I really prefer flying nonstop. This time I had a stop in Charolette (North Carolina). Even one stop ends up taking a whole lot more time, and as busy as my life is, I don't want to spend more time sitting around in airports.
Then, once arrived in Cancun, over an hour was spent in the immigration line at the airport, which was even worse than I was prepared for.
After showering, I got my conference registration done (quick and easy), and then had the breakfast buffet in the hotel ... which is lovely but expensive, USD $22! So I ate as much as I could hold. Met Bill Hartman and his wife Chris and sat with them for breakfast, it was good to catch up with them, they are very nice folks.
One thing I've always thought of as the very ultimate in decadence is a swim-up bar, and there it is, in the pool just below my room! You can see the row of underwater stools, around the big palapa roofed bar in the middle.
A mynah bird hangs around on my hotel room balcony, chirping and strutting.
The big boxy puffer fish are very shy, and skitter away as soon as they see me seeing them. Two needle-nosed gar, silvery blue, with sharp scimitar tails, drift just below the surface, with their mirror images just above them. I found one live conch, retracted into its shell with one poison claw and two beadwork eyes looking out at me. A couple of fat purple sea urchins covered with white spines. There are quite a few fish, mostly small angelfish (striped yellow and grey) but also vast clouds of tiny minnow-like fishies, that look bright blue from the side, but duller from the rear, so that the school as a whole changes color when it turns away from you.
The oddest things are the holes in the sandy bottom, some over an inch in diameter, that seem to belong to some kind of tube worms. Most of the time you only see a hole, which if it gets filled with sand by wave action, promptly gets puffed out again and just sits there, open. Obviously something with big lungs lives down there! Sometimes you see a loose tube of thin whitish tissue extruded, curling and undulating with the motion of the waves, which is less ominous but no less weird.
Tourist watching provides some sights that are no less odd. There was one girl who was snorkeling while wearing one of those backless thong bikinis, so that pale hemispheres of butt were popping up and down with the rolling of the waves. Cute and bizarre at the same time.
In the afternoon I went to conference sessions, mostly on the generation and detection of sounds by coral reef fish, which was great -- there's a remarkable amount of new work going on in this area.
Scrump! The high point of this session! There was a scientific study of the sounds that coral reef fish make during courtship and mating. After the dry talk, they showed a video which took the film and audio and recast it as a music video about sexy fish, complete with the lab scientists rapping and doing hand jive, even gogo dancing! These biologists sure seem to have more fun than us engineers!
Also saw a good talk on musical acoustics, analyzing sound from hand bells (via holographic imaging of real bells, and finite element models which give good images of resonance modes and good sound too).
Late afternoon, I had a sandwich at the beachside restaurant, which was really nice -- enjoying a glass of wine while smelling the warm breeze over the Caribbean, and watching the piled clouds turn red with the approaching sunset. I met Mario Svirsky in the lobby, and we caught each other up on what we've been doing. He's doing more editing than he wants, and I'm doing more software than I want, and we're both wanting to do more research while appreciating the fact that we do have solid jobs.
The conference had a mixer in the evening, and I did walk through it and try to talk with a couple people, but didn't make any progress. I'm lousy at the social small talk and schmoozing ... even though that's a big part of the conference experience, making contacts and putting names with faces. I've got to get better at this. Somehow.
The food is really good, but I'm already getting tired of hovering obsequious waiters. They even try to put the napkin in my lap for me! And the killer is, the service still isn't all that great. Even when I ask for tea, I get coffee as often as not.
The thing I notice is that, for all the expensive trappings and polished marble floors and so on, it's still Mexico, with all that implies about idiosyncrasies. For example, the restaurants in the hotel have very specific hours, there's only one choice for breakfast, another for lunch, and yet others for dinner (and those are the really fancy ones, I haven't been in those).
I notice that I picked up a moderate sunburn while snorkeling today. Gotta watch out while in the water, because you can't feel the heat.
I spent most of the morning at the music analysis and synthesis session, there's lots of good work coming out of France (IRCAM) and Champaign-Urbana (which has a well developed software system available for download). The latest thing seems to be digital waveguides, there's a lot more work here than I remember from a couple of years ago. Example: detailed model of a piano hammer striking the string, showing the resonance of the short length of string and the exchange of energy between the two.
Also saw the posters in the speech session, vowel quality studies (relevant to my presentation). I saw many of my MIT colleagues here, presenting their own work and checking out the posters.
The afternoon was an endurance test for me. I helped get the audio and video equipment set up at the beginning of the session, and listened to lots of interesting work in speech feature detection. By the time of my talk (almost 5:00 pm), everyone was pretty fried, including me, and my presentation was not nearly as smooth and polished as I wanted it to be.
I asked my question about the musical interval of the pyramid's chirping effect compared to the quetzal's call, and David Lubman (the dreamer) seemed very intrigued. Apparently nobody has been listening to these things with a musician's ear. I also asked if there are other birds with calls similar to the pyramid's downward chirp, and apparently no one knows. I doubt that we will ever have enough evidence to settle the question one way or the other, but it makes for lots of fun debate.
