Category: Uncategorised

Advertising Results

I recently ran an advert on Facebook. Ok, yes, Facebook is evil, but it was £7 for a week and the whole idea was so ludicrous that I gave it a go.

Originally, the advert was directed at US-based fans of Christian rock music, but they were so profoundly disinterested, that I started worrying a bit about wasting my money and so broadened out to also include Canadian fans of noise music.

My advertisement ‘reached’ 1,267 people. Which means, it was placed in the feeds of that number of people. Not that they saw it at all, just that it went into their feeds. Of those, 22 people interacted with it some way. 15 of them clicked ‘like’. One of them liked my page (more useful). One of them actually shared my promoted post!

So I went to his page. He shares everything he sees. Which is mostly about cars, guns and war. His 13 facebook friends probably have him muted.

Of the 15 people who liked the post, I ‘invited’ all of them to like my page. Two or three did.

Facebook does not tell me how many people clicked the link through to my shop. However, Etsy gives me statistics on views.

31 people found my shop via Facebook. I can’t say how many of them came from my advert, but I think having 17 views from Canada is possibly unusual.

I’ve also been promoting this round of commissions through blog posts (like this one), twitter and Diaspora. Etsy also is a traffic draw. Over the last 30 days, there have been 224 views of my shop, which may or may not mean it’s been seen by 224 people. 29 People came via twitter and 3 from my blog. Views peaked on Friday, when my shop had 60 views.

16 people actually got as far as looking at a listing. One person favourited the listing. Nobody commissioned me.

It’s worth noting that only nine of my facebook visitors came from the non-mobile website and the rest were mobile users. this may be a reflection of the growing importance or the mobile web. Or there is the tiniest possibility that it’s more strongly related to the facebook mobile UI. Users complain frequently that it’s impossible to use and they keep clicking on adverts accidentally. But, if it looks like clicks to advertisers, why would facebook fix it? It’s not like their users are their customers.

I think it’s clear that I just wasted £7, spending it on ineffective, annoying evil. It’s like selling your soul to the devil for a subway sandwich.

I started this project nearly 10 years ago. Before crowd funding sites and before patreon. Both of those models are potentially well-suited to this project. Indeed, in many ways, they’re both better suited than my model. If I had done crowd-funding, I could have made naming tracks rewards for sponsorship, which is more or less what I’m doing now, but with a model that makes a bit more sense and guarantees that people will actually end up with the album at the end. If I had gone with Patreon, I would not be wedded to the one-minute-of-noise format I’ve chosen, as subscribers would be supporting my output more generally. It would, however, create pressure to make and post tracks frequently enough that I didn’t feel guilty for taking people’s money. Through sponsorship and reliable posting, there’s a potential I could grow my listener base.

This is not a good time of year for doing this sort of project, which may have performed better before Christmas. Every time I do it, I worry I’ve exhausted my social capital. People who commission me are usually only one degree away. Once in a while, I’ll get somebody two degrees away. Alas, my original, foundational hope that people would hear their friend’s commissions and want one for themselves has not come to be.

On the other hand, I started this before my PhD, something which did force me to take along break from it. I do it when I feel like it and pause it when I don’t. I have a lot of control over when I’m not working on this project, which is something I needed towards the start.

I’ve got another advert about to run on a porn blog. Will anybody commission me from it? Probably not, but at least this one will result in a new piece of music, so I don’t care.

This is an advert right here. Have you noticed it? Have you ever clicked through? Have you ever wanted to commission short bursts of noise for the same amount of money I spent advertising that possibility? Go for it! Order now for this Valentines Day!

Musical Influences

For hundreds of years, the Catholic church used Gregorian Chant. Until the second Vatican Council in the latter half of the 20th century, and then they stopped. But in the mean time, every mass-going Catholic heard chant every week. A medieval form of music was thus influencing Catholic composers for hundreds of years, long after chant had been in the early modern charts. Even if the composers weren’t interested in it or didn’t even particularly like it that much, it was still something they had known from early childhood, that could not help but burrow into their unconscious. Refreshed, week and week.

Which is why I felt so horrified on giving a brief listen to Attention K Mart Shoppers. My upbringing was thoroughly suburban – a consumer culture made up of gigantic retail outlets surrounded by even more gigantic parking lots. My stay-at-home mother, quite reasonably, took my brother and I along for shopping trips. Sometimes we followed her and the grocery cart around, whining endlessly for whatever sugar-coated precursor to the obesity epidemic had been advertised on TV that week. In some larger/ more varied stores, such as Gemco, she would allow us to wander around in the sports and camping section. (Thus sparking my profound fascination with camping gadgets and inflatable rafts. (My plan to save up enough of my allowance to buy my own raft never came to fruition.))

