Here’s the highlight of my day (which shows you just how pathetic my life has become). While driving home I listened to an NPR program called Fair Game. Host Faith Salie must be almost as desperate as me because her post-drivetime oeuvre for today featured an interview with musical saw virtuoso Dale Stuckenbruck. I learned a few thing about saw playing that would otherwise have passed me by, such as the blade must be flexed into a symmetrical waveform curve with the amplitude of the wave corresponding to the pitch. The sound is produced by bowing at the point where the curvature crosses the x-axis. Mathematically this would be given by
A • sin(ωt + θ) = 0
The interview was interesting and Stuckenbruck is evidently dedicated to his instrument, he even has a CD out that’s available from Amazon. But to me saw music always invokes images of Joan Crawford experiencing psychotic hallucinations.
