High G

When I started singing, I had to strain my voice to hit the F below middle C, and I could pretty easily sing a full two octaves below middle C. For a long time I thought my range would top out at about middle C, but I got there a little bit ago, and it's still been going up. Sometimes it makes me feel like less of a man; sometimes I wish I had extended my range downward rather than upward; sometimes I worry that my talking voice is higher now that I've been upping my range rather than lowering it.

Last night at drumline, we couldn't get into the mirrored room in which we normally practice, so we just got our instruments, found a corner anywhere in the Blue Band Building, and practice on our own, individually. I played some warm-ups and played through the show a few times, but got bored of it after a while. You can only play the same thing so many times in a row without someone yelling at you to play it more other than yourself.

After a while I played some songs I felt like playing. "Ain't No Reason" by Brett Dennen is a favorite recently, and I also discovered how to play "Black Balloon" by Goo Goo Dolls on piano yesterday (Friday). So I played that. I had been struggling with the range - I felt like I couldn't do it the way the lead singer did in the song, and that my range wouldn't go high enough. But I figured I'd give it a try and just see how it went.

I was in the corner, facing a glass wall, right near the mirrored room, on its west side, facing South I think. I think Sean was over my right shoulder, and maybe Rich was too, and they were both practicing. At some point in the song, the lyrics go something along the lines of "and scattered like lights from the sun; where was your mind, ye-e-ah" before "coming down, the world's turned over; ..." and the "was" is the syllable on the G, which I thought I couldn't reach.

Somehow, I'm pretty sure that while I was belting it on with the vibraphone, I actually hit that G. I had to scream pretty hard, but I think I got the pitch. It didn't squeak or seem to cause dissonance. It was the highest I'd ever gone. I tried to do it with some other songs, or with longer notes, just a little bit later, but it didn't seem to work. I think I tried that when Alex and Sean were near me, and I think they might have heard me. Or maybe it was actually Matt, the director. It might have been embarassing, but I don't think they know that I'm really a singer at all, and I guess technically I'm not really.

Anyhow, I just thought that was exciting.

Peace out.

tQx

In actuarial science, the symbol tqx is the notation for the probability of somebody dying anytime from the year denoted x and the t years following x. Typically it's given as a function, and typically it turns out that the area underneath the function between 0 and about 110 is 1, which implies that there is a 100% chance that you've died at age 110. So the function might be something like (t)Q(x) = (1/10) * e (-1/10)*x, where x is your age. You have to work with it a lot, and you use it to construct mortality tables, probabilities of dying, and from there you'd calculate how much premiums the group should pay based on their expected lifespan, etc., etc.

Typically the whole concept seems pretty distance, but sometimes our teacher Ron brings it back home. In class, he often gives examples of tQx for something like, "If you have an equal chance of dying every year before 100, and you're all 20 now, when will most of you be dead?" Sixty, of course. And some kids look around the room, like "Holy crap, we're actually dealing with dying people here." Recently he was doing an example, which requires some math to understand, but in case you're unfamiliar I'll explain a little bit. We were working with an operation, and the point is that if you input a number of about 115, the operation will tell you that everyone has died. The question in class was what number to put in to assure everyone had died, and someone responded "infinity." Technically, it's correct, but you don't need to go that high.

Our teacher responded, "Hmm, well, that's certainly safe." He has a way of making everything seem mundane even when it's not, in a good way - he smiles a lot and often stands akimbo and nods just a tad. "Yeah, well... I suppose no one's getting out of here alive," he finished.

Just in case you're interested, your chance of dying can be predicted almost exactly using a really simple equation, with a simple principle. The principle is that as you get older, you get worse and worse at warding off the effects of aging and mortality. The guess was that you get worse exponentially as time goes on. It requires math again, but to explain, the "force of mortality" for you at any moment is e^[.0004 + .00002x^1.103] or so. It seem like low numbers, I know, but if you add it up, it guarantees you're dead by about 111.

It's strange how with all the complexities of life and nature biology, we can figure it all out with five numbers.

Peace out.