Jul 09, 2005
Trip to Rio
I'm going to Rio de Janeiro to present a paper in a national congress on music research. (the XV Congress of the National Association of Music Research and Post-Graduation). The paper is "Desenvolvimento e implementação de uma linguagem de descrição de alto-nível, extensível e conectável, para composição musical com sistemas de afinação" (Development and implementation of a high-level, extensible, and contactable description language for musical composition using tuning systems). Is that mouthful or what? :-) The basic idea is to develop an interpreter in Scheme to deal with music representation of tuning systems. I started with the top-down idea of 1) describe the language and 2) implement it. But after I started working I was deeply influenced by the lisp culture of doing things bottom-up and decided that using an interpreter to test my ideas was the way to go. The project is basically stalled now, but I intend to resume it, probably in Common Lisp this time.
This trip will be nice because my girlfriend will go with me. Besides attending the congress we plan to do fun things in Rio, including visiting the awesome Confeitaria Colombo, a place I love and would go all the time if I lived in Rio. We will go to Petropolis to visit the Imperial Museum. Petrópolis is a city near Rio de Janeiro built by Brazil's last Emperor, Dom Pedro II, to be his summer residence. Dom Pedro II was a really smart guy. He knew literature, french, English, German, geography, natural sciences, music, dance, painting, among other things. He also know Greek, Latin and Tupi-guarani. He collaborated with the Pasteur Institute in Paris and with the Wagner's theater in Bayreuth. Just to mention a few things. Yeah, this trip will be fun!Posted at 15:00