trad-callers March 2016

trad-callers@lists.sharedweight.net

40 participants
28 discussions

by Chris J Brady

I am sending this various lists because travelling dancing masters were the key to the spread of social dancing throughout Scotland, Ireland and England if not also Wales). https://www.mediafire.com/folder/53gleiq05549d/Ireland_-_Radio Tom and Joan Flett in their research, collecting and publishing during the 1950s/60s, tell many stories from their informants about the influence of travelling dancing masters. Chris B. RTE Radio 1 - Documentary 1976 "Hayfoot Strawfoot Dancing Masters" Synopsis 1 For centuries 'Dancing Masters' travelled throughout Ireland from village to village, teaching Irish dance to all they met. They were flamboyant characters, wore bright clothes and carried staffs. Now long gone - their history lives on. (First Broadcast 1976) Synopsis 2 Dancing Masters and old style dances are almost lost in Irish history - Dancing was once at the heart of every community - Prionsias O'Conluain travels to West Clare and discovers that dancing still holds a special place in some communities (Broadcast 1976) Description Hayfoot, Strawfoot, Dancing Masters The early history of Irish dance reveals a constant shifting of population through migration and invasions. Throughout the ages, many different dances and dance influences came to Ireland. During the eighteenth century, the dancing master appeared in Ireland. He was a wandering dancing teacher who travelled from village to village in a district, teaching dance to peasants. Dancing masters were flamboyant characters who wore bright clothes and carried staffs. Their young pupils did not know the difference between their left and right feet. To overcome this problem, the dancing master would tie straw or hay to his pupils' left or right feet and instruct them to "lift hay foot" or "lift straw foot". Group dances were developed by the masters to hold the interest of their less gifted pupils and to give them the chance to enjoy dancing. The standard of these dances was very high. Solo dancers were held in high esteem and often doors were taken off hinges and placed on the ground for the soloists to dance on. Each dancing master had his own district and never encroached on another master's territory. It was not unknown for a dancing master to be kidnapped by the residents of a neighbouring parish. When dancing masters met at fairs, they challenged each other to a public dancing contest that only ended when one of them dropped with fatigue. Several versions of the same dance were to be found in different parts of Ireland. In this way a rich heritage of Irish dances was assembled and modified over the centuries. Today, jigs, reels, hornpipes, sets, half sets, polkas and step dances are all performed. Solo dancing or step dancing first appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. 'Documentary on One is the home of Irish radio documentaries - the largest library of documentary podcasts available anywhere. We tell stories in sound, mostly Irish stories, with each documentary telling its own story' http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/2012/0207/646928-documentary-podcast-iris… http://www.rte.ie/radio1/podcast/podcast_documentaryonone.xml - then search the listings for 'dancing masters' ====

8 years, 9 months

Re: Query re digitizing live dance recordings from cassette

by Walter Lenk

Dear Jim, Nick, Nancy, and Emily all have good suggestions about the process, so let me add in my two cents: I have been using a program called 'sound studio' on my Mac for many years now. It costs about $70, but I have found that it is well worth it. I have used audacity and GarageBand as well and found both of them to be very difficult and frustrating to use. I would highly recommend 'sound studio'. As far as hardware goes, all my iMacs over the last 15 years have had stereo analog line level audio inputs on them and I have simply connected the cassette recorder to those inputs to record. If you have a portable mac that does not have an analog line level input on it, there are several products that cost under $100 and provide Stereo audio to USB conversion, such as the iMic. Regarding files to store the raw material: I highly recommend saving them as mono MP3 files at 128kbps or lower. This will significantly reduce storage space and will be far better quality than the material that comes off a cassette deck. There is no point to store them as wave files because that is a total waste of disk space. Neither MP3 or WAVE files allow you to identify anything in them except by a file name. I have found the best way to do that is to keep text files as log sheets for what's in the file itself. Yes, you can go through and separate out the larger file into lots of smaller files with very different names, but that's a lot of work and it probably is not worth it at all. I strongly suggest using MP3 files and text files to identify the parts of the MP3 files as these formats will probably be around for a long time and will survive operating system changes, software obsolescence, and anything else you can think of. As far as cleaning up the files, I question the worth of doing that. I know of no automatic programs that will do that for you, and it is a lot of work to do it manually. Sound studio has controls in it to implement high-pass and low-pass filters to get rid of rumble in hiss, but just turning the tone controls on your playback device will achieve much the same thing on a temporary basis. As I understand it, your object here is to extract information from these recordings about techniques and timing and stuff like that rather than making them into listening enjoyment objects. If there are a few files that deserve this treatment, then go for it – otherwise you will quickly burn out if you try to do that to all the files. As Nancy said, this is a worthwhile project to do for your own edification, but probably you should not have any illusions that many others will be particularly interested. Good luck, Walter =========================================== Walter Lenk Cambridge Ma 617-547-7781 ===========================================

