1. The movie "Casanova" uses music
taken from concertos, overtures and dances written by a dozen or so 18th century
composers. Yet, because they have been stitched together in a cinematic way, you
are actually hearing a "new" Baroque work. The production recruited
Roy Prendergast, a New York-based movie music editor with a background in classical
music and composition. Featured composers include Vivaldi, Albinoni, Rameau, Paisello,
Corelli, Handel, Telemann, and Soler. What about Mozart? There is evidence that
Casanova attended "Don Giovanni"'s premiere on Oct. 29, 1787. "After
spending two weeks listening to Baroque music, I finally said, 'well, now we can
go to Mozart.' Mozart's style was so different, it just didn't play". In
July more than 40 Baroque musicians--named the Hollywood Studio Orchestra for
the occasion--gathered in New York with period instruments. "I apologized
to them beforehand; I am the person responsible for chopping all this music up.
But they were all so delighted that Baroque music was getting this kind of exposure".
2. I recently built an Ultrasonic Receiver kit
from Smartkits ("Educational kits with professionl finish"). It uses
a 40 kHz transducer and mixes an oscillator signal to generate a difference frequency
in the audible range. The circuit is like that in a heterodyne AM radio. I was
able to "hear" the 50 kHz ouput from a piezo tweeter. Presumably it
could pick up a bat's sonar as well. The instructions were adequate, with one
error on the silk screened pc board. With only 2 ICs, construction is straightforward.
Obvious improvements would be a low noise front end and a steep lowpass after
the mixer to filter out the sum frequency. They sell many other kits and their
100 series, for beginners, requires no soldering. www.alertent.com
Other kitmakers include www.ramseyelectronics.com
, www.jaycarelectronics.com
, and electronics-kits.hobbytron.com

President, Boston Audio Society
email me HERE
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