Uncategorised – Page 212 – Les said, the better II

The vet didn’t call. Christi said she would call the vet, but didn’t report back. what’s going on with the cat? she doesn’t seem to feel well at all.

Artist Statement – Calarts

When I was in high school, my two loves were computer programming and tuba playing. I chose to pursue a career in programming for economic reasons, but I’ve often wondered about the tuba-playing road not taken.

I went to Mills College to study Computer Science, but I quickly found myself gravitating toward the Center for Contemporary Music. I had some limited exposure to New Music before college, thanks to an excellent community radio station, but was not aware of it other than casually listening to noise bands. What I learned at Mills changed everything I thought about sound and music creation. I studied electronic music with Maggi Payne. She taught synthesis techniques on a large Moog Modular Synthesizer. The sound and the possibilities for music making were incredible. I thought that the Moog was fantastic. I loved making music with it and the approach to sound creation that went with it. I decided to double-major in Computer Science and Electronic Music.

I learned to compose music for tape by recording source sounds, such as field recordings or interesting synthesizer patches and mixing them together, so that mixing is as much composing as finding or creating the source sounds. It shaped how I think about composing. This is still the method I use for creating almost all of my pieces. Often, there is a metaphor or idea that ties all of the source sounds together, but sometimes I just record interesting patches until I have “enough” of them. Then I look for interesting ways to mix them together. I love doing this because of the focus on pure sound, rather than algorithms or theory and also because of its tactility.

In addition to studying synthesis, I played tuba in the Contemporary Performance Ensemble and also took classes in recording techniques and computer music. I learned to program in MAX and experimented with unusual input devices, like the Nintendo Power Glove. I took all of the required classes in music history and theory and also classes in Computer Science, my other major. Those classes covered programming concepts relevant to computer music including networking and programming languages. I also took an independent study class in analog electronics, to better understand the internal workings of analog synthesizers.

My senior concert was a collaboration between another composition student and myself. We decided to have multiple pieces playing at the same time, like one of John Cage�s music circuses. I wrote three pieces of tape music and one MAX patch that ran on a laptop throughout. I also wrote five or 10 small pieces for wandering trios that played throughout the program and I assembled one small installation. My partner and I collaborated on a piece for electric guitars and vibrators. She wrote most of the trios and a percussion trio with three movements. We created a web page about this concert, with information for performers and attendees. It is still on-line at http://casaninja.com/concert/.

After graduation, I worked at a startup company that made products related to e-commerce. I did web programming and worked on their server. The company was a bit chaotic. Periodically, the management would come by and tell everyone that we were just about to have an IPO, or get more funding, or be bought by someone, in the meantime, we just had to give up a few more evenings and weekends. I did not write any music at all while I worked there, because the schedule took over all of my time.

When someone I had met at an earlier interview called to ask if I would like to go work at Netscape and have more free time and make more money, I accepted. The job was interesting and I had enough time to make music and the means to obtain equipment. I purchased a MOTM Modular synthesizer and started recording tape music and posting it to Mp3.com. I also submitted a tape to Woodstockhausen 2000, which they played. My goal was to have two careers simultaneously. I would be an engineer and a composer. It might have worked except that I was commuting 50 miles each way to work and it was starting to burn me out. I realized that music had become a hobby rather than a vocation, so I started looking for work closer to home. In 2001, I was laid off.

While I was searching for another job, I continued recording tape music and posting it to Mp3.com. I joined a group of noise music composers on the service. We thought that by working together, we could raise the profile of noise music in general while also advancing our music careers. One of these artists had a small record label and released two songs of mine on a compilation disk.

Around the same time, the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco, issued a call for proposals for temporary installations that focused on sonic characteristics of the museum. I collaborated with two other people on two proposals, both of which were accepted. The first installation used piezo contact microphones attached to exhibits with moving parts. The sounds were amplified, unprocessed so that passers-by could hear the quiet sounds they would not otherwise notice. For the second piece, I wrote a MAX/MSP patch to demonstrate the resonant frequencies of a part of the building. It used the type of feedback loop that Alvin Lucier used in his piece I am Sitting in a Room.

