Cello Players

On April 9th, composer Christi Denton and I will be featured composers for the Washington Composer Forum meeting. We’re planning on writing some music for cello (or other tonal instrument), percussion and tape. Our cello player cancelled on us, so we’re trying to find a replacement. Rehersals would be in Berkeley and the performance will be in Seattle. The music is not written yet and additional information is not yet available. We will not have time to hold auditions until next week because Christi is working on the Other Minds music festival starting this wednesday. More information will be posted as it becomes avilable.

Grad Skool

Well, I’ve gotten one letter from CalArts saying “yes,” and have heard only rumors from other schools. I’ve heard via a third party that Alvin Lucier thinks I sound “interresting.” A certain bitter ex-member of the Mills Community says that their financial sitution makes my acceptance there near certain. Oh, well, gee, uh. I didn’t think they took economics into account for admissions, but what do I know. I don’t mend benefitting from affirmative action, but I’d prefer it to be the “we need a better male-female balance” kind rather than the “we need more cash” kind. This is because I’m a contrary leftist and nobody on the right is suing to stop the second kind of class-based admission system. And I’ve heard from another individual that CalArts is not an easy school to get in to and that Mills has already made it’s descision and the letter will be mailed shortly.
The more I think about it, the more I just want to move to Seattle and screw grad school. Honestly, it’s not like my music career matters. If all 15 people who care about electronic tape music think that I’m cool, well, that’s swell, but it’s still only 15 people. I think that in the US art is dead. If it’s not dead, it’s terminal and twitching. In the 80’s it was doing that reaching it’s arm up towards the light thing and a bunch of folks decided it was about to go for a walk, but nope it was that increased wakefulness before death thing. (I haven’t read too many hospice pamphlets, not me.) Give art some more morphine, talk quietly in it’s presence, hold it’s hand for a moment, hold your breath each time it breathes in, waiting to hear if it will breathe out again.

Protools

digidesign’s techsupport closed at 3:00, so i didn’t talk to them, but their website says the software works with 10.2.3 only. don’t upgrade. Yeah, so I have noone to blame but myself. someone suggested that I could blow away my OSX system folder and all other traces of system and then re-install. Making a backup first would be a good idea. I guess tomorrow, I’ll make a mirror of my drive on a firewire disk and then try blowing away my system folder. The worst the caould happen is that I would need to reformat completely and start over and that would be ok because . . . well, I have no idea how it would be ok. I have the system software disks for OS 9, 10 and 10.2 of course. I could probably drag applications back over from the backup drive and most of them would work. If I hosed MAX/MSP, I would be pretty unhappy, though.
If I wanted to wrestle with stupid problems like this, I would be running linux, where at least there is a chance I could fix things without crippling my system.

Possible Personal Ad Photos

Mitch has got his nifty blog (see link on the left) and his personal ad, and he’s got pictures of himself up. I’m not saying the picture is bad, I’m just providing additional options:

Option 1: Mitch standing at Resurrection Elementary School in Sunnyvale (circa 1993)

[Mitch!]

Option 2: Mitch the serious, smoldering artist working on his installation at the Exploratorium in 2001

[Mitch!!]

I like option 2 a bit better. The original is a bit under-exposed. But I have the PSD from the original scan (at 800 dpi) if you want to clean it up a bit, since it’s beyond my ability.

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

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

Deadline extention

Christi just hit the website for the singapore thing, and the deadline has been moved to March 14. Wow. That fixes some problems. Everything else is due the 14th too (Women’s Phil Score – which I might not do, since I don’t have any experience writing even for string quartet, let alone orchestra, the tea-pot, bathtub, washging machine thing, um other stuff), so it is still necessary to move quickly. But now I can breathe and move quickly.

why why why did protools stop working?
Ok, alternate options. …. um
Beg charles to let me use his studio for an hour to dump one hour long tape (plus another tape of interviews….), then do the mix on christi’s laptop with protools free on os9, which actually works.
ADAT? no the 8 track won’t work, i have software sound files from minidisc.
um.. crap.

