Uncategorised – Page 32 – Les said, the better II

Protest St Petersber’s new anti-LGBT Law (NEW DATE AND TIME)

Time and Date: 3:45 pm, Thursday, 1 December

Location:
Meet in front of the Nandos by Notting Hill Gate Tube station to walk to the Russian Embassy
6/7 Kensington Palace Gardens, London, W8 4QP

Map: http://g.co/maps/d5tfr

According to the Pink Paper:

The city of St Petersburg has passed a law which puts in place fines for people who promote the LGBT community to minors.

The new law passed by 27 votes to 1, having been introduced by the ruling United Russia party.

It introduces fines for “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderism, to minors” and “propaganda of paedophilia”.

Fines range from 1,000 roubles (£20) for an individual to 50,000 (£1,000) for a business.

Polina Savchenko, General manager of LGBT organization Coming Out, Russia told LGBT Asylum News while the bill was being discussed: “By combining homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality into one law with sexual crimes against minors, members of the Legislative Assembly indulge in gross manipulations of public opinion.
“Their goal – to pass an anti-democratic law, directed at severely limiting human rights in St. Petersburg.
She added: “Organizers of public events cannot restrict access of minors to any open area; people under 18 can be there just by chance. Consequently, it makes any public campaigns aimed at reducing xenophobia and hate crime prevention impossible.”

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/11/21/st-petersburg-passes-gay-propaganda-law/

Similar laws are already in place in the Ryazan region and Arkhangelsk region. Wikipedia states that “according to Russian media, a similar regional law is being drafted in Moscow city legislature and according to Federation Council of Russia speaker Valentina Matviyenko such ban on ‘propaganda of homosexualism’ might also be adopted on federal level in order to ‘protect the children from destructive influence’.”

The international community must stand up to these attempts to scapegoat Russian LGBT people.
Join us at 3:45 on 1 December to march to the Embassy to protest this anti-democrat homo and transphobic law. Bring signs, banners, etc.

Facebook Event: www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=178542975572908

This event has been moved to coincide with the World AIDS Day protest of Russia’s treatment of IV Drug Users. See more
about that at: http://russianembassyprotest.wordpress.com/

Explaining the Inexplicable: Gender Dysphoria

I was in my 20’s the first time I ever experienced snow. I’d seen it on TV and distant hilltops, but I’d never been in it, heard it fall, smelled it, gotten it stuck to my clothes. There’s no way anybody could have really explained snow to me.

And yet, I’d seen a lot of TV and movies that featured snow, read books, read descriptions. So If my attempt to explain dysphoria is confusing, imagine that you’ve never seen snow.

I asked on twitter several weeks ago, “If you were going to try to explain dysphoria to a cis person, what would you say?” Nobody replied, except one guy who said, “I’d use the pizza topping example ‘I like pineapple, it just don’t belong in my pizza.’ or something similar…” I’m not sure what he meant.
I was asking because of a particular cis person, but it did get me thinking more generally about the difficulty in communicating something that is outside of most people’s experience. But I thought I could try to explain:

I’m starting to see the convenience of the “in the the wrong body” narrative as a way to attempt to explain the inexplicable. However, I prefer to think of myself as having after-market upgrades. Because who gets the right body? One of the most good looking (cis) guys I know told me doesn’t like his body and meanwhile I wish I looked more like him. Also the “trapped” in the wrong body thing seems alarmingly close to some very problematic ideas about disabled people.
I’ve never had another body than the one I have now, he’s mine, he’s me. I’m male, so every part of my body is male. For example, I have a very manly spleen. This is why I almost always refer to having transitioned in the past tense, dating it back to when I started T. Losing my moobs was a happy day indeed, but it doesn’t make me more of a man.
St Augustine wrote about being freaked out by his private parts, cleverly disguised as a discussion of Original Sin. Adam was the first, last and only guy to get the right body, according to Augustine and then getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden screwed everything up for everyone. Which is to say that I wish I could pass naked, but everybody has issues.
On the other hand, it really does bug me that I have parts that are atypical and how I feel about them is a lot more complex than whether they’re “wrong,” because they are male and they are part of me. And that’s what I can’t explain. My experience of this is not the universal trans experience, because there is no such thing.
Which is why I don’t normally try to explain. All interested parties accept my assertions about myself and I accept their assertions about themselves and we move on.
How much could I even explain? I dunno how I figured out I was a man, just that I know I am. Not that this was an easy conclusion to come to. I spent a lot of time agonising about this, and yet the process is opaque to me now. When I read She’s Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan, I found her glibness on the issue profoundly frustrating. She said she “just knew.” I didn’t know at the time and wished she’d said more about how this came to be. Alas, now I “just know,” and am not sure what more I can say about it. I think that if I asked a cis person how they knew they’re cis, I doubt they’s have a better answer.
It bothers me when cis people get freaked out about this. And despite my happy life in a bubble, it’s clear that they do get freaked out, even the well-meaning ones. Sometimes, I think an easy explanation might help them, but, again, it’s like snow. Well-meaning people will quickly see that they need to just accept that other people have different experiences. They will accept that snow exists without having ever been in a blizzard. Becoming a spokesman for the weather service won’t help.
It seems weird to some people, but it’s my life. It’s my identity. It’s vital. And yet, as the one who is different, I’m socially expected to engage and manage other people’s reactions, in which they are alarmed by a core aspect of my being. It’s interactions like that in which I see the great attraction of going stealth. Instead, here are some words about it.

