WTF-Beta

@Mik that's lovely, and your landscaping is quite nice!

@bernard what about red? I love this look:

(this is in Iceland btw, a photo from the NYT)

@Steve-Miller oooh maybe that's it! If so, it's rather subtle, but I can see the connection.

How interesting!

@Steve-Miller I really like that yellow house with white trim!

@bernard I think that's maybe why I didn't like the yellow house pic you posted. It's not the color, but the fact that the trim and everything is the same color. Also I don't think that red door works with.

One issue for your house is matching the color to your lovely deck. I wonder if yellow wouldn't work with the deck, whereas green or blue might.

Hmm, this is hard!!

So, I every time I hear this piece, it makes me think of the Beatles, but I don't know why.

Could someone else listen and comment? Do you hear something Beatle-esque in it?

Hedgehog

@Bernard ooh thanks for posting those! I didn't really like the first one, but I really like the Pascal Roge's playing!

It's fun to listen all these different versions, esp. because usually that's not something I do (since I don't generally play classical pieces).

@AndyD RCM puts it at grade 10 (according to a quick and dirty internet search).

Yep, it won't be easy!

I am going to purchase it from the Henle app so I can reduce the number of staves on the page, but (again) an internet search says that it's about 72 measures. No super long, but the complexity is there...

@Bernard Ooh this is a hard question! I generally like green houses, but there's so much green around you... Maybe a blue?

I don't dislike the idea of yellow, but maybe not the one you showed?

@AndyD said:

Almost in tears watching the old man show how it ought to be played. I am going to have to learn it.

this was basically my response! I have known this piece since forever, and sort of generally liked it.

But hearing Victor Borge's version, I immediately wanted to learn it and play it myself. (My teacher tells me it's within my level, so I may start working on it when the fall semetser starts...)

@bernard you may be right about the "orchestral" style.

So, do you have a favorite version of CdL?

@Bernard said:

played like a pop song

Oooh, that's interesting! Maybe that's part of why it falls flat for me... I wouldn't have thought to describe it that way, but once you said it, it rings true.

There's nothing wrong with pop music, to be sure (and there's a lot of pop music that I like). But Debussy is not pop music, so that approach doesn't work here. IMO.

I have actually always thought that I Giorni, by the post-classical pianist Ludovico Einaudi, has very strong "pop music sensibilities" ... so to play this piece like a pop song would be fine. IMO of course.

back to Clair de Lune... Listening to it, I also wondered if Borge's style of playing is not currently "in vogue" in the classical piano world, but I don't know because I don't really know what's "in vogue" (like, I don't know, how would Lang Lang or Yuja Wang play CdL?)

@Mik Ooh I googled, that's a very pretty color!

I also like a good cherry red car too. A friend of mine has a 1966 red Corvair, it's so awesome!

On the topic of red, Elton John's red Yamaha is pretty cool too!

Burger

P.S. join me in this thread for an extension of this discussion to piano music: https://wtf.coffee-room.com/topic/3960/two-different-versions-of-clair-de-lune

I'm pretty sure I already posted this video of Victor Borge playing Clair de Lune, but in the thread about using AI to detect AI, the topic of music and digital pianos came up...

So listen to these two different versions of Clair de Lune. The first by Victor Borge

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1595935812544429

The second by Rousseau, the YouTube pianist (who actually started the trend of this kind of video)

The Rousseau version is so clean... It's nice enough (and I certainly couldn't play it this well!) and actually I think this recording and this video would be an excellent learning tool (which I will probably make use of when I start working on this piece).

But it also strikes me as very sterile. It's too precise, too clean, too sterile. And I don't really care if I ever listen to it again.

Victor Borge's Clair de Lune, on the other hand, I am obsessed with. I can't listen to it enough.

@CHAS said:

Digitals are too precise.

I never liked playing a digital because it sounded too clean, lacked character and voice... I actually like how my acoustic piano sounds subtly different depending on the time of day or the weather (now, having said that, I wouldn't like it if my piano was truly challenged in terms of tuning stability...)

So to @axtremus 's comment about adding imprecision to machine generated music, I don't think that would be enough for me. The music might still be good, but it would be missing some essential quality...

back to the original topic, and watermarking for example, as far as I understand it, there really is no way to reliably leave a "marker" that shows some content is AI generated.

Here’s a great article in the Atlantic about the proliferation of gray, beige, and greige in houses, interior and cars.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/colorless-gray-products-houses/688174/

Or here https://archive.is/M47pS

And an antidote, San Francisco houses painted by Dr. Color:
https://drcolor.com/gallery/

We don’t live in an HOA neighborhood and this neighborhood was built before the gray-invasion. So the housing exteriors around here are not super uniform. Nothing shocking, but enough variation that it makes the neighborhood nice IMO. Also our house (1990) has the original (and very nice/pretty) wood trim around the windows and very nice wood doors etc., and the walls are a nice warm, off-white color. Then we get our bursts of color through furniture and artwork (especially in my piano room). But we don’t have any “accent walls” or dramatic interiors.

BTW when I lived in Japan and bought a car new for the first time, here’s the Subaru I thought I would buy:

And here’s the Subaru I actually bought:

The car we have now is that boring gun metal gray color

Dogs

@dolmansaxlil said:

a study of folks who play board games as a serious hobby and see if that has impact.

Oh, I bet it does! Strategy games, having the think ahead, consider various possible outcomes several steps/turns out.... Also, depending on the games, like D&D etc. where there's kind of world-making in addition to strategy...

I'm sure the complexity of individual games and the diversity of playing different games result in all kinds of benefits.

@wtg thanks for posting that article. I had actually heard about the “London cabbies have bigger hippocampi” finding (that research study is apparently from 2000), but it’s interesting to read about it now, when practically everyone relies on GPS to get around and esp. to go new places.

I’m surprised the author didn’t mention that, but I have read people talking about the skills we lose when we don’t learn the lay of the land, so to speak…

(ETA I had to look up the plural of hippocampus, I wanted it to be hippocampuses…

Happy birthday @mik !!