Today is 30 July. My dissertation is due on 30 September. I am now planning on how things will be between now and then.
I know that I cannot work every day between now and then. My maximum sprint time is 10 days. So I need to plan on taking one day off per week, which might was well be on the weekend. With BiLE on Wednesdays, that gives me 5 days a week. Also, planning on working 16 hour days is also not going to work. Instead, I can do 4 hours on music and 4 hours on words. Roughly, I have 160 hours of each to spend.
If I keep to a reasonable sleeping schedule and cut back on facebook, I can still go out occasionally. I am not going to drink unless it is the evening before my one break day per week. Also, since stress levels will be high, that break day needs to actually be spent away from a computer like riding my bike or going to the beach or something worthwhile.
Everything is going to be fine. This will all be over soon. I will get it it all done. I just need to focus and work hard.
I may start doing again what I did with my MA and start posting drafts of various bits, looking for feedback.
Tag: celesteh
Concert Review: RCM LOrk
Last night, I went to see the Royal College of Music Laptop Orchestra perform in their institution’s main hall. I found out about the concert at the last minute because a friend spotted it on twitter. Until yesterday, I didn’t even know there was a LOrk in in London!
The audience was quite small and out numbered by the performers. There were 6 people on stage and one guy working at a mixing desk, who got up to play piano for one of the pieces. The programme was quite short, with 5 pieces on it. They started with Drone by Dan Trueman, which was the first ever LOrk composition, according to the printed programme. They walked in from the back, carrying laptops and playing from the internal speakers. The tilt of the laptop changes the sound. They then walked around the space, making this drone. It worked well as an introduction and had a good performative element, but I find this piece disturbing in general because it pains me slightly whenever I see anyone shake a laptop. This kind of treatment leads disks to die. Somebody should port this piece to PD and run it via RjDj on an iPhone.
The next piece they played was Something Completely Different by Charles Mauleverer. It was quite short and was made up of clips from Monty Python. Somebody from the ensemble explained that they were playing YouTube videos directly and using the number keys to skip around in the videos and stutter and glitch in that way. This piece was played through two large monitors on the stage. Because all the clips are in the vocal range, using only two speakers made it a bit muddy. Also, the lack of processing the sounds in any meaningful way could become an issue, but the piece was quite short and therefore mostly avoided the limitations of it’s simple implementation.
Then, alas, there was a few minutes pause for technical issues and a member of the group stood up and gave a short talk about what was going on in the pieces played so far.
After they got everything going again, they played Synchronicity by Ellis Pecen, which was very well done. The players were given already processed sounds of a guitar and were playing and possibly modifying those further. The programme notes said it used instrumental sounds “process[ed] to such a degree that it would be difficult to discern the original instrument and the listener would … perceive” the source materials only as “a source of sound.” As such it was acousmatic in it’s construction and it’s ideals but the result was a nice drone/ambient piece. After a few minutes, the sound guy got up and joined the ensemble to play some ambient piano sounds. The result was a piece outside of the normal LOrk genre (as fas as one can be said to exist) and was extremely musical.
Spirala by David Rees, the next piece on the programme, was supposed to have a projected element, but the projector crashed just as the piece was about to start. The piece was apparently built in flash and involved the players turning some sort of crank, by drawing circles on their trackpads. the sounds it made (and perhaps the mental image of crank-turning) lead me to think of a jack in the box. The programme says the piece is online, but I’m getting a 404 on it, alas.
The last piece was Sisal Red by Tim Yates. It relied on network communication, making groups of three laptops into “distributed instruments.” The piece didn’t seem to match it’s programme notes, however, as there only seemed to be four people actually playing laptops. One of the players was on a keyboard controller and another one was playing the gong with a beater and a microphone as if it were Mikrophonie by Stockhausen. This piece used 4 channels of sound, with the two monitors on stage and the two behind the audience. It seemed to fill up the hall as if were were swimming in sound. I’m not sure what sounds were computer generated and what were from the gong or other sources, but I had the impression that the gong sound was swaying around us and was a very strong part of the piece. It certainly harkened back to the practice of putting instruments with electronics and also seemed to be an expansion of the normal LOrk genre. The result was very musical.
According to the programme, this is the only LOrk situated at a conservatory rather than a university. The players were all post graduates, which is also a break with the normal American practice of undergraduate ensembles. All of the pieces except the first one were written by ensemble members. As is the case with most other LOrks, the composer also supplied the “instrument,” so all the players were running particular programmes as specified by (or written by) the composer. Aside from the first piece, there were no gestural controllers present.