We spent an hour in church every week, listening to the newer liturgical music, required by canon law not to be overly distracting (read: interesting/good). I don’t know how many hours a week we spent in shopping establishments, but, especially during my teen years, I suspect it was a lot more time. Which means I heard at least as much elevator music as a Catholic composer a century earlier would have heard chant.

The songs on Attention K Mart Shoppers aren’t bad, per se. The people who worked on them were clearly skilled. Taken individually, the music isn’t even bland. Their formal constructions are so intuitively familiar – the timbres, the rhythms, the note choices. When I was in my teens and twenties, I had a recurring dream where I was flying/floating in a shopping mall, with an especially grand layout, escalators criss crossing over the atriums. And then, in my adulthood, I went to Valley Fair mall in the South San Francisco Bay Area. It was incredibly eerie. Here was the mall I had been dreaming about. My family had been local to it in my early childhood, but had moved away when I was 7 or 8. I had forgotten it, except not. It was still rooted in my subconscious, impossible to shake away completely. How much deeper-rooted is the music, which would have been heard across multiple locations?

Indeed, what I heard most immediately on listening to this sound track of my childhood, was not eerie nostalgia but the echos that are in my own composition. When I’m writing something that’s melodic, my tool kit of notes, timbres and rhythms is build off a foundation of elevator music. This is the well-spring of my creativity. I don’t just make noise. I make the noise of late 20th century capitalism. I can leave American suburbia, but American suburbia will never leave me.

The Les Said the Better music section is home of many fine varieties of noise music. From analogue to digital to acoustic, there’s something in it for you. Head over to the shop now for Valentines Day noise, great for a friend or a partner. With every day low prices and a wide selection, when you think of noise commissions, think of celesteh.etsy.com.

Send me your dick pics

Friends, Romans, countrymen, send me your dick pics! It’s for an art project.

You might want to encrypt them first. It turns out the UK’s government has the world’s largest of dick pics. Not because civil servants are extra-randy, but because they’ve intercepted them. From people’s private webcam conversations. Which is another way of saying they’re all stolen. Which is another way of saying: those dick pics are yours. You took them (or other intimate pictures involving your own anatomy) to share with someone special and now they’re in the mitts of Davey Cameron.

(Don’t worry about this too much unless you happen to resemble a ham. He’s probably not personally seen them. Anyway, if you haven’t done anything illegal, you’ve got nothing to hide. Aside from your dick pics, if you have some completely unreasonable notion that you should be able to control the distribution of these pictures and resent third parties taking copies of them mid-transit. Like a terrorist would think.)

If you would like to send me your dick pic, but prevent it from falling into the hands of spads, feel free to encrypt it. To be extra-secure, you need not send me your decryption keys. I will not decrypt your images because, despite me asking for photos, I don’t actually want to look at your knob.

I’ve been commissioned by one of Tumblr’s popular porn blogs to create a minute of noise. And what better to use than actual sexy images? Oh sure, some people might suggest using sexy sounds, but still images have a certain quiet grace to them.

There is a type of harsh noise practice called ‘data bending’, which is very easy to do. The image is played as if it were a sound file. This method of music make would allow me to turn your dick pic into something that’s completely unrecognisable. Especially if you send it encrypted!

This is conceptual, but it seems reasonable to make an ode to dick pics out of dick pics. And hopefully we can all learn about encryption in the process. One of the best ways to encrypt a single image is GNU Privacy guard. You can also use this to encrypt lots of your different forms of communications. There’s a brief introduction to it in this Lifehacker article.

So please send me your GPG-encrypted dick pic, but not any of your keys. Also, let me know how you would like to receive credit for your contribution.

You too can commission romantic or sexy music. Order now for this Valentines Day!

Back Catalogue

As a New Year’s Resolution, I’ve put some of my back catalogue available for download.

In the case of my first album, this is the first time this work has ever been available in a high quality format.

When I put out my 3rd album in 2005, the original pressing was only 50 CDs. But now, thanks to digital distribution, anybody can get a copy!

And, of course, my latest album of Christmas music is now kind of unseasonable, but free (with the expectation that those who can afford to will make a donation to a listed Charity such as Crisis).

Some of you may be wondering what happened to my second album. It was called Virtual Memory. It had two tracks on it instead of one, because there was a duration limit per-track on Mp3.com.The sound was an example of ‘data bending’ – that is, taking a data file and playing it as if it were an audio file. The source was the virtual memory for my operating system. Mac OS 9. I added some reberb and a drum machine to make things a bit more interesting.

The first several minutes are epic harsh noise with an incredible beat. And then it carried on for the rest of the album. Why I thought this was a good idea is kind of lost in the mists of time, but I think I was probably being kind of a dick.

