lonely fire

Just wanted to touch base with a somewhat related post to the Soundseer post I made last summer. Today two articles came to my attention related to the visual aspect/properties of sound. First, by using modern technologies, sound engineers and researchers have managed to “play” a phonautograph of a person singing made in 1860, as the NYTimes and LATimes report. This is significant, because this “recording” predates Edison’s work with wax cylinders by nearly 30 years. I say “recording” because phonautographs were never intended to be heard- they were merely supposed to be a visualization of a voice or sound, an aural autograph or signature, if you will. Here’s a rendition of the device:

Not surprisingly, the sound that the audio historians managed to elicit from the recording is not impressive by today’s sound quality standards (read this article about overcompression in CD’s/mainstream recordings, or this blog post for more info about the volume wars in the music industry). Nonetheless, the fact that this aural document exists, and may be the first such document created by humans, is quite significant. The latest example of this significance being the music software/digital audio workstation Melodyne, which updates the 19th century concept of sound visualization with 21st century perspective/technological advancements.

If you watch the Melodyne video on the Celemony homepage, you’ll find out what advancements I’m referring to- namely, the ability to pick out the different notes that occupy a static waveform/chunk of polyphonous recorded sound, and being able to manipulate each note however you like- change pitch, rhythm, etc. Pretty neat, huh?

Who knows what kind of implications this will have for composition of music. No doubt, professional recording engineers have been using fancy recording technology (esp MIDI) to polish thousands of turds for years now; but software like this may even preclude the need for studio musicians. I don’t know, its a double-edged sword- the implications of this kind of technology (if it becomes widespread), used in conjunction with MIDI instruments, etc, seem to remove the necessity of people playing instruments at all. At least in my most simplistic and backwards of minds. But on the other hand, the compositional possibilities this software enables are kind of endless, and utterly fascinating. I’d like to get my hands on it someday, that’s for sure.

Hey all-

Long time, no type, eh? Well, I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things with this here blog. What better way to do so than by sharing a mix of music I made, yes? If you want more info on how Muxtape works, you can check out Schleep’s blog post (and mix); though get in soon, because as this article indicates, there may not be a substantial legal footing for sites like Muxtape and Mixwit to stick around…. (which kind of doesn’t surprise me, even if you’re not able to download songs from either of these sites…) Seems like Mixwit may be the winner of the two, as that news article explains, since it doesn’t require users to upload songs from their hard disks to their servers, but instead takes advantage of an mp3 search engine to find songs that are already out there on the internet to pull from to create your mix; though, of course, this means that the ultra-rare Wicked Sceptre b-side that you need to make your mix perfect may not be so readily available with such a set-up. (CAUTION- Wicked Sceptre link is NSFW).

All this talk of mixtapes brings two things to mind: the book Mix Tape that was compiled by Thurston Moore a few years ago (more info on it here and here), and the short-lived Gentleman’s Dining Club of Southwestern Pennsylvania (a mixtape & supper club some folks put together), which I managed to wrangle my way into, and made some pretty outlandish tape “cases” for- including some weird box for Q and a crucifix for Rick Gribenas; a creative streak that led me to make an epic 4-tape, 8-sided, travel photograph-hot glue-gunned, hinged wooden triangle contraption for someone I had feelings for at the time.

While Muxtape, et al, is a pretty amazing idea/design, infinitely fascinating in the possibilities of sharing and discovering, you still miss that human element that goes into writing out the setlist, choosing a photo or making a collage (or carved, painted wooden triangles) to accompany the music; just that lack of personalization that the giver goes into great detail for the receiver. But, if you’re sharing the music with the whole internet anyway, how personal can you really get? Hm?