I think putting a LOrk into a conservatory is an especially good idea. This will create LOrks that will concentrate heavily on performance practice. In their piece Something Completely Different, they completely de-emphasised the technology and created something that was almost purely performative. However, they obviously still embrace the technical, not only through their choice of medium, but in pieces such as Spirala which required the composer to code in flash.
I was really impressed by the concert overall and especially their musicality and hope they get larger audiences at their future gigs, as they certainly deserve them.
By the way, if you’re in a LOrk and have not done so already, there is a mailing list for LOrks, Laptop Bands, Laptop Ensembles and any group computer performance: LiGroCoP, which you should join. Please use it to announce your gigs! Also, BiLE will be using it to make announcements regarding our Network Music Festival, which will happen early next year and will have some open calls.
Some Ideas
The music of 40 years ago is more innovative, challenging and interesting than almost anything produced in the last decade. Like all of life, we have forgotten ideas and become focussed on technology. The future, as we see it is an indefinite sameness differing only by having shinier new gadgets.
Increasingly, the trend in electronic music performance is to see the player as an extension of the machine. Or tools are lifeless, sterile and largely pre-determined and thus so are we. We are becoming automatons in music and in life. Young composers, instead of challenging this narrowing of horizons are conforming to it. We are hopelessly square.
In order to look forwards, we must first look backwards, to a time when people believed change was possible.
Any social model maps relatively easily to a music model. Self-actualised individuals, to take an example, are improvisors who do not listen to each other. Humans as agency-lacking machines are drones, together performing the same musical task, like an orchestra, but robbed of diversity and subtlety. If the model does not work musically, it will not work socially and vice versa. The state of our music is the state of our imagination, the state of our soul and the state of our future.
A better world is possible, and we can begin to compose it.
Why I Identify as Transgender
There’s been a spate of blog posts recently about how the word “transgender” is dead and we all need to decamp to a new term. And then there are posts arguing to opposite point. I’m not going to bother linking to any of them, but I am going to offer my 2p.
First of all, I’ve noticed that almost all of these posts about whether the word “transgender” is good or bad are coming from trans women, but none that I’ve noticed have come from trans men. The trans women who are against the term transgender seem to call themselves “transsexual” instead. I suspect that the reason for this is a desire to separate themselves from cross dressers and specifically from fetishists. Some straight men get a sexual kick from dressing like women. There is no parallel situation for trans men. While a surprising number of drag kings are straight, there is no visibile community and no stereotype of straight women dressing up like men for illicit fetish sexy fun time (alas).
It’s quite reasonable to want to de-link your gender identity from being seen as a fetish. However, I don’t think emphasising the term “transsexual” is the way to do this. First of all, it has the word “sex” in it. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable. This makes me uncomfortable. I almost never identify as TS. I don’t want to describe myself in a way that invokes sex or genitals.
I also really don’t want to invoke medical intervention, when disclosing conversationally or whatever, and especially not in a human rights campaign. Now, of course trans people should have rights to transition-related healthcare. But our other rights should in no way be linked to that. I don’t want my job or housing rights to have anything to do with what surgeries I’ve had or am planning to have. Indeed, this can, itself, create a human rights issue, in which some governments require sterilisation as a prerequisite to proper gender recognition and/or civil rights protections. That’s deeply problematic.
Furthermore, there are problems related to privilege. This is much less an issue in the UK, as the NHS does offer appropriate healthcare to trans people. But in the US and developing countries, medical transition can be economically out of reach for a lot of trans people. Thus, any limitation to those who are medically transitioning is a hugely problematic assertion of class privilege.
The rights of people who don’t want to medically transition are also hugely important. I spent many years as an obviously gender non-conforming person and I didn’t want to face discrimination then any more than I do now. People who are full or part time cross dressers or whatever, still deserve to have full rights to access education, housing and employment and enjoy the same full civil rights as cis people. The same issues that effect people with no plan to medically transition also effect people who are planning on medically transitioning and haven’t started yet and people who may not be passing all the time. Again, linking rights to medical procedures seems deeply dubious and may pressure people into having interventions that they don’t want or need and leaves out people who cannot afford the costs associated with those procedures.
