My grandfather passed away this week in his sleep. I will always remember his sense of humor, his hearty laugh, his interest in people, his energy and his great love for his family.
Archive for June, 2006 Page 2 of 2
We Feel Fine is, according to the web site, “an exploration of human emotion, in six movements.” The creators, Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, have written software which trolls the blogosphere and gathers statistics about how people are feeling. More precisely, it scans blog posts for occurences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling” and catalogs the results. At first it just looks like a random jumble of swirling circles (this mode is called “madness”), but it draws you in the more you explore. Click on murmers, and it starts showing random messages about how people are feeling, along with their locations and the time they wrote it. Eg. “i feel the sparks of a crush” or “i feel it is altogether more likely to happen than my other life ambitions.” Other modes tally up the feelings in interesting ways. Neat stuff. I’m a sucker for this kind of purposeless data mining of the ‘net.
Via Cool Hunting
I’m trying something new starting with this week’s podcast. I’m going to see if this blog can coax me into writing more music on a regular basis. Each week I’ll be working on a sketch and posting whatever I’ve got on Sunday nights. The plan is to rotate sketches so on Monday I start working on a different one (either a new one, or once I have a few in the hopper, back to a previous one). I’ve jotted down some ideas for future sketches so I have a bit of a roadmap for the next few weeks. The idea is to create a deadline for myself, which I will keep to for fear of disappointing my (as of yet imaginary) audience. Keep in mind that although I’m posting this publicly, if it says Sketch
in the title of the post, it’s a very rough draft and a lot will probably change in the final version.
This week’s sketch is tentatively titled Chamber Guitar
for no good reason other than all the sounds will be produced by the various stringed instruments laying around the house (I thought there’d be a play on the word chamber too, but so far it just makes it sound fancier than it is). I’m playing with a method I’ve used with some success in the past, which is to simply sit down and imagine the piece before I start playing, and just write a verbal description of what’s in my head. Here’s my description for this piece:
Chamber Guitar Verbal Description
Lush, ethereal wash in background with slow but directed harmonic motion. Low, dull thud begins defining pulse (like a kick drum). Metallic scraping sounds, with some reversed flitter over the top, moving across the stereo field. A chorus of hammer-ons, in twos and threes, at first randomly distributed in space and time lock into a hocketing pattern, eventually defining a theme. These recede into harmonics, played by various guitars, which give way to a massive, sustained sound, with a slow attack and some distortion (mixed with reversed recording?), playing a melismatic, sometimes pitch-bending, melody based on the theme earlier expressed by the hammer-ons.
A bass line forms below. A texture of percussion fades in to join the thuds, with interesting eq (suggest snippets of these at the beginning). The massive sustained sound thins out and the hammer-ons return, this time building into hocketing chords. The percussive texture thins and the scraping metallic stuff comes back in. Focus again on the ethereal wash and the thud, which have been transformed by the previous interjections. Encore of the big sound and all the percussion to finale.
Notes:
- Hammer-ons may be also combined with single staccato plucks.
- Start the piece rising. Middle is combined rising and falling. End is falling only… maybe.
- They may chain together to form melodic fragments (but no single track has the whole fragment).
- They may overlap to form momentary chords, which are related to the ethereal chordal texture.
- They slip in and out of being easily recognizable as guitars.
- Bass line is pitched down guitars.
- The ethereal wash is slowly, gradually evolving throughout the entire piece, but always recognizable.
This week I’ve sketched out some of the first paragraph. It’s a lot more jazz fusion / prog rock that I was going for, but there you have it. I imagined more of a glitchy electronica texture with the big electric guitar sound more like a guitar solo in a Radiohead song whose title escapes me at the moment. Well, on to next week…
Here is a map and a report of the current situation in Indonesia. According to the report, between 4,500 - 5,400 people have perished (a more recent estimate put it at over 6,000) and the homeless population could be as much as 200,000 (a more recent report estimates as many as 600,000 people have been displaced). 9 out of 12 water treatment plants are down. This kind of devastation is just unfathomable to me.
This article, titled Smoke and Mirrors: Deficiencies in Disaster Funding (written in February, 2005, in the wake of the 2004 tsunami) talks of a need to change the way the world deals with disaster relief. They propose a new system: 1. UN relief agencies should be funded by member countries rather than having to appeal for donations after a disaster has struck. 2. Pledges for financial relief should be tracked to make sure they don’t fade once disasters recede from the headlines (and that they are not merely reallocations of existing relief funds pledged to other regions, or loans disguised as donations, or attached with unreasonable strings). 3. Vulnerability to disaster should be taken into account in economic development strategies (I assume they are referring to developing nations, but Katrina has taught us that the distance between the first world and the third is not as great as we might think, in the arena of disaster preparedness). They claim that in southern countries, where the economic cost of disaster are lower than in the north, but human costs are higher, the emphasis is not placed on examining the risk of disaster and protecting against its effects on infrastructure.
Until these plans are put in place, appeals for donations are necessary. Here are some links to well-known organizations’ donation forms:
Via ResourceShelf