Anywho, more posts soon, I promise

Having recently moved back in, here’s some of things I found whilst poking around in the basement:

My collection of various Grateful Dead memorabilia from when I was 15/16 (the poster is for a show on some mountain in CA in the mid-80’s, billed as “the highest GD concert in the world”):

the concert ticket from when I saw them in 1995 on their last tour:

my lava lamp:

my authentic Bob Ross Beginner’s Painting Kit:

my guitar string “sculpture”:

and finally, the cream of the crop:

my 6th grade biography assignment, “Good Trips, Bad Trips: The Beginnings of Jimi Hendrix.”

note especially my explanation of the title from the Introduction. How I got away with this in Catholic school, I don’t know…

and last but not least, my grandfather’s WWI medals and plaque, dated 1918, from when he was a soldier in the Italian army:

impressive, yes, but note the signature at the bottom:

“B. Mussolini.” Whether it was handwritten or stamped, I’ll probably never know (unless I get it appraised or something). Nonetheless, how many families can claim to have the signature of an infamous 20th century dictator hanging on their wall, hm? I wonder what else I can scrape up…

So, I recently moved back into my parent’s house (at age 26 no less). Last summer before she got sick, my mom had started to rip down wallpaper in one of the bedrooms so that she could paint it. When she started taking down the wallpaper, she discovered pictures on the wall drawn by my dad’s sister some 55 years ago….. This room is the room that I just moved into, and I before I finished the paint job, I took picture’s of Aunt Louise’s work…. The majority of these pictures can be found on my Flickr page, but I thought I’d include a couple here:

First, Mama Conneaut herself:

some jive hep-cat lingo:

put on yr. dancin’ shoes:

senior prom anyone?

before:

after:

The American Library Association’s TechSource blog had this post a few weeks ago, about libraries in Arizona rearranging their physical locations and online public access catalogs to be more like the Barnes and Noble around the corner. The books, in both their physical locations and in their corresponding surrogate records in the OPAC, were categorized using BISAC codes (a standard the book industry uses), not the traditional Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress schemes. So far, the general public seems pretty happy with it… the only complaints coming from other librarians who have heard about the story (as this link to a news story from the blog post will tell you).

This trend has been a long time coming in public libraries, I know…. And I do remember being at Powell’s Books two years ago on vacation, walking around, browsing, and feeling constantly engaged and interested in every section, and wondering “how come libraries don’t look like this??” Of course, the reason is Dewey and LCSH can offer a much more in-depth results in doing serious research (though I’ve definitely fell victim more than once to the “onesie syndrome” Schneider mentions in the blog), but, as the quote from Jessamyn West from the news story above notes, most people aren’t looking to do serious research, but rather just get a general idea of what something is about. If this trend in Arizona is indicative of where public libraries are headed, I’m not really opposed- if it gets more people in the library, and more comfortable finding books on their own, then so be it. I think this quote from blogger Michael Casey in the news story hits the nail on the head for me:

“Librarians like to think that we’re indispensable,” he said. “While I think that is true to a point, I don’t think we should continue to propagate the idea that we’re indispensable by keeping a complicated cataloging system.”

So, during the times that I’ve been able to travel in the past few years, I’ve always made a point to do something outdoorsy and camper-like; be it bummin around Arches, drinking beers on the Craters of the Moon, sleeping under the stars in Spearfish, hiking around Rainier, or chillin with ponies at Assateague, etc. But I hardly ever manage to do these types of things around Pittsburgh…..

So I’ve been planning this massive post with info on all the local hiking trails just outside of town, to kind of spur along my own intentions of seeing many of these places for myself… And whilst doing some internetting for good sites, lo and behold, at the beginning of June, our good friends at the Carnegie Library already went ahead and compiled a comprehensive list of hiking trails in Western PA…. So dig in! Who knows, maybe you’ll even run into Brangelina pettin the wild cthulu’s mane at Ohiopyle….

And one last note about summertime and tunes- gotta say, this time of year makes me want to listen to nothing but CCR and the Rolling Stones (Exile on Main St. in particular). When I was 13, Chronicle was one of the first albums I ever bought with my own money (on cassette no less!), so all the green & humidity of Pgh in the summer just gets me all nostalgic….