And did I mention that a word with “sex” right in the middle of it makes people feel uncomfortable? No centrist political candidate in the US is ever going to give a speech about how we need to protect the rights of transsexuals. They may be persuaded to give a speech protecting the rights of transgender people, but they’re not going to want to say the word “sex” in this context. And, if we don’t want to be lumped in with fetishists, we don’t want to say the word “sex” either.
Those who think that we can get more rights by sacrificing those who don’t medically transition need some serious help with the concept of solidarity. It’s sort of amusing that some of the same people complain whenever trans protections are stripped out of laws that were originally conceived to protect all LGBT people.
So I’m sticking with the word transgender. People who hear it know what it means (or can figure it out quickly enough. It’s a word I’m comfortable with. It implies solidarity. People can, of course, self-identify however they want and that’s fine, but I think it’s too soon to say the word “transgender” is done.
The head of St Vitalis of Assisi
Alas, I’ve missed the auction of the head of St Vitalis of Assisi, which I guess is just as well as it was expected to go for at least £700. Still, I kind of feel like my entire life as an RC might have been heading for that purchase. I’ve gone on saint-head related pilgrimages and generally have a fascination with relics….
As I see it, the major problem with having a first class relic like this one is where to put it. St Vitalis is the patron saint of STIs and it doesn’t seem fair to keep such an obviously useful saint to oneself. The owner of the head really ought to build a chapel for it. As I don’t have any kind of space for such a construction, the head would be doubly beyond my means.
Indeed, as I live in a two room flat that’s already a bit overly full of stuff, storing the head until I could build a chapel would present a major problem.
I really don’t want a holy relic on display in my bedroom. A skull of any saint looking down on my bed would be a bit of a mood killer. I can’t decide if this particular saint would be better worse than other saints. On the one hand, he is kind of appropriate, if you don’t mind his dead, judging eye sockets. But on the other hand, do I want to send the message to overnight visitors that supernatural help is required in addition to the normal precautions?
I think he could also be distracting in the living room. Alas, I don’t even have room for him in my living room. It’s already stuffed to the gills with rather too much furniture, two tubas, a bass amp and a synthesiser. I have no idea where I could even find space for a head.
He may have died in 1370, but the kitchen seems unhygenic even for a very old and holy skull. And the bathroom is humid, which might lead to corruption of the sort saints are supposed to be spared. A mouldy relic would not be very nice.
This leaves the toilet, which in some ways is the ideal space. I have unoccupied space on top of the cistern, where he could gaze down upon possibly afflicted areas as guests wee. It also gives the faithful a private place where they can take a moment to determine if the saint’s prayers might be helpful before invoking them, and/or possibly calling their local GUM clinic. On the other hand, it does seem somewhat disrespectful to the saint to perch his head in a loo.
(American readers of the linked BBC article should note that in British English, an “outhouse” is a kind of a shed. In American English, an outhouse is a privy. So moving from an outbuilding to a toilet would be a reduction in his circumstances.)
Alas, I’ve been unable to discover ho bought the head, how much they paid or what their plans are. Do I want to know? I’m not sure.
Backstage at a BiLE gig
We played yesterday in Wolverhampton and I thought it went rather well. While we’re playing, we have a chat window open, so we can do some communication with each other. This is what went on in chat during our last piece:
Norah> :( Les> reme Les> why is norah sad? Shelly> :(? Norah> someone crashed? Antonio> Antonio crashed Norah> oh :( Shelly> ack Les> bummer jorge> ohh sheeet Antonio> next? Norah> Les note! chris> my wiimote is boken chris> ok ill start Antonio> cool chris> ready? Les> i am now Norah> bang Shelly> huh? firebell starts? jorge> yes chris> im clock jorge> purrfect Les> go? Shelly> ack brb. start without me Antonio> go go go Shelly> bk Shelly> ...test... Norah> hi Les> we need a better beater for that bell Shelly> jorge can i have the spoon? Les> eye contact!! Shelly> chirs can u pass the small bell this way? Les> sounding good, norah Shelly> sounding GREAT! Norah> thanks Antonio> everything is crashing for me :( Shelly> norah, ur patch sounds really coo1 Norah> it's being very magical today! Shelly> GRANULATINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG BILE! Norah> WOW Norah> excellent transition guys Shelly> i dont know what time it is by the way Les> 10 Norah> 10:58 Norah> let's start winding down? Les> 10:15? Norah> 11:17 Les> 10:35 Les> nice Shelly> NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICCCCCCCCCCCCEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Antonio> :) Norah> that was super! Antonio> is ther eone more? chris> sh*t that was amazing! jorge> super!! Antonio> !!! Shelly> nope! Antonio> super fun times Shelly> suppersuppersupper Antonio> what's next?