As to my next album, I am working on Shorts, which will be made up of the 1 minute long noises pieces that you commission! I only have eight left to go to meet my original goal of 45 pieces. If you want to have your name on the album, time is running out!

Or if you want to publish the album, get in contact. A wide variety of people have been involved in this project over the years and I’m optimistic about the album’s reach.

Music commissions make great gifts. Order now for this Valentines Day!

Facebook Advertising

Some readers may remember my advertising spree last winter, in support of my short commissions. I’m carrying on with the noise project again. I have a goal of putting out an album when I reach 45 noise shorts and I am currently on #36, so there’s just 9 to go! Check out my shop to order one.

For me, doing the promotion is part of doing the project. With my Christmas album, I tended to do facebook posts for every song I put out, so it seemed natural to kick off the latest (and possibly final) round of noise music commissions via a post to my facebook page.

Looking for a really unique valentines gift? Why not bespoke noise music? https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/celesteh

Posted by Charles Céleste Hutchins on Wednesday, 6 January 2016

Due to the temporary benevolence of facebook algorithms, a fair number of people actually saw the post. Then these same algorithms alerted me that this post was doing very well. Was I interested in promoting it, say to US-based fans of Christian rock?

I LOLed. Although, it was an idea that suck with me. When I lived in Berkeley, the guitarist/song writer for Sixpence None the Richer was my next door neighbour for a year. He turned out to be a very nice chap. We went for coffee many times and when we talked music tech, we had a very large number of interests and issues in common. While I tend to have more secular views, there’s certainly nothing in my music that has religious baggage either way. Are we not to ‘make a joyful noise unto the Lord’?

Alas, I don’t think facebook advertising is ethical, because of its data collection and tracking, etc, but it’s also very cheap. Bless me, for I have sinned. I gave £7 to Facebook, in exchange for 7 days of showing my posts to Americans who probably knew what the Dove Awards were before living next door to a many-time winner.

Ardour Screen ShotAfter suggesting that I turn the post into an advert and taking my money, Facebook promptly declared that my advert was against their guidelines. The image, a screen shot of the Ardour program that I use for music-making, contains too much text. I made an appeal and they relented.

I’m still on the first day of this experiment. So far:

  • 2 Christian rock fans have clicked ‘like’ on the post (a cost of 50p each)
  • 6 people have clicked through to view the shop.
  • 0 people have clicked through to either sale item.
  • 0 people have made any orders.

I’m paying £1 / day for this little experiment, so the week-long advert will cost as much as 1 sale. I have a feeling this is not money well spent, but I can see why advertisers do pay facebook. If I had been less ridiculous and, say, paid to attract the attention of Canadian fans of noise music, it’s possible to speculate that the novelty of seeing ‘bespoke noise’ advertised to fans of the genre might actually gain me listeners if not orders.

Music commissions make great gifts. Order now for this Valentines Day!

12 Days of Crimbo

I had a plan in the fortnight before Christmas to write 12 songs in 12 days. I nearly made it in time!

I’ve posted all of the pieces as a free album on Bandcamp. My only request is that if you download it and can afford to, please donate to one of the listed charities, such as Crisis.

While I didn’t get twelve pieces in 12 days, each piece only got a few hours of attention. Because Christmas music tends to be tonal, I looked into more instrumental synthdefs and because of the constraints on time, I tended to borrow and adapt instead of inventing totally new sounds. I’ve not got a pretty good additive bell, based on Risset, a good karplus strong plucked sound and decent jingle bells. These shall go up shortly on the sccode site.

I used glitched jpegs as still images for each track on Bandcamp, so when I decided to also upload the tracks to youtube, I created a glitch movie maker script. It’s based on a workshop I saw Antonio Roberts do at Tate Britain. He opened up a jpeg file, typed some junk into it and then it glitched. I wrote a script to insert junk into jpegs. It first looks at the aiff, to decide how many jpegs will be needed, makes all of them, then turns them into a music video. I’ve posted it to github.

This is an example of the script’s output. All 12 pieces are up on YouTube also, if you would like to have a look.

Boycott Trump

Fortunately, as Trump names everything after himself, it’s relatively easy to figure out what things to boycott. His holdings in the UK are most limited to golf courses, but some international brands are also partnered with him. I’ve been writing them letters:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to ask that you end your business relationship with Donald Trump. As you may be aware, he has already been dropped by Macy’s, Univision and NBC for his racist remarks. I hope that your buisiness is soon added to that list.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid that I will be boycotting your products in the mean time. I hope that you sever your relationship soon.

Thank you for your time,
Charles Hutchins

You too can boycott:

Leave others in the comments!