For the past 3 years, 11 months and two days, I have spent approx. 37.5 hours a week of my life here:

But no more! This Friday is my last day.  :)  In the picture there, you’ll notice my Hasler WJ250 Mail Metering Unit, fancy-pants touch screen ‘puter (viewing a certain infamous message board), and that brown box there left of center? That has someone’s ashes in it. I mail a couple of those out a week (long story).

Yeah,  I was planning on having some long, thoughtful essay on the nature of work and capitalism and yadda yadda yadda, but I’m just happy to be done and moving on with my life. You can read Working by Studs Terkel at your own leisure. I used to think there would never be a job that I could work that I would be satisfied with; but now that I’m a little older and have a better idea of how the world works in general, I feel that what I’m moving on to is the best possible choice I could ever make. I’m a much different person in many ways since I’ve started this job, and thats a good feeling.

Yeah, so if you’re in town, meet me at Dee’s in Regent Sq. for some taters and burrs! :) 

Stumbled upon this gem of a website last night, a source of reviews for psych and prog rock bands worldwide. It is especially worth noting the amount of info they have on one of their pages about Ya Ho Wa 13, the mothergod ur-root of hippie-commune-cult-worshipping-wack-job rock outfits for all eternity, as the following album sleeve and live photo will testify:

And King Fiery Jaguar Paw had yet another casually miraculous touchdown the other night:

sandy bull e pluribus unim electric blend

Xhol Caravan motherfuckers live side 1, first day (excerpt)

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band doc at the radar station sheriff of hong kong

Vladimir Ussachevsky Electronic and Acoustic Works 1957-1972 metamorphosis

Fire could you understand me jedan divian den

Juan de la Cruz band shake yr brains i wanna say yeah

Sir Lord Baltimore s/t hell hound

SRC s/t daystar

Kraftwerk 4 heavy metal kids

Adam Bohman & Roger Smith Reality Fandango the first question

Nels Cline/Chris Corsano/Carlos Giffoni Graduation side a, excerpt

Midnite Snake Shaving the Angel sacred mist

carlos santana/john mclaughlin love devotion surrender the life divine

Les Razilles Denudes high or die heatwave (excerpt)

Robbie Basho Venus In Cancer venus in cancer

gunter schickert Samtvogel kreigmaschinen, fahrt zer holle

So, anyone who’s recorded/edited music on a computer/digital audio workstation will be familiar with something like this:

Its just a visualization of the audio track you’ve recorded. I’ve always kinda wondered if the shape/outline of the audio given in DAWs was arbitrarily assigned, or agreed upon by some committee, etc. It turns out that it is (duh) a pretty accurate depiction of what sound really looks like (Mr. Obvious strikes again).

Manometric Flames and Phonodieks

Back in the 1860’s, predating Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, an instrument known as the Manometric Flame was used to visualize sound waves. In a nutshell, a manometer measures pressure; a flame manometer also measures pressure, with variances in the size of the flame it outputs (as a result of changes in the gas supply to the flame) indicating said pressure changes. If one of the walls of the gas chamber for the flame is a diaphragm of sorts, and vibrations of air, resulting from any acoustic instrument, act on that diaphragm in order to cause the pressure changes in the gas leading to the flame, the size of the flame will vary in kind. If you turn out all the lights, rotate a mirror in front of said flame, and take a picture of it, it’ll look like this:

Those particular examples are soundwaves of human speech, not sure what year its from.

The Phonodiek was developed a little later, in the early 20th century. The process is kinda complicated, but through sets of mirrors and lights, it allowed one to actually photograph soundwaves on film. The following examples came from a flute, clarinet, oboe and saxophone, respectively:

Follow this link for more info/better descriptions (and the sources of these pictures).

In the late 1920’s, when sound on film was developed, there were two different systems for it- variable density (basically an optical barcode) and variable area (similar to the DAW audio track above), which is still in use today, and is the template for the audio track that we see in DAWs these days

. How sound can be optically rendered onto film, and subsequently read off of it with light, totally fascinates me. Complete magic, if you ask me.