8 years, 9 months

Query re digitizing live dance recordings from cassette

by James Saxe

Folks, I wonder whether any of you can offer advice about digitizing a collection of cassette tape recordings. I have about 300 cassettes that I recorded live (and through the atmosphere, not straight from the sound board) at various dance events--some called by me, some where I was just another attendee--mostly during the 1980s and 1990s. I'd like to get them digitized and do some processing and indexing to make them easier for me to listen to and study. (For various reasons, I'm not currently looking to make them suitable for distribution.) I'm interested in learning about software for a variety of purposes: capturing audio signals as WAVE files; applying various kinds of digital signal processing (DSP), such as cutting some of the tape hiss and transport rumble; and labeling, indexing, and annotating, complete sound files and portions thereof. With 300 or so cassettes to deal with, any tools that make it more efficient to process them, to annotate and index them, and to keep all the files and notes organized, could significantly reduce the amount of time it will take, or significantly increase the amount I get done before I run our of steam. I'm looking for recommendations of programs that will run on a Mac (with OS X), and that are not insanely expensive. I'd also like to end up with files that are in common standard formats or that can easily be converted to standard formats without unnecessary loss of information. For those who want more detail, below are some rambling musings about things I might want to do and for which software assists might be helpful. * * * * * * * * * * * * For one thing, I'd like to do some noise reduction. I recorded all these cassettes using a variety of little Walkman-sized portable cassette recorders, mostly using the built-in mics, which pick up transport rumble from the rollers and spools. And of course they all have some amount of tape hiss, which is more or less evident depending on the volume of the actual program content on each particular tape. The transport rumble and tape hiss can make it fatiguing to listen for long periods, and I'd like to eliminate as much of them as I conveniently can without giving the sound an obvious "processed" feeling that would be similarly fatiguing to listen to. Another thing I'd like to do is to annotate the files with index marks for sections of the content. A typical live recording of a contra (and/or traditional square) dance will naturally divide mostly into segments of set formation, walk-through, and dancing to music, plus other miscellaneous stuff like couple dances and announcements. It would be nice to know of a program that would let me create index points, label them ("Walk-through for dance 3"), adjust them (retaining the labels), re-label them ("Walk-through for Double Boomerang"), skip directly to a chosen index mark during playback, etc. In some cases, I might want to apply long annotations, such as a detailed description of the figures and choruses of a square dance, which I might want sometimes displayed and sometimes hidden. I also might want to annotate sound files, or portions of them, with things like dates; names of callers and bands/musicans; venues; session titles; etc. (Of course I realize that I could also write such detailed notes in separate text files and use some sort of file naming discipline to keep them associated with the correct sound files.) In any case, it would also be good if I could conveniently get (accurate) times and labels of all index marks and other annotations dumped to a plain text representation. This would insure that (1) the data wouldn't be hostage to the proprietary format of some company that could stop supporting it or simply go out of business, and (2) I could search through the labels and annotations using ordinary UNIX tools like grep, which I trust to be reliable. I presume that it would be best to start by capturing the content from the tapes in WAVE format and to do any noise reduction or other processing on the WAVE files. Then if I wanted to create MP3 files to save space, I could do that afterwards, also saving the original WAVE files on some off-line medium. [Any suggestions about which off-line media are likely to have long shelf life?] Besides reducing tape hiss and transport noise, there are some other kinds of digital signal processing that might be useful. For one thing, I don't trust that the little battery-powered recorders I used did a great job of keeping the tape speed accurate, especially as the batteries began to run low. They might even have done a bad enough job to significantly affect any timings I might do of the musical tempos on the recordings. I can think of various ways in which digital signal processing might help determine accurate playback speeds. For example, a frequency spectrogram might reveal a small but detectable spike near 120 Hz that came from fluorescent lights originally humming at (almost) exactly 120 Hz. Spectral analysis of the music might give a clue about whether it's being played back at original tempo, at least if there's reason to believe that the instruments were originally tuned to A440. Even if the original tuning isn't known, it might be possible to tell whether the apparent tuning stays the same from the start to the end of a cassette. By the way, on the subject of timing tempos, does anyone know of software that can do a truly, no-nonsense, good job of detecting the beat/tempo of something like typical contra dance music (mixed with crowd noise) with minimal or no hunan assistance? To give you an idea of what I mean by "a truly, no-nonsense, good job", I have a stopwatch designed to time multiple laps of races. Suppose I click the lap/split button on beat 32 of each round of a tune, and suppose that my clicks are usually accurately within 100 milliseconds and very rarely off the beat buy as much as 200 milliseconds. You can do the arithmetic and see that if the tune is played 15 or so times through, I should get a pretty good idea of what the tempo is and of whether the band sped up or slowed down during the course of the tune. I'm asking about software that can generally do at least as well as that, and that, in the cases where it can't track the beat with high confidence, will report that it can't, rather than reporting a bogus tempo. A number of my cassettes were recorded on a recorder that was capable of applying Dolby noise reduction, and I might not always have remembered to check the little boxes on the cassette labels to indicate when cassettes were recorded with noise reduction on. Probably there are DSP techniques to make a good guess about whether a recording was made with Dolby on, but I have no idea what existing software products have this capability. Given a player that supported Dolby, I could of course play any given recording with and without Dolby and decide which way I liked it better, but reliable automatic detection would save me the effort and avoid guessing. Another area where automated DSP might in principle be helpful is in making a preliminary guess at how a recording divides up into segments. Presumably portions with a band playing will have spectral characteristics significantly different from those consisting primarily of crowd noise and/or the caller's voice. Again I know nothing about specific software products (if any) that attempt to segment a long audio file into parts with different spectral characteristics. Here, of course, I'm talking about segments with length typically on the order of a minute to ten minutes, not the vastly shorter segmentation of speech into phonemes. Cassettes that have been stored unplayed for two or three decades might have acquired some crosstalk--faint "echoes" or "pre-echoes" resulting from transfer of magnetization between adjacent layers of tape. I don't know what software, if any, is available to detect and remove/reduce crosstalk without introducing more annoying artifacts than the ones it's removing. That's about what I can think of for now. I'd be interested in information about good products to help with any of the tasks I've described, but the ones I consider most important are * doing the initial capture to WAVE format, * cutting some of the tape hiss and transport noise, and * applying and labelling index marks so that I can jump quickly to whatever segment I want to listen to, without a lot of fast-forwarding, overshooting, rewinding, etc. Thanks for any advice. --Jim