If I can’t get protools to creat a new session without hanging, how the @#!$@#$%@$%!#$%!% am I supossed to get data off my DAT.

Gear Review – ProTools 6

running on dual processor 500 MHz G4 running 10.2.4
Overall: crap
crap crap crap. crashy. it won’t let me open a session this afternoon. who knows why not? i paid $75 bucks for this, over and above the hardware and software i purchased for the digi001. sometimes it won’t open my old protools 5.x sessions. some times, when it opens them, it won’t play them. sometimes it won’t save changes. sometimes it chases after i scoot 2.5 seconds worth of audio around, right after i get it where i want it and before i hit save.
I should not have run the 10.2.4 upgrade. i should have gone to 10.2.3 or stayed with 10.2.0.
On a side note, the heater smells vaguely like gas and the holy candle that i’m burning cracked alarmingly. next the shroud in the temple will be torn in two and the sky will go dark for three hours and then, i guess, my protools woes won’t matter so much. i’m going to go phone all of this into the TIPS program.

Today (techinically yesterday) – I’m recording sounds of household appliances that use water. This for a call for acousmatic music. So far I have the clothes washing machine and dryer (those were part of an old project that i’m recycling, so the dryer counts), the tea kettle and the dishwasher. Coming up on the list is the garbage disposal, the tiolet, the sink and a shower, especially the wine at the end. It’s sure a good thing I went to music school… I feel so pretentious working on this piece, which is I guess appropriate since I think my list of favorite composers has gotten me a reputation for pretentiousness online, which shouldn’t annoy me but does anyhow. Anyway, all my middle-class water-wasting, electricity-eating gadjets will soon be musical, and I won’t even need to go to the laundrymat, which is too bad, since the washing machines there are extra cool sounding, especially with contact mics on them. Makes me wish I had a fixed filter bank to process all of this. I could write one in MAX. I could write a whole application for generating laptop music and call it the acous-a-matic and check my email while generating sounds for audiences pretentious enough to like it.
Matthew, Jenny and Owen came over. Matt had his first interview with East Bay MUD today. He expects a second interview. Then we all went over to Jenya’s house to talk about our proposal for the Singapore installation. It has a postmark deadline by Saturday, which means it has to be done friday. I have zero recordings for it. None. I was too busy recording my dishwasher because I completely forgot about the due date. I suck. So tomorrow, instead of going to the Other Minds office to file things, I’ll be riding BART around. Jenya has a PC with USB, so I can do a DAT and minidisc recording at the same time and be able to dump the minidisc data to her computer. Then, I need to interview people about their thoughts during commute rides. Will I walk up to folks on bart? Interview my neighbors? I’m screwed! And I have a wineglass rehersal tomorrow night, I think. I emailed two people to ask them for the rehersal schedule, one of them was the composer, and neither emailed me back yet.
Lord I’m a flake. I need to program due dates into my yahoo calendar and tell it to nag me. Hey well, if you (whoever is reading this) want to play the wineglass in the Other Minds concert on friday March whatever, drop me a line, and I’ll send you the rehersal schedule if anyone sends it to me. If you want to be recorded free-associating about public transit, or rather talking about what you think about (or would think about if you are a car commuter) while riding on the train, well, then email me in that case too. Tomorow afternoon would be a good time for that. Or after 10:00. Or, you could just record yourself talking about what you think about on BART (think voice over for movie or something) and send me/post a WAV or AIFF file (mp3 ok encoded at 160 or better), that would be extra groovy. Put the mic right next to your mouth for a good close-mic effect. If you put the mic around your nose or a bit below your chin, it will not catch air bursts (called “plosives”) from ‘p’ sounds. Don’t run processing on it. I’ll put on some reverb for a dreamy effect. Or hell, put on your own reverb, i don’t care. I procrastinated too long! I need male voices. Maybe one voice will be fine. Speaking in a non-english language would be super excellent. I need a five minute example tape for Singapore. tomorrow, I’ll post about the benefits of planning ahead and remebering deadlines. :p