Shortly thereafter, my domestic partner was also laid off, so I postponed my job search and we spent the summer traveling in Europe. I wrote no music while I was there, but I visited several modern art museums, and went to the Venice Biennale. I also visited an online in Germany at ZKM, a research center that her commissioned to write a paper on MP3s. I was very impressed with the facilities there and the idea of music research.

When I came home, I had hundreds of musical ideas. The first was to switch career tracks to focus on composition. I wrote several pieces of tape music, and then I decided that I wanted to write more music for live performance, so I organized a five person percussion group and wrote a couple of pieces music for them. The group performed them at an art a local artist�s gallery opening. I also did computer consulting. I was not sure how to pull my work and aspirations together into a career.

At the same time, I started volunteering for Other Minds, a New Music nonprofit in San Francisco. I started as the driver for their festival. Shortly after that, they got possession of the KPFA music archives, featuring interviews with every important composer between 1969 and 1992. They are planning to use their library for a web radio project. I am helping them catalog their tape archive and pick out interesting tapes to submit for grant applications. I also work for them as a volunteer sound engineer and produced or helped produce several CDs used for grant applications and I gave them technical advice regarding the web radio server hardware and software.

Last spring I attended the Composing a Career Conference sponsored by the Women’s Philharmonic. Almost everyone else there had a masters degree and the presenters all assumed they were speaking to a masters-level audience. Realizing that I needed more education, I started looking into graduate programs. I also started submitting tapes to festivals and calls for scores. One of my tapes was accepted at Woodstockhausen 2002.

Tragically, shortly after the conference, while I was on my way to visit Jack Straw Productions in Seattle, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She had surgery and started radiation treatment. All of my music work and consulting jobs were put on hold so I could spend time helping to take care of my mom. The treatment was not helpful and she died in the middle of October.

I spent several weeks after her death re-thinking my life plans. A few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to continue with my chosen track. I submitted a score to Jack Straw Productions for inclusion in a Trimpin installation and they accepted it. I also started pulling together applications to the graduate schools that I picked out in the spring. Your program caught my interest because of your faculty, especially Subotnic, with whom I hope to study.

At Calarts, I hope to learn more about electronic music and also about composition for live performance. I would like to learn new techniques for creating music, including computer sound generation and digital synthesis. I would also like to learn about building installations and other electronic musical tools. I hope to learn more mediums for composition. I would also like to explore more writing for traditional instruments. Calarts has a reputation for performance as well as composition and I hope to be able to work with some of the performers studying there.

After I graduate with a masters degree, I hope to find success as a freelance composer. I am also interested in doing music research at a center like STEIM, IRCAM or ZKM, or a comparable center in the United States. I know that Calarts could give me the skills and education necessary to achieve this goal. Your excellent reputation would also help my professional aspirations. I hope you will consider me for your program.

Oh yeah, that’s not exactly the same as my wesleyan one or anything…

Chicken was throwing up more than usual and she threw up blood twice in two days, so she went to the vet. The possible causes for this are:

She ate a ribbon and it’s irritating her stomach
She has an ulcer
She has a malignant tumor in her stomach

I think it’s an ulcer. Only Christi’s cat could possibly worry herself into having an ulcer. Anyway, so the vet took a lood sample to test for cancer cells in her bloodstream. We will get a call around 10:00 AM on the results of that. If it’s not a tumor, I think they want to xray her again or something; I can’t remember the exact order of possible future events. Anyway, she can’t have any food until we get an all-clear from the vet. Christi is worried because the cat is being friendly and that’s unusual for her. But I think it makes sense because she just went to the vet and is always friendly afterwards, because we’re not so bad compared to the evil needle-weilding people. And she’s out of food. Hungry cats are friendly cats.
Christi and I went over to Christi’s boss’ house after the vet, since he wote a letter for me. It’s a really good letter. He asked for a CD, so I gave him the CD I have on Mp3.com and another work-in-progress. Then he asked me a bunch of questions about how I got certain sounds and how to do certain FX. I’m starting to feel confident about college admissions. My writing sample is not going to matter very much unless my admission is borderline or the sample is illiterate or terrible. Still, must give them the best thing that I can.
Anyway, then we started talking about how to quickly insert track markers into audio files to burn a CD. He knows a guy who sells Pro-tools, so he called him up at home at 9:00 at night and put him on speaker phone and started asking him how to do things. The guy was totally cool about it. Tiffany saw him play last weekend at 21 Grand, so I said she had said good things about him. She said good things about the whole show and I’m sure if she knew who I am writing about, she would say good things about him in particular. How could you not have good things to say about a guy you can call at home at 9 PM and ask tech support questions? Anyway, he solved the problem and the day was saved. yay.
I hope the cat doesn’t have cancer.

