#AND THE RESIDENT c!HANNAH EXPERT TOO???!!!

[hopalongfairywren]

ASDFGJHLKJHG THIS IS SO COOL WOW ^^^^. Icarus I actually sent an ask with c!purpled and c!Boomer's limbo as well as an alt version of Hannah's (more eggy) but this is so cool asdfghjkl

butterfly exhibit

a drawing loosely based off of @/hopalongfairywren’s concept of c!hannah’s limbo being akin to butterfly pinned within a glass frame. i couldn’t get the image of it out of my head.

(reblogs >>>> likes)

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Washington, D.C. — The human ear is an amazing sensor. It can detect a wide range of sounds. But it often can’t discern subtle differences between similar tones. Nor can the human brain “record” sounds for playback and analysis. Such abilities could help shoppers looking for a good musical instrument. They also could aid vocal coaches. Now, two teens are turning to technology to tackle such acoustic challenges.

Isabelle Katz, 15, lives in Moraga, Calif. Hannah Shu, 14, resides in Seaside, Calif. Each had a science-fair project last year that performed detailed mathematical analyses of musical tones, among other things. These projects qualified each teen to become a finalist, late last month, in the ninth annual Broadcom MASTERS competition.

MASTERS stands for Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars. Open to U.S. middle-school researchers, this program was created by Society for Science & the Public. (The Society also publishes Science News for Students.) Broadcom Foundation, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., sponsors the event.

Both Isabelle’s and Hannah’s projects were impressive. After all, each allowed the girls to make it through a screening process that knocked out at least 2,200 other applicants.

Sonic bull’s-eye

When expert musicians refer to musical tones, they often use words like “fat,” “bright” or “mellow.” A bit vague, these terms could mean different things to different people, says Isabelle. Non-experts, especially, might become confused. So Isabelle decided to describe and clearly depict musical tones mathematically. That should provide data that would be equally useful to all.

As Hannah did, Isabelle recorded and analyzed the musical tones produced by stringed instruments. But unlike Hannah, Isabelle used pianos — three brands of them.

Isabelle Katz, 15, of Moraga, Calif., developed an alternative way to analyze and display musical notes. Her’s could help vocal coaches as well as instrument owners who want to evaluate sound quality.

CREDIT: Linda Doane/Society for Science & the Public

She started by analyzing 10 different recordings of the so-called middle C note from each instrument. It has a fundamental frequency of about 261 hertz. (One hertz is the same as 1 cycle, or vibration, per second.) For each brand, she calculated the average intensity, or volume, of the middle C’s fundamental tone. She did the same for each of that note’s first six overtones. Then, she graphed the seven frequencies for each brand of piano.

To make these graphs easier to compare, she adjusted each so that the loudest fundamental or overtone had a value of 1.

Each brand of piano, she showed, had a different balance of frequencies. Isabelle decided to depict her frequency maps using rings of different colors. The resulting maps looked a bit like an archer’s target. The blue center of the bull’s-eye represented the fundamental frequency. Just outside was a green ring. It depicted the first overtone. Outside of that ring were rings of (in order) yellow, orange, purple, black and dark green. The width of each ring related to the volume of that overtone.

Such maps offer a type of “fingerprint” of the note for that instrument. These could be used to tell one brand of piano from another. And with just a little practice, Isabelle says, someone could learn to read such a graph and interpret a note’s balance of frequencies.

Her colorful bull’s-eyes could find many uses. For instance, they could be one way to monitor a piano’s tones over time. Indeed, big changes in a note’s fingerprint might signal it’s time to tune the instrument.

Vocal coaches might find these maps useful, too. They could record a student’s voice and then display its mix of frequencies. The coach could then compare that fingerprint to an ideal mix of frequencies for that note as sung by experts. Over time, a coach — or student — could monitor how a fingerprint changed and potentially improved.

Isabelle hopes to one day develop a phone-based app based on her technique. She also wants to file a patent on it, form a company and (maybe most of all) find investors who can help her develop her ideas further. For now, once she’s developed her app she’ll test it out on members of the choir in which she sings.