Here are some schematics of the optical sound recording process. Click on the pictures for a more in-depth explanations:

Here’s a link to a lil’ movie on the history of sound in film.

And did you know that Alexander Graham Bell used a human cadaver in his experiments for the phonautograph (a precursor to the telephone)? This article will tell you a little more about it.

And who can forget Greg Sage? Interesting tidbit about his pre-Wipers days cutting records, and studying the grooves therein. Warning- page loads with sound. Click.

So, while some people may be aware of this, not everyone is, so I might as well tell you about it… I have a special partnership with an ancient celestial soundwave being known only to me… When he is in communion with our recongnizable frequencies he prefers to be known by the title King Fiery Jaguar Paw. His mentorship over the past four years has provided with sound training (pun intended) in the esoteric arts of intergalactic hyper-synaptic wavebrain thoughtshare, conducted primarily through the forms and structures we here on planet earth understand as “music.” His guidance has been invaluable to me, as I navigate the spaces and times of universal expression and mythic apparition of form and purpose.  Some playlists from recent touchdowns include:

Artist    Album    TrackName  

Dr. John    gris gris    croker courtboullion 

OOIOO    green & gold     emeraldragonfly 

Shinichi Yuize    japanese koto    shinsencho bukyoku, pt 1     (shuttlecock) 

Seiichi Yamamoto    crown of fuzzy groove    mantral 

Ennio Morricone     Morricone High    astratto 1 

Baris Manco    prog is not a four letter word comp.    lambaya puf de   

Erkin Koray    1st album   askimiz bitecek 

Davey Graham     midnight man     the fakir 

John Berberian Ensemble    oud and the fuzz    oud and the fuzz   

Embryo    prog is not a four letter word comp.    music of today   

Herbie Mann    evolution of mann    turkish coffee 

Sweet and Honey     Live At Your Cosmic Mind   last cosmic people still dreaming 

Eyes and Arms of Smoke    birthing timbers     pt 1 

Tom Recchion    Chaotica     flying weather 

Terry Riley    persian surgery dervishes    pt 1- live april 18, 1971   

Sigur Ros    Von     hun joro  Panda Bear     Person Pitch    i’m not   

Parts & Labor    Mapmaker     long way down 

The Psychic
Paramount    Origins and Primitives Vol. 1 2    the perfect request

Artist       Album        TrackName

Ed Yazijan   [no value]   orange sky, black clouds 

 Masayuki Takayanagi    April is the Cruelest Month    we have existed 

 Picchio
del Pozzo   prog is not a four letter word comp    merta 

Stone Harbour   emerge    ride 

Georg Dueter    library record    pearls  Skip Spence   oar    little hands 

Remko Scha     machine guitars (live, kremlin, 1982)     sweep 

Grey Daturas/Yellow Swans    silver/gold    silver, track 2 

Ash Ra Tempel    schwingungen/seven up darkness-     flowers must die 

Cromagnon     orgasm     organic sundown 

 Cor Fuhler    Stengam    north south 

 The Psychic
Paramount    Origins & Primitives Vol. 1 2    dsinter blues recorder  Biota   Almost Never     burn daylight pt 2 

 Sun Ra     Heliocentric Worlds Vols. 1 & 2    of heavenly things 

John Cale    Stainless Gamelan     stainless steel gamelan 

Han Bennink     Tempo Comodo     brushes/air drumming  Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid    Tongues    the sun never sets 

The Los Angeles Free Music Society    The Lowest Form of Music    disc 6- foundation boo- slow piece #1

blah, blah, you get the picture.

Showtime: Thursdays, 10-midnight.

Showchannel: 88.3 FM on your radio dial, or www.wrct.org in your web browser. Program guide and various events calendars are also on the website.

And for now, I leave you with Bollywood Hippie Freakout:

(click on this link if the embedding didn’t work)