Strategies for using tuba in live solo computer music
I had the idea of live sampling my tuba for an upcoming gig. I’ve had this idea before but never used due to two major factors. The first is the difficulty of controlling a computer and a tuba at the same time. One obvious solution is foot pedals, which I’ve yet to explore and the other idea is a one-handed, freely moving controller such as the wiimote.
The other major issue with doing tuba live-sampling is sound quality. Most dynamic mics (including the SM57, which is the mic I own) make a tuba sound like either bass kazoo or a disturbingly flatulent sound. I did some tests with the zoom H4 positioned inside the bell and it appeared to sound ok, so I was going to do my gig this way and started working on my chops.
Unfortunately, the sound quality turns out not to be consistent. The mic is prone to distortion even when it seems not to be peaking. Low frequencies are especially like to contain distortion or a rattle which seems to be caused by the mic itself vibrating from the tuba.
There are a few possible work arounds. One is to embrace the distortion as an aesthetic choice and possible emphasise it through the use of further distortion fx such as clipping, dropping the bit rate or ring modulation. I did a trial of ring modulating a recorded buffer with another part of the same buffer. This was not successful as it created a sound lurking around the uncanny valley of bad brass sounds, however a more regular waveform may work better.
At the SuperCollider symposium at Wesleyan, I saw a tubist (I seem to recall it was Sam Pluta, but I could be mistaken) deliberately sampling tuba-based rattle. The performer put a cardboard box over the bell of the tuba. Attached to the box was a piezo buzzer in a plastic encasing. The composer put a ball bearing inside the plastic enclosure and attached it to the cardboard box. The vibration of the tuba shook the box which rattled the bearing. The piezo element recorded the bearing’s rattle, which roughly followed the amplitude of the tuba, along with other factors. I thought this was a very interesting way to record a sound caused by the tuba rather than the tuba itself.
Similarly, one could use the tuba signal for feature extraction, recognising that errors in miccing the tuba will be correlated with errors in the feature extraction. Two obvious thing to attempt to extract are pitch and amplitude, the latter being somewhat more error-resistant. I’ve described before an algorithm for time-domain frequency detection for tuba. As this method relies on RMS, it also calculates amplitude. Other interesting features may be findable via FFT-based analysis such as onset detection or spectral centroid, etc using the MLCD UGens. These features could be used to control the playing of pre-prepared sounds or live software synthesis. I have not yet experimented with this method.
Of course, a very obvious solution is to buy a better microphone. It may also be that the poor sound quality stemmed from my speakers, which are a bit small for low frequencies. The advantage of exploring other approaches include cost (although a tuba is not usually cheap either) and that cheaper solutions are often more durable or at least I’d be more willing to take cheaper gear to bar gigs (see previous note about tuba cost). As I have an interest in playing in bars and making my music accessible through ‘gigability,’ a bar-ready solution is most appealing.
Finally, the last obvious solution is to not interact with the tuba’s sounds at all, thus creating a piece for tuba and tape. This has less that can go wrong, but it looses quit a lot of spontaneity and requires a great deal of advance preparation. A related possibility is that the tubist control real-time processes via the wiimote or other controller. This would also require a great deal of advanced preparation – making the wiimote into it’s own instrument requires the performer to learn to play it and the tuba at the same time, which is rather a lot to ask, especially for an avant guarde tubist who is already dealing with more performance parameters (such as voice, etc) than a typical tubist. This approach also abandons the dream of a computer-extended tuba and loses whatever possibilities for integration exist with more interactive methods. However, a controller that can somehow be integrated into the act of tuba playing may work quite well. This could include sensors mounted directly on the horn such that, for example, squeezing something in a convenient location, extra buttons near valves, etc.
I’m bummed that I won’t be playing tuba on thursday, but I will have something that’s 20 minutes long and involves tuba by September
WiiOSCClient.sc
Because there are problems with the wiimote support in SuperCollider, I wrote a class for talking to Darwiin OSC. This class has the same methods as the official wiimote classes, so, should those ever get fixed, you can just switch to them with minimal impact on your code.