Writing Letters to Oakland

Dear Mayor Quan,

I just watched an internet video in which an Oakland Police officer at the Occupy Oakland protest had his name taped over, so that it was unreadable.

We ask a OPD officer why he had his name badge covered…. from BLK PXLS on Vimeo.

The officer in question, J. Hargraves, was ordered to remove the covering by his superior officer once members of the public intervened. That he had his name covered at all strongly suggests to me that he was intending to break the law in his policing of protesters. I also find it troubling that he was willing to do this only a few feet away from his superior officer. This further suggests that the department has an informal policy allowing or encouraging this behavior.

I hope you as mayor investigate whether or not this is the case and order the police to issue a clarification to their officers that they are required to follow the law and respect the civil rights of protesters.

Thank you for your time,
Charles Hutchins

You can contact the mayor of Oakland via her website: http://www.oaklandnet.com/contactmayor.asp

You cannot shop your way to a better world

Shopping is not activism.
Let me state that again: a targeted, organised, specific boycott, like the United Farm Workers No Grapes boycott of the 1980’s is activism. Because it has specific goals and is part of a larger protest movement. But buying only locally produced, organic produce from your local co-op is not activism. Because shopping is not activism.
Now, it could be very good for you and beneficial for your community to buy organic produce from your co-op, but that doesn’t make it activism. Similarly, you can use voting as a way of mitigating negative political change in your area, but voting isn’t activism either.
There are images going around facebook that suggest the “real” way to occupy Wall Street is by shopping at the right stores. I want to pick apart some of the problems with that.
Many of Walmart’s shoppers are poor. they shop there because they can afford the produce there. It might not be great produce or an altruistic retailer, but they’re eating better than they would be if they shopped someplace else. While it’s true that their communities would be better off if there were more independent retailers, in the mean times, you’re asking them to sacrifice feeding fresh fruits and vegetables to their kids. This is not reasonable. Also, by implication, the people who shop at Walmart become responsible of the bad effects of that retailer, when, in fact, they tend to suffer more keenly from those same effects.
Let’s say you go to an independent shop to buy clothes. Good for you. What are you going to buy? You decide to avoid the cardigan made by sweatshop labour. Good for you. You decide to avoid the one made with polluting synthetic yarn. You decide to get one made from only ethically treated animals. And decide to mitigate pollution by only going for organically fed animals. So you buy a llama hair cardigan made by a local hippie who grew his own llamas locally, feeding them only locally grown organic feed. You have successfully avoided Wall Street, kept your carbon footprint low, bought a sustainable cardigan that will last for several years and keep you warm even when you get soaked by the rain. Good for you! That cardigan probably cost $200, every penny of which stayed local and was invested back into your community. This was a good choice of how to spend your disposable income.
However, buying your hypothetical cardigan was not activism. First of all, although it was a wise investment in your own clothes and the community, this was really not affordable to most people. Walmart shoppers cannot afford to buy your clothes. Buying that cardigan is certainly an ethical act, but it’s not an accessible act. If you want to protest income inequality and economic injustice, this protest could not possibly come in the form of expensive personal purchases.
It’s disappointing that voting and shopping are not actually enough to change the world in a meaningful, positive way. These things are, quite literally, the least we should do. And we should do them. Those of us who can vote should take that responsibility seriously and if you have enough money to be ethical with your purchases, then certainly do it, but don’t make these things out to be bigger than they are. If you want to occupy Wall Street, then you’re going to have to vote with your body, not with your money and not with a check mark in a box, but by physically participating.
Our consumer culture of predatory capitalism has gotten seriously out of control and fixing it requires people of different social classes working together. If your activism is not accessible to the poor, it’s not in common cause with them. Anybody can stand in a mass demonstration. And we need to stand together.
I know we’ve been told our whole lives that consuming stuff is voting with our money, that we have choices that empower us through buying stuff and that we can build our identity (including our moral sense of self) by what we buy, but all of these ideas came from advertisers who want to sell us stuff. It’s been drummed into our heads since birth, but it’s not true. It’s propaganda to keep us buying stuff and docile. The purpose is to prevent protest, not empower an easy for of it.
Activism is a group activity. If it’s done at the mall, it comes with a risk of being escorted out by security. It is visible. It is disruptive. It is what we need.