8 years, 9 months

Mountain Dance – Calling, Feet & Figures – From Scratch - Scholarships Due April 1st.

by T Claw

I'll be co-teaching a week long Appalachian Dance and Calling class with Becky Hill this summer. So if you don't have post Clifftop plans that make you feel like living and you're not going to Galax, come hang with us. SCHOLARSHIP Applications due APRIL 1st. Save yourself $450. I think we are taking over William Mentor's slot. Staff Musicians include Aaron Olwell and Jess McIntosh. You can take all sorts of other dance and music classes too. https://augustaheritagecenter.org/about-augusta/scholarships/ https://augustaheritagecenter.org/augusta-schedule/dance/ "Mountain Dance – Calling, Feet & Figures – From Scratch: This class focuses on Appalachian Dance Traditions. As a major facet of community dance is inclusion, no prior experience is necessary and all ages are welcome. T-Claw <https://youtu.be/uNTu_WbWdas> and Becky Hill will be joined throughout the week by West Virginia square dance callers Mack Samples, Ellen and Eugene Ratcliffe and Lou Maiuri, who will share dance figures unique to this region. We’ll present the basics of square dance calling, choreography, patter and teaching. Becky will cover the fundamentals of flatfooting and clogging. Look forward to the Tennessee Walking Step and creating your own steps through improvisation." Take Care, T-Claw Square Dance Caller calling.t.claw(a)gmail.com 615-430-8230 www.tclawcalling.com www.facebook.com/tclawcalling

