The Light of Day

Sound atoms

So, according to Wunderground, March will in fact be going out like a lamb. It’s just waiting until the last minute to put its lamb suit on. And if I’m waiting until the last minute to have my car inspected (we have to do this once a year in New York state), then it would be hypocritical for me to demand anything else.

I’m working out an idea for a new coding project. It’s not in code language yet. It’s not even in pseudo-code. It’s in English, but not “blogosphere friendly English”, so I’m not going to alienate all y’all by posting said brainstorm here. Essentially it’s a kind of analysis and resynthesis for creatively simulating and manipulating voice-like sounds, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while now. I’m basing it around something I call “sound atoms”.

Why on earth we as humans feel the need to simulate voices, when we actually have voices, I couldn’t tell ya. But it should be interesting.

Does that make me crazy? Possibly.

“Crazy”, when used to describe someone’s mental state, is not a nice or modern term. But that aside, what does it mean? Can I say I was leaning farther that way than usual during a period roughly between 1990 and 1992? That’s what I tend to do, though I try to frame it with more compassionate words like “going through a rough time”. But what would it actually mean?

I know there are experts on psychology who discuss this in further depth than I’m able to, but let me toss out some definitions off the top of my head.

It would seem that I couldn’t claim insanity outright, because I’ve always had a well-developed sense of logic and reason. I didn’t take a course in statistics and probability, but I get the gist. (I’m not “crazy” enough to buy lottery tickets.) I know how to be critical of my own thoughts.

However, there are people with highly developed logical constructs of their own who manage to come up with terrifying conclusions, and can explain in elaborate detail why the muppets are communicating to them through controlled cloud formations that the FBI is reading their thoughts through stool samples collected at public bathrooms (unless they drink enough vinegar to scramble the data).

So this means “a sense of logic” isn’t good enough; we now have to distinguish between good logic and “crazy” logic. Each time I think of a way to differentiate between the two, I find myself coming up with notable exceptions. For example, favoring a majority viewpoint over a fringe belief, in which case we’d be discrediting the likes of Galileo and other pioneers.

Then I suppose I could try another defining factor: happiness (or lack thereof). If you’re happy, and at peace, can you technically be crazy? Even if you have beliefs which turn out not to be true, or logic with some holes in it? And it’s often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, which is what a lot of unhappy people do.

How about a total inability to communicate? If a person refuses to truly listen to anything you try to explain to them, and continues to repeat and reinforce a viewpoint that you’ve already explained away, you’re more likely to chalk them up as “not well” than if they said, “that’s an interesting point. I’ll have to think about that”.

Or how about lack of humor — inability to laugh from the belly, or to acknowledge absurdity? Or never asking questions, only ever making statements, as if you are The One with the knowledge? Or placing a high priority on some obsession of yours that ultimately has little effect on anyone, while disregarding the things that really matter?

Maybe insanity is one of those concepts that you can’t define by any one thing, but… well, think of an object with three elastic strings attached to it, and three people standing around it in a circle, suspending the object above the ground by each holding their own string taut in one direction. No one person is dictating the position of the object. If any one person moves from side to side, or increases or decreases his tension, the object will move, but it’s still dependent on all three people. Maybe sanity is similarly the sum result of several forces/factors pulling in a variety of directions.

A bleak moment before the creative storm (December 1990).

The way I felt (and feel) about music I was working on between 1990 and 1992 is mixed. Not just the usual “mixed”, but mixed with extremes at both ends. The extreme positive about it is that I had the will, ambition, focus, and commitment to get serious, take the wheel, liberate my muse from a dependence on bandmates, and try to ascend from “demo” level to “album” level on a limited budget without anyone’s help. I admire the Keith of that time for that. But I ache for how serious and important this was to him, to the point where he couldn’t just go off and have a bit of fun between sessions. It was like a religious mission. Hell, it was a religious mission. It was too important.

This is the backing track from Dear Diary (1991/92), without vocals. I wish I could listen to this and just think “that’s pretty neat, in a slightly embarrassingly dated way”, but there are too many emotional associations.

(Incidentally, this is when I was “born” as a guitarist. I wasn’t comfortable with it yet — improvising was clearly out of the question, although I tried once or twice — and I had to hunch over the guitar and stare closely at the frets to get the notes right.)

