Choir and How a Song is More Than Just its Words

As usual, I arrived at choir practice before everyone else. I arrive at exactly the minute that choir is scheduled to start, while everyone else is often finishing up their food at coffee hour. Just to clarify - this is not because I do not take advantage of the opportunity to eat a delicious fresh-baked chocolate doughnut, but because it is so good that I eat it quickly. I then have time to answer older congregants' questions about technology before I head off to practice. When everyone else arrives, we begin our warm-ups. We start by humming the lowest notes, progress to singing "ooo" when we get higher, and then repeat, changing the vowels a few times. Next, we go through the songs we will be singing for Palm Sunday and Easter.

When we sing, I always pay more attention to the flows of the songs than the words - I believe that the flow often carries more meaning than the words alone. While singing one of the songs, I realized that the word "destroy" can be calm if you shorten the consonants and lengthen the vowels - stretching out the "o" vowel into a wavy tune. A smoothly flowing song typically makes the listener feel happy or calm, while a fast song can excite, energize or anger the listener, depending on word pronunciation or rhythm. You can notice another entire level of meaning in a song when you pay attention to the rhythm and pronunciation that is beyond its lyrics. Sometimes the words and music convey a similar meaning, but other times they do not. This does not only apply to songs - the way you say anything carries meaning. Yelling "goodbye" in a gruff tone means something very different than a soft "goodbye." Singing has taught me that the way you say something matters just as much as your choice of words.

Bonus Tech Stuff: SBCs - Single Board Computers

Single-board-computers provide reasonably high performance in a tiny form factor. These devices are typically inexpensive, credit-card sized, and nowadays fast enough to run web browsers like Google Chromium (web browsers use a lot more processing power than one would think). In the past, most of these devices were slow and expensive due to limited popularity, but now that they have caught on that has all changed. Most single-board-computers utilize ARM smartphone processors, which also use minimal energy.

My personal favorite SBC so far is the Orange Pi PC. Although it has limited documentation and a small glitch in the installation process, the OPI-PC is faster than all other SBCs in the <$40 price range, and provides what might be the highest performance/$ of any SBC. It costs $15, and has 4 ARM Cortex-A7 processor cores with a Mali-400 GPU and 1GB of RAM. Although the ARM Cortex-A7 was released in 2011-2012, it remains the most efficient currently available ARM. It will be beat later this year by the upcoming Cortex-A32 and Cortex-A35 cores.

Much more popular than the Orange Pi PC is the Raspberry Pi. While none of the Raspberry Pi's are as fast as their Orange Pi counterparts, Raspberry Pi has great documentation and an assortment of high-quality tutorials. ODROID is another line of SBC's with a variety of available configurations. The ODROIDs are extremely fast, but are also more expensive - the high end ODROID-XU4 costs $74. However, the XU4 features 4 fast cores and 4 low power cores (total of 8 cores), 2GB of RAM (good enough to run a reasonable amount of Chrome tabs), USB 3.0, an eMMC (the type of flash memory used in phones) port, as well as a cooling fan.

#slice2016