Cruise is free and virtual, and I am finally going to run a poetry show as a shadow event. Come join us!
I’m excited to discover a more recent viral TikTok is singing a sped-up version of Mike Phirman’s Chicken Monkey Duck! I’m not cool enough to be on TikTok, so I made sure to learn that song before it was cool, just so I wouldn’t surpass my coolness quota. Here’s a playlist of me singing Chicken Monkey Duck, some diagrams I made of the song, and an rtf of it using colours from my personal grapheme–colour synaesthesia, created using an app I wrote a while ago. And for completeness, here’s the Spanish version of it, Pollo Mono Pato, which I think is a bit harder to learn due to all the words having the same number of syllables.
On the subject of Mike Phirman, he’s just released a new album called Activity Books, and it’s great. I’m consistently impressed by how many of his songs do things that songs have rarely or never done before. For instance, Color by Number can probably detect grapheme–colour synaesthesia in young children, by causing them to throw tantrums about the incorrect colour associations. ‘Word Search / Vacuum’ makes me wish there were an alphabet song of the entire International Phonetic Alphabet.
In unrelated news, a while ago I requested a cover of K’s Choice’s song ‘America’ on the CamannWordsmith patreon. That Patreon post has now been made public. The track is also available on the brand new CamannWordsmith Bandcamp page, along with a whole lot of other covers that you can download for free. To bring this back around to relatedness again… CamannWordsmith and I are collaborating on something; watch this space to find out what!
Things I forgot to blog about, part n+1: MathsJam Things
Posted by Angela Brett in Holiday Highlights, Publishing on January 5, 2020
Happy new year! There are so many things from last year that I’ve forgotten to blog about. For instance, my poem They Might Not Be Giants (which is, by the way, available spoken and sung on videos and on a poster) was published in Chalkdust 10. Chalkdust is a magazine for the mathematically curious, which we were frequently encouraged to submit work to during the 2017 MathsJam Annual Gathering. I gave a talk at that gathering where I recited They Might Not Be Giants and also presented a few of the haiku I found in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics, so that was an obvious thing to submit.
There exists Joey for all Angela
Through a combination of luck and procrastination, I submitted it just in time for it to be in the latest issue available at the 2019 UK MathsJam Annual Gathering, which I also attended, along with Joey Marianer. We wore ‘matching’ clothes; a ‘forall’ (∀) neckline dress and a ‘there exists’ (∃) hoodie, so that if we aligned our nametags well (which I didn’t) we could make an unproven statement quantifying our coexistence.
Now, Joey and I have a habit of noticing words which scan to ‘hallelujah’ (that is, double trochees*) and writing short parodies of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ about them. Having some experience singing the original song, Joey sometimes sings those parodies, as you can see in this playlist:
MathsJam has a Competition Competition, so naturally, I wrote a Hallelujah about that:
Well, sometimes competition’s tough.
At MathsJam, that is not enough —
they have a competition competition.
But what if all the MathsJams fought,
and all such fights together wrought
a meta-meta-meta-competition?
Competition competition competition competition.
And then we decided to enter a competition into the competition competition, where our competition would be to write a Hallelujah parody about competitions. I wrote these instructions for our Competition Competition competition:
You know that oft-sung Cohen song?
We challenge you to write it wrong —
instead of “hallelujah”, “competition”.
And if your lyrics really slam
we’ll sing them in the MathsJamJam.
We call this Hallelujah competition:
Competition-competition competition “Competition”
There was quite some competition in our competition Hallelujah competition; Hallelujah! Some entries used a word other than ‘competition’, and we ended up giving a prize to the best non-competition entry into our Competition Competition competition, as well as the expected prize for the best ‘competition’ Competition Competition competition entry. As promised in the competition rules, Joey sang some of the competition entries (and the two Hallelujahs above) at the MathsJamJam, with the accompaniment of whoever else felt like joining in:
Lyrics and credits for the other entries are in the video description. Joey came to Vienna after MathsJam and performed with me at Open Phil, including singing They Might Not Be Giants both on-stage and in Phil’s studio, but that’s for another post.
∎
* I noticed that ‘double trochee’ was a double trochee, and stopped writing the blog post at that point to write a Hallelujah:
You heard there was a secret song
that if you play, they will sing along.
You want to make a splash at karaoke.
It goes like this, the halfs, the thirds…
you can’t remember Cohen’s words,
so sing about a random double trochee.
Double trochee, double trochee, double trochee, double trochee.
Pico, emacs, ed, vi (Pico and Sepulveda parody lyrics)
Posted by Angela Brett in NanoRhymo on November 29, 2019
The following are parody lyrics to the song Pico and Sepulveda, about text editors. I imagine that if someone sang them, I’d want to make a music video consisting of the lyrics shown in each text editor in time with the song.
pico, emacs, ed, vi,
pico, emacs, ed, vi…
SublimeText
mcedit
or Notepad…
++
xedit,
TextEdit
or Notepad…
++
You can use BBEdit
or an IDE,
EVE or Atom or ex.
TeachText never vexed
but for NeXT I want to feel
perplexed and try escaping out of
pico, emacs, ed, vi…
to NotePad…
++
The editor you can quit!
∎
This idea popped into my head when I saw yet another thread of people discussing their favourite text editors. Writing these lyrics did nothing to get them out of my head, so let’s see if putting them here works.
Pico is the editor I typically use if I must use a command-line editor, because it’s fairly easy to use even when I haven’t used it for a while and don’t remember any secrets, and most importantly, it’s easy to exit. I usually use GUI text editors though. If I’ve left out your favourite editor, just paste these lyrics into said editor and edit them.