One thing I notice about people who exhibit various character flaws is that they’re often trying to compensate for something they perceive to be the exact opposite. My determination to rigidly control every aspect of the Open The Window album was a reaction to my feeling a greater loss of control over my life… and to a lesser extent, an uphill fight against the maddeningly convoluted digital ping-ponging technique I imposed on myself, for the wrong reasons. Any time I go back to one of these mixes it brings back the overwhelm and the futility. (Lesson: what you put in is what you get out.)

That said, it was shortly after the millionth re-EQ’ing of these nine overworked songs that I began the slow and clunky journey towards getting over myself (somewhat, that is… so, okay, it’s a never ending journey, and I’m fine with that)… so, it all ends with a light at the end of the tunnel.

Apparently, though, I felt like I had to stay in the tunnel until it was done.

What did we learn today, kids?

What if I wrote a blog post every single time I did a recording session? It would be sort of like a “what I learned today” thing, like at the end of any given episode of Fat Albert or Davey and Goliath.

I didn’t really intend to replace the bass and drums on every single song in my rock opera, but when you’re doing an inventory on the state of your remixes, and the bass guitar is within arm’s reach and already plugged into the board, and hey, the camera is right behind you so you might as well turn that on too… you know how it goes.

So, hmm… what did I “learn” from this one? What was the “moral”?

The lesson is: always give yourself a “thumbs up” of encouragement just prior to a take!

One thing I like about these Through Forbidden Black Doors session videos is that they make the songs actually look playable. By humans. Somehow, having originally done so much on a sequencer, I’d probably given myself and everyone else the opposite impression.

I don’t intend for the Chamberlain (Mellotron) sample to sound like a real flute player, but it would probably be a good idea to ride its volume a little and add a touch of delay to give it a more “trippy hippie fantasy” quality. Maybe also scrunch a few of its more metronomic sounding notes closer together, to loosen the overall rhythm and open some “breath spaces” between phrases.

The John Lennon t-shirt was a thoughtful gift from my friend’s mother, but somehow I get the feeling it was designed by someone who spends more time listening to Motorhead.

Happy Easter!

Anatomy of a family, through the lens of song

In innocenter times, while my mom, dad, sister and I were on one of our summer road trips, we jointly composed “Bubbles” as a game to pass the time:

Bubbles are the
Wonderfullest
Because they’re (or “they are”)
Round and poppable
But my friend
Henry says
He hates them
Each day

The idea (I don’t know whose it was) was that one person would sing three words, then the next person would add three more words, and so on. Because I have such a clear memory of how things went down, I can now distill its components to correlate them to our individual personalities:

Mom (Sandy): “Bubbles are the…”

Mom has always been the most innocent of the four of us. She never ever uses swear words of any caliber, let alone any nasty or cynical expressions, and she “just wants things to be nice”. Obviously she started this song with the intent to pay homage to something nice and happy.

Heather: “…wonderfullest. Because they’re…”

As we grow older, we lose our inclination to make up words like this. Well, some of us do. I remember that she thought her turn was done after contributing the “w” word, an easy error to make since it was the same number of syllables. But we had to coax two more words out of her. Later this warped into “because they are”, but I will insist all the way to my deathbed that it didn’t start out that way.

Me: “…round and poppable.”

Always a correct, literal, and scientific description from me. I mean, what else are bubbles? Wet, I suppose. Soapy, perhaps. But most importantly, what defines a bubble (and makes it more wonderful than anything else), is its roundness, and its capacity to be popped.

Dad (Fred): “But my friend,”

I don’t know what this says about my father, except perhaps “my friend” may have been the kind of thing that would be in a song he would hear on the radio. He could have initially meant it as “But, my friend,” — meaning we’re addressing the audience as “my friend” — but obviously we didn’t interpret it that way at the time. It’s not exactly bubble-specific, but that’s a good thing, because it opens the rest of us up to re-thinking the larger context of what we’re singing about.

Mom (Sandy): “Henry says, he…”

Who the hell is “Henry”? The only Henry we knew was Henry of “Henry and Amy” fame, who I’m thinking (but not sure) were grandchildren of one of my grandmother’s friends, and who Heather and I had to keep re-getting to know, because we only saw them once every two or three years. But I think this song is less about him, and more about “The EveryHenry” in all of us. Yes, I’m over-thinking this.

Heather: “…hates them, each…”

You could stereotype Heather as a child with a negative attitude — her first word was allegedly “no” — but to be fair, this line had to be something negative in order for the “but” to make sense. We just didn’t know how deep into negative territory she would go with it. At least it’s only Henry who is hating the bubbles. Really, that’s okay — we can’t all love them. Different strokes for different folks.

Me: “…day.”

