Chinese Lute June 6, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music, movie clips, soundvideo , trackbackNow with sound
During the half term holiday I finally found the time and inclination to get the Cybercentre’s DV camcorder out of the box, charge it up and read some of the instructions.
The upshot of this is that I can now make half decent sized movies which are longer than 16 seconds duration, but much more importantly adding the extra dimension of SOUND.
To celebrate this, I planned and directed a short music performance featuring me in the back garden playing a composition on the chinese lute. I was really pleased with the sound quality captured by the built in microphone, but then it took a long time working out how to get the captured video into a format small enough to put online. This would probably have been much easier on Mac with iMovie, but the cybercentre doesn’t have macs and neither do I at home.So the output file which you can download by clicking on the embedded photo here is a 3.6Mb .ASF file using mpeg4 encoding, which should play in Windows Media Player. Please let me know if you can hear it.
You can play too.
The instrument I am playing was purchased in Beijing during a trip I made 4 years ago ( lots of photos on my Yangstse Gorges site ). Known in english simply as “Chinese lute”, they are made in sizes ranging from a huge double bass version right down to a ukelele size.
For fun, I made a flash movie based on my lute
which has the genuine sound of each string sampled and you can play it by mousing over the drawing of the strings. See below, go on - try it.
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11 Comments
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is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
sadly the smart filter refused to let me play it at work:( L
There’s no obvious application for playing .asf movies on the Mac. So I’ve copied the 80Mb mpeg file off my pen drive and that plays OK in Quicktimeplayer but it won’t import into iMovie. Next step is to connect the camcorder to the mac and try to capture direct from the DV tape into iMovie, then I may be able to export in the preferred quicktime mov format.
There must be a mac application that can play mpeg videos. try renaming extension to .mpeg
I like the video - who did the camera work?
Hiya frankie, unfortunately renaming extensions isn’t quite enough. The file is encoded not just as mpeg4 but also as asf which seems to be specific to windows media player. There is a version for Mac os X which can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/software/Macintosh/osx/default.aspx
The camera work, hmm, yes. I sort of rehearsed it and then operated by remote control with grateful help from a willing assistant.
Hmm… a willing assistant… Barney???
Would iTunes be of any help? http://www.apple.com/itunes/jukebox.html
Nice to hear the chinese lute again, by the way
“grateful help from a willing assistant?” Why was your mystery assistant grateful I wonder? A nice plate of fish afterwards perhaps?
Thanks for the comment on my last post. If play is related to length of childhood what about mice, they play and ive for 3 years or so. WHat about tortoises they live long but I do not think they play.
I think the lute is great, I must get my head round this video mlarkey I am going to be teaching children how to do video soon…maybe they will teach me.
Wonderful-I heard it fine. Of course it’s not as sophisticated as my ukelele….
Wow-just played it virtually-now that is fun!
Glad you like the virtual Lute, Gina. You can mark it instead of the action research project if you like
Hi Vix, thanks for commenting. I’d love to be able to convert movies from the DV cam into quicktime but I just don’t have all the connecting pieces to do it yet. I think I need Media Cleaner Pro, but that’s not cheap. Or to be able to extract audio from Mpeg and then add it back into a mov. Meanwhile if you really want to hear it you can do so by downloading :cough: windows media player for Mac - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/software/Macintosh/osx/default.aspx