Possible Wesleyan Writing Sample

Evolution, Physics and Usage of the Wagner Tuba

The evolution of the tuba in the nineteenth century begins with the ophicleide. (See fig 1) This instrument, inspired by a keyed bugle, was invented in 1817. (Baines 198) It was an improvement on the Serpent, a brass-type instrument from the end of the eighteenth century. Variants of the ophicleide remain in use today, such as the Russian bassoon. But this instrument is best remembered as an ancestor to the tuba.

Fig 1 ophicleide this picture exists on my website

After the invention of valves, brass was changed forever. Keyed instruments have weaker sounds when they keys are opened, but a valved instrument is strong on every note. After the invention and improvement in valves, the ophicleide was modified into the Bombardon (see fig2). As you can see from the picture, it still retains the ophicleide shape. Unlike the ophicleide, keyed in B flat, the majority of bombardons “are in tuba pitch F” and are “up to 145 cm. tall with valve bore reaching 18 mm.” (250) The instrument as a whole is very close in profile and shape to its predecessor.
Fig 2 a bombardon this picture exists on my website

While the bombardons were still a relatively new invention, Moritz and Wieprecht produced the first tuba. This horn was also keyed in F, and had an unusual valve arrangement. (250) Most modern tubas follow the trumpet, where the first valve lowers by a whole step, the second a half step, and the third is equal to first two added together. On the first tuba, “the 1st and 2nd valves, for the left hand, lowered by a tone and a semi tone. The three for the right hand provided: a large tone, to make an exact two tones with the 1st valve; large semitone, to make an exact tone and a half with the 1st valve; and a perfect fourth.” (250) Although some argue that this is a more useful valve arrangement, it soon was replaced with the one we are more familiar with.

The tuba, thus introduced, continues to evolve to this day. But in the nineteenth century, several people tried modifications to the tuba, with varying degrees of success, which no longer survive in regular uses. One of these people was Adolphe Sax. Sax did not primarily work on the tuba. His plan was to integrate the wildly divergent band instruments of the time into a single family of Saxhorns. These tuba-influenced instruments are narrower in bore than generally found on modern tuba. As his ideas were more of unification than modification, especially among the tenor and tuba size instruments, his changes did not significantly alter the sound or structure of the bass instrument. However, all of his changes were soon incorporated by other instrument makers into their own horns, so whatever improvements he made remain with us today, even if by a different name. (253)

Despite all this comparison between the bore of a particular horn and the “modern tuba,” there was and still is a lot of variance in layout, size and bore. Two tubas in the same key with widely differing bores would be called by the same name but have a great difference between them in timbre. With this in mind, the various re-namings and deviants of tuba seem to be of less importance. They are all variations on a theme with pretty much the same sound. Yet one mutant tuba does stand out, the Wagner tuba.

The Wagner Tuba stands out not in its legacy to modern instruments, but in the wild divergence it possessed. The Wagner tuba has several construction differences which greatly later its tone. The most immediately striking thing about the Wagner tuba is the almost complete absence of a flared bell. In fact, the instrument is completely conical, including the valves. How does this change the sound? “The [sound] waves passing down a cone without a bell have their curvature suddenly changed at the open end.” (Richardson 77) This makes the Wagner tuba less efficient at transmitting sound. It also affects the timbre. “If you give a tube a large flare you reduce the intensity of the upper partials in the note and render it more mellow.” (78) The Wagner tuba would then have a brighter sound than either the French horn or a more standard tuba.

The next major difference between a Wagner and a standard tuba is method of sound production. “They are intended to be played by French horn players using their own mouthpieces.� (Morley-Pegge) This certainly affects the tone of the instrument in a way different from other tuba-variants. “On mouthpieces of the horn type there is no flange and therefore nothing definite to form an edge-tone, hence the player is deprived of its help, with the result of a soft tone” (Richardson p 72) Therefore, we have simultaneously a bright sounding instrument with a soft tone.

