We happy to have a new picture of Mimi from our friend Eric Pochesci of polynominal.com, this time with a Roland Alpha Juno:
And we also introduce “her little brother called “Monsieur Gris” (Mister Grey) playing with Future Retro Revolution! he’s a bit shy :)”
I have to admit, the Future Retro Revolution has interested me for a while because if its visual appeal. I tried it a few times at NAMM, but it never made to the top of the priority list to acquire. Does anyone have any thoughts on it as an instrument?
I recently downloaded an iPad game for cats by Hiccup for Luna to try out. For a cat that spends a lot of time surrounded by technology, including the iPad, she is quite reluctant to touch it, so I wasn’t quite sure how she would react.
The game features a little mouse that resembles a cat toy scurrying around the screen. When the cat (or human) hits the mouse, it emits a little squeak and the player receives points; and the process repeats. That’s it – very simple. I started it up for Luna, and she immediately went to tracking the mouse intently, her little head shifting back and forth in deliberate motions. Tentatively, after a while, she started to paw at it, and eventually managed to pounce on the mouse. She seemed to be quite enjoying it, though she was still a little nervous and often backed away from the device after a pounce.
Here a brief excerpt of her first day of playing:
This is really just a little diversion for both of us to enjoy together, Luna playing with a virtual toy that draws her attention, and my taking delight in watching her do so. But this is clearly a demonstration of user engagement in the app space, for both cats and humans. Sometimes simplicity wins out.
I set up the game again in the office/studio while writing this article, and managed to get a brief iPhone video of Luna’s play. As one can see, she has gotten a bit more confident, even aggressive with it.
This does not seem to be a good game to play a small cluttered space.
Weekend Cat Blogging will be hosted here at CatSynth next weekend, so do check then and submit your cat-related blog posts. New participants are always welcome.
The theme for this week’s combined Weekend Cat Blogging and Photo Hunt is Patch. We at CatSynth have an alternative take on the theme, as Luna poses with a Korg MS-20 patch on the iPad:
As a bonus, the app’s simulated interface features patch cords. They’re a little challenging to manipulate on the screen, but the make for nice visuals.
Appropriately for an iPad-centric post, Weekend Cat Blogging #320 is hosted by Meowza at his blog iMeowza.
Photo Hunt 275 is hosted by tnchick. This week’s theme is Patch.
Sad news about a feline composer, from the New York Times:
Ketzel, who won a prize for piano composition in 1997 and went on to be featured in a book, “The World of Women in Classical Music,” died Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 19 and lived on the Upper West Side.
Ketzel was a black-and-white cat.
In the article you can see a picture of Ketzel (whose name means “cat” in Yiddish), and a recording of her one composition, Piece for Piano, Four Paws. It is descending pitch-wise, but has a good sense of timing with a “beginning, middle and end.” The work was transcribed by one of Ketzel’s humans, Morris Moshe Cotel, who retired as chairman of the composition department at the Peabody Conservatory in 2000 and became a rabbi. It would be interesting to see, and even perform the score of Ketzel’s piece at some point.
Her piece one an award in the Paris New Music Review’s One-Minute Competition, and led to exchange between Professor Cotel and Allan Forte, with this observation:
long the way, Professor Cotel said he realized that Ketzel’s “exquisite atonal miniature” used only 10 pitches of the chromatic scale. “The two missing pitches are G natural and B-flat” — the opening notes of Domenico Scarlatti’s famous Fugue in G minor, known as the “Cat’s Fugue.”
Our thoughts go out to Ketzel’s surving human, Aliya Cheskis-Cotel.
