Heardle #35
🔊🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️
😂😂😂
Himself
Sprung
Awaking from my winter hibernation I ventured out to find that spring was happening already. As I had not walked for a while I decided to keep to a local River Mersey – Sale Water Park loop; if it proved to be too much I could hop on a tram half way round and return home.
It was not too arduous, being mostly level, and I managed the full nine and a bit miles.
Good to see the graffiti along the Floop is being kept up to date:
A lady interrupted my stride enquiring about a bird perched on the goal post.
“Shag?” I retorted. Which seemed to alarm her for some reason. We decided it was something akin to a cormorant – which it almost certainly was.
The heron, which is usually around the water park, was exploring the other side of the river.
The river banks are littered with the debris from the recent storms and flooding.
With a week of warm and sunny weather forecast. and the aged legs still functioning, I may venture further afield at some point.
Testing
Ashton canal walk
The promise of a day without rain was enough to inspire a trip along the Ashton Canal and catching the tram back. Heading out from the Piccadilly end of Manchester it’s just shy of 7 miles to the tram stop at Ashton.
Not sure just where I exceeded seven miles an hour on the gentle climb upwards. At the Ashton end the canal joins the Peak Forest canal – a section of which was part of the previous stroll. Perhaps I’ll venture down this section next time.
Ten Years After
Rummaging around in here I discovered I still had a YouTube account, from the days before it became the quagmire of advertising and tracking it has become, which lead me to this old post from a decade ago:
The iPad was a mere one year old at the time but was already showing signs of its potential for making interesting noises. I suspect the missing video was for an, alas short lived and no longer available, app called Konkreet Performer which was an early attempt at new ways to interact with sounds on iPads:
Things have evolved over the years and today you have AudioBus to pump sound between apps, AUM to connect and mix instruments and effects and countless apps like TouchScaper and SoundScaper and even some that are not called somethingScaper. Although Smule still have some apps available their MadPad has also vanished; as has the Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra.
The other video in that old post was a young Frank Zappa performing on a bicycle during the Steve Allen TV show in March 1963. Many years ago I read about this but who could imagine that decades later and thousands of miles away you can sit on a sofa with an iPad watching the video and also learn how, in late 1962, the young Zappa would hang out in Don Preston‘s garage improvising soundtracks to various film clips. Preston had a range of junk percussion ‘instruments’ he used including a bicycle.