While the shape of the mouthpiece is important, it is not as important as the dimensions. “The cup volume and the diameter of the constricted passage [of the mouthpiece] have significant effect upon the performance of a given mouthpiece, with the shape being a much less important variable.” (Fletcher and Rossig 369-370) The depth of the French horn mouthpiece is 44 mm (Richardson 74). The higher Wagner tuba is in approximately the same range as the horn, so this is not striking. However, the lower Wagner tuba is in the same range as a tenor trombone, which has a cup depth of 64 mm (74). The varied cup volume and constriction of the French horn mouthpiece would also give a French horn sort of sound to the instrument.

It is important not to underestimate the mouthpiece in sound generation and tone. Figure 8a shows the input impedance for a particular tube. Figure 8b shows the impedance for a particular mouthpiece. The impedance of the horn resultant when they are joined together and in figure 8c. As one can see, the mouthpiece has a profound affect on the impedance of the horn and the sound of the horn in general. The impedance, as modified by the mouthpiece, is also closely linked with the flare of the bell. (Fletcher and Rossig 372) The total sound of the Wagner tuba, therefore, will be unlike anything else in the orchestra, not like a tuba, and not like a French horn, but similar to both.

Despite these very unique characteristics, the Wagner tuba is really a hybrid between the saxhorn or tuba and the French horn. Aside from sharing mouthpieces and players with the French horn section, “in bore they are midway between the horn and the saxhorn.” (Morley-Pegge) What lead Wagner to invent a hybrid instrument? In fact, “Wagner had already begun to compose Rheingold before he included the tubas.” (Baines 263) So initially, at least, he did not even have them in mind. But in October of 1853, Wagner visited Sax. “(September 1865) A letter from the composer to King Ludwig refers to the ‘extra instruments’ which he had been scoring for in The Ring and which he had become acquainted with . . . in Paris ‘at the maker Sax, whose, invention they were.'” (64) So at least by that time, Wagner had not thought of any innovations. Necessity, however, prompted him, as he was unable to find “those ‘Sax’schen Instumente’ or even possible substitutes for them in the military bands in Munich, or in Vienna either.” (264) As he had already begun to compose for the Saxhorns at this point, he was faced with a dilemma.
When he finally had the instruments built, he used them as a quartet, with two Bb instruments and two F. When they are used in The Ring, “they are played by the second quartet of horns, horns 5 and 7 playing the B flat instruments, and 6 and 8 those in F� (Morley-Pegge) Unsurprisingly, given Wagner’s history of building his own opera house specifically for one opera, he only uses the mutant tubas in The Ring and nowhere else in his work.
Bruckner and Strauss both made some use of the Wagner tuba. Bruckner uses them in the adagio movement of his seventh symphony and also in his ninth. Strauss made use of the horns, but later revised them out. “The Tenor Tuba in Don Quixote was evidently first to have been a Wagner tuba: Strauss tells in Instrumentationslehre how several times he has written for a B flat tenor horn, and had found that as a melody instrument the ordinary Bariton (euphonium) was preferable to the ‘harsh, awkward Wagner-tubas with their demoniac [sic] sound'”(Baines 265)
Despite Strauss’ criticism, it was Bruckner’s seventh symphony that became his first commercial success, which must be attributed, at least in part, to the role of the tubas.
Wagner failed to create a consistent transposition for his instruments. “In all the parts . . . of Rheingold, they sound . . . respectively a tone and a fifth lower than written.” Yet, “In the other scores they appear in E flat and B flat, sounding a sixth and a ninth lower.” (264) He apparently though the second version would be easier for the conductor. But in yet another “exception is in the Prelude to Gotterdammerung, where they are written in B flat and F in brass-band style . . . and sound a ninth and a twelfth lower.” (264) This lack of consistency may indicate a lack of certainty on Wagner’s part about the best way to notate his new instrument.
In Das Rheingold, Wagner uses D flat major for the tonality around Valhalla, as it is suggested “as the most obvious contrasting tonality for the framing scenes . . . before Valhalla . . .” (Bailey 54) Thus, the Valhalla theme is in D flat.

