Category: Uncategorised

Recently, the world’s frist partial face transplant was performed in France. The recipient’s labrador had bitten off part of her face while she was unconscious. Apparently, this is normal for dogs. It tried to wake her up by pawing at her, and when she failed to respond, it started chewing on her. Who knows when the next meal is coming, better to eat the hand that used to feed you.

If you fall and hit your head and get knocked out, maybe your dog will be heroic like Lassie and run for help. Or maybe it will eat your face. How do you know ahead of time if your dog will try to save you or grab a snack? You don’t.
I haven’t seen Xena in weeks and weeks, but now I think of her a bit less fondly. She never was particularly affectionate. Oh, sure, she seemed to love me while I was awake. But if she nosed me in the morning and I didn’t wake up, would I become dog food? Possibly. Maybe when somebody else came home, she would run around excitedly with my head like sho normally does with a chew toy. It could happen. You don’t know.
Your pets look at you like you look at them. In case of emergency: emergency rations. Can that really be love?
Tags: Dogs, Celesteh

I submitted my UC Berkeley Application on Thursday. Yikes. I have no idea about one of my recc letters, so I de-listed it. My former advisor has also been very quiet about whether or not he sent anything, but I would be surprised if he did not. Why are the deadlines so close to final exams?

Friday morning, T blew through town again. We wondered around Montparnasse and did a teeny but of Xmas shopping. The next day, we hopped on a train for Bordeaux, which I’m sure you’re aware, is in the south west of France. We arrived and walked around town for a while, which was done up in beaucoup de holiday decorations. Lights were everywhere! We went to the Marché de Noël and wandered around some. It was very charming and stuffed full of food vendors. I purchased a hat, which I like. Then we wandered around looking for food.
It turns out that traditional food of Aquitaine is not entirely vegetarian friendly. I’ve never heard of so many different kinds of pork. We finally went to an “Italian” restaurant. It’s often interesting to see how one country does ethnic food from other countries. I don’t recall seeing emmental as an ingredient in Italy. I got gnocchi drenched in cream and cheese. It was good. Sort of a franco-italian hybrid.
The next morning we went to a café / coffee shop that I swear could have been plucked form Berkeley and dropped into Bordeaux. The cafés in the touristy part of Bordeaux have much more similarity to Berkeley’s “french” coffee shops than do the cafés of Paris. After drinking too much coffee, we went to look in the Cathedral and then went wine tasting.
The wine tasting was a bi-lingual tour, with most of the information being repeated in English after it was explained in French. The bus ride to the wineries was full of information about the history of Bordeaux and it’s wine trade. Bordeaux is the major city in the Aquitaine region. Elanor of Aquitaine was a woman in the 11th century who controlled a large portion of France. She was first married to the French king, but after he was out of the picture (died, probably), the land holdings reverted to her. She then married the king of England and Aquitaine became English property for the next few hundred years. Her son from her second marriage was Richard the Lionhearted, the good king who went on crusades and left somebody crappy to replace him, thus forcing Robin Hood to spring into action and forcibly redistribute wealth. His temporary replacement also signed the Magna Carta. Anyway, fast forward a few hundred years to the Hundred Years War. The French king, with the help of Joan of Arc, regained control of all of the continental holdings of the English. Bordeaux was banned from trading with England. Sine the English were nuts for Bordeaux’s wine and bought almost all of it, the people of the region were unhappy and went into revolt. The last battle of the Hundred Years war was fought near the city of Bordeaux. Talbot, then in his 70’s, was called out of retirement to help re-take Bordeaux. The English were completely defeated and the French king installed towers to track the coming and going of the people of Bordeaux and make sure they didn’t revert to their English ways.
The wine was good too.
For dinner, we managed to go to a traditional restaurant which had a few vegetarian options. Is there anything better than caramelized onions, cream and cheese baked together? No, there is not.
After dinner, we went back to the Marché de Noël with the goal of trying the Bière Chaud. That’s hot beer, a speciality of Alsace, which was for sale at the market. It was basically a spiced Christmas beer, served at the same temperature that mulled wine is served. It had a strong flavor of cloves and was drinkable, except for the bitter, awful aftertaste. It was as if they had used the bitterest, nastiest hops in the world. I shudder thinking of it now. Cola and T did not experience this aftertaste, which is strange. So I tried it again, but it was really there. Maybe I can taste some bitter hops oils that some other people can’t taste. Maybe this is why I hate IPA and other people like it. Weird. I cannot recommend the bière chaud and may even shudder if you mention it to me. The vin chaud, however, was another story. It goes really well with cotton candy, “barbe à papa.” (Literally, “daddy’s beard.”)
The next day, T left for Spain and Cola and I returned to Paris. I just now realized that Christmas is coming this Sunday. Oh my god, I haven’t purchased Cola a present yet! And I need to buy a tree and food and figure out what we’re going to eat! So much to do!
Tags: Bordeaux, Celesteh

If I never eat anything else with cheese, cream, milk and butter again. . . ..

Back from Bordeaux and going on a vegan fast. I’ll tell you about my trip after I finish having a coronary.
Tags: Paris, Celesteh

Now with expanded goal section!!

