Thank you.

Two more posts in the Unicode mailing list thread, one from me, one a reply to my post.

Yes, I went searching on YouTube as a result of that reply to my post.

William

I tried to watch the Eurovision song contest yesterday evening.

I used to, in recent years, with regret, avoid it because of the disgraceful sarcastic nasty comments added in by the BBC.

One year a man was about to play a guitar and the camera went on him and the BBC commented that he has a receding hair line.

Why mention it?

But that seemed to have gone yesterday. I only noticed one unnecessary comment added by the BBC, about the dress one of the women reporting a jury's votes was wearing.

I was watching it on my computer but alas I did not view a lot of the entries though I heard them.

I had two instantiations of the web browser going so everytime the warning about flashing lights came on I looked at the other, blank, webpage until the song was over.

I cannot understand why such flashing lights are allowed. It is possible to have good visual effects without flashing lights.

I remember one where someone acted planting an apricot seed and watered it, then later a huge model of an apricot tree with white flowers in abundance rose up.

That was spectacular. There seemed nothing special about flashing some lights, though I was not watching.

William

Thank you Albert.

The four ladies at the left each play an instrument different from the others of them.

Are the instruments of the three ladies at the right each the same?

William

I am now going through it again to check.

The first three questions I found straightforward.

And I have just got 7 and 8 correct.

William

The wiki has a new, additional, top-level category today.

https://punster.me/wiki/

William

Years ago I heard that the way music works is that Middle C is 256 Hertz.

Later I think it changed to A is 440 Hertz.

If I remember correctly, 440 Hertz was the tone broadcast on at least some television channels a while after close down so as to remind people to turn off the television set, which is practice meant that the tone woke up a person who had gone to sleep in an armchair while watching television.

So, does what Geoff wrote mean that, say, middle C is a different frequency on a clarinet than on a bassoon?

Something that has puzzled me about music.

Is that 440 Hertz a more or less arbitrary standard, chosen rather than being like, say, whether a certain number is or is not a prime number?

I can easily imagine that an octave is a natural phenomenon that is applied in music.

However, is there a reason why there are a certain number of notes in an octave, rather than some other number, and why the black notes on a piano are some of them and not others?

I remember from school that a lady music teacher would say about fourths and fifths and demonstrate with a piano.

She used to give us tests where she would play two notes and we had to write down the, I think she might have called it the interval.

A fourth and a fifth in music seemed to be different from a fourth and a fifth in mathematics, but maybe I was missing something.

Is it that, like for some people red and green look the same, that for some people it is not possible to distinguish those distances between notes?

I can usually tell that one note is a higher pitch than another, but that is about it. I don't think that I can detect that something is an octave in difference.

Maybe to some (most?) people, the difference between a fourth and a fifth is as obvious as the difference of red and green is to me.

William

How about a Music section please?

William

It appears that there are two episodes.

William