Sure, I had credit for two more words, but the song was over (or was that the fun-ness of the game?). Besides, my father didn’t even get a second turn. Why should I be greedy?

Eye candy for the day

Low tech eye candy, that is: Tupperware instruments…

Originally spotted on Homemade Noize.

Happy Friday!

Little drum machine mixing tip

I don’t know that this will be useful to anyone, but if you’re remixing an old song where you used a drum machine (or electronic drums), and tried to make it sound like real drums… and it has this stupidly wide stereo spread… you could of course move the left and right inward, so it’s not so wide, but let’s say you actually want to keep the “wideness”, but less of the annoying fakeness as tom toms bounce around unrealistically across your ears… make a copy of the track, swap the left and right, delay it by about 40 to 50 ms, and mix it in quietly. The delay will not only soften the unrealistically perfect transients (attacks) a little, but also create more of an open “two microphone” sound, by giving something to the opposite ear, and filling a void that would have no business being there in the real world.

Stuff that’s not so great (quick thought)

I don’t think of myself as having “good stuff” and “bad stuff” — I think of myself as having “good stuff” and “experimental stuff”. The good stuff is, well, good, and that’s wonderful. Calling the other stuff “experimental”… I don’t mean to get all pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, or imply that it’s all on the cutting edge and you’re just too bourgeois to understand it… but simply to have the attitude that it’s potentially good, or at least potentially interesting, or at least potentially good or interesting in some context down the road.

And it’s stuff that I can play around with, without worrying that I’d be ruining something.

Yes, I do have a wastebasket. But I think our culture is disposable enough already.

“Everything tech”: continuing thoughts

I was asked by a faithful reader (where would I be without my faithful reader?) to elaborate on my “low tech/hi tech/everything tech” train of thought. Which I was going to do anyway, but it’s good that the peasants have voted in favor of the king’s will, because I just haven’t been in the mood to behead you folks lately. I know, I know, you’re saying “King Keith has lost his spunk”. Hey, we all grow older. It’s time to move on, man. Besides, this is the age of psychological cruelty. Either catch the wave, or leave your board home, brah.

When I think of an idea that has both specific and general implications, I tend to ramble at length about the general, without actually explaining what it is I’m thinking about in the first place. The general is very important to me, because I want you to run with it — I want you to find your own specific implementations of the general, not necessarily use mine (unless of course you really want to copy me). But if I don’t tell you my specific idea, then I’m not giving you a concrete illustration of the general idea, which would probably help to loosen up your tangled synapses. One little idea which, by itself, any idiot could think of — but which comes with a thousand “potential ideas” attached to it, if you zoom out and ask why it was interesting.

After all this build-up, it will sound really stupid and primitive. But that’s what low tech is, on the surface. Yet, for all its backwardness, it’s something that could not have been done well or cheaply more than about ten years ago. So, yes, it involves the computer. But it requires letting go of some basic assumptions about “what happens outside of the computer” versus “what happens inside the computer”.

After the bazillionth combination of keywords, I found a decent illustration of rear projection on images.google.com. I don’t mean as a type of home entertainment device — those turn up in vast quantity — I mean as an ancient technique for superimposing actors against a fake, moving background, before the advent of chroma keying. The accompanying text for this picture referred to “one of the worst ’street traffic’ rear projection shots I’ve ever seen”, while the image file itself was contradictorily called “sybluescreen.jpg” — just to be sure, had this been blue screened, rather than actually projected behind the car, the horizontal lines behind the windshield wouldn’t appear bent by the glass.

Now, this effect doesn’t exactly look real, as I’m sure you’ve already seen for yourself while watching various old-timey movies. But as someone with an interest in the surreal and experimental, particularly things with a “cartoon-y” or “puppet-y” tinge or texture, it’s not a technique I would run screaming from.

Today, the sane way to composite video elements — live action with live action, live action with animation, animation with animation — is to use computer software to merge your layers together. You wouldn’t want to actually use a first movie playing on your LCD monitor as a background, while taking a second movie of yourself manipulating little objects in front of it… yes, physically in front of your monitor… and then perhaps use the resulting movie as a new background, onto which you can add more foreground objects the same way… repeat ad infinitum…

…or WOULD you??

You wouldn’t achieve the same kind of effect. Not even anything close to it. You’d achieve a very different effect, which would be the whole point. And if you did this repeatedly for a while, you’d start to develop a vocabulary of techniques specific to the approach. You would become an expert at a previously non-existent art form.

Like I said, this is just one little example of hi/low tech mix and match.

Come up with your own!