Not Safe for Work

http://www.bramdaman.com/nokia.html

Things i love about Christi

• She's smart
• She's funny
• She's talented
• She's beautiful

dates

i'll be in california from dec 20 - jan 18

book deals

The top thing on blogger.com right now is people getting book deals based on their blogs. This, of course, causes me to become starry-eyed. Would Random House be interrested in the ramblings of a neurotic grad student who hasn't changed her sheets since October? Then I remembered that I only post tired Marxist political rants and papers written for classes.

(I wear pajams. it's not that bad. i've been busy. Like you've never done it.)

All of you California folks who were hoping to see me over my winter break (ok, i know "all" is perhaps an exagerating term. "hey you one person" then) are in luck. See you soon.

Elephant sounds on the web

• http://www.nhm.ac.uk/interactive/sounds/no_flash.html#
• http://www.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/2002/nov/index.html
• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/
• http://www.tintagel.net/resources/Multimedia/Audio/Animals/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/mammals/up_close/elephant_index.shtml
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/reallywild/wildtunes/picpops/5.shtml
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/reallywild/wildfile/wildfile_asian_elephant.shtml
• http://elephant.elehost.com/Multimedia_Page/Sounds/sounds.html
• http://www.elephantvoices.org/
• http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Byte/8867/animals/Elephant.wav
• http://simplythebest.net/sounds/other_formats/AIFF/sound_effects_AIFF/animals_aiff.html
• http://members.tripod.com/~drphilgood/GIFs-BAMA_elephants.html
• http://www.doghause.com/sounds.html
• http://www.3dcafe.com/asp/soundsanimals1.asp

flight info?

hrm, i cannot find any confirmation email about my winter flights. i must have deleted them by accident. i wonder what airline I'm suppossed to be on.

Insomnia + notation software =

Et sonnera le baffroy de la ville sans cesser durant l'assault

clearly editting is required.

Lou Harrison biography

There exists a biography of Lou Harrison, which was written during his lifetime. It makes him out to be something of a saint, but this is perfectly alright because everyone makes him out to be something of a saint, and with good reason. the biography has an extremely good articles about his tuning systems and how he built gamelans and stuff. when I did my presentation on La Koro sutro, I borrowed the biography because I knew it would contain information on the tuning system of the piece and indeed, it did, which I then used in my report.

Well, at the beginning of the semester, i was assigned to read the biography and report back on it. The teacher told us that when responding to an author's viewpoint about a work, we should "take them on." So my report was about the weakest areas of the biography instead of the strongest areas. apparently, I misunderstood what it meant to "take them on." but, despite being somewhat off-track, this was ok and I got to educate my fellow grad students on Esperanto.

The teacher of the seminar just sent me email saying that he'd talked to Lou's biographer about what I said about Esperanto and she wants my notes.

pretty cool, if you ask me.

Let it snow!

So it snowed last week some time. I think I posted about this. It was very exciting when it happened, but then it started turning to slush and was a lot less endearing. I was told that the best time to make a snowperson is when it's kind of warm, but I had a bit too much stuff to do. then thursday, it rained and all the now went away, for which i was glad.

Had a final concert wed night (which a lot more people would have attended had there been any pre-concert publicity), then a presentation on La Koro sutro on thursday evening. the three most important things about that piece are just intonation, limitted pitch material in the gamelan and other instruments, modality and drones. I guess that's four things. alas. I was concerned that i would get off track and start talking about musical instruments in the time of Joan of Arc, but I did not. It worked out well in that I ran out of time just as I ran out of things to say. Aaron said it was a good presentation. then friday, I emailed in my joan of arc paper. There was a massive campus-wide toner shortage. So I gave up trying to find a printer.

Spent most of yesterday sleeping, but also went to the African Drumming and Dance concert, in which Aaron was playing, as he was the drum TA. It was a groovy concert. Woke up today in the afternoon (*yawn*) and snow was coming down like crazy. While slush is a bummer, snow is really pretty. So I went out and shoveled some of the driveway. then went out later and got a saucer sled and went sledding with Aaron and his gf Zoe. We came in when it started to sleet. Little sharp chuncks of ice fall from the sky when it sleets. but a saucer sled makes excellent head protection. Made my first snow angel. There's a hill (called Foss Hill) that overlooks the school baseball field. It's a prime sledding spot.