Wagner scores this for his tuba quartet. This theme, as is this key are paralleled in Gotterdammerung and the tubas are again used. As Bailey sates, Wagner uses many such parallels between the two, “The appearance of D flat, then, at the beginning and end of the main action of Das Rheingold serves to define the dramatic structure of the work, but at the same time Wagner reinforced the structural parallel of this opera with Gotterdammerung by concluding that opera in D flat also. The parallel uses of D flat are reinforced by the association of the Valhalla music with that tonality-music which is scored for the special sound of the so-called ‘Wagner Tubas’ in both operas. ” (54) In fact, the first time the tubas get the melody in Das Rheingold (in the beginning of the second scene) it is a variant of the Valhalla theme in D flat major.
Bruckner makes more diverse use of the Wagner tubas in his seventh symphony, which, as stated above, undoubtedly lead to its commercial success. The second movement opens with a Wagner tuba quartet. Their part is marked hervortretend, which means �from the heart�. Bruckner uses the Wagnerian tubas in this way, primarily to carry emotion, and especially sorrow.

Bruckner dedicated that movement to Wagner because he died while Bruckner was writing it. The use of “the Master’s” weird little tubas is undoubtedly done in tribute to him. The use of sorrow in the tuba parts is then a reflection of Bruckner’s sorrow over Wagner’s death.
When he makes use of the tubas, it is in the low register and often with only minimal support from the orchestra. Their solis introduce both the first and the second theme of the movement. His tubas are scored richly and tragically.
Aside from its use by the composers mentioned above, the Wagner tuba has undergone a bit of a renaissance and is currently being used for film and television scores. Most of the other historic brass mentioned above is still here and there also. Nothing in music ever gets obsolete.

This paper sucks. Also, I no longer posses any graphs of mouthpiece impedance. How do I write around figure 8? And the bibliography is toast! arg

Possible Alternate Wesleyan Writing Sample

Notes Towards a Libretto

My great grandmother was walking down the street, arm in arm with my great grandfather. She was nine months pregnant and people scowled to see her promenading around, as they thought it wasn’t seemly. But she smiled away, blissfully happy in the start of her new family. But she tripped on a curb and fell to the ground, right in front of the wheel of a horse-drawn cart that was moving too quickly. The drivers were Roma – gypsies; they stopped in town for supplies, but were told to get out, so they trotted along with the authorities behind them. The cartwheel decapitated my great grandmother. Her head rolled over next to her body and sat blinking; looking at it while her body went immediately into labor. My grandmother was born, while the head of my great grandmother lay watching. As soon as the baby started to scream and people watching could see it was all right, my great grandmother’s head closed its eyes and lay still. The new father sat horrified, holding the screaming baby. Not knowing what to do, he handed it to the cart drivers, who drove out of town and never returned again.
They named the girl Sarah and raised her as one of their own. They were good parents to her, but she never felt like she belonged, since she knew her story and she didn’t look at all like a Roma. When she was 18, she left them and eventually came to America. She met a recently discharged GI and married him, buying a house in the suburbs. After one year, my mother was born. After 10 years, my grandmother left to run away with the circus, as an accountant. She never felt like she belonged with the Roma, but she never felt like she should stay rooted to one spot either. She took my mother with her. My mother stayed for a while, juggling and taking tickets from customers. She became best friends with the boy in the trapeze act. His family was Roma, so they spoke Romany in common. A year and a half later, my grandfather found her and with a judge’s order, took back my mother and never let her go to the circus again while he lived. When my mother was eighteen, he died of a heart attack.
My mother had just graduated from high school and had no clear idea of what to do afterwards, when my grandfather died. He had been hinting strongly that she ought to consider spending a year or two someplace where she could meet eligible young men and then get married. But he was gone now and she went to find her mother instead. My grandmother was still with the same circus, doing the accounting. My mother went out to where they were to meet her mother as a surprise. She still looked back on her time with her mother at the circus as the happiest eighteen months of her life. She saw her mother standing across the ring, in the big tent, talking to the ring master and called out to her. My grandmother recognized my mother and went running across the ring to see her. Just then, in a freak accident, the rope came undone holding the swing where a trapeze artist was practicing. He started to fall to the ground and landed on my grandmother, killing her, but he survived with only a twisted ankle. It was my mother’s best friend from when she had been with the circus. They married eighteen months later.
My mother learned to juggle again and tried keeping the books to replace my grandmother, but wasn’t good with numbers. In 1969, I was born. In 1970, my mother discovered feminism. My father said there was no place for any of that nonsense in the circus or in his family, so my mother took me and left. We went to live on a women’s land collective in the Midwest. When it broke up, we spent several years at a yoga retreat. When the yogi was expelled, we went to live in a vegan cooperative. Eventually, I rebelled. At sixteen, I ran away and ended up becoming a makeup consultant at a department store. It didn’t pay very well, though, so I started taking classes to become a CPA. Then I got a call from Michigan that my mother was dying. I went out there immediately and reconciled with her. I spent the last month of her life taking care of her. When she died, I had barely enough money for the funeral. Her friends helped out a lot. I told the mortician that I would be doing her makeup myself. He didn’t argue much, like he normally would because his makeup person had just quit. When I finished with her, she looked so life-like that he offered me a job. I put makeup on corpses and did the books. Eighteen months after burying my mother, I married the mortician.
His family never liked me. They had wanted him to marry his last makeup artist and didn’t forgive him when she went and married somebody else. The history of my family didn’t help much. His family had lived in the same town for five generations and owned the same mortuary for three. His grandfather started out as a gravedigger and worked his way up. That stability was all I wanted, but they thought I was going to run away from him like all the women in my family ran away, and they were right, I eventually did and he ended up losing the mortuary because of me.
When he and I were separated and getting divorced, I got drunk with my best friend in town. She kept asking me why it was over and finally I told her. I didn’t even remember telling her the next day, but she told her best friend who told the hairstylist, who told Mrs. Lewis on account of her daughter just dying. Mrs. Lewis took her daughter’s body out of town and people got to wondering why, so Mrs. Lewis told them. It was a small town, after a short while, everyone knew. He and I both had to leave town. He went east, I went west. I finally took the test to get certified as a CPA. Now I work in this building.

