Wk 4 forum

Continuing on with the presentations of work done by second and third years, the idea that the composer is obsolete is now firmly established in my mind. The music that students create using technology rarely has any premeditated design...but it sounds fine, and is applicable to the real world..chances are people would pay for a CD of it (gullible fools). So, who needs a composer nowadays when you can grab and sound tech student from uni and tell them to go through a, b and c arbitrary sound manipulating processes to produce an end product. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, it could be the natural evolution of music, I mean, I use this same trial and error, do it if it sounds good technique when I am coming up with riffs..). So, what proof do I have of this phenomenon this week....our friend Freddy was told to make 'sounds' using a guitar (strictly not allowed to 'play' said guitar though). He sequenced and recorded these sounds using software sequencing programs where in real time he was then able to add effects and processing to these 'sounds' (like mass pitch shift, reverb and the such). He made recordings of his output and chose his favourite out of several. This end composition surely is nothing more than the nicest/most interesting sounding out of a collection of potential compositions generated out of the experimental process. But it sounds absolutely awesome, I would not be surprised if I heard it on a TV show, or in a video game, somehow, it has value.

Wk 4 Creative

I'm so behind in this class, it is absolutely brutal!

Wk 4 Audio

I could resubmit my experiments with recording acoustic sound from last year but I am boycotting the process on grounds of wanting to learn something new!

Wk 3 Forum looking at other students wonderful creations

Today in forum, we first years got to experience some of the work that the second and third years have done in their time at Adelaide. By the end of the lecture I found myself wondering about composition, their compositions and the value of a composition…and the composer…. Take John for example… I can only really describe his software as a composition generator. He has programmed software to trigger random samples (the random samples mostly consisted of sample tank strings) and made a whole bunch of recordings. Stating that he programmed this software because he likes large tone clusters, I can only assume that his favourite recording out of 20 featured a lot of these along with the standard build and decay present in most music. Two students on and another piece of software that does similar things…in this instance it was Dave with his ‘self contained sampling unit with on board effects processing unit’. With the samples that Dave loaded in, I can see no value in this thing at all. Potentially, with different samples, the resulting ‘music’ might be more, uh, musical, at any rate, the end result is a product of chance and whimsy. So, what value can a piece composed in this manner could possibly have? If the end result hasn’t been premeditated in some way, if you just land on it by chance, can it still claim legitimacy as a composition and value as a piece of music?

Wk 3 Paper projectiles

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Wk 3 Audio studio 2

Still behind, haven't actually done anything. This lecture did provide one invaluable piece of info....the engineer that can be bothered to listen to what's coming through the cans is the engineer who is a step above the rest. An artist's performance can be made and broken depending on the vibe they are getting from their situation, a good headphone mix is a crucial part of the puzzle. At this point in my recording career, I have only ever listened to the head phone mix through the monitors, always adjusting the levels of the incoming instrument to be balanced or slightly louder and asking the musician for feed back. So, it's really time I learnt to have two or more mixes going, mission for my next recording session.

Blogs - Black Holes of Time just like this one

It seems that by missing forum, I missed nothing of consequence as it consisted of two hours conversing on the subject of ....BLOGS So my thoughts on the things? Maybe they are a useful tool for spreading your message, promoting yourself or others, finding like minded people...the online blog provides a free, easy access platform to speak your mind, essentially becoming a virtual soapbox. I am sure there are a slim number of instances where this freedom to speak and distribute your thoughts amongst the growing number of people suffering blogitis (an overwhelming compulsion to vent your woes/joys or blabber your message freely). however, the most widespread use of the blog is meer self glorification. Most people use them as a kind of online, immensely public journal. Maybe, in a way, this appeals to people because it provides a easy, hit and miss platform to vent and seek counsel with your peers...maybe the perpetrators of these irrelevant online journals are meerly somewhat self obsessive (see the entire emo culture). Whatever, this overl;oad of personal information leads to a generation of people who know their friends better through reading their blogs and personal info than through conversation with them. It also lends itself the the growing practice of voyeurism in our society (ie the slew of reality tv shows bombarding our primetime telly). In a nutshell, I think that a 2 hour forum on blogs would probably have been a black hole of time just like the blog phenomenon it seeks to discuss.