[zephyrchin5]

4 Kinds Of Cleansing Professionals And Also When To Use Them.

Carpeting Water Elimination Overview

Content

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[caveartfair]

7 Things Artists Should Know before Filing Taxes

Bla Bla Bla..., 2017. HuskMitNavn V1 Gallery

For U.S. residents, tax day is April 15th. And if you’re an artist, filing your income taxes is probably not so straightforward.

Like other professionals who work in a freelance capacity, artists typically earn untaxed income that they must report to the IRS—and if the artist had a clear intent to make a profit, their practice is considered to be a business. That means they can file a Schedule C form (which is designated for small businesses) to report earnings or losses and deduct expenses. But what counts as an expense? How should artists keep track of these things? And is it necessary to hire an accountant? We recently spoke to artist and accountant Hannah Cole—who counts many artists among her clients—for some basic tips to help artists navigate tax season smoothly.

Behave like a business

When artists report their income on the Schedule C, Cole explained, “you’re making an agreement with the IRS that you’re operating like a real business”—and that means you have a profit motive. People making art without a profit motive are considered hobbyists and cannot deduct expenses, she added.

“In the arts, I see a lot of people who really don’t talk about a profit motive,” Cole said. “They feel like they’re professional, but they’re focused on so many other things aside from just making money; they might be focused on getting good press and building their reputation and just making great work. But artists need to be extra, extra careful, and actually just think of themselves more the way that everybody else does—if I’m a professional, I’m trying to make income.”

…Even if you’re not turning a profit

Losses and a lack of income may make it hard to prove a profit motive—but you still can. You can be “applying for grants, doing your bookkeeping, and in general behaving like a business—trying to circulate your work and get it sold,” Cole said.

Having dips and spikes in income over the years is part of what can make filing taxes tricky for artists. You might win a sizeable grant and sell many pieces one year, and then have very little income the next. “But side hustles are the American way, so that is okay,” Cole said. “You can have a legitimate business that you do nights and weekends in your garage.” What’s important is to maintain a profit motive regardless.

However, issues may arise if you report losses on your Schedule C too frequently and you have other income: Losses can shelter that stream of revenue—essentially becoming a tax shelter. If that happens too often, it starts to look suspect. “The IRS may rightfully question whether you actually have a profit motive, or if you should actually be listing your art as a hobby (which means not taking any expenses as deductions),” Cole explained. In order to prove that your art practice is not a hobby, you should be able to have proof on all nine points of this hobby loss test.

If you have a clear profit motive that you can prove with documentation and you’re not making an income from your art, one thing you can do is opt not report all of your expenses. “You don’t have to claim deductions that you’re entitled to,” Cole said. “It’s illegal to not claim income that you make—you have to report your income, there’s no messing with that. But if you want to not report all your expenses, that’s a privilege, not a right.” If you don’t report all of your expenses, she added, you’re effectively overpaying your taxes, which the IRS permits.

Learn which expenses you can deduct—and be conservative

Keeping track of your expenses is to your benefit as an artist. Expenses can include obvious things like art supplies and studio rent, but they can also be costs relating to a studio space in your home, and portions of your phone and internet bills. You can also include museum trips and research expenses if they relate directly to the work you are making, as well as travel. For example, you could deduct travel expenses if you attend art fairs and make appointments in advance with curators and collectors. You could also take into account the cost of driving to see shows or purchase supplies.

“The more you can tie it to a specific thing you’re working on,” the better, Cole explained. “The general principle is to make conservative estimates; it’s when you get greedy that your returns get looked at.”

Cole noted that she often finds that artists try to include clothing as an expense, which is only allowed if the clothing is a costume—the general rule is that it cannot be something you could wear on the street. For an artist like Nick Cave, who incorporates clothing into his sculptures, Cole said, “I would start getting into more fine-grained detail about clothing, because that truly may be material for his artwork.”

