It is Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award season again. The final ballot was announced today, and Facebook is exploding with posts expressing gratitude, humility, honor, and respect for nominations. It is definitely a feel-good kind of day all around. It’s also a great time to remember why we are in the industry and how we got here. I’ve not met anyone who started playing music because they expected to win a Grammy or Nā Hōkū Hanohano award, though I’m certain that there are some out there. For many, it started out as a way to express our artistic inclinations, a way to…
“HI” Fonts on Newer Versions of Mac OS
I occasionally get emails from folks telling me that the old “Papa Pihi HI” for “HI” fonts no longer works on more recent versions of Mac OS X. While I’ve always encouraged folks to abandon those fonts and use the “Hawaiian” keyboard and Unicode fonts built into Mac OS X, sometimes there are valid reasons for using the old fonts. A few years ago the format for keyboard layout resources changed. The old format is actually a remnant of the pre-OS X operating systems. The new keyboard layouts are XML based, and I created one of these kinds of keyboard…
Aloha Keauhou In “Song of the Year” and “Single of the Year” for 2103 Nā Hōkū Hanohano Awards
“Aloha Keauhou”, with music by Kenneth Makuakāne and lyrics by yours truly, is on the preliminary ballot for the 2013 Nā Hōkū Hanohano Awards in the Single of the Year Category and Song of the Year. We originally composed it for the Kamehameha Schools Song Contest in 2012, and Kenneth re-recorded it for the CD “Ho‘ōla Lāhui, Ho‘oulu Pae‘āina”, released last year. The senior girls won the women’s division of the competition with their performance, and tied for first with their language use. You can listen to the recording on my page for “Aloha Keauhou”, which includes a lot of…
Visual Basic Scripts Back In Word 2011 For Mac
For whatever reason, I never did warm up to MS Word 2007 for Mac, and continued to use Word 2004 until recently. When I received my new MacBookPro 13′, I decided to abandon Office 2004 and make the leap to Office 2011. I’m glad I did, and just noticed something pretty cool. The ability to run Visual Basic macros-removed from Office 2007–is back. This means that the VB macros I originally wrote to convert documents written in our old HI font system to Unicode work again. So if you happen to have older documents that have Hawaiian text in the…
New Windows 8 Operating System Supports The Hawaiian Language
While still a devout Macintosh user, I’m extremely grateful for friends at Microsoft who shepherded this project through to completion, and saw that the work we did stayed embedded as Windows 8 was being developed. I’ll be documenting how to activate the keyboard and type the ‘okina and kahakō later, but if you have Win 8, please feel free to explore and experiment. And I would like to ask my fellow Macintosh aficionados to refrain from the normal litany of Windows bashing. This is significant development for the language that will help other important projects move forward. I’m cautiously optimistic…
Memories Of Kamehameha Schools’ Song Contest, 2012
On the evening of March 16, 2012, my wife and I traveled to Honolulu to attend the 92nd annual Kamehameha Schools Song Contest which was held that evening at the Neil Blaisdell Center. It was a night that Kenneth Makuakāne and I and our families had looked forward to for over four months. Back in the fall of last year, we had been asked to contribute a composition for this year’s song contest. This year marks the 125th anniversary of the founding of Kamehameha Schools. The theme of this year’s contest was “Ho‘ōla Lāhui, Ho‘oulu Pae ‘Āina — Vibrant People,…
Setting The Record Straight Regarding The Nā Hōkū Hanohano Awards
Aloha kākou. My esteemed colleague and friend Dr. Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman writes eloquently and passionately about Hawaiian music on her blog “Hawaiian Music for Listening Pleasure”, and I encourage artists, labels, producers, engineers, other industry professionals and fans to check it regularly. I owe much to Amy in my development as an ethomusicologist and budding academic, and for adding clarity to my thinking regarding many issues that surround the culture of music, but this does not mean we agree on everything. While we differ on many of the issues surrounding the Grammy Awards, their legitimacy when it comes to recognizing…
More Details on iOS 5’s Hawaiian Language Support
Last week Apple released iOS 5, the latest version of their operating system for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. There has always been some support for Hawaiian language in iOS. Since it shares some core software with OS X, and OS X has supported Hawaiian since 2002, iOS has had the ability to display the ‘okina and kahakō since it first shipped, and we were delighted when some of our translated strings showed up in that first version as well. With version 3, iOS has been able to generate the ʻokina and kahakō by pressing and holding the vowels…
I Love It When A Plan Comes Together: More ‘Ōlelo Support in iOS
A new iPhone was announced today, the iPhone 4S, and the response to Apple’s press conference was a bit lukewarm. Many were expecting the iPhone 5 and/or iOS5 today. But one of the more exiting developments for us was found on the specification sheet for the phones (tip o’ the cap to Joseph Erb for the heads up): there will be a Hawaiian keyboard and spell-check document included. Yes, we’ve had support for the ‘okina and kahakō in the iPhone and iPad for a while; however, while you can generate them from the soft keyboard by long-holding your finger on…
New Journal Publication
I was happy that my first peer-reviewed journal article (and first article of any type in several years) was published in Language Documentation and Conservation. I’ve had interactions with the National Foreign Language Resource Center at UH-Mānoa for many years, presented at their conferences, and have had a strong admiration for their work. The paper is entitled “Puana ‘Ia me ka ‘Oko‘a: A Comparative Analysis of Hawaiian Language Pronunciation as Spoken and Sung”, and it is a translation, distillation, and revision of my MA thesis, which was originally written in Hawaiian. It is a comparative analysis that uses recordings and…