Wk 2: In studio 2

NB, even with the alterations to the signal flow in Studio 2, this lecture overall, was not one to be sad about missing seeing as I used this studio last year in the diploma course (infernal crossover and repetition of information). They’ve gone and changed the whole way the signal moves through the studio two system. From what I can intuit the procedure for set up now goes something like…… Check the speakers are off → Mains Power on → Desk On → Sound card on → Speakers on → Patch Protools 1 and 2 out to Mixer 15 and 16 in (thusly finely rendering us some sort of dummy control on the mixing desk yee hah). I haven’t done the exersise, in fact, I don't even know what it was but, if I had done it, the procedure would have probably gone something like… Open Protools → create new session saved to temp hardrive with L R stereo set up for the I/O → create a mono track with recordable input coming from A1 → mic up a noise source to be put through the first patchbay input → record arm my track → press the record button → press play → presto noise replication

Wk 1: Some lecture about MIDI networking that I also missed

Based on the information available to me through the reading of my classmate’s blogs, I proceeded to attempt the tranmittal of MIDI data between two Mac lab Macs by doing the following…. Open MIDI keys Open Audio MIDI setup Click on MIDI devices, Network Ensure anyone can connect to you In the ‘directory box you should see some names (humemu003, humemu015, that sort of thing). Select one and press the ‘connect’ button I get a bit hazy at this point but, you tell it where the info is coming from and where it is going to and then, n theory, you should have a connection demonstratable in MIDI keys. Having missed the lecture itself I’m guessing I am meant to comment my thoughts on the virtues/drawbacks of this function…Sending MIDI data in general from point A to point B is the whole reason for MIDI existing. In terms of controlling miscellaneous pcs in the Mac lap it seems pretty superfluous save fro playing pranks. Or, if the latency was good then you could theoretically bring in your far superior Mactop with wireless and somehow use one of the Novations as a controller for you far superior software without having to unplug anything. Whoo

Wk 1: Audio something or what I wasn't here here it is

Demo production plan Band: The Ocean Uprising Type of recording: demo Time: endless Cost: Nothing Instruments: mics Drumkit: kick – b52 Snare – 2 * SM 57 above and below Toms – 3 * b56 Cymbals and hats – pencil mics Guitar: SM57 Bass: 414 and DI Vocals: Nuemann Session 1 – standard kit micing in live space, drum tracks laid down (guitarist playing scratch track in control room) Session 2 – bass, guitar respectively played in live space and picked up with a 414.SM57 Session 3 – guitar solos (SM 57), vocals, backing vocals in live space using Neumann and pop filter Session 4 – EQ kits with band, get a rough mix Session 5 – assess rough mix, refine, mix down Session 6 - master

On the surface, this appeared to be a forum about collaboration. Out of 6 speakers only 1 managed to tie in her shameless product plugging with any real advice…and anyway, I don’t think we were there to learn about collaboration at all, I think we just wanted to hear Mr Audiomulch speak his bit (and to witness awesome robot origami flowers).

Our Audio Mulch man was attempting to collaborate music and technology (not really such a radical idea really as instrument makers have been doing this since the first musical bows *footnote 1*). He wanted to create software that could augment sound in real time (IE a live performance orientated synthesizor)…the result…Audiomulch (a project which, incidentally, required collaborative efforts with 30 software engineers to get off the ground).

After the AudioMulch project, he became a collaborator in a much more ambitious music tech instrument design project….The ReacTable (apparently these won’t be
released for the mainstream any time soon because there is no market for them. PFFFFFFT!)

This instrument is a collaborative effort realised by people with a diverse range of skills. It is essentially a synthesizor but, every parametre is controlled by placing/removing and manipulating specialized objects on a big, flat, blue, round thing (I later found out that the ReacTable (probably) “sees” the objects courtesy of a scanner *footnote 2*). Even in it’s finalised form, used as a live performance instrument, the music produced by ReacTable benefits from team work.


1) David Moss – 2001 Victor Folk Festival
2) My mate Luc about 2 weeks ago

lisa wants a reactable (or, the blog we didn't need)

On the surface, this appeared to be a forum about collaboration. Out of 6 speakers only 1 managed to tie in her shameless product plugging with any real advice…and anyway, I don’t think we were there to learn about collaboration at all, I think we just wanted to hear Mr Audiomulch speak his bit (and to witness awesome robot origami flowers). Our Audio Mulch man was attempting to collaborate music and technology (not really such a radical idea really as instrument makers have been doing this since the first musical bows). He wanted to create software that could augment sound in real time (IE a live performance orientated synthesizor)…the result…Audiomulch (a project which, incidentally, required collaborative efforts with 30 software engineers to get off the ground). After the AudioMulch project, he became a collaborator in a much more ambitious music tech instrument design project….The ReacTable (apparently these won’t be released for the mainstream any time soon because there is no market for them. PFFFFFFT!) This instrument is a collaborative effort realised by people with a diverse range of skills. It is essentially a synthesizor but, every parametre is controlled by placing/removing and manipulating specialized objects on a big, flat, blue, round thing (I later found out that the ReacTable (probably) “sees” the objects courtesy of a scanner ). Even in it’s finalised form, used as a live performance instrument, the music produced by ReacTable benefits from team work.