Because this class takes an OSC stream from a controller and treats it like input from a joystick, this code may potentially be useful to people using TouchOSC on their iPhones.
There is no helpfile, but there is some usage information at the bottom of the file:
// First, you create a new instance of WiiOSCClient,
// which starts in calibration mode
w = WiiOSCClient.new;
// If you have not already done so, open up DarwiinRemote OSC and get it talking to your wii.
// Then go to preferences of that application and set the OSC port to the language port
// Of SuperCollider. You will see a message in the post window telling you what port
// that is .... or you will see a lot of min and max messages, which lets you know it's
// already callibrating
// move your wiimote about as if you were playing it. It will scale it's output accordingly
// now that you're done callibrating, turn callibration mode off
w.calibrate = false;
// The WiiOSCClient is set up to behave very much like a HID client and is furthermore
// designed for drop-in-place compatibility if anybody ever sorts out the WiiMote code
// that SuperCollider pretends to support.
// To get at a particular aspect of the data, you set an action per slot:
w.setAction(ax, {|val|
val.value; // is the scaled data from ax - the X axis of the accelerometre.
// It should be between 0-1, scaled according to how you waved your arms during
// the callibration period
});
// You can use a WiiRamp to provide some lag
(
r = WiiRamp (20, 200, 15);
w.setAction(ax, {|val|
var scaled, lagged;
scaled = ((val.value * 2) - 1).abs;
lagged = r.next(scaled);
// now do somehting with lagged
});
)
Calibration
this class is self-calibrating. It scales the wiimote input against the largest and smallest numbers that it’s seen thus far. While calibration is set to true, it does not call any of its action methods, as it assumes the calibrated numbers are bogus. After to set calibration to false, it does start calling the actions, but it still changes the scale if it sees a bigger or smaller number than previously.
WiiRamp
The WiiRamp class attempts to deal with the oddness of using accelerometers, but it does not just do a differentiation, as that would be too easy. The accelerometers give you major peaks and valleys, all centred around a middle, so just using the raw values often is a bit boring. In the example, you see that we scale the incoming data first: ((val.value * 2) – 1) changes the data range from 0 to 1 into -1 to 1. The puts the centre on 0. Then, because we care more about the height of peaks and depth of valleys than we care about whether they’re positive or negative, we take the absolute value, moving the scale back to 0 to 1.
When you shake your wiimote, the ramp keeps track of your largest gesture. It takes N steps to reach that max (updating if a larger max is found before it gets there), then holds at the number for M steps and then scoots back down towards the current input level. You can change those rates with upslope, hold and downslope.
OscSlot
This class is the one that might be useful to iPhone users. It creates an OSCResponderNode and then calls an action function when it gets something. It also optionally sends data to a Bus and has JIT support with a .kr method. It is modelled after some of the HID code. It also supports callibration. How to deploy it with TouchOSC is an exercise left to the reader.
http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/code/WiiOSCClient.sc
My life lately (is tl;dr)
Tuesday and Wednesday Last Week
A week ago Tuesday, I taught my module in Cambridge. The next morning, I got on a train to Birmingham for BiLE practice. I’m a co-founder of BiLE, the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble. We formed in February and we have a gig next week. The technical hurdles to getting a laptop ensemble going are not minor, so there has been a lot of energy going into this from everybody. We have got group messaging going, thanks to OSCGroups and I wrote some SuperCollider infrastructure based on the API quark and a small chat GUI and a stopwatch sort of timer, which is controlled with OSC, so there’s been a lot of that sort of tool writing. And much less successful coding of sound-making items, which will eventually be joystick controllable if I ever get them to work. All my code is written for mono samples and all of the shared samples people are using are in stereo, so I spent a lot of time trying to stereo-ise my code before finally mixing the samples down to mono.
I’m a big believer in mono, actually, in shared playing environments. If I am playing with other people, I’m playing my computer as an instrument and instruments have set sound-radiation patterns. I could go with a PLOrk-style 6-speaker hemisphere, if I wanted to spend a boatload of money on a single-use speaker to get an instrumental radiation pattern form my laptop, so I could just use a single Genelec 1029 that I already own.
Anyway, after the BiLE rehearsal, a couple students gave a group presentation on Reaper, which is a shareware, cheap, powerful DAW. I’m quite impressed and am pondering switching. My main hesitation is that I expect my next computer will be linux, so I don’t know if I want to get heavily involved with a program that won’t run on that OS. On the other hand, I don’t actually like Ardour very much, truth be told. I haven’t liked any of them since I walked away from ProTools.
