Introduction
By Claus Kucher
Greetings from Vienna!
First of all thanks to the moderator of this group, Jody Kravitz, and Robbie Rhodes, answering my request in cyberspace and guarding me safely to this place.
So, where to start ... ah there is a posting of Robbie and give me the chance to correct some things (thanks to the financial ministry of Austria oppressing me now to do my tax declaration, therefore I do not have enough time to do what I want, e.g. to answer to a lot of E-mailings).
Robbie wrote:
> Claus is a member of the "School of Viennese Songs" [I think that's the
> name of a club] which meets regularly at the restaurant, "Zum Werkelmann",
> operated by Wolfgang Geissler.
... I am a part time member there, the school is operated by the "Club Monte Laa" and his secretary Wilhelm Heidenhofer. Everybody, who likes to sing and learn Viennese Songs can come there on every Monday, accompanied by old and young musicians, like Pepi Matauschek on accordion (a very famous player) and/or Rudi Koschelu on "Kontragitarre" (I think a typical Viennese instrument like an ordinary guitar combined with a bass guitar, that means it has two necks in one body).
> "Werkelmann" means "workman", so the restaurant is "At the Workman's".
... "Werkel" has the meaning of a machine
> I think in Austrian it also connotes the man who turns the crank of the
> barrel-organ, so "Werkelmaenner" means the "Hurdy-Gurdy Men".
... it is the only importance!
> Wolfgang Geissler has organized the 13th annual convention at the "Bohemian
> Park" in Vienna, which is a BIG amusement park much like Tivoli, with
> [they say] the largest Ferris Wheel in the world. "Stachelwalze" means
> "spiked cylinder", another name for barrel-organ or -piano or music box.
... note the difference between the largest Ferris Wheel in the world ("Riesenrad") - it is in the very big Vienna "Wurstelprater" near river Danube and the highest suited (!) Giant Wheel in Vienna on the "Monte Laa".
I come from the south of Austria - the federal state Carinthia ("Kaernten" with its capital "Klagenfurt") is about 300 km away from Vienna ("Wien"), where I live for over 20 years now. When I finished my studies of "Elektronik und Regelungstechnik" on the Technical University of Vienna
- guess, how old I am -
I started with jobs like controlling waffle and ice-cone machines. So, because of this Austrian company (no ad.s here!) is number one worldwide, maybe you did not look at your even baken cone, but maybe the know-how comes from the solution of 4th dimensional Fourier-heat-transport-equation applied to that machines. Another thing was the control of the very first infrared-heated tunnel oven; imagine a length of about 70 meters with a speed of about 25 waffles per minute (size about 20" diagonal). Here I wrote my first program (I have learned Cobol and Pascal programming language - but there were only a Basic-programmable computer) to calculate electric elements for heating.
Two years was enough and I joined a company producing 35mm professional movie cameras (do not think about MOVIECAM and also do not think of me as a blowhard, but really it is the most silent self-plimped camera in the world (<18 dBA); of course it had to be named "Super America" - nobody believe it, but then some years before this wonderful machine won the only technical Academy Award an Austrian product ever got. Regretfully it was one year after I left this small company and after half a year of thinking what to do, I did some things in data-base-applications as a free-lancer.
Then I decided to be the owner of my one free enterprise, called it "Computer Spezial Anwendungen", and till seven years now doing various things like consulting, installing computers and networks, programming in 80x86-assembler, C, Clipper, training in AutoCAD especially for architects, and so on.
Some highlights in my work are construction of info-games for the Austrian Railways (demonstrating the new models for locomotives, wagons and integrated clock-keeping time table), simulation of a telescope (official contribution to the world exhibition in Sevilla/Spain 1992), mainframe-PC connection of a weight machine, foreign traffic bookkeeping program for the city of Kitzbuehel/Tyrol, data exchange and conversion programs between different CAD-systems and platforms.
My interests in computer-music has roots in my lacking of reading standard music notation. So, after a short experiment with a frequency-modulated synthesizer (Soundblaster) I acquired a better wave-table synthie (Roland SCC-1), which sounds quite well - and I always can be sure, if I put the right note on the score with the mouse (now I have a master keyboard but no knowledge to play), the computer will play "right" - and so I am able to hear and learn to sing unknown music quasi from plain paper.
The sequencer and notation programs I use on a wimpDOS-platform are:
Voyetra, Midisoft Session, Cubase, Power Tracks Pro, Aleatoric Composer,
Encore and MIDI-Karaoke.
My interests in Automatic Music are very new and inspired by my occupation with old and new Viennese music as well as the festival of MEMUSI 95 (I will inform this group in a few days about that meeting) and the thing I want to transform some music from MIDI-format to that wonderful machines, especially EPROM-controlled barrel-organs (made in Germany by Hofbauer/Goettingen).
Servus!
Claus
- - -
legend:
Basic Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
CAD Computer Aided Design
Club Monte Laa Monte = mountain Laa = Laaer Berg (mountain),
small hill in the south of Vienna
Cobol Co-mmon b-usiness o-riented l-anguage
dBA Dezibel A = measure unit for acoustic loudness, value at
human impression
EPROM Electrically Programmable Read Only Memory
MEMUSI in German "MEchanische MUSIk" - mechanical music
with a 2nd meaning in Viennese
dialect: "Musi" = music
Pascal programming language named by French mathematician
wimpDOS user of other platforms sometimes call that name for Bill
Gates genius(?) creation |
(Message sent Wed 6 Sep 1995, 02:12:14 GMT, from time zone GMT+0200.) |
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