Editing 1482: NowPlaying

<noinclude>:''The correct title of this page is '''1482: #NowPlaying'''. It appears incorrectly here because of {{w|mw:Manual:Page title|technical restrictions}}.''</noinclude>

There are a variety of applications that post a user's music-listening habits on their preferred social network. In this comic, [[Randall]] takes that notion to its extreme, envisioning a program that does this note-by-note, rather than just song-by-song (This program is hard to implement in reality, as most of the music files shared online are wave tables <code>.mp3</code>, and it may be difficult to extract notes from them). As songs play several dozen notes a minute (and some songs, many more), this would lead to the flooding of friends' notification streams. In the example, the software is sharing the notes that Brian is listening to; and his friends Mike and Caitlin are getting annoyed with the number of posts they are receiving.

There are typically many hundreds of notes in any song.  Any song with more than a single line of music contains multiple different {{w|Note|notes}} whose names according to the English convention are communicated here. All but the slowest songs will require reporting dozens to hundreds of notes every minute (a single {{w|glissando}} may cover a dozen or more notes in less than a second), meaning that anyone who can see your stream of posts will be [[Literally|literally]] inundated by posts from the service. Even if you could keep up with the speed of the posted notes that someone is listening to, the similarity in {{w|Phrase (music)|phrases}} in many songs (especially pop songs, e.g. [https://youtu.be/JdxkVQy7QLM Pachelbel's Rant]) means that many different songs may include the same sequence of notes, though possibly in different {{w|Octave|octaves}} or at different speeds. The so-called "Black MIDI" music files would contain thousands, or even millions of notes (a notable example being "Pi" by TSMB2 [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ7ipUQoik8 on YouTube] with 3 million notes in total: an average of about 16000 notes per second), and this may annoy Mike and Caitlin even more - probably by crashing their phone system with too many notifications.{{citation needed}}

The comic's title alludes to the fact that you can "play a song" but can also "play a note." It may also allude to the visual similarities between the hash/pound/{{w|number sign}} (#) and the {{w|Sharp (music)|sharp sign}} (♯). ''C sharp'', above Mike's comment, is the only note not given by a single letter (after the correction - see [[#Trivia|Trivia]]).

The title text continues the joke of this new musical service: ''If you click on the post, it takes you to search results for the note on various online music store.'' Since many songs in similar {{w|Key (music)|keys}} contain at least some of the notes posted, you would be given a list of a large part of the music you can buy in any on-line music stores. Of course this is at least as useless as being told which note someone is listening to.

 

The notes appear to be the beginning of ''{{w|I'll Be There for You (The Rembrandts song)|I'll Be There For You}}'' by {{w|The Rembrandts}}, the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-9kPks0IfE title music] of the TV series "{{w|Friends}}". This could be an internal reference to the idea that it "notifies" (converts into musical notes) your "friends" of the notes (a {{w|Pun|play on words}}).

 

Or we've been [[356: Nerd Sniping|nerd sniped]].

:[A social network news feed with user images for each of the three different contributors. The top of the first post is partly obscured, and for the last post only half of the first line is visible.]

:''[Partially Visible]'' '''Brian''' is now listening to: E

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:28 PM

:Today • 3:29 PM

:''[Partially Visible]'' '''Brian''' is now listening to: A

 

:My new social music service notifies your friends about what notes you're listening to.

**One of the messages was out of order. The instance where "Brian is now listening to A" above Caitlin's post was {{w|timestamp}}ed at 3:29, but the next two posts were timestamped at 3:28. Now this timestamp has been corrected to 3:28 so only the last timestamp reads 3:29, the rest 3:28.

**The first partially visible "note" post was "{{w|E major}}". This is not a single note but rather a chord or {{w|major scale|scale}}. The "major" was removed from the comic so it now reads simply "E".