Other News (and then I’ll stop typing and quit boring you)

This morning I spent a couple of hours on BART, recording to DAT with two SM57s, one poinbted up at the BART car, the other pointed down at the wheels. It’s cool, you can hear the clutch and stuff that you don’t normally hear. I also had binaural mics stuck in my ears (these are tiny microphones that record what you hear, since they’re in your ear. It picks up all the directional stuff that you hear too. I’ve heard rumors that if you listen to a binaural recording of a rollercoaster, you can actually feel dizzy and sick, but this was just BART, so it will be ok.) and recorded those to a Sony Minidisc walkman. The downside of the mics, is that they hear everything I hear, so when I swallow, it makes a noise. Try for a few minutes, trying to sit perfectly still, while thinking, “don’t swallow! Don’t swallow!” Next time, I’m taking a sudafed first. The sounds from the DAT though are startlingly good. After a struggle, I got them into a protools session.
Jean, the great and wonderous Jean, brought a friend and came over to be recorded talking about transit. So I recorded them to DAT, with the intention of getting them into a protools session later.
Jenya came over to scan pictures of people to add them to digital pictures of our mockup thing for Singapore. She’s doing all the design for that. She is an awesome designer. At the same time, I was trying to use USB to upload the minidisc recordings to her PC, since Sony’s MD software only talks to PCs and not macs. All I could do with the software was name the track. The consumer-designed minidisc has four ins, including a mic preamp and two digital ins, but not a single out besides headphones. There’s no way to get sound off of it. The software has stuff to “check in” and “check out” songs, but it turns out that that’s just some super-lame copy protection scheme so that you can’t make too many copies of your music collection. There’s no way to use my recorded to get sound off of a disc. It’s the Hotel California of audio equipment. you can check out any time you want, but your data can never leave.
Fortunately, this was all part of my original plan. The plan was to buy a used professional minidisc with sufficiently advanced playback algorthyms, but less than optimal recording ones. Then I could use it’s digital outs to get data off of my discs and it wouldn’t be very expensive. I could get dern good recordings (provided I don’t swallow) on cheep media with a cheep player that I don’t worry about, like I worry about my DAT recorder. Anyway.
christi came home with a big envelope from CalArts that she removed from the mailbox. They’re delighted to inform me that they want a heck of a lot of money. I had no idea the tuition was so high when I applied. Anyway, this is good news.
I went to wineglass rehersal. The woman next to me told me that she loves public transit and wants to talk to me about it. I asked her to wait until later because she could be a rich and wonderful source of audio (she’s a singer too) and I want to have the time to treat it properly. I’m worried about playing the wineglasses in concert. I don’t know my part. The composer says don’t worry, the conductor will cue us. Sounds like a great conductor. Sometimes I don’t understand why people make a big deal about who conducted what, since the conductor doesn’t even make sounds, but other times, I get it and this could be one of those times.