8 years, 9 months

Re: Dance Book for callers at parties, weddings, family events ("one night sta nds")

by karendunnam＠gmail.com

If Yahoo Groups does this correctly, the original thread from 2007 will be visible. (Go to the Groups page, click on "View Message History") Since this topic started again, I looked into the "Dancing for Busy People" book, which has been referenced several times over the years. (Busy? The authors explain, "The dances are designed to meet the needs of people who wish to have fun dancing without spending an extended period of time in ‘lessons’.") Where I'm going with this: since this book exists, maybe Calvin Campbell (who is on this list) would be interested in letting it serve as the foundation for Paul's purported CDSS book. More gems: The Heart of Community Dancing http://d4bp.com/wp/articles/the-heart-of-dancing http://d4bp.com/wp/articles/the-heart-of-dancing The Heart of Community Dancing http://d4bp.com/wp/articles/the-heart-of-dancing Reprinted from “Dancing for Busy People” by Calvin Campbell, Ken Kernen & Bob Howell  The Heart of Community Dancing The success of any dance program de... View on d4bp.com http://d4bp.com/wp/articles/the-heart-of-dancing Preview by Yahoo Here's another book, downloadable. "The 18 dances featured in this short book use only four basics. Circle Right/Left, Forward & Back, Arm Turns, Star Right/Left. These four basics are used in big circles, line dances, contra dance, square dances, trios, and mixers. This enables the teacher to teach only four dance movement and then to use these same movements in various ways to provide a great deal of variety in dances." Smashwords – Teaching New Dancers -- Keep it Simple Keep it Fun – a book by Calvin Campbell https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/291116 https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/291116 Smashwords – Teaching New Dancers -- Keep it Simple ... https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/291116 I have taught dancing for 57 years. I am a member of CALLERLAB -- The International Association of Square Dance Callers. I've been on their Board of Dire... View on www.smashwords.com https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/291116 Preview by Yahoo Adding a handful of figures (peel the banana, swing, somebody-do-something-with-a-designated-person) would probably give you a hundred unique dances. HTH --Karen D.

8 years, 9 months

A contra corners dance identity?

by Grace Goodwin

Hello callers,I recently was viewing a video of Erik Weberg calling a contra in 2005 at Dance Awakening. I'm pretty sure he said it was called "Farewell to Cassidy" but I've found no other references to such a dance, so far. It's a nice dance, I think, and it is almost exactly the same as one I composed in June of the same year that I named "June Cold Spell". The difference has only to do with where the figure sequence begins. My composition began at balance the ring and neighbors roll-away then actives half figure-8 up thru the 2s, while the other dance begins at actives center in a line of four down the hall, neighbors turn as couple & return. Probably the dance sequence got lodged in my subconscious at Dance Awakening. But I'm left not knowing the author information and date of composition of "Farewell to Cassidy". Do any of you know of a dance by that name? Mark Goodwin (sending from Grace Goodwin)

8 years, 9 months

Insurance!?

by tod1950＠yahoo.com

Recently a school contacted me about calling a dance in their gym. After it was all set up I received this message: One last thing I forget to ask you to send us a copy of your certificate of Insurance naming Hitchcock for the March 26th dance. Most insurance companies just email it to us. This is the first such request I have received as caller hired by an institution. Any suggestions on how to handle this request? Is this becoming common? Is this an appropriate topic for this group? Thank you!

8 years, 9 months

Contras for One Nighters

by Rich Sbardella

I rarely call a contra at a One Night Party Dance, but occasionally I am asked to. I have a few in my cards, but can anyone make some sure fire recommendations. Assume 95%-100% non dancers. Thanks, Rich Stafford, CT

8 years, 9 months

Re: Community and One Nighter dances: Book and CDSS article

by Paul Rosenberg

Thanks for the feedback, Doug Paul Rosenberg Albany, NY www.homespun.biz <http://www.homespun.biz/> 518-482-9255 > On Mar 14, 2016, at 11:59 AM, 2doug(a)dougplummer.com <mailto:2doug@dougplummer.com> [trad-dance-callers] <trad-dance-callers(a)yahoogroups.com <mailto:trad-dance-callers@yahoogroups.com>> wrote: > > > I think this is exactly on target with CDSS's educational mission. CDSS has an active publications program, which I think would be a fabulous ultimate destination for your project, and they do have funding. An article for the CDSS News would be a good way to start and organize your thinking, and they’re always open to submissions. > > > > Doug Plummer > > Seattle, WA > > CDSS board member > > > Paul Rosenberg www.homespun.biz 518-482-9255

8 years, 9 months

Community and One Nighter dances

by Marian Rose

Hello again Jim let me know that the attachment didn't go through. Here is a DropBox link to my article on Community and Family Dances. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72493124/Calling%20Community%20Dances.p… Thank-you! --- Marian Marian Rose CP 8162, 150 rue Racine Est Chicoutimi, QC G7H 5B7 (418) 545-6603 (maison) (581) 234-1614 (cellulaire) www.marianrose.com

8 years, 9 months

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trad-callers March 2016