Crystalized Intelligence

Unsurprisingly, the need to catch up on my schoolwork following the terminal diagnosis of my long-suffering Toshiba Portege has left me with little fun time.  Additional cycles have been commandeered by the learning curve inherent in two new OSs (Mac OSX and iOS).  Of course, they are living up to their reputation for being intuitive, but I suspect they would be intuitiver if it were not for all the years I spent forcing my intuition into the mold that Microsoft engineers insisted it should fit.  Nonetheless, there have been a few moments here and there during which I have been able to futz around with my current project.

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the first things I needed to do following the port to Mac was to come up with an alternative to ZynAddSubFX, an extraordinary VST plugin that I was using for several key voices.  With some searching, I was able to find another free softsynth compatible with my DAW that, although it is qualitatively a different beast from ZynAddSubFX, it was nonetheless designed to be a fairly sophisticated sound generator:  it's called Crystal.  The good news is that it is capable of some pretty impressive noises and there is an iOS version too, so I can take it with me and play with it away from my desktop.  Unfortunately, however, all of the presets, while being very creative and interesting, are out of character for what I've been working on.  Further, its interface is not exactly intuitive (not that ZynAddSubFX is), so it's taken some time for me to get a sense of which end to blow in. 

Despite my student status, I am of an age at which learning curves present steeper slopes than they once did and between OSX, iOS, and Crystal (not to mention iWorks and a handful of other partially and completely new friends), I feel like I've done more than my share of climbing of late.  That said, I have had a few minutes here and there to mess around with the project and I feel like I'm pretty close to where I left off when the Toshiba started showing signs of byting the dust.  The semester will be over in a week or so (whether I'm ready for it to end or not) so I hope to have some real playtime in early- to mid-May and to get this long overdue project polished and posted. 

...and there was much rejoicing

After a long, impatient week, the new iMac arrived this morning.  I promised myself that I would get everything else set up on it before seeing how my DAW would run, but by 8pm I still had not finished installing and setting up everything I needed for an actual productive life (for example, EndNote and Quicken are still in the queue).  I felt my eyes crossing at all the details yet to be handled and concluded I needed to do something nice for myself, so I decided to give the DAW a whirl. 

Contrary to my earlier fears, I had run across some discussions online that indicated that Tracktion 3 should run fine on multi-core Intel processors, CPUs that were not what it was originally built for.  So I began to entertain some hope -- even some excitement -- that I might not lose all the work I'd put into this new endeavor that was enabled specifically by the ridiculously marked-down copies of Tracktion 3 made available following its discontinuance.  Replacing it with something equivalent would run several hundred dollars.  

The good news is that -- after some initial crashes and accompanying panic -- an updated version of Tracktion seems to be stable on the Mac quad-core:  yay!  The bad news is that one of my principal softsynth plug-ins, ZynAddSubFX, is currently only available for Windows and Linux (boo!).  There apparently was a MacOS port some years ago, but the link is dead (apparently long since).  As a consequence, I will need to rebuild in a new softsynth the voices now missing from my arrangements, something I am as yet unskilled in.  But, it will be a good learning experience!

Of course, after a week without a computer, I am terribly behind in my academic work:  dissertation (of course), class paper (last one ever!), a couple of presentations (not the least of which is for my daughter's school), and a menagerie of minutia.  So, my seemingly Sisyphean music project is going to roll further back down the hill, but at least it looks like it won't disappear. 

Decomputerized

One problem with computer music is that it requires a computer.  Actually, this isn't an inherent problem, unless there is a problem inherent in the computer on which the music is supposed to be being made.  In my case, such a problem has developed:  my computer is terminally ill.  Being one who believes in allowing the dying to pass honorably, I am taking steps to relieve my old colleague of its duties before senility sets in by ordering a replacement.  However, there has been a sea change in computing technology in the time since we began working together nearly five years ago and the new young hot-shot on its way has a multi-core architecture.  Although the software with which I have been working is designed to be cross-platform (my old computer is a PC and the new one will be a Mac), it was written during the now seemingly distant single-core era and rumor has it that it does not get on well with the dual- and quad-core designs of today's machines.  Thus, it is up in the air whether or not my late-blooming but still fledgling passion for music synthesis -- and the reason for this blog -- will be curtailed before it even gets a fair start. 

This blog is turning into more of an "Excuse of the Week" than the homage to ADSR that I had hoped.  Still, to succeed, one must first fail many times.  Onward, into a brave new iWorld!