After that we went out for socialising and instead of catching a train home, I went to stay on the floor of Julien’s studio. He lives way out in the country, up a lane (British for a single-track country road). It’s quite lovely. I would not be a fan of that commute, but I might do it for that cottage.
Thursday
The next morning, Juju and I set back to campus quite early so he could meet his supervisor. I ran a couple of errands and got a uni-branded hoodie. I haven’t worn such a garment for years, because fabric clinging to my chest in the bad old days was not a good thing. But now I can wear snug woven fabrics, like T-shirts, hoodies and jumpers! It’s amazing! Also, I remember the major student protests about university branded clothing made by child labour, but this was actually fairtrade, according to the label, which is fairly impressive.
Then all the postgrads met in the basement of the Barber Institute to start loading speakers into a truck for a gig. We were moving a relatively small system, only 70 speakers, but that’s still a fair amount of gear to muscle around. Then we went to the Midlands Arts Centre to move all the gear into the venue and set it up. The gear is all in heavy flight cases, which needed to be pushed up and down ramps and down hallways and then the speakers inside needed to be carried to where they would be set up, as did the stands to which they would be attached and the cables that connect them. It’s a lot of gear. We worked until 6 or 7 pm and then went back to the studios at uni to get a 2 hour long presentation from Hans Tutchku about how he does music stuff. I tried desperately to stay awake because it was interesting and I wanted to hear what he was saying, but I did not entirely succeed in my quest.
Friday
Then, Juju and I went back to his place, 45 minutes away and then came back to the MAC early the next morning to finish rigging the system. We put up the remainder of the system and then people who were playing in that evening’s concert began to rehearse. I hung around for the afternoon, trying to get my BiLE code working. Kees Tazelaar, who played the next evening came along to see how things were going and recognised me from Sonology and greeted me by my old name. I like Kees quite a lot, but it was a very awkward moment for me and I wasn’t sure what to do, so I spoke to him only briefly and then mostly avoided him later. This was not the best way to handle it.
There were two concerts in the evening. The second of them was organised by Sound Kitchen and was a continuous hour with no break between pieces. The people diffusing the stereo audio to the 70 speakers took turns, but changed places without interrupting the sound flow. It was extremely successful, I thought. The hour was made up of the work of many different composers, each of whom had contributed only 5 minutes, but somehow this was arranged into a much larger whole that held together quite well, partly because many of the different composers had used similar sound material. A lot of them used bird sounds, for example, so that was a repeating motif throughout the concert.
Saturday
After that, we hung around the bar for a bit afterwards. The next morning was not so early, thank goodness, when we went back to the MAC and then back to the uni for the BiLE hack day. The idea was that we would do a long group coding session, where people could write code around each other and ask for clarification or feedback or help or whatever from band mates. However, it started really late and everybody was really tired, so it was not entirely successful in it’s goals.
Then we went back to the MAC for the concerts. I was sitting in the hallway, trying to figure out why my BiLE code had failed so completely when I got drafted into being in charge of the comp tickets. It turns out that this is actually somewhat stressful, because it requires knowing who is supposed to get comped in, getting tickets for them and then distributing them. Which means approaching Francis Dhomont and speaking to him.
The first concert was curated by Kees Tazelaar and started with a reconstruction of the sounds played in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958. He found the source tapes and remixed them. Concrete PH sounded much more raw and rougher than other mixes I’ve heard. It had a gritty quality that seemed much more grounded in a physical process. I was surprised by how different it sounded. Then he played Poem électronique and a his own work called Voyage dans l’espace. I hope he plays these again on large multi-channel systems, because it was pretty cool.
I was feeling fairly overwhelmed by the lack of sleep, my lack of success with BiLE and getting stuck with all the comp tickets, so I was not happy between concerts. The next one was all pieces by Anette Vande Gorne, a Belgian woman who runs the Espace du son festival in Brussels and who has very definite theories about how to diffuse sounds in space. Some of them are quite sensible, however, she thinks that sound can start at the front of the hall and be panned towards the back of the hall, but sound cannot originate at the back of the hall and travel to the front. Hearing about this had prejudiced me against her, as it seems rather silly.