Use a separate bank account for your art

The IRS expects you to operate as a business, so, in step, you should have separate bank and credit accounts for your art practice. “As a professional, you should not be commingling business and personal expenses on a single credit card or in a single bank account,” Cole explained. Another benefit of doing this is that it makes filing your taxes and gathering all of your expenses much easier. “Then, everything on that bank or credit statement is a deductible business expense,” Cole said.

Another way to organize your expenses is to keep a folder for digital receipts on your desktop or in your email, Cole said.

Don’t confuse itemized deductions with deducting expenses

One mistake artists often make, Cole said, is confusing itemized deductions with deducting expenses on the Schedule C. This can lead you to miss out on a lot of deductions. “Those two things are completely separate and unrelated,” Cole said. “Itemizing is specifically for mortgage interest deductions or charitable deductions and state and local tax deductions.” (There are other, smaller deductions, but those are the big three, she added.)

Be careful with crowdfunding

If you do a crowdfunding campaign, all of the funds you received are taxable income. However, presumably, you’re crowdfunding in order to use that money to do something, and when you do, you can deduct those expenses, Cole said. “So as long as you document those expenses really carefully, they probably will offset each other,” she explained.

“The thing to watch out for is the calendar,” she continued. “It would be better to do your crowdfunding when you get the money early in the year, so that you have all year to spend it. It would be trickier if you got all the money in December and didn’t spend it until the following calendar year, because then you’ll get taxed on it all before you ever get a chance to incur expenses.”

Find an accountant who’s a good communicator

Popular tax software programs that many people use, like TurboTax, are generally a good value, Cole said; they’re efficient and ask questions in simple English. However, they can leave you in the dark. She’s had several new clients come to her saying they’ve earned some income from their art and want to report expenses for the first time on a Schedule C, only to learn that they had been doing that for years through one such tax software, and were missing out on deductions.

So, if the tax process feels unwieldy and you’ve never filed a Schedule C before, you may want to seek out an expert. An accountant or tax advisor can help you make sure that you’re not missing out on deductions you may be eligible for, and that you are properly adhering to tax code.

As far as what to look for in an account, Cole said: “I have come to value communication above most other things.” Even if you’ve found an expert, she explained, if they don’t “let you make informed choices—they’re not making sure you get it—then it’s not worth much to you.” She added that it’s rare to find someone who specializes in working with artists (since tax code is so broad), but someone who has experience working with freelancers will generally be well-equipped to help artists.

from Artsy News

[fairfieldthinkspace]

Why I Started A Writing MFA After Retirement

By Kathleen B. Jones, PhD

Reposted with permission from Brevity.

Awaken today in the lemon yellow-dove grey dawn. Blink several times. Close eyes again.  See sentences imprinted under my eyelids.

I get up, wash my face, brush my teeth, and sit down with my morning coffee. The sentences are gone.

I try cajoling them out of my brain again. Traces appear. I type these revenants onto the simulacrum of a page on my computer screen. Amazing how the body can remind the mind of what the mind forgot it already knew.

The memoirist Patricia Hampl once said she still gets shocked when she realizes she doesn’t write what she knows but writes in order to discover what she knows. This is how I think about my writing now: I write to discover what I know. And this is why, at the age of 69, I decided to go back to school for an M.F.A. in creative writing: I’m studying the craft to write in order to discover what I know.

I’m no novice writer. But, for most of my professional life, my writing conformed to the scholarly conventions of my academic field (political theory); I told what I knew. As a university professor, my job was to lead others into discovery. Now, I’m a student again. I have the opportunity to be led into discovery, along with a cohort of peers, by a core faculty of accomplished writers.

Figuring out how to shape a sentence so it sings, how to choose a metaphor so it means more than a clever coincidence between two things, how to invent the right diction for a narrator’s voice, how to create authentic dialogue and how to employ a panoply of related elements of style in aid of telling a story will consume the next year and a half of my life. You can learn a lot about those things through independent study or by attending short-term writing retreats. I’ve done both and they’ve helped. But I’ve wanted more.

