[Politics] MacOS is for Women, Windows is for Men

Yesterday I was, almost literally, hit in the face with a cold.  I was feeling fine reading a book when, within about 30 seconds, I went from perfectly normal to spewing snot monster.  It was a pretty strange sensation and forced me to spend the day, not practicing, but instead blowing my nose.  Anyways, my foggy brain came up with this title and I'm running with it.

Yesterday I read this article about why it's so hard to work in shared offices.  My immediate thought after reading it was, "Duh! How can you concentrate when there are a million people around you making noise doing their things!"  Having spent most of my life in a padded room making noises with a permanent beeping sound in my ear(aka practicing), I understood how annoying distractions and extraneous noises are when you take an exam, or are concentrating really hard.

How is this relevant to the title?  Honestly, it was because of this section here:

“This place must have more Apple AirPods per capita than anywhere in the world,” he said one afternoon, warily looking around.

Okay, not much of a correlation, but my brain grabs on to snippets and it made me realize something.  Not only are shared offices one of the worst ideas ever, but only status-driven narcissistic Facebook-obsessed millennials would every use an Apple, and that the majority of those would be females.

As I began searching for the answer, I soon realized this is a much harder question to answer than I previously suspected.  Apple would never let someone know if a user is male or female, as they themselves probably do not know.  While I did see a statistic that said men spend more money on Apple online sales (think appstore), this did not equate to actual product sales.

I kept digging.

And found a more concrete answer (though I cannot verify statistics)

It seems that men out-buy women 2:1 on apple products.  This could be because men tend to have more disposable income or tend to prefer technology than women, but this is entirely conjecture.

A Forbes article has further statistics, that more educated and affluent people have iPhones.

However, I found this paper from Marshall College indicating that the "demographic profile of U.S. smartphone users who have used a QR code, February 2011,” the gender ratio is 51% male and 49% female"

I have to admit my preconceptions are a little blown out at the moment.  I guess that's what I get on relying on gross stereotypes.

So my thesis is entirely wrong and the parallelism I was going to make up about it is completely false.

-SomethingMusic

Touch Pianist is Amazing and Here's Why

Touch Pianist is a phone app/website that was released today and every tech geek is blogging about it.  As I'm a music geek and ran into it I thought I would also write a little post about it.  So here's what I have to say:

Teachers: learn piano if you don't and be prepared to teach people piano.

                                                             The interface for touch piano

The premise of the app is very simple: Take a well known classical piano piece.  Every time you press your screen or press a key notes will play.  Repeat until the end.

I fiddled with this app for a while and I have to say it's intoxicating.  While I can play the piano, I would hardly say I'm remotely good at the instrument.  This app made me want to brush off my books and relearn how to play piano.  Honestly I might start practicing piano seriously again because this app is pretty inspiring.  Just hammering out the last movement of Beethoven's Appasionata, or the opening of Pathetique, without spending the time to actually learning the notes and the proper technique is still somehow incredibly fun to play.

While you can't control the dynamics (well) and articulation is still an issue, it is still a fun way to mess around with amazing classical works and feel a way of expressing yourself musically without spending the hundreds or thousands of hours necessary practice to master these pieces.  I definitely felt inspired to dust my music off and start practicing again and I believe this app is an amazing way to introduce people to what it feels like to be a classical musician.

While this doesn't remotely feel like playing on an actual piano, it is definitely worth letting students take a crack at this simply because when I was playing this I was playing it as I would a real piece.  While the export of the audio is obviously MIDI and doesn't effectively emulate the sound of the piano, I still felt moved trying to give a, albeit romantic, performance of Beethoven.

So stop listening to me and click on this link and visit the website!  Be warned: It works best on Chrome.  Firefox works, but it doesn't work on IE.