Occupying Oakland

I was on the West Coast of the US for a few days recently. On my last day there, I spent some time at Occupy Oakland, one of the occupation protests to spin off from Occupy Wall Street. The Oakland protest was an encampment in front of City Hall. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon to find a bunch of tents set up and people milling about. There were signs posted, renaming the plaza to “Oscar Grant Plaza.” Oscar Grant was, of course, the man shot by BART police a year or two ago. Other signs invited the 99% to “hella” occupy Oakland. Another large banner was against corporate oligarchy
Some of the people were working on stuff, so I asked a guy there if I could help. He sent me to the food tent, where there was another guy dishing up soup to passers by. I helped him out for a while and then he went off, leaving me in the tent.
Several people came up for soup, bread, grapes os something to drink. The soup was made in a large pot which was over a camp stove that was keeping it warm. It seemed like about half the people who came asking for food where people who had come specifically for the protest and the other half were people who might have been hungry anyway. I worked a shift in a soup kitchen once many years ago and this was not like that. In the soup kitchen, you have a stark dividing line between who is feeding and who is being fed. Some people bring food and others eat it. In this case, there were people coming constantly with donations, but everybody was eating together.
As long as people just wanted soup, I was fine and I could tell them where to put material donations, but anything more than that and I had no idea. I was alone in the tent for a while, unable to answer questions. Finally the women who knew stuff came back and told me to take a break.
I wandered through the tents to where I could hear music. There were native Americans playing a large drum and singing. A reporter from the local TV news recorded herself talking with them in the background. A circle of lesbians were sitting nearby with a MacBook, planning something. A woman from Revolution Books sold me a newspaper about how Bob Avakian is the second coming of Mao. I sat in the sun until the shade progressed over the entire plaza and then I moved towards more music.
I found a guy with an American flag T-shirt and a rockabilly haircut playing a guitar and singing something about a “rich man” through a PA system, when there seemed to be the sound of drumming getting gradually closer. There was a samba band marching up the street, to the occupation. As they arrived, the guitar player wrapped up his set and the drums played for at least an hour. They had a dance troop with them. Both the drummers and the dancers were amazing. After a long routine, they said they’d brought extra instruments and everybody should join them by playing or dancing. Many people did.
Meanwhile, the kitchen crew had gotten a BBQ going and were cooking something that might have been pork. A woman came by with a bag of apples and handed them out to all and sundry, so some people stood eating ribs or apples, watching people dance. This was Oakland, so the dancers were all races, all ages. Some of them were middle class, some were poor. Some were white, some were black, some were asian. There were LGB people, trans people, straight people, cis people, in what felt like a giant festival. A middle schooler lept into the middle of the dancers and started break dancing to wild cheering. Then a pair of guys in maybe their mid 20s started doing a sort of martial arts dance while the samba dancers danced in a circle around them. One of the martial arts guys was hopping up and down on his hands while the other one did some move I could never hope to replicate.
The joy, the diversity, the food, the music, the use of the word “hella” – it was pure Oakland. It’s why I love the East Bay. It’s why that protest gave me hope. With the wide swath of people participating, with the toilets donated by the unions (and by a local BBQ joint), it felt like real coalitions are happening. And while the demands of the protest aren’t entirely clear, they’re building something that seems like a movement. Real change might come out of this and it is change we desperately need.

How to do page numbers and a table of contents in NeoOffice

This may also apply to Open Office.
Go to the format menu and select styles and formatting. a window or something will come up. one of the tabs on it is for page types. Duplicate the default type and call it something else. Then, go to the start of your document at the very top of the page and under insert, select manual break. A window will open that will have a drop down menu of the page types. Change it from [none] to the page type you just created. At the bottom of the window, in the second little box from the left, it lists page type. so when you’re on your new blank page, it should say default and when you go to the second page, it should say the name of your new type of page.
Next, go to the first page of your text and go to the insert menu and select footer and it will have next to that your two page types. Check the one that describes the main body of your text. It will hopefully make you a footer, which it will then stick your cursor in. then under the insert menu, go to fields and the page number. The popup will have something asking about style, make sure it’s set to 1 2 3, etc. and it will have something about starting with a specific page number. set that to 1.
Then go back to that first empty, still blank page and insert two manual breaks so you have three blank pages at the start of your document. Go the middle of those pages and go to the insert menu and then select indexes and tables and then indexes and tables and then table of contents
You’re nearly there. Go back to the styles and formatting window and go to the paragraph styles tag. Right click on the one called heading1 and select modify. It will give you a window asking about spacing, fonts, etc. Set it to look like every heading you’ve used for your chapter titles. If they’re 14 point centred times new roman, then make it like that. then go to heading2 and modify it so it looks like your subheadings you’ve used for chapter sections and keep doing this for all the heading levels you’ve used.
Now, lastly, go through your text and highlight all your headings. So at the starts of chapter 1, highlight your title “why i’m awesome” (or whatever you called it) and then, in the styles and formatting window, double click on the heading 1. This will switch that title to have the heading 1 formatting, which, if you did it right, will look the same as it did before. Then go to your subheading and select it and double click on heading2 in the styles and formatting window. Go through your entire document changing your heading to use the heading1, heading2, etc. When you’ve got everything, go back up to your table of contents page and right click on the table of contents. A menu will pop up and one of the options will be to update the table of contents. Do that and it should list all fo your headings and subheadings. If you’re missing some of them, then you forgot to change it in the document.
And of course, the best way to do this is to use the headings and stuff from when you first start writing your document, so keep that in mind for next time.