In other news, I’m making a halfhearted effort at NanoRhymo over on Twitter… ostensibly a short, rhyming poem for each day of November, but I started late and have only done 16 so far, plus this one, all in a thread:
Also, my poem They Might Not Be Giants is in issue 10 of Chalkdust magazine, just in time for me to go to the MathsJam Annual Gathering this weekend. I’ll bring a few larger-than-usual posters of it in case anyone wants them.
In which I appear content with content in which I appear
Posted by Angela Brett in News on September 24, 2018
I’ve been having a pretty relaxed month, but my life is ridiculous, therefore so far in September I have appeared in a music video, a radio broadcast, and a podcast.
The music video is Molly Lewis’s ‘Pantsuit Sasquatch‘, for which I recorded my feet walking up to a tortoise sculpture on a playground:
This joins the six other official music videos I have contributed to, and five unofficial music videos I’ve made. I guess I just like being in music videos.
The radio broadcast (which you can also listen to online) was episode #9 of the Open Phil Broadcast on Radio Orange. The broadcast mostly features regulars at the Open Phil open mic in Vienna. Each episode features an interview with and performance by two acts; I shared this one with Adrian Lüssing, also known as The Cliff.
It was an honour to be invited to participate in the broadcast, and it was made extra awesome by the fact that it happened while Joey Marianer, who has been setting a lot of my poetry to music, was visiting Vienna, so he participated too. I recited They Might Not Be Giants, then he sang his version of it, then we sang I Love Your Body, with Joey singing the first part and me singing the second part. Yes, me singing. This is about the first time I’ve sung for an audience, and the third time Joey and I had sung that song together, and it went on the radio. I think it went pretty well, though! We performed it again a few days later on the Open Phil stage, and I’ll post video of that once I’ve uploaded it.
The podcast was episode #60 of Wrong, but Useful, a recreational mathematics podcast by @icecolbeveridge (Colin in real life) and @reflectivemaths (Dave in real life). I was invited to be a special guest cohost. I’m not sure I contributed very much, but I once again recited They Might Not Be Giants, because the hosts had heard me perform that at the MathsJam Annual Gathering last year. I have to admit, I had not actually listened to the podcast until I was invited to be on it — podcast listening is something I usually do while commuting, and lately I’ve been noncommutative. However, before episode #60 was recorded, Joey and I listened to episode #59 together, and I’m happy to report that the answer we came up with for the coin-flipping puzzle was correct.
In hindsight, I wish I’d mentioned my linguistics degree while we were chatting about English and poetry and such. I also wish I’d said something about the fact that nobody on episode #59 noticed that the diameter of the Fields medal in millimetres happened to round up to the number of the podcast (that is, 64, not 59. You don’t expect mathematicians to give each podcast episode only a single number do you?)
This reminds me, I need to register for the MathsJam Annual Gathering soon. You should too, if you can get to it. It’s a lot of fun! And who knows? Maybe if you go, you’ll end up co-hosting a podcast.
They Might Not Be Giants: now a song!
Posted by Angela Brett in News, Things To Listen To on November 18, 2017
The other day I discovered that the ukuletrically charged Joey Marianer has once again set something I wrote to music! Truly, a Joey is an exciting kind of friend to have. (No, not a joey. Not everybody‘s got a baby kangaroo.) This time it’s They Might Not Be Giants.
On the subject of people who could conceivably be called Joey, and who make music, my friend Joseph will be singing a parody of a song I wrote on his patreon some time soon. I’m looking forward to it! If you support him on patreon you’ll see it as soon as it comes out — check out some of his recently-unlocked older posts to get an idea of what you’re in for. The patreon is his only source of income at the moment, so your contribution would mean a lot to him, as well as being good value for you.
On the subject of They Might Not Be Giants, I recited it at the MathsJam Annual Gathering last weekend. It was my first time at a MathsJam and it was great fun. At MathsJam, anyone can give a five-minute talk about anything mathematical, and newcomers were especially encouraged to, so I decided to present The Duel, a more mathematical poem than I would usually do at open mics. I even made some slides depicting what was going on. Eventually, though, I started to think The Duel wasn’t very good and I should do They Might Not Be Giants instead. After reciting both to a focus group of order two a few hours before my talk, I made the switch. With my remaining talk time, I showed some of the haiku I found in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. It seemed to go down well. I had brought along a few of my posters in case people would be interested in them, and came back with none.
The rest of MathsJam was amazing, and I’m sure I’ll be back. There were all sorts of talks, including another mathematical poet, as well as magic, coin-floating, robotic cube-solving, juggling, puzzles, balloon animals, fancy yarn spinning, mathematical song parodies (I also sang Tom Lehrer’s Derivative Song for the people at the MathsJam Jam, since they hadn’t heard it), mathematical cakes, and a competition competition!
I won an origami double-stellated tetrahedron in a competition competition competition. It might not technically be a double-stellated tetrahedron, but the competition was to name it, and, inspired directly by the talk by the shape’s creator (Kathryn Taylor), that’s what I named it.
I was a bit worried that it was going to be a pain to get that home without damaging or losing it, since it would get crushed in my bag and I’m not used to carrying something in my hands constantly. At first it had a string or rubber band around it which had been used to tie it to the competition box, so I tied it to a belt hook. At some point it fell off and partly came apart, but I was having dinner with other MathsJam attendees at the time, and one of them knew enough modular origami to fix it (Kathryn had run a table devoted to modular origami on the Saturday night.) After that I held it by hand, until I realised that it could be suspended quite securely in the Acme Möbius scarf I was wearing.
I heard, repeatedly, that there’s a magazine called chalkdust which I should really be submitting some of my mathematical writing to, so I’ll do that. First, though, I will read the copies I picked up at MathsJam.
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