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Thursday 31 March 2005

Caffeine makes me agro

Second cup of coffee yesterday morning was not a good idea. i have wiggle room on the written paper, which anyway, i am officially Not Worried About. Worst case: I have to rewrite it over the summer and don't graduate on time. I understand that the amount of work required for the paper is inversely related to the amount of work done creating the musical opus. I've written a few personal library files which ought to count for something, including my fancy panning class, and my set of buffer tools for manipulating recorded speech. It took me many weeks to do my first text piece with bush's voice. a few weeks to do my ann coulter piece, only days to do rush limbaugh and i banged out medidations for women in a single evening. this plus the hundred or so pages of my previous (gah) thesis project, and i am not worried.

a motu is a device which allows a computer to be able to receive 8 separate lines of audio simultaneously or output 8 separate lines simultaneously. with a motu attached to my computer, i can send out 2 lines to the stero speaks built in to the chapel and 2 smaller speakers that i'm going to use for folks like fred phelps, because running him through the built in chapel speakers puts him just too much on his home turf. my dislike of motu products dates back to driver problems i had in os9. ever single mac midi application except for motu ones used the official oms midi drivers. except for motu. they had their own set. which meant rebooting to run my one piece of motu software and big headaches sorting out my extensions. motu hardware is somewhat more compatible with supercollider. their program performer does a few more things and does not require installed hardware to run it. however, performer is overly complicated and i don't use the extra features. and motu hardware won't work with protools. blah blah blah. i got sick of worrying about this and so all of my pieces were designed to be only two channels

what really really annoys me about my advisor is that upon listening to a piece of music, he immediately grasps the point and makes several suggestions to make the concept clearer or to make it work better in the space. infuriatingly, these suggestions are almost always a good idea. ok, it's not infuriating. it's just a lot of work. and, of course, this is why i went to music school. i've been mostly sitting at home working on stuff and not sharing them, which is illogical and foolish. i HATE asking for help because i have the idea that it makes me look weak. ahem. anyway, last semester, advisor was on sabatical. this semester, we mostly talked about d00med first thesis project. so that's why i'm getting musical feedback right now.

in case you missed it below my poster, i'm going to paris next year. if you have an idea of a grant that i should apply for, let me know.

for you californians, i will be playing the contents of my thesis concert again in california, in san francisco at the hemlock tavern on the last wednesday in june. it will cost $10 (or less, i'm going to try to bargain the price down) to get in. more details as they become available.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi, it's Polly.
June 29th at the Hemlock Tavern. Cool. It's on my calendar.
Congratulations so much on Paris!!! I would recommend the NYFA Source website for looking up grants. It's searchable and very useful. www.nyfa.org

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