Advantages over tuba paper: it’s done. it doesn’t need a bibliography. it’s all spelled ok.
disadvantages: it’s tawdry. it’s not necessarily well written. bizarre. also, gypsies are a very opressed minority group and it may perpetuate stereotypes or offend well-informed members of the admission committee (they’re all musicians, but there’s an excellent ethnomusicology department). On the othher hand, it might not be offensive at all. I have no idea.

I’d never read the text of that manifesto in English before. If you think it’s confusing now, try reading it in Esperanto.

Instant Messenger One-sided Conversation

dahdah35: hi
dahdah35: how r u ???
electrogirls: fine. r u a dadaist?
dahdah35: what is this!!!
electrogirls: me must sharpen our airplanes to bayonett the heads of sumatran babies bang bang
electrogirls: dada signifies nothing
dahdah35: i dont know
dahdah35: !!!
dahdah35: so asl plz
dahdah35: 🙂
dahdah35: where r u 😕
dahdah35: :/
electrogirls: Dada is our intensity: it sets up inconsequential bayonets the sumatran head of the german baby; Dada is life without carpet-slippers or parallels; it is for and against unity and definitely against the future; we are wise enough to know that our brains will become downy pillows that our anti-dogmatism is as exclusivist as a bureaucrat that we are not free yet shout freedom –

electrogirls: A harsh necessity without discipline or morality and we spit on humanity. Dada remains within the European fram of weaknesses it’s shit after all but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors and bedeck the artistic zoo with the flags of every consulate
electrogirls: We are circus directors whistling amid the winds of carnivals convents bawdy houses theaters realities sentiments restaurants HoHiHoHo Bang

electrogirls: We declare that the auto is a sentiment which has coddled us long enough in its slow abstractions in ocean liners and noises and ideas. Nevertheless we externalize facility we seek the central essence and we are happy when we can hide it; we do not want everybody to understand this because it is the balcony of Dada, I assure you. From which you can hear the military marches and descend slicing the air like a seraph in a public bath to piss and comprehend the parable

electrogirls: Dada is not madness – or wisdom – or irony take a good look at me kind bourgeois Art was a game of trinkets children collected words with a tinkling on the end then they went and shouted stanzas and they put a little doll’s shoes on the stanza and the stanza turned into a queen to die a little and the queen turned into a wolverine and the children ran till they all turned green

electrogirls: Then came the great Ambassadors of sentiment and exclaimed historically in chorus
psychology psychology heehee
electrogirls: Science Science Science

electrogirls: vive la France
electrogirls: we are not naive
electrogirls: we are successive
electrogirls: we are exclusive
electrogirls: we are not simple
electrogirls: and we are all quite able to discuss the intelligence.