I wrote a letter to the Metro

I wrote to the Metro about this article which differs from the print version. The print headline was “Boy, 10, returns to school a girl.” The first sentence repeated the word “boy” and thereafter used only terms like “child,” and avoided any use at all of pronouns.
I’m not sure how much of an improvement it is to say that a 10 year old wants a “sex change.” I guess they thought the word “transgender” would be too difficult for London morning commuters.
This is the letter I wrote:

Dear [Editor],
I am writing in regards to yesterday’s Metro front page article,
“Boy, 10, who went back to school a girl” in regards to misgendering
the subject. The correct way to refer to a trans person’s gender is
to follow their choices. The girl in the article clearly wishes to be
known as a girl and your use of “boy” in the first sentence and
headline is therefore inappropriate. The rest of the article uses only
the term “child.” It is not appropriate or neutral to treat this
girl’s gender as if it is a subject of open debate. You also use
words like “youngster” to avoid using pronouns outside of direct
quotes. This, plus the use of boy does seem to undermine the gender
identity of the girl.
There is a very helpful website, trans media watch, which offers
advice to journalists writing articles about trans people:
http://www.transmediawatch.org/guidance_for_media.html This website
advises the media to avoid phrases like “sex-change,” which also
appears in the first sentence of your article. Your article is
otherwise sympathetic, so I hope you can keep these things in mind the
next time you write about a trans person.

Did I mention they picked it as their front page article? This is something that happens every single autumn in at least one school in the UK. It was in other news outlets, including on the BBC, as the girls’ mum talked to the national press. I’m all for raising awareness of anti-trans bullying, but large shocking headlines seem to be participating in, rather than decrying, adults calling this girl a “freak.”
The Metro has not acknowledged my letter, although they did correct the web version. I thought I’d post the letter here.
I’m trying to imagine how it would have felt to have a newspaper headline when I returned to uni with a new set of pronouns… I hope the girl’s mum is keeping her away from the news.

Dissertation Draft: Solo Live Electronic Pieces

Phreaking

When
the local 2600 group, started organising BrumCon 2007, which took
place on 3 May 2008, I asked if I could present a musical set. They
had never done such a thing before, but they agreed. 2600 is a
hacker group (“2600 Meetings”) with roots in phone phreaking
(Trigaux), so I decided to reference that in a piece written for the
gig.

As
noted in The Complete Hacker’s Handbook, “Phone phreaking”
refers to the practice hacking phone systems in order to get free
calls or just explore the workings of the system. Phone systems used
to be controlled by in-band signalling, that is, audible tones that a
user could reproduce in order to gain unauthorised control. For
example, 2600 Hz was a useful tone to “seize” control of a line.
Other such sounds commonly found in telephony are Dual Tone Multi
Frequency [DTMF] sounds, which are the ones produced by a landline
keypad. (Dr. K.)

I
looked up red box phreaking on Wikipedia and also DTMF signals and
used those tones as the heart of the piece. It starts with a dial
tone, then does coin dropping sounds, followed by the sound of
dialling and then a ring back sound, followed by a 2600 Hz tone.
After that introduction, it plays dialling signals and then a beat.
The beat is made up of patterns of sampled drums. The programme
picks random beats to be accented, which will always have a drum
sound on them and then scatters drum sounds on some of the other
beats also. The loop is repeated between 8-10 times and then a new
pattern is created, retaining the same accents for the duration of
the piece. If the randomly generated drum pattern seems too sparse
or too full of beats, the performer can intervene by pressing a
joystick button to add some drum beats or another to remove them. The
idea for randomly accenting beats comes a lecture by Paul Berg at
Sonology in the Hague where he noted that accenting random beats
seems like it had a deliberate rhythm when it’s heard by audiences.
This is related to Trevor Wishart’s discussion of Clarence Barlow’s
“indispensability factor,” where Wishart notes that changing
accents of a steady beat can alter the listener’s perception between
time signatures. (Wishart p 64) It seems that greater randomness in
picking accents leads listeners to perceive more complex rhythms.

After
the beats, a busy signal comes in occasionally. There are also bass
frequencies which are DTMF sine tones transposed by octaves.
Finally, there are samples of operator messages that are used in the
American phone system. These are glitched and stuttered, the degree
of which is controlled with a joystick. Thus, this piece is partly a
live-realisation, self-running piece and partly controlled by a
performer.

At
the time, I was interested in making computer pieces that necessarily
had to be computer pieces and could not be realised with live
instruments or with an analogue synthesiser. Extremely exact tunings
and sample processing are both examples of things that are
computer-dependant. I was also interested to have more live control
and more visible gesture, in order to, as Paine describes in his
paper on gesture in laptop performance, “inject
a sense of the now, an engagement with audience in an effort to
reclaim the authenticity associated with ‘live’ performance.”
(Paine p 4) I thought having physical motions would engage the
audience more than a live realisation. Conversely and relatedly, I
was also interested in the aesthetics of computer failure, within the
glitches I was creating. Cascone writes, “'[Failure]’ has become a
prominent aesthetic in many of the arts in the late 20th century,
reminding us that our control of technology is an illusion, and
revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient
as the humans who build them. “ (Cascone) I thought this
intentional highlighting of imperfection would especially resonate
with an audience that largely worked in a highly technical and
professional capacity with computers.

I
also find glitches to be aesthetically appealing and have been
influenced by the extremely glitchy work of Ryoji Ikeda, especially
works like Data.Matrix,
which is a sonification of data. (“Datamatics”) Similarly,
in-band signalling is literally a sonic encoding of data, designed
for computer usage.