The No Fly List

This is my letter to Rep. Barbara Lee regarding the No Fly List:

Dear Representative Lee,

I am writing because I believe the No Fly List is unconstitutional and should be eliminated. It deprives people of the right to move freely within the country without due process.

I have recently seen some Democrats, such as Bernie Sanders, arguing that some gun control legislation should be based on this list. While I would strongly back increased gun control, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. The No Fly List is secret and is not often subject to judicial review. The list itself is islamophobic. Indeed, the vast majority of shootings happen at the hands of angry, white, Christian men who are unlikely to ever appear on the No Fly List.

However, even if the No Fly List were not racist, and the ‘right’ people were put on it- in terms of people likely to engage in unlawful use of firearms- it would still deprive Americans of due process and, as such, my opposition is not solely because it is ineffective. I hope you are able to pass gun control laws that apply across the population and which do not rely on secret lists or skirt appropriate judicial oversight.

I have very high regard for your work as a representative for my district and very much appreciate all that you do. Thank you very much for your service and good luck in your bid to become vice chair.

Best Regards,
Charles Hutchins
Berkeley, CA

The House of Represenatives provides a handy tool for Finding your represenative via your zip code.

There is a staggering amount of racism being openly stated in the US. It’s vital that racist institutions be dismantled, rather than expanded. Recently, Donald Trump suggested that Muslims be barred from entering (or re-entering) the US. While this is obviously illegal and wrong, this exact scenario is already in place for many Muslims, based on secret criteria, in decisions made in secret panels. The No Fly List has stranded American citizens overseas, effectively preventing them from returning to their homes. President Trump could just expand this already unconstitutional program, which already lacks judicial oversight.

It is vital that Democrats prepare for the possibility of Trump being elected by removing tools that he could exploit to ignore the constitution and human rights. The rule of law must be restored as soon as possible to the Executive branch, secrecy must be stripped away and the executive must openly and visibly respect human rights and due process. While this is obviously the right thing to do no matter who is in office, handing a shadow government over to Trump would be a nightmare.

Composers of Colour and Music Tech

It seems to me to be the case that a lot of music tech books seem to lag a bit in noting the musical and technological contributions of people of colour. I’m looking for resources that address this and to make up for my knowledge deficit. One obvious location to search for and collect this kind of information is wikipedia.

Therefore, I will post here a list of wikipedia articles for composers of colour who work with music technology for free music, art music, experimental music, creative music or in other genres derived from jazz, classical, noise, etc.

I have a few goals in creating this list here, the most urgent of which is making sure my lectures this term are appropriately diverse. When this list is long enough, of course, I want to move it to wikipedia, but in the mean time, I will edit this list to add names to it as they come up. I will additionally create a second list of people who are not listed on wikipedia.

My starting point for these names is wikipedia itself. I will be going through the List of Composer of African Descent and reading the existing articles. As I go through them, I’ll also look at who these composers collaborated with and trying to discover if these collaborators also belong on the list. I will also go through this list of non-western composers to see who already has wikipedia articles and who needs them. I also intend to go through the lists of past Other Minds fellows. I suspect there may have been a lot of stuff in the 60’s and 70’s and so will be asking around composers I know who were working in that era.

Obviously, these starting points will leave many gaps and so I’d be really happy if this was a collaborative project. (Again, these are my very early working notes and I want to move this to wikipedia very shortly – as soon as I have around 40 names.) This could be a great project for a meetup or a project for students to write short articles for composers who are missing them. Note that the enforcement of wikipedia’s notability guidelines is sexist and racist in practice. Therefore, collaborations are more likely to resist the whitewashing of the site as editors can watch out for spurious deletions.

If you can see missing names, please leave a comment. Or, if this project already exists and I’ve just failed to find it, please do let me know.

Has an article

(this list has no moved to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electroacoustic_composers_of_color)

Needs an article

Dreams of my Mother

Here are two dreams I had years ago, some months apart.

Shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer, I dreamt I was in my parents’s bedroom. My mother was stood outside her wardrobe, her suitcase open on the bed. She was putting things into it. Gently, slightly sadly, she told me she was packing for along trip and didn’t know if she would be coming back.

A month or so after she died, I dreamt I had run into her, in a farm yard. I hadn’t seen her for some time and was happy to see her there. We were making small talk, but I had a nagging feeling that something important had happened concerning her. I had forgotten something crucial to our exchange. Suddenly, as I neared waking, knowledge of the past few months returned to me. Surprised, I blurted out, ‘You’re not supposed to be here!’

‘Oh,’ she said agreeably, and walked around the corner of a barn out of sight.

‘Wait!’ I ran after her, turning the same corner, but she was gone, nowhere to be seen.