She always diffuses standing up, so they had raised the faders for her, with one bank slightly higher than the other, like organ manuals. She started to play her pieces… and it was amazing. It was like being transported to another place. All of my stress was lifted from my shoulders. It was just awe inspiring. The second piece was even better. I was sitting in the back half, so I could see her standing at the mixers, her hands flying across the faders dramatically, like an organist, full of intensity as her music dramatically swelled and travelled around the room. It was awe-inspiring. Then I understood why people listened to her, even when some of her theories sound silly. She might not be right about everything, but there’s quite a lot she is right about. This was one of the best concerts that I’ve ever been to.
The last concert was a surprise booking, so it wasn’t well publicised. It was Jonty Harrison, Francis Dhomont and Hans Tutchku. It was also quite good, but I wouldn’t want to play after Vande Gorne. Tutchku’s piece had several pauses in it that went on just a few moments too long. It’s major climax came quite early. It worked as a piece, but seemed like it could be experienced in another order as easily as the way it was actually constructed. I talked to him at the party afterwards and he said that the pauses were climaxes for him and ways of building tension and that he had carried them out for too long in order to build suspense. I’m not entirely positive they functioned in this way, but the idea is quite ineresting and I may look into it. He also asked me what I thought of his presentation for two days earlier, so I was hoping he hadn’t noticed me dozing off, but I think he did.
After the final concert, there was a large party at Jonty’s house. I got a lift from Jonty, so I was squeezed in the back of a car with Anette Vande Gorne on one side of me and Hans Tutchku on the other side with Francis Dhomont in the front. They all spoke French the whole way. I’ve been filling out job applications and one them wants to know about my foreign language skills and now I can say with certainty that if I’m stuck in a car with several famous composers speaking French, I can follow their conversation fairly well, but would be way too starstruck to contribute anything.
Apparently, the party went on until 4:30 in the morning, but I didn’t stay so late. I talked a lot to Jean-François Denis, the director of empreintes DIGITALes, a Canadian record label. He flew from Canada just for the weekend and showed up without anyone expecting him. He is extraordinarily charming.
Sunday
The next morning, we went back again to the MAC and then there was a long concert with an intermission in the early afternoon. Amazingly, none of the concerts over the entire weekend featured overhead water drops. There were barely any dripping sounds at all.
After the concert, we de-rigged the system and packed all the gear back into cases and loaded it onto the two rented trucks. Then we went for curry in Mosely, which we seem to do after every gig. Shelly was talking about how it was her last BEAST gig and I wasn’t paying much attention until I realised this meant it was my last gig too. I really should have signed up to play something. I thought there was another gig coming later in the year, but it was cancelled. I’m seriously going to graduate from Brum having only played a piece at a BEAST gig one time and never having diffused a stereo piece. That is extremely lame on my part.
Monday
Juju was completely exhausted, so we left the curry early, so he could go home and catch up on sleep. The next morning, we all went back to the Barber Institute to unload the trucks and put everything away. Then we, as usual, went to the senior common room to have cups of terrible coffee. Their tea is alright, so that’s what I had, but most people go for the coffee, which could double as diesel fuel. I guess this was my last time of that also.
Normally, I would then gather my things and go home, but I did not. I worked on code and faffed and worried about my lecture the next day and then in the evening, we had another seminar. Howard Skempton came and talked for two hours about Cardew and Morton Feldman and his own music. It was quite good. We all went to the pub afterwards, but that dissipated quickly as people left to sleep it off.
Tueday
I got the train home, finally and got in after midnight. There’s a large stack of mail inside my door. I woke up early the next morning to assemble my presentation for my module. As luck would have it, the topic was acousmatic music, so I talked about BEAST and played them some of the music from the weekend. I also pointed them at some tools. I was supposed to have them start their task during the class time, but a surprising number of them wanted to show their works in progress, so that didn’t happen.
As I was on the train back to London from Cambridge, I wondered whether I should go out to a bar that night to socialise when I fell completely asleep on the train. Drooling on my backpack asleep. I completely crashed. I woke myself up enough to get the tube home and then thought I would sort out my BiLE code instead of going out, but I couldn’t concentrate, so I just faffed around on the internet instead of sleeping or going out. Meh to me.