I took a little time at lunch break to lie out in the sun, which is one of my all-time favorite ways to relax. It was quite hot and I didn't stay long, and I don't want a bad sunburn, but it sure was nice.
In the afternoon I went to the poster session on speech processing, and had some good interactions with some of the presenters, including Khalil from Haskins Labs. Then there was the plenary session (awards and so on) which did not sound exciting to me, so I went snorkeling (again) with Mark Tiede and Khalil. This time we went to the rocky point (marked with the lighthouse, visible in the pictures from my balcony, above) which has much more coral reefs, and much more fish!
There are far too many kinds of fish for me to try to describe them all, but my favorites are the parrotfish with their big beaks and clown colors. The iridescent blue wrasses are also delightful. The coral shapes include fan-shaped spreads of lettuce leaves, and brains (yup, brains, just like you'd imagine!)
There are loads of black-spined sea urchins, fat red sea cucumbers, chubby stubby starfish, and massive clouds of tiny minnow fish, more than I've ever seen before, surely they numbered in the tens of thousands, no lie. I wish I had an underwater camera to take pictures of all this.
The only problem was that the wind and surf were very strong, so much so that the federales had a red flag flying to warn swimmers. At best, I bounce up and down with each wave, along with the fish, and hold my breath when a wave breaks over my snorkel. At worst, the froth and bubbles reduce visibility to zero, and I was getting worried about being bashed against the coral (that would REALLY hurt!) So I gave up before too long. Mark, Khalil, and I walked around the point to find a sand beach for body surfing. This is a pretty walk along the cliffs, with palapas for massage here and there. Lots of tiny geckos skitter along the path.
Some hotel has a hexagonal platform sticking out into the water, and this is where we swam. The surf was wild, and we had a blast! We rode lots of massive and powerful waves, all colored the fluorescent turquoise of the Caribbean, but had to be careful to break off before running right into the rocky wall. We all got tossed and pounded in the waves, and I picked up at least a kilogram of sand in my bathing suit and hair.
Walking back to our hotel, we found a mesquite grille restaurant right on the beach, and met some of Mark's friends there (Kara and her husband). So (after a shower and change) we all had dinner there. This is one of the best memories of the trip -- though it was expensive, I'll pay extra to enjoy fine food right on the beach, with the smell of the mesquite grille on one side and the sea on the other. Excellent margaritas, bread with herbed oil, and grilled mahimahi (I also got to share some of Khalil's paella). Yummy. Wow. After dark, snowy egrets fly back and forth along the beach, ghostly white in the hotel lights.
Morning sessions included speech posters as well as the acoustics of ancient theatrical spaces ... it was noted that classical Greek and Roman theatres had vases under the seats, and Nordic churches a thousand years later had vases built into the walls, and even Chinese operatic theatres mention vases under the stage. Debate about the acoustic significance, no strong evidence, but it's an odd coincidence if nothing else.
At lunchtime I took my camera out to the punta Cancun, where the yellow lighthouse is, to take some pictures.
I was a little late for the afternoon session on ancient musical instruments, actually sat through the whole thing in a wet bathing suit! But it was well worth it. I learned a lot about the Carnyx (the ancient Gaelic horn, that may have been played like a didjeridu) and Chinese reed flutes, and of course there were lots and lots of presentations on pre-Columbian instruments (almost all aerophones of various types). There are little frog-shaped whistles, that can generate a very good imitation of a frog call if you trill your tongue while blowing. There are dual- and tri-tone whistles that are said to produce entheogenic effects (since they're not precisely tuned, they generate infrasonic beat notes, that presumably can cause brain wave entrainment). I learned a lot of detail about ocarinas and other globular flutes, apparently they are Helmholz resonators, with tone control by opening and closing various holes to control the acoustic mass. I talked a lot with David Lubman (the chirping pyramid guy), and Roberto Velasquez (runs a musical heritage and acoustic science foundation in Mexico), and Susan who studies and makes central American ceramic flutes and ocarinas. Roberto also has a big horn made from some kind of gourd, which is fun to blow. I managed to get some didjeridu technique going on it, but I was nowhere near as good as these experts.
This was another marathon session, ending well after dark. Then there was another conference social hour at poolside. This one did not seem to be as well run as the first: I waited in a very long line and there was no food when I got to the end. Again, the food was free (if you could get it) and the drinks were overpriced to compensate, but my second glass of wine never got charged to me ... I have no guilt, they're making plenty of money on me as it is. Talked some more with Bill Hartmann and his wife Chris (who got stuck with sea urchin spines and had to go to a very disorganized doctor, made a good story).
The hotel seems to be much more jammed with tourists this morning, and I got buffeted at the buffet breakfast. Just as well I'm leaving. Checked the weather, and it looks like the ice storm that shut down Charlotte NC (my connection) is past, so hopefully my flight home will happen as per plan.
Spent a while talking with some cool folks in the airport, they were just returning from a week of scuba diving and horseback riding and swimming with dolphins. They covered a lot more activities than I did! Anyway it was fun talking with them, helped cure the lonelies that have been troubling me this trip.
I'm writing this on the plane over Key West, and with any luck, this page will be posted to my web site by tonight. Vaya con dios!
This page maintained by Wil Howitt