electrogirls: But we Dada are not of their opinion for art is not serious I assure you and if in exhibiting crime we learnedly say ventilator, it is to give you pleasure kind reader I love you so I swear I do adore you

electrogirls: I’m from California. How about you?

http://www.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/mr_antipyrine.html

The text for the Wesleyan Application (not counting the writing sample)

(2.) If you have attended more than one undergraduate college or have transferred from one graduate school to another, please attach a statement giving the reasons for your transfer.

I attended junior college in the evenings and during the summer while I was still a high school student. I transferred to Mills when I graduated from high school.

(3.) List any work experience relevant to this application on an additional page.

I volunteer for Other Minds, a New Music nonprofit in San Francisco. I started as the driver for their festival. Shortly after that, they got possession of the KPFA music archives, featuring interviews with every important composer between 1969 and 1992. They are planning to use their library for a web radio project. I am helping them catalog their tape archive and pick out interesting tapes to submit for grant applications. I also work for them as a volunteer sound engineer and produced or helped produce several CDs used for grant applications and I gave them technical advice regarding the web radio server hardware and software.

(6.) Briefly describe any research which you have done on a separate sheet of paper.

I have not done any research.

(8.) List standardized U.S. graduate admissions tests you have taken or plan to take (i.e., GRE, MAT, TOEFL, Graduate Foreign Language). Have scores sent to the above address.

I plan to take the GRE.

(10.) On a separate sheet or sheets, please describe in detail your academic background abilities, interests, and objectives. What attracted you to your chosen course of study and why do you feel that Wesleyan’s program is suited to your needs?

When I was in high school, my two loves were computer programming and tuba playing. I chose to pursue a career in programming for economic reasons, but I’ve often wondered about the tuba-playing road not taken.

I learned to compose music for tape by recording source sounds, such as field recordings or interesting synthesizer patches and mixing them together, so that mixing is as much composing as finding or creating the source sounds. It shaped how I think about composing. This is still the method I use for creating almost all of my pieces. Sometimes, there is a metaphor or idea that ties all of the source sounds together, but often I just record interesting patches until I have “enough” of them. Then I look for interesting ways to mix them together. I love doing this because of the focus on pure sound, rather than algorithms or theory and also because of its tactility.

Around the same time, the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco, issued a call for proposals for temporary installations that focused on sonic characteristics of the museum. I collaborated with two other people in two proposals, both of which were accepted. The first installation used piezo contact microphones attached to exhibits with moving parts. The sounds were amplified, unprocessed so that passers-by could hear the quiet sounds they would not otherwise notice. For the second piece, I wrote a MAX/MSP patch to demonstrate the resonant frequencies of a part of the building. It used the type of feedback loop that Alvin Lucier used in his piece I am Sitting in a Room. (One of the other participants ironically remarked, after I described our installations, �So you guys are a little influenced by Lucier.�)

Shortly thereafter, my domestic partner was also laid off, so I postponed my job search and we spent the summer traveling in Europe. I wrote no music while I was there, but I visited several modern art museums, and went to the Venice Biennale. I also visited Dunaway in Germany at ZKM, the research center that commissioned her mp3 paper. I was very impressed with the facilities there and the idea of music research.

When I came home, I had hundreds of musical ideas. The first was to switch career tracks to focus on composition. I wrote several pieces of tape music, and then I decided that I wanted to write more music for live performance, so I organized a five person percussion group and wrote a couple of pieces music for them. The group performed them at an art a local artist�s gallery opening. I also did computer consulting and started volunteering for Other Minds, a New Music nonprofit in San Francisco. (See relevant work experience.) I was not sure how to pull my work and aspirations together into a career.