Wednesday
Then, the next day, which was Wednesday, a week and a day after all of this started, I got on the train for Birmingham to go to a BiLE rehearsal and to go to a seminar. I got my code working on the train and was feeling somewhat happy about that, but when I got to the rehearsal, it just gave up completely. I managed to make sounds twice during the entire rehearsal, one of which was during a grand pause. When I tried repeating the sound later, it wouldn’t play. Also, Shelly found a crash bug in my chat application, when Juju typed a french character. On the bright side, however, all of the MAX users got all the way through one of the pieces we’re playing next Thursday, which is quite encouraging. Antonio, our graphics guy got the projector sort of working, so I was able to glance at what he was doing a couple of times and it looked good.
We took a break and a bunch of the postgrads were dissing live coding, so I guess that might not be a good goal for the ensemble. They thought projected code was self-indulgent and only programmers would care. I need to link them to the toplap mainfesto. Actually, they were more dissing the idea of live coding, having barely witnessed any themselves. Non-programmers do seem to care and, while it is a movement that does require some thoughtful understanding to fully appreciate it, the same could certainly be said of acousmatic music. I like the danger of live coding, something that I think a laptop ensemble ought to appreciate. It’s a bit like a high wire act.
The presentations at the seminar were interesting and then we went to the pub. I was so tired biking home from the train station that I got confused about which side of the street I’m supposed to be on.
Thursday
I slept until 2 this afternoon and I was supposed to sort out my BiLE code and fix up my CV and write my research portfolio, but all I did was send out email about Monday’s supercollider meetup and fix the crashbug in the chat thing. SuperCollider strings are in 7 bit ascii and fuck up if you give them unicode, which is really quire shocking and not documented anywhere.
Then I went to Sam’s to get Xena back and I wired up part of the 5.1 system she got for her daughter and sorted out her daughter’s macmini so that she could connect to it with VNC and so it was wired to the sound system and the projector and quit asking for the keychain password every 5 seconds. Then I came home and spent ages typing this up. Tomorrow, I will do my CV stuff for real, because I have to get it done and then work on my BiLE code. Saturday I’m going back to Brum again for a 5 hour rehearsal in wich we sort out the rest of our music for the gig. Sunday, I need to finish and job application related stuff and write my presentation for Tuesday. Monday is the job application deadline and a SuperCollider meetup. Tuesday, I teach. Wednesday, I need to get Xena back to Sam’s and then go to Brum again for a rehearsal and will be there overnight to practice the next day and then play the gig and then get stonkingly drunk. Friday, I go home. And then start sorting out the tech stuff for the next two pieces, which at least are by me and count towards my portfolio. And I need to sort out my stretched piece which is a disorganised mess and start writing a 20 minut piece, which I haven’t done at all and needs to be done very soon because I need to graduate and I have not spent all this busy time working on my own music, although the tools I’ve written should be kind of valuable. All I can think about now, going over and over in my head is all the stuff I have to do. And snogging. That thing about men thinking about sex every 7 seconds has never been true for me before, but it is now. And it’s actually quite annoying except that as the alternative is thinking about everything that I have to do, I actually prefer it.
Attention: Single Ladies
Are you a straight or bi woman between 29-40, who has given up on the single scene? Feel like all the good men are taken?
Despair Not!
Meet eligible postgraduate men near you!
Yes, your area may be teeming with unpaired postgrad men. Men with exciting and interesting hobbies such as:
- Working on their dissertations
- Doing fake-work
- Facebooking
- Procrastinating
- Feeling guilty about facebooking and procrastinating
- Deconstructing re-runs of The Simpsons
- And More!
Yes, you too can be let into the life and the flat of a man who has stacks of books everywhere and mutters to himself about conference submission deadlines. You can experience the joys of wonder of hearing him say, “I really should be working right now.” You can go to fun parties with academics where your date shows up exceedingly late and then drinks only lemonade in case he decides to do more work at 1:30 AM.
Do you find gaudy material tokens of success like nice haircuts and shoes without holes to be shallow and off-putting? Have you always wondered abou the finer points of spectromorphology carried out with open source software and the communities that produce those artefacts? Does your heart go pitter-patter for somebody reading theory textbooks on the beach on holidays? Yes, postgraduate men are waiting to meet you!
Or
If you’re a bloke and you’re still reading this far, why not meet postgraduate women who are pretty much like the men described above, but with the added bonus of being female.
Act NOW
While supplies last! Yes, nab them quickly before they finish with their writing up year or drop out of uni or meet somebody else (haha, just kidding on the last one)
Why note date a postgraduate near you TODAY?
You’re going to have to make the first move here, and be as blatant as possible about it, or else they might not notice. But give it a go. Soon.