When
I performed the piece at BrumCon, their sound system did not have an
even frequency response. Some sine waves sounded way louder than
others and I did not have a way to adjust. I suspect this problem is
much more pronounced for sine tones than it is for richer
frequencies. Another problem I encountered was that I was using
sounds with strong semantic meanings for the audience. Many of them
had been phreakers and the sounds already had a specific meaning and
context that I was not accurately reproducing. Listeners without
this background have generally been more positive about the piece.
One blogger wrote the piece sounded like a “demonic
homage to Gaga’s Telephone,”
(Lao) although he did note that my piece was written earlier.

Blake’s
9

The
music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has been a major influence on
my music for a long time. The incidental music and sound effects of
Doctor Who during the Tom Baker years was especially
formative. I found time in 2008 to watch every episode of Blakes
7 and found the sound effects to be equally compelling. I spent
some time with my analogue synthsiser and tried to create sounds like
the ones used in the series. I liked the sounds I got, but they were
a bit too complex to layer into a collage for making a piece that
way, but not complex enough to stand on their own. I wrote a
SuperCollider programme to process them through granular synthesis
and other means and to create a piece using the effects as source
material, mixed with other computer generated sounds.

The
timing on a micro, “beat,” and loop level are all in groups of
nine or multiples of nine, which is why I changed the number in the
piece title. I was influenced to use this number by a London poet,
Mendoza, who had a project called ninerrors
which ze*
describes as, “a
sequence of poems constricted by configurations of 9: connected &
dis-connected by self-imposed constraint. each has 9 lines
or multiples of 9, some have 9 words or syllables per line, others
are divisible by 9. ninerrors is presented
as a series of 9 pamphlets containing 9 pages of poetry.”
(“ninerrors”) I adopted a use of nines not only in the timings,
but also in shifting the playback rate of buffers, which are played
at rates of 27/25,
9/7, 7/9 or 25/27. The
tone clusters frequencies also are related to each other by tuning
ratios that are similarly based on nine. I was in contact with
Mendoza while writing this piece and one of the poems in hir

ninerrors
cycle, an
obsessive compulsive disorder,
mentions part of the creation of this piece in it’s first line,
“washing machine spin cycle drowns out synth drones.” (“an
obsessive compulsive disorder”)

While
ratios based on nines gave me the internal tunings of the tone
cluster, I used Dissonance Curves, as described by William Sethares,
to generate the tuning and scale for the base frequencies of the
clusters. The clusters should therefore sound as consonant as
possible and provide a contrast to the rest of the piece, which is
rather glitchy. The glitches come partly from the analogue material,
but also from sudden cuts in the playback of buffers. For some parts
of the piece, the programme records it’s own output and then uses
that as source material, something that may stutter, especially if
the buffer is recording it’s own output. I used this effect because,
as mentioned above, I want to use a computer to do things which only
it can do. When writing about glitches, Vanhanen writes that their
sounds “are
sounds of the . . . technology itself.” (p 47) He notes that “if
phonography is essentially acousmatic, then the ultimate phonographic
music would consist of sounds that have no acoustic origin,” (p
49) thus asserting that skips and “deliberate mistakes” (ibid)
are the essential sound of “phonographic styles of music.” (ibid)
Similarly, “glitch is the digital equivalent of the phonographic
metasound.” (p 50) It is necessarily digital and thus is
inherently tied to my use of a computer. While my use of glitch is
oppositional to the dominant style of BEAST, according to Vanhanen,
it is also the logical extension of acousmatic music.

Indeed,
the piece was written with the BEAST system in mind. The code was
written to allow N-channel realisations. Some gestures are designed
with rings of 8 in mind, but others, notably at the very start, are
designed to be front speakers only. Some of the “recycled”
buffers, playing back the pieces own recordings were originally
intended to be sent to distant speakers, not pointed at the audience,
thus give some distance between the audience and those glitches when
they are first introduced. I chose to do it this way partly in order
to automate the use of spatial gesture. In his paper on gesture,
Paine notes that moving a sound in space is a from of gesture,
specifically mentioning the BEAST system. (p 11) I think that because
this gesture is already physical, it does not need to necessarily
rely on the physical gesture of a performer moving faders. Removing
my own physical input from the spatialisation process allowed me more
control over the physical placement of the sound, without diminishing
the audience’s experience of the piece as authentic. It also gives
me greater separation between sounds, since the stems are generated
separately and lets me use more speakers at once, thus increasing the
immersive aspect (p 13) of the performance.

Although
this piece is entirely non-interactive, it is a live realisation
which makes extensive use of randomisations and can vary
significantly between performances. In case I get a additional
chances to perform it on a large speaker system, I would like the
audience to have a fresh experience every time it is played.

Synthesiser
Improvisation

When
I was a student at Wesleyan, I had my MOTM analogue modular
synthesier mounted into a 6 foot tall free-standing rack that was
intended for use in server rooms. It was not very giggable, but it
was visually quite striking. When my colleagues saw it, they
launched a campaign that I should do a live-patching concert. I was
initially resistant to their encouragement, as it seemed like a
terrible idea, but eventually I gave in and spent several days
practicing getting sounds quickly and then refining them. In
performance, as with other types of improvisation, I would find
exciting and interesting sounds that I had not previously stumbled on
in the studio. Some of my best patches have been live.