I’ve wanted the discipline of an imposed structure, the support of a writing community, and the wisdom of expert teachers in a program with students of varied ages and diverse backgrounds and I’ve wanted all that on a more consistent basis than I’d find in a week or two-long retreat or could create for myself. So I thought, back to school, why not?

I used to ignore the pages and pages in Poets & Writers advertising M.F.A. programs. A year ago, I started paying attention. I eliminated all the residential programs with the exception of two in my area. One would have taken me four years to complete, so I crossed it off. The other required the GRE. I already had a Ph.D., I told the director. No exceptions to the rules allowed, she’d said. My list narrowed to a handful of low residency programs in different parts of the country and then narrowed to two, one on the east coast and the other on the west.

I dug into their web sites to learn about what they offered. I spoke to students and faculty at both schools. I read the faculty’s books. Because I wanted to concentrate on literary fiction—I’m writing an historical novel—I was especially interested in a program with strong fiction writers, but which also stressed cross-genre training. One granted a semester’s credit for previously published writing, which meant I could complete the M.F.A. in three semesters. My decision was made. The icing on the cake was learning, after I was admitted, about Brevity’s  intention to affiliate with the program I’d chosen and that there was an opportunity to work with the magazine.

When I graduate from Fairfield University’s M.F.A. program in December 2019, I’ll be 70. Remember, 70 is the new 40, a friend of mine says. So, if anyone asks why I’m going back to school at this point in my life, I say it’s never too late to learn to write to discover what you know. You might be surprised by what you find, like I’m surprised every morning by those sentences under my eyelids.

Kathleen B. Jones taught Women’s Studies for twenty-four years at San Diego State University. She is the author of two memoirs, Living Between Danger and Love, and Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt. Her writing has appeared in Fiction International, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, The Briar Cliff Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. While completing an MFA in writing at Fairfield University, she is currently working on an historical novel about the 15th C writer, Christine de Pizan, and serves as Brevity‘s Associate Editor.

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Washington, D.C. — The human ear is an amazing sensor. It can detect a wide range of sounds. But it often can’t discern subtle differences between similar tones. Nor can the human brain “record” sounds for playback and analysis. Such abilities could help shoppers looking for a good musical instrument. They also could aid vocal coaches. Now, two teens are turning to technology to tackle such acoustic challenges.

Isabelle Katz, 15, lives in Moraga, Calif. Hannah Shu, 14, resides in Seaside, Calif. Each had a science-fair project last year that performed detailed mathematical analyses of musical tones, among other things. These projects qualified each teen to become a finalist, late last month, in the ninth annual Broadcom MASTERS competition.

MASTERS stands for Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars. Open to U.S. middle-school researchers, this program was created by Society for Science & the Public. (The Society also publishes Science News for Students.) Broadcom Foundation, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., sponsors the event.

Both Isabelle’s and Hannah’s projects were impressive. After all, each allowed the girls to make it through a screening process that knocked out at least 2,200 other applicants.

A sound analysis

Hannah has played the violin since she was eight. For her project, she asked a simple question: Does a high-cost violin produce better music then an inexpensive one? To answer that, she turned to math. She used it to compare the tones produced by different instruments.

Hannah Shu, 14, of Seaside, Calif., came up with a way to analyze and display musical tones. Her technique could help violin shoppers distinguish good from not-so-good instruments.

CREDIT: Linda Doane/Society for Science & the Public

The teen recorded the same notes on her smartphone as she played them on different violins. Computer software then converted those recorded sounds into graphs. (This is the same sort of software that scientists use to analyze the songs of birds and whales, Hannah notes.) In her graphs, powerful pitch frequencies showed up in bright yellow. The software depicted less-powerful ones in a subdued purple. Hannah used these graphs to assess each violin’s overall sound quality.

In theory, a musical note has a single frequency. But in practice, that’s not true, Hannah points out. Stringed instruments, such as violins, produce “notes” that contain a range of frequencies, she explains. The dominant tone should be what’s called its fundamental frequency. That’s the sound a string makes as it vibrates back and forth as a single unit. Higher-frequency components of a string’s movements create what are called overtones. They develop when a string vibrates back and forth in a wave-shaped manner. The larger the number of waves there are between one end of the string and the other, the higher the frequency of that particular overtone.

