RELATIVELY SPEAKING

 I see that Richard is still banging on about metro gnomes and crotches.

A metro gnome

A crotch

A metrognome crotch

In a recent post Richard wrote:

Metronomes:

"Apart from playing long notes for tone and checking your intonation, practising with a metronome is one of the most important things that a musician can do. Never underestimate it! For my jazz playing I like to practise at crotchet = 120, especially when practising swing tunes. Then I like to move the metronome up to crotchet = 240. Let's imagine that we're practising walking likes on a double bass. At solo time you may want to use quavers (eighth notes). I have found that crotchet = 240 is a good speed to get these two things under control. Then, when you feel ready, you can slowly increase the speed. The quavers that worked at crotchet = 240 should move up to faster speeds pretty easily. It's all about getting those fingers comfortable."

        Richard of RBB 

Well, whatever that meant I know that there can be a correlation between speeding things up and a perception of things going slowly as a result. Albert Einstein said:

“An observer who is sitting eccentrically on the disc K' is sensible of a force which acts outwards in a radial direction, and which would be interpreted as an effect of inertia (centrifugal force) by an observer who was at rest with respect to the original reference-body K. But the observer on the disc may regard his disc as a reference body which is “at rest”; on the basis of the general principle of relativity he is justified in doing this. The force acting on himself, and in fact on all other bodies which are at rest relative to the disc, he regards as the effect of a gravitational field.”

        Albert Einstein 

Which makes at least as much sense as what Richard wrote.

I was thinking of this today when I was sitting in the waiting room of the eye specialist. I closed my eyes and breathed rhythmically and slowly - a transcendental meditation trick that a GP taught me back in the 1990s. This has the effect of slowing down the heart rate and helps to de-stress. In time you can slow down your breathing, heart rate and thoughts to the point where you can imagine that things going on about you are very still or stopped while you can, of you want move at norma speed yourself - kind of like in that film series The Matrix.

I was doing this with my eyes closed when the receptionist called my name. I 'woke up' with a start and she looked at me severely and told me that the specialist was waiting. She must have thought that I'd nodded off. I somehow doubt that she'd ever seen The Matrix nor heard about Albert Einstein let alone Richard of RBB.

 Well, that's it.

Goodnight.