I’ve
been deeply interested in the music of other composers who do live
analogue electronics, especially in the American experimental
tradition of the 1960s and 70s. Bye
Bye Butterfly

by Pauline Oliveros is one such piece, although she realised it in a
studio. (Bernstein p 30) This piece and others that I find
interesting are based on discovering the parameters and limits of a
sound phenomenon. Bernstein writes that “She discovered that a
beautiful low difference tone would sound” when her oscillators
were tuned in a particular way. (ibid) Live patching also seems to
be music built on discovery, but perhaps a step more radical for it’s
being performed live.

Even
more radical than live patching is Runthrough
by David Behrman, which is realised live with DIY electronics. The
programme notes for that piece state, “No
special skills or training are helpful in turning knobs or shining
flashlights, so whatever music can emerge from the equipment is as
available to non-musicians as to musicians . . .. Things
are going well when all the players have the sensation they are
riding a sound they like in harmony together, and when each is
appreciative of what the others are doing.”
(“Sonic Arts Union”) The piece is based entirely on discovery and
has no set plan or written score. (ibid) The piece-ness relies on
the equipment. This is different than live-patching because a
modular synthesiser is designed to be a more general purpose tool and
its use does not imply a particular piece. Understanding the
interaction between synthesiser modules is also a specialist skill
and does imply that expertise is possible. However, the idea of
finding a sound and following it is similar.

Recently,
I have been investigating ways to merge my synthesiser performance
with my laptop performance. The first obvious avenue of exploration
was via live sampling. This works well with a small modular, like the
Evenfall Mini Modular, which is small enough to put into a rucksack
and has many normalised connections. It has enough flexibility to
make interesting and somewhat unexpected music, but is small and
simple enough that I can divide my attention between it and a laptop.
Unfortunately, mine was damaged in a bike accident in Amsterdam in
2008 and has not yet been repaired.

My
MOTM synthesiser, however, is too large and too complex to divide my
attention between it and a laptop screen. I experimented with using
gamepad control of a live sampler, such that I did not look at the
computer screen at all, but relied on being able to hear the state of
the programme and a memory of what the different buttons did. I
tried this once in concert at Noise = Noise #19 in April 2010. As is
often the case in small concerts, I could not fully hear both monitor
speakers, which made it difficult to monitor the programme.
Furthermore, as my patch grew in complexity, the computer-added
complexity became difficult to perceive and I stopped being able to
tell if it was still working correctly or at all. A few minutes into
the performance, I stopped the computer programme entirely and
switched to all analogue sounds. While the programme did not perform
in the manner I had intended, the set was a success and the recording
also came out quite well and is included in my portfolio. One
blogger compared the track to Jimi Hendrix, (Weidenbaum) which was
certainly unexpected.

It
is unusual for me to have a live recording come out well. This is
because of the live, exploratory aspect to the music. If I discover
that the I can make the subwoofers shake the room or make the stage
rattle, or discover another acoustic phenomenon in the space, I will
push the music in that direction. While this is exciting to play, and
hopefully to hear, it doesn’t tend to come out well on recordings. I
also have a persistent problem with panning. On stage, it’s often
difficult to hear both monitors and judging the relative amplitudes
between them requires a certain concentration that I find difficult
to do while simultaneously patching and altering timbres. In order
to solve this problem, I’ve written a small programme in
SuperCollider which monitors the stereo inputs of the computer and
pans them to output according to their amplitude. If one is much
louder than the other, it is panned to centre and the other output
slowly oscillated between left and right. If the two inputs are
close in amplitude, the inputs are panned left and right, with some
overlap. I think this is the right answer for how to integrate a
computer with my synthesiser. Rather than giving me more things to
think about, this silently fixes a problem, thus removing a
responsibility. An example of playing with the autopanner, from a
small living room concert in 2011, is included in my portfolio.

For
future exploration, I am thinking of returning to the idea of live
sampling, but similarly without my interaction. I would tell the
computer when the set starts and it would help me build up a texture
through live sampling. Then, as my inputted sound became more complex
(or after a set period of time), the computer interventions would
fade out, leaving me entirely analogue. This could help me get
something interesting going more quickly, although it may violate the
“blank canvas” convention of live coding and live patching. In
February 2011, there was a very brief discussion on the TopLap email
list as to whether live patching was an analogue form of live coding
(Rohrhuber). I do not see that much commonality between them, partly
because a synthsiser patch is more like a chainsaw than it is like an
idea, (“ManifestoDraft”) and partly because patching is much more
tactile than coding is. However, some of the same conventions do seem
to apply to both.

