Toby Rush

Hey
Thank you for the lovely essay
You’re email’s in my inbox
But you don’t know the life of a department chair, babe
And you’re never gonna wanna

Shh… if you listen closely, you can hear the soft melody of Ohioans’ snowblowers announcing the storm’s completion

It’s that time of year where I once again wonder what past events have led to the fact that we are expressly forbidden by University IT from using “MerleHaggard1Troubadour” as a password

A stack of 6 MacBooks and MacBook Pros, plus an iPad on top, all sitting on my cluttered desk.

Doing some long overdue decluttering…

Also, Toronto, where I assume all music is Metric, Stars and Sex Bob-Omb

New York City. I haven’t been avoiding it, but I’m 51 years old and life has just never gotten around to landing there. Been to Rochester, DC, and even Boston multiple times, but to me NYC exists only as Sesame Street, Billy Joel, and Seinfeld have relayed it to me.

Our sweet Russian Blue cat Denki, sitting in a basket

So sorry to hear about this, Megan… we just had to do the same thing with our sweet boy.

Duo the owl, but weirdly crossed with Taylor Swift, complete with makeup, long eyelashes, long blond hair, a microphone, and long human legs in knee-high boots

I try to lead a good life and treat people right, what exactly have I done to deserve this

My thoughts exactly! Especially since in this analogy Kleenex is now named ¶ anyway

And it’s nowhere near ready for prime time — we only have early drafts of the second year and part of the first semester — but folks are welcome look at our approach to accessibility (and watch our excruciatingly slow progress) at tobyrush.com/book if they want :)

WAI-ARIA basics - Learn web development | MDN This article has by no means covered all that's available in WAI-ARIA, but it should have given you enough information to understand how to use it, and know some of the most common patterns you will e...

Also, anyone doing online pedagogy should get familiar with WAI-ARIA — there’s a lot more that just alt-text! It’s about using semantic tags to construct your page in a way that allows people to navigate your content efficiently. developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/L...

Now, that all takes a lot more web design know-how, but we’re making everything open source so other people can use it… I’m happy to spin the image stuff off into a separate library if people are interested.

Additionally, if the user has their interface set to dark mode, the score image is replaced — not with a white-on-black version, but with a low-contrast black on gray version. Oh, and I use SVG images, not GIF, JPEG or PNG, which retain quality when zoomed in (and load faster!).

The online textbook I’m working on with Stef Acevedo goes a lot farther than this: musical examples have an alt text like described above, but provide options to hear the example and/or access a version written in braille music notation.

I think a better approach is to describe the information the example is meant to provide, like “a notated excerpt of Johnny Doe’s 1967 Kazoo Concerto, showing a Neapolitan Six chord on beat 3 of measure 72.” The idea here is that the reader gets the gist, and can go look up the score if they want.

(By the way, if when describing notes in alt text, you need to spell out accidentals, since screen readers won’t pronounce G# or Eb the way sighted folks read them.)

As for alt text, it’s tempting to be super descriptive (“a treble clef staff with an A4 dotted quarter note, then an eight note chord containing G sharp 4 and B4, slurred to the previous note…” but this gets pretty impractical for screenreading software to relay.

This is definitely an area ripe for some published best practices! I think there’s a few different approaches here. 🧵

A card with the title “Faculty Complaint Forms” and a pad of intentionally tiny (less that four square inches) post-it notes, posted on my office door. On the top post-it note, someone has written “Dear Slim, I wrote you but you still ain’t calling”

This gift from a former department chair was already hilarious but my student’s addition is just *chef’s kiss*

The reconstruction of academic music twitter is going great so far, everyone. We need to keep this momentum going so the effort can be sanctified by @imanimosley.bsky.social live-skeeting this year’s Nine Lessons and Carols

One of many people who learned today that Clue’s Mrs. White was replaced by Dr. Orchid…

A prolongation of music theorists
A synod of musicologists
A hybridity of ethnomusicologists

An image version of the PDF linked in the post.

Doing my part to give your feed a little break from All The Things

(PDF version at bit.ly/music-venery)

I’m also enjoying the mellophones and sousaphone whose valves apparently just stop the air in a few slight different locations

Coming back from SMT and seeing the energetic reconstruction here of the community we used to have on twitter is making my heart all kinds of happy.

That space was how I went from feeling like an outsider to eating at the cool kids’ table, and I’d love for more folks to have the same opportunity.

Started using Finale 3.5 in college about 30 years ago… it was a nice improvement over MOTU’s Professional Composer. I’ve tried to use MuseScore several times, eventually quitting and saying, “ah, I’ll just do it in Finale.” Time to hunker down and figure it out, I guess 😕

If you were visited by 3 ghosts on Christmas Eve, who would you want them to be?

AMS/SMT folks: Denver has a great light rail system! You can take the train from the airport to Union Station for $10.50 and then take the free MallRide bus from Union Station down 16th street to the Sheraton. You can even buy tickets on your phone! rtd-denver.com

O! H! I! O! 🎉