At Wesleyan, I hope to learn more about electronic music and also about composition for live performance. I would like to learn new techniques for creating music, including computer sound generation and digital synthesis. I would also like to learn about building installations and other electronic musical tools. I hope to learn more mediums for composition. I would also like to explore more writing for traditional instruments. Wesleyan has a reputation for performance as well as composition and I hope to be able to work with some of the performers studying there.

After I graduate with a masters degree, I hope to find success as a freelance composer. I am also interested in doing music research at a center like STEIM, IRCAM or ZKM, or a comparable center in the United States. I know that Wesleyan could give me the skills and education necessary to achieve this goal. Your excellent reputation would also help my professional aspirations. I hope you will consider me for your program.

Giant Tortilla Xena!

I had band practice tonight. It was pretty low energy, partly since I’m kind of tired and also partly because we all stuffed huge pieces of foam in our ears because Chand, plays very very loudly. Anyway, the foam sort of overcorrected. After kind of a short time, we decided to come up stairs and drink coffee and have cookies. Chand was looking at the dog and exclaiming how cute she was. He said, “She’s so cute, I just want to wrap her up in a giant flour tortilla. Not that I want to eat her or anyhting, just to hug her, you know, in a tortilla. That would be hard to find though. You’d have to find somebody with a really big tortilla stone.”
What is it about drummers? I felt stoned just listening to him as he expanded on this idea further. This is a near-verbatim quote, btw.

CalArts Portfolio Disk

Airwaves #1 2002
Airwaves #2 2002
Airwaves #3 2002. The Airwaves series will eventually include seven pieces. All of these pieces use a MOTM analog modular synthesizer and are mixed with Pro-tools. Airwaves #3 also uses a Midiverb and a recording of breathing. Airwaves #2 was played at Woodstockhausen 2002. The program notes for this series are:

Airwaves is a series of tape music featuring the sounds of analog modular synthesis. It primarily uses a MOTM modular synthesizer. Because the sound of this synthesizer is so naturally big, pieces in this series try to give the listener some space by creating music with more air in it.
Breaking Waves 2001. This piece was composed in responce to a call for tape pieces by Ibol Records. It was released on a compolation disk called Random Spheres of Influence. The source sound for this is white noise from a MOTM synthesizer. It was then processed with Audio Catalyst software, by convertng it to mp3 format and then back to AIFF format and then to mp3 and so forth, so the original sounds would degrade and alaising would become apparent. It was mixed with Pro-tools.
Phase 2001. This piece was created with a Future Retro 777 synthesizer. I used the same pattern on the sequencer in three differnt loops, but the pattern was cut to different lengths so that the lopps fall in and out of phase with each other. It was mixed with Pro-tools. This was featured in the now-defunct Nonsequiter ezine.
(de)construction 1998. This piece was created with field recordings and Mills’ Moog analog modular synthesizer. It was recorded to tape and mixed with an analog mixing board.
Bitter Day 2000. This piece was created with a MOTM synthesizer, with some sounds controlled by keyboard. It was mixed and compressed with Pro-tools. This has been played on Internet and pirate radio.
Headerless Data #1 2001. This piece was created using Photoshop software. I generated an image in photoshop and then modified the resultant data with Sound Hack, by adding headers to turn it into an AIFF file. It was mixed in Pro-tools.
Chaos Patch 2000. This piece was composed with a MOTM synthesizer using analog chaos. Three oscilators were patched together in an FM loop, so that the output of each one was the FM input of the next one. It was recorded and mixed with Pro-tools in one night while awaiting returns from the state of Florida during the last presidential election.
Scape 1997. This piece was created with Mills College’s Moog modular synthesizer. It was recorded to tape and mixed with an analog mixer.
Choral No. 1 2000. This was recorded using a MOTM synthesizer and mixed in Pro-tools. It was played on German radio in 2001.
Drum Decay 2001. This piece uses a feedback loop like the one Alvin Lucier used in I am sitting in a Room. The drums sounds were generated with Rebirth software and then processed via a MAX/MSP application, a bass amplifier and a microphone. The results of that were processed with Sound Hack and then remixed in Pro-tools.