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*“ze”
and “hir” are gender neutral pronouns

Remembering

We all remember exactly where we were ten years ago today, so I’ll skip that part. Some of you lost family members, friends, jobs or became injured when terrorists attacked the US and I’m very sorry for your loss.For the rest of us, and most of the people watching TV coverage or reading endless news editorials or otherwise paying attention to this anniversary, it was something that happened in a remote location, a far away city, with no personal effect at all, aside from the shock and horror that we all felt. And today, the TV and editorials and whatever are asking us to rekindle that shock and horror and revel in it as if it were yesterday and not ten years ago. I don’t think that’s useful, helpful or remotely reasonable.No other successful foreign terrorist attack has happened in the US since 2001. The ones foiled by the FBI turn out to have been half-hearted and poorly planned at best. We don’t need to react to this memory with fear. Instead, I think we should stop and ask how it has changed us as a country, as a culture and as a people. Is this who we wanted to become? Is this the country we want to have? Have the changes we’ve made caused us to be better or worse than before? It’s true we can never go back in time, but we’re not on a fixed course forever either. We can reassess and change.The creation of the Department of Homeland Security removed union rights from a large number of government workers. Do we still want it to be like that? The Patriot Act allowed warrantless wiretapping and all kind of domestic spying, temporarily, but it’s still ongoing. Do we want to renew that? A lot of people will be talking about the wars we’re now waging abroad, the secret prisions, the renditions, the predator drones, and that bears reflection as well. Do we want to do all that to other people? But also, what do we want to do to ourselves? Does a terrorist attack in NYC mean that we need to reconfigure emergency services such that we cannot respond to a hurricane in New Orleans? Does it mean we need to attack unions? Does it mean we need to bleed all spending on social programmes out of our economy so we can afford more bombs?In the days after 9/11, we talked a lot about reflection and taking stock. Now might be time to do that again. Are we better than we were before, or have we made ourselves worse? What should we do now in the next ten years?