Lost in Thought (-ish)

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary (my favorite source for all things wordy), "reverie" has two meanings:  a daydream or the condition of being lost in thought.  Of late, I have definitely not been daydreaming.  After finishing the applications for phase II of the internship match process early this month, I then had several obligations arise simultaneously, namely doing a series of short pieces for the soundtrack of my daughter's stop-motion animation project (very fun), grading a stack of undergraduate case conceptualizations (double-plus unfun), working on a paper presentation (fun, but recently canceled), and reformulating my dissertation (more fun than it sounds).  All of these projects demanded a fair amount of time- and brain-cycles, so perhaps "lost in thought" is closer to where I've been. 

They also preempted the work I was doing on the next piece I want to post.  It's something I've been working on since January and, although it's an arrangement rather than an original composition, it has been a lot of fun, not least because it's taking a shape that is dramatically different from what I had in mind when I started it.  The pleasures has been in taking the risk of following a timbral thread that started accidentally -- and which seems to be working.  You all will be the judges of whether that is actually the case, but conducting the experiment has been interesting in the interim.  I hope to have the outcome of my reverie up here in the next few weeks.

In Three II

Okay, so the whole raison d'être of this site is to serve as a public repository of some of my creative output. It's taken a while to get the software necessary to upload this working, but, at last, I seem to have figured it out (and not, of course, without some key assistance from my daughter).

This is something I more or less tossed off in a fit of experimentation last Christmas when I couldn't sleep (no, I wasn't waiting for Santa). To pass the insomnia productively, I decided to spend some time learning to use a new open-source digital audio workstation I had run across (Linux Multimedia Studio) and this was the result.  Later, when I upgraded to another DAW (Tracktion 3), I was able to rebuild the piece essentially identically because both LMMS and Tracktion 3 were compatible with the plug-in softsynth in which the voices had been built (ZynAddSubFX) and the MIDI was pretty basic.  For the record, the voices are not my creations, although I did tweak some; Tracktion 3 also allowed me to play with some other parameters and to polish it up a bit.  In the end, I was pleased with the result and so it's the first piece I'm sharing here.  Stravinsky it ain't -- nor even Roger Waters, whose idea (an old favorite from "Meddle") was the inspirational germ -- so judge it gently, but I hope you enjoy it.

I have several other pieces in the pipeline, although, with the semester end approaching, it seems likely that their completion will be slow in coming.

Treading Water

As promised, I have some music to post here, but I have been unable to do so successfully, so far.  It took me a while to figure out that you can't post .mp3 files as such, but that you have to convert them to video.  Having gotten that far, I had some difficulty getting the video capture software that I found to work.  I got that running tonight, but now the trouble is getting the video to load; Blogger isn't doing what I understand it is supposed to do.  I have a request for help posted on the appropriate help forum (for whatever that's worth).

So, my apologies.  I know it's not like there are vast crowds out there waiting to hear my stuff, but still, I was hoping this would be a simpler process.  With luck, I'll soon be able to get my first piece, called "In Three II" (which is actually in 12) posted for all the world to hear (or not...).

Why Crows? Why Circling?

First, I have always thought crows were cool.  They hold some mystery for me: I remember when I was a little kid watching seemingly endless flocks of crows around sunset flying in long clouds coming from where I couldn't see and going to where I couldn't guess.  They do this where I live now, too, and it seems just as mysterious, even though I know where their rookery is.  They also have the mystique that comes with being frequent figures in myth and legend; I especially love the mercurial trickster crow characters that populate some Native American tales of the Southwest.  In truth, crows are smart, raucous, a fascinating balance of individualistic and collectivistic, and, I think, beautiful birds.  I love their caws and the many distinctive calls they have; they are sophisticated social animals.  They are intelligent, highly adaptive tool-users and elegant and practical fliers. 

Crows are opportunistic omnivores; they hunt, forage and scavenge.  At some point in my past an image came to my mind of crows circling in the air above something on the ground.  This image was meaningful to me: if I, as a terrestrial animal, should notice a handful of crows circling in the air, I know these opportunists have found something of interest to them, even if I don't know what it is.  The crows see what I cannot, yet, by their presence, I am alerted to the existence of something which would otherwise have remained outside my awareness; they are pointers, flags, dreams, catchers-of-attention in the corner of my eye.  In this way, circling crows represent the things in my life that point me to what I might have missed: unexpected opportunities to learn, to grow, to nourish myself. 

Like any metaphor, this one is imperfect, but it is very personal, so its flaws don't really matter to me.  I am using this image here because it communicates something of who I am and where my values lay.