An internet search reveals that there is a musical instrument museum at Yale. Of course, they won't have any 15th century clairons, but I want to go see it. Angela is still in town. Aaron is leaving tonight after Dan St. Clair's concert. Dan was the CA for the course I TAed. (CAs are undergrad TAs, fwiw) He's doing installations. They're super cool. He's doing grad-level work and consequently, has the respect of the grad composers. I dunno when Dan is leaving. Most everyone is gone already and those that aren't are leaving very soon.

No more pencils, etc. Maybe I'll get a chance to make a snow person.

Scitilopolitics

Celeste Hutchins
Music 222
Final Project Notes

Scitilopolitics

Program notes:

Researchers have discovered that if they take the syllables of a word and play them backwards, but in the correct order, people will be unable to hear the reversal. This piece explores how backwards things have to be, before you can hear it.

The male voice is George Bush. The female voice is Jessica Feldman reading text from Jeffner Allen, Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations (Palo Alto: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1987)

Essay:

I wanted to write something that could only be done with a computer, so granular synthesis seemed link an obvious choice. My friend posted about the syllable reversing thing in his blog several weeks ago, so I thought I should try that. I decided to use Bush, because everything he says is so very backwards. I searched CNN.com for aiff files of Bush speaking and only found two good ones. One was him speaking about the ABM treaty, but my wife just wrote a piece using that one (also premiering 8:00 p.m. Dec 10th, but in Paris), and didn't want me to use it. The other one is the one I am using, where he gives a speech about terrorism and destroying American culture. One of the students in MUSC 220 used the same audio clip for a different sort of tape project. I had been thinking about the subtext of the speech since hearing that project and about how to make Bush's real message - his desire to destroy pop culture - clear. Repeated listening, which this piece contains, helps get people hear the real message behind the seeming non-sequiturs of the presidential speech. To make it clearer, I splatter key phrases, using the same reversal algorithm, out to any one of the 4 speakers. As the piece progresses, I add additional sound-bites, from the ABM treaty speech and from press conferences where Bush talks more about foreign policy.

After Bush winds down, I launch the contrary text from Allen's book. I run the algorithm in the opposite direction, because I take the opposite view of the words. Allen also talks about violence, terrorism and victimhood, but unlike Bush, everything she says is true and real. Her words are ultimately empowering to her reader, giving her readers freedom instead of taking it away. Her viewpoint is equally extremist, but exists in reaction to the sort of evil that Bush proposes.

Also, I find that listening to Bush talk about destroying culture for 5 minutes makes me very tense and Jessica's soothing voice talking about women uprising against men is an antidote to Bush's evil rhetoric.

Technical:

I put the splattering in a routine, because I found it hard to fight my impulse to send out bushisms in all directions as key words popped up. The texture was always too dense. and I thought it would better to not necessarily have the highlighted text match what was just said. Doing a computer implementation was much easier than teaching myself to play the piece. The Allen quotes at the end are still manually triggered, as it's easier to manually put them in the right spot than to get the computer to do it.

I always have an instinct to generalize software that I've written so it could take any audio files and do the same piece, or make it very general so it could do a number of related pieces. This is not always a good instinct, although the reversing routine might come in useful. It is already stand-alone. The maxTimesThroughLoop variable may not be useful going in reverse. Would you want your loop to start from the largest possible grain and run N times? Or start from N loops from the smallest possible grain? My instinct is that the second case would be more useful, but the first case is what would happen currently.

The weighted averages of buf2 in the splatter routine are kludgy. While the splattering code works, I wouldn't want to invite it to dinner parties. The three while loops are especially awful. If I want to do more with this piece, I would fix the splattering. But for now, it works. My old boss used to say, "worse is better," as in, it was better to release something that worked than work forever to make the most pristine thing in the world. You could fix it later. He also used to go through and remove comments from code, saying that the code itself was truth and comments were distorting, so I don't think he always gave the best advice on programming. If someone took out the comment around figuring out what number should reside in timesthroughLoop, for example, I would be hopelessly confused.

postmortem - blog comments

The concert was sparsely attended. only around 4 spectators came. my piece crashed right near the end of the George Bush section, so the radical feminist text was not played at all. Ron, the prof, said that Ashcroft had gotten in my computer. I was using a different computer than i had used to test and develop (and compile the intrepretter on) the piece, and i think that may have been a factor. so i'm going to get a laptop this week. as a student, i won't have to pay for it for a long time. i think i can pay it off over a year with an interest free loan.

and christi did Working Girl instead of the ABM tresty piece, perhaps due to a shortage of elephant samples. I will be going to the library on monday to return my interlibrary loan books, so if i take my brain with me, i'll check out some elephant tapes.