Live blogging stallman

Stallman is speaking in Brum
He says that proprietary softwre is a tool that the owner uses to control the users.
closed source software may contain malicious code used to harm or spy on the user. As does windows and the iphone. (And andriod, which is open source).
Free software develops solutions but proprietary programmes create dependance. Writing free software is a contribution to society. Proprietary software harms society, he says. Good features in a proprietary programme are bait in a trap. The users are suckered in and made less free.
To what extent do the 4 freedoms apply outside of software?
If you buy an object, does it carry restrictions on using it as you wish? (Freedom 0)
Freedom 1 is the freedom to study and change the source code. Do you have that freedom to modify an object? Depends on the object. This point is kind of lame.
Freedom 2 allows people to make copies. Does not apply to physical objects because he has apparently never heard of a 3d priter. Shiny future technology will solve the problems it causes.
Has he heard of the arduino?
Now he’s brining up copyright, which is apparently the main topic of his speech.
What should copyright say about what you can do with published works. Copyright developed in responce to technology, however the morals of these laws are not based on technology, however the context can change, thus effecting the utilitarian evaluation of moral choices.
in the ancient world, copies were made by hand and does not scale. There was no copyright, but copying was very difficult. There was censorship, however.
then the printing press came along and mass production copying much more efficient, but did not speed up making one-off copies. It was purely an economy of scale. Printing presses were expensive and required special skills. Copy making was highly centralised. Many copies were still made by hand. Poor people would hand copy thing because they had time but no money.
in 1553, copyright was introduced to england to censor protestant texts. You had to apply to print something and one printet would be granted a monopoly in perpetuity. In 1680, a new system came in where authors were granted a monopoly for 14 years.
The US consitution was going to have copyright in it, but instead it grants congress the power to create laws granting a monopoly for a limitted time, in order to benefit the public. Copyright laws only applied to publishers, not to hand copying. It was solely an industrial regulation. Copyright was arguably beneficial, was easy to enforce.
in the 1800s, printing got a lot cheaper. Paperbacks were invented. Hand copying dropped way off in responce to cheaper media.
the computers came along and made one off copying much much cheaper. This has completely transformed the effect of copyright law. It is no longer an industrial regulation. Copyright law has become difficult to enforce, has become controversial. It is no longer beneficial, he claims.
a proper democracy, he says, would restore a freedom to copy to the public. He says the increase of copyright power is an indictment of a non functional democracy.
retroactively increasing copyright does not encourage the production of new works in the past. Increasing copyright for future works could create an incentive for current artists, except that nobody plans for income 50-70 years after their death.
he claims that the extension of corporate copyright law in the us was done to protect mickey mouse. He says disney purchased the law. Stallman is seriously incensed.
he says film companies want perpetual copyright, which is theoretically allowable in the uk. If disney keeps this up, there will be perpetual copyright in the us, granted 20 years at a time, he claims.
he is encouraging us to fight the copyright extension of audio recordings, saying we must fight every batlle, no matter how minor.
he says publishers want to seize total power over content, making a pay-per-view uiverse via DRM. Our media players, etc will control us, instead of vice versa. He is using dvd region codes as an example. Some smart person wrote free software to let people play dvds. So the us made this illegal with the digital millenium copyright act. The eu also passed a similar law, except in finland. In france, posession of copies can be punished with a prison sentence.
Stallman is so ideologically pure, he doesn’t play dvds. And we shouldn’t either, he says.
aacs was a new form of encryption, which was sort of broken. Blue ray disks have new encryption every few months. Which is kind of mental. Drm on video is undefeated.
10 years ago, non-compliant cds were for sale.
(stallman is so damn free, he can’t do anything….)
apple did drmed music and sony installed a rootkit on its cds, which is highly malicious software, akin to a virus. Seriously a trojan horse, this was extremely illegal. They also plagarised the code in their programme, which is illegal under copyright law.
there is drm in the playstation. Somebody put linux on it, and then sony put out an upgrade that killed linux. People have been arrested for putting free software on playstations!
DRM is mostly dead for music because of some weird contract dispute with apple. He is encouraging everyone to boycott itunes, so we can be free.
spotify is designed to restrict users, because it won’t let you save streams. So nobody should use spotify. They don’t actually pay labels or artists at any kind of reasonable rate, so um…
books are now facing the pressure of drm, thanks to ebooks. He thinks ebooks are a plot.
in order to be free, he has to say no a lot. The free software foundation is against facebook and are not on it and if i were smart, i wouldn’t be either.
he really hates ebook readers! The amazon “swindle!” Kindle users cannot anonymously buy ebooks with cash. Amazon knows what you’re reading and keeps a list. This has a large potential for human rights abuses. Ebook ownsers do not actually own their books. They cannot give it away or lend it out. They don’t even get to keep a book as long as they want, only as long as amazon lets you. They remotely deleted a bunch of bought and paid for copies of “1984” off of people’s kindles.
amazon promised to never do mass censorship again unless ordered to by the state. Which is not actually comforting.
now he syays we have to boycott harry potter. And puppies, i’m sure. And ice cream. “There are loys of other books that are fun to read.”
i don’t think i could handle this much freedom….
one company by itself could not set up drm. They have to “conspire to restrict the public’s access to technology.” These conspiracies are trade organisations.
“of course, you should never use a product that conspires to take away you freedom.” We must organise against drm. There is a website “defective by design.”
i’m not sure that boycotts are actually a useful way to deal with this.
he says copyright should last for 10 years after being published. (I’d make it a bit longer, but maybe i’m brainwashed by publish companies.) He is making a good point about how god-like devotion for composers is used abusively by publishing companies.
publishers sometimes let stuff go out of print but will prevent others from publishing.
those of us who aren’t making money are uncorrupted, we still have the purity of the dueling 19th century ideas of the artist, in contrats to being godlike.
what sort of copyrights are there for content? Recipies, software, how to stuff, textbooks, etc is kind 1. He says this kind of works have to be free. “Freedom is having control of your own life.”
type 2 is works that state people’s views: essays, memoirs, academic works. These should not be allowed to be modified. Modification is distortion. Non-commercial redistribution of unmodified copies must be allowed because sharing is good. He says. Copyright is intolerable because of the “war on sharing.” Attacking sharing is attacking society. This is EVIL, he says.
type 3 is works of art and entertainment. Should people be allowed to modiy? Modifying something may destroy its artistic integrity. But most artistic works contain remixed elements from past works. People could wait for the copyright term before allowing remixes. But, people must be free to share.
i don’t see a future for for-profit publication if sharing is allowed? I allow my stuff to get shared, but i mean, if i could get lady gaga for free and it was allowed, i wouldn’t pay for it
he just said something about remixing, but i was thinking about lady gaga.
peer to peer file sharing will not hurt musicians because record companies have already stolen everything. It is true that corrupt accounting is a problem for musicans on major labels.
he won’t do ecommerce….
he says that musicians make money off of concerts, so sharing recorded music actually helps musicians. Ha ha ha ha ha ha, sorry.
he says only record companies lose money with music sharing record companies and they’re evil and deserve it. Minor record companies are ok, of course, but let’s not talk about them.
could movies still make money under stallman’s capitalistic paradise? He says yes, but if we have to stop making movies, well, we’ll all be more free.
he says hollywood makes shit movies on purpose, through their system. Censorship is wrong, so we must protect their right to make shit.
how to support the arts: use state funds, he says. We must be efficient in these grants. Only give it to artist, not publishers. Give away money by popularity, using polling, he says. Linear distribution is not a good plan, he says. Take the cube root of popularity he says, getting very detailed. He may think too much, but i can’t really argue his point.
artists then have incentive to share.
now he’s on with the virtual tip jar, which has never worked in practice, but he wants to have this government regulated? He claims that thw virtual tip jar is working for musicians, but what he’s talking about is merch. He says it’s not merch. Heh, I wonder if he’s considered commissions. I guess all free software could come with a donation button in Stalltopia.
he seems to be taking credit for linux? Oh no wait, torvalis doesn’t deserve credit. Jesus!
schools (and unis) should only use free sotware, in order to make them citizens of a free society. Now he’s comparing software companies to playground drug dealers!
now he’s talking about people learning to code. Only free software properly teaches coding. Closed sources are contrary to the goals of education.
students should be compelled to share their source code.
we should all campaign against MAX/MSP in education, as an ethical issue. Constantly recruit others to the cause!
Antonio is attacking his art funding proposals. Stallman is claiming that crowd funding works, which is complete bullocks. And he doesn’t know the term “crowd funding,” which does somewhat impunge his credibility on the issue. Then he says that WPA is the way forward, which I don’t disagree with. Now he says that you can’t say arts funding is too low or too high because it’s inagruable, which seems dubious.
i’m pondering irritating him with android questions.
oooh ranting on “open source” in respince to another question, so no point in asking android question.
I really need dinner as his twattishness is starting to annoy me.
i’m not sure a purely software guy is really the best guy to talk about arts copyright. Especially somebody who says all closed source software developers should quit their jobs. If he doesn’t want his own tribe to prosper, he’s not going to be overly concerned about artists.