In general, a musical tone is pleasing if the fundamental frequency is louder than its overtones. But poor-quality instruments don’t always produce such tones, says Hannah. The fundamental may be only slightly louder than its overtone. And in some, the overtones can dominate.

On average, each of the eight most expensive violins that Hannah tested cost more than $8,000. The cheapest 16 averaged just a bit more than $1,250 each. Maybe it’s no surprise, but the costliest instruments tended to produce better tones, Hannah found. Yet some low-cost instruments sounded nearly as good as the pricey violins.

By recording musical notes and making them visible, Hannah Shu could easily tell a good violin (which produced notes with strong fundamentals [bright bars], upper image) from a bad one that produced weak fundamentals (dim bars at right, lower image).

CREDIT: Linda Doane/Society for Science & the Public

She now suggests that the type of analyses she did might help violin shopper identify a bargain — or avoid a dud.

Sonic bull’s-eye

When expert musicians refer to musical tones, they often use words like “fat,” “bright” or “mellow.” A bit vague, these terms could mean different things to different people, says Isabelle. Non-experts, especially, might become confused. So Isabelle decided to describe and clearly depict musical tones mathematically. That should provide data that would be equally useful to all.

As Hannah did, Isabelle recorded and analyzed the musical tones produced by stringed instruments. But unlike Hannah, Isabelle used pianos — three brands of them.

She started by analyzing 10 different recordings of the so-called middle C note from each instrument. It has a fundamental frequency of about 261 hertz. (One hertz is the same as 1 cycle, or vibration, per second.) For each brand, she calculated the average intensity, or volume, of the middle C’s fundamental tone. She did the same for each of that note’s first six overtones. Then, she graphed the seven frequencies for each brand of piano.

To make these graphs easier to compare, she adjusted each so that the loudest fundamental or overtone had a value of 1.

Each brand of piano, she showed, had a different balance of frequencies. Isabelle decided to depict her frequency maps using rings of different colors. The resulting maps looked a bit like an archer’s target. The blue center of the bull’s-eye represented the fundamental frequency. Just outside was a green ring. It depicted the first overtone. Outside of that ring were rings of (in order) yellow, orange, purple, black and dark green. The width of each ring related to the volume of that overtone.

Isabelle Katz, 15, of Moraga, Calif., developed an alternative way to analyze and display musical notes. Her’s could help vocal coaches as well as instrument owners who want to evaluate sound quality.

CREDIT: Linda Doane/Society for Science & the Public

Such maps offer a type of “fingerprint” of the note for that instrument. These could be used to tell one brand of piano from another. And with just a little practice, Isabelle says, someone could learn to read such a graph and interpret a note’s balance of frequencies.

Her colorful bull’s-eyes could find many uses. For instance, they could be one way to monitor a piano’s tones over time. Indeed, big changes in a note’s fingerprint might signal it’s time to tune the instrument.

Vocal coaches might find these maps useful, too. They could record a student’s voice and then display its mix of frequencies. The coach could then compare that fingerprint to an ideal mix of frequencies for that note as sung by experts. Over time, a coach — or student — could monitor how a fingerprint changed and potentially improved.

Isabelle hopes to one day develop a phone-based app based on her technique. She also wants to file a patent on it, form a company and (maybe most of all) find investors who can help her develop her ideas further. For now, once she’s developed her app she’ll test it out on members of the choir in which she sings.

A sound reward

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For her qualifying project, Isabelle nabbed the $2,500 second-place award in the Mathematics category at Broadcom MASTERS.

In most student science competitions, the majority of the finalists’ scores is based on their qualifying science-fair projects. That’s different from how it works at Broadcom MASTERS. Here, roughly four-fifths of the finalists’ scores are based on the creativity and teamwork they show in helping to solve on-the-spot research challenges.