As an undergraduate, I went to Mills College to study computer science, but I quickly found myself gravitating to the Center for Contemporary Music. I studied electronic music with Maggi Payne, who taught synthesis techniques on a large Moog Modular Synthesizer. Its sound and musical possibilities captivated me, and I decided to double-major in music and computer science.
After graduation, I became immersed in Java and web programming and the dot com boom and I did not compose for a couple of years. I began creating tape music again in 2000, with an analog modular synthesizer. My method of creating music was to record interesting patches until I had enough of them for a piece, and then find an interesting way to mix them together. The compositional forms I used tended to be either intuitive or sonata form. After writing many such tape pieces, I branched out into acoustic instruments and focused on rhythm. In 2002, I organized a percussion quintet, for whom I wrote music.
That same year, I began volunteering for Other Minds, a New Music nonprofit in San Francisco. I was a driver for their festival and then I helped them catalog their tape archive and worked for them as a volunteer sound engineer. In 2003, I joined the board of directors.
Also in 2003, I composed a piece for a mechanized coin-operated toy piano nonette designed by Trimpin. The odd intonation of toy pianos got me interested in pitch and tuning. I studied Just Intonation techniques with composer Ellen Fullman and took on the Java Just Intonation Calculator project, for which I am now the lead programmer (see http://jjicalc.sf.net). My interest in tuning also led me to the fretless bass guitar, which I played in an improv art rock quartet. We had a few gigs in the spring and summer of 2003.
When I arrived at Wesleyan in the fall of 2003, I decided to focus on things that are not possible with my main instrument, the analog modular synthesizer. Taking advantage of being surrounded by performers, I created several compositions for acoustic instruments; I also played tuba in Anthony Braxton’s Ensemble. I worked with him: studying free improvisation and also helping him debug his SuperCollider patches.
My main focus, however, was studying SuperCollider with Ron Kuivila. I concentrated on tuning and on working with audio files using granular synthesis techniques. For source material, I generally used recordings of the voices of recognizable public political figures such as George Bush and various right wing pundits. Most of the pundits sound very angry, so I also include more meditative just intoned works interspersed with the politics. I’ve applied my homebrewed granular algorithms to process live audio input, as well.
At Wesleyan my music became more rigorously organized and algorithmic, and less intuitive. To some extent, this was because of the tools I was using, but I also began to feel that a purely intuitive approach had its shortcomings. I’ve continued to work on form and computer music techniques since receiving my degree. I thought a year abroad would contribute to my education in many ways: I was accepted into the program at CCMIX in Alfortville, France, in fall of 2005. I’m studying timbre, both how to manipulate it electronically, and how to make use of it within a form. I believe this will complement my interest in tuning.
Berkeley and CNMAT seem like the most obvious next steps in my path. As a long-time Bay Area resident, I’ve attended many CNMAT events that have affected my music. For instance, in 2002, I saw a concert where Professor Wessel improvised with Pauline Oliveros. He played granular synthesis algorithms where he processed sound from recordings released by Oliveros. That was the most convincing demonstration I had yet seen of granular synthesis and is what sparked my interest in that technique.
Of course, when I was a MAX programmer, I made frequent uses of objects developed by Berkeley, especially the multislider object, which was one of the closest things to a vector object available in MAX. Doing computer music means using tools developed at Berkeley. My primary music language now is SuperCollider 3, which uses OSC as a backbone for interprocess communication. This protocol was developed at Berkeley. In August 2004, I went to the OSC conference sponsored by CNMAT. One of the things discussed at this conference was the need for an authentication layer. The security problems inherent in SwingOSC seem to indicate that this is still an open problem. As a Java programmer, I’m both excited by SwingOSC and spooked by the huge security risks. Therefore, if admitted to Berkeley, one thing I would like to do is work on OSC authentication.
My primary goals are, of course, musical. I enjoy programming and technology, but I see it as a means to an end of creating interesting sounds. I love new ideas and I find that they tend to come from new tools. A new tool leads to a new way of thinking about sound, or vice versa. Being a part of a musical community also leads to new ideas, especially in a community such as Berkeley, where the goals are to create new things. I hope that being at Berkeley will take my music in new and unpredictable directions.
After graduation, I hope to teach or even become a professor. While I was a TA at Wesleyan, I discovered that I like teaching. Also, there are a lot of benefits for composers who are attached to universities, like access to performers and facilities and being part of a musical community. By teaching, I would be able to share my knowledge and expand the userbase for my favorite tools. There is no better path to becoming a professor than a PhD from UC.
Berkeley is my first choice for schools because of its excellent reputation and because it is a leader in developing computer music technologies. With my background as a computer programmer, I hope to be able to help develop the next pieces of audio software and to use them to create art. Berkeley is ideally situated for me both in terms of educational philosophy and physical location. While there, I would be able to continue all of my interests: composing, performing, improvising and programming, and I would be returning to the Bay Area: my home and a place where I have many musical contacts.

The added new paragraphs are as rough as ring-modulated square waves . . . Or ten cent off tones . . .. Ahem. Going to submit this before midnight tonight Pacific Time.

Tags: UC, Celesteh

Well, it’s near my house and I’m kind of homesick and plus they have a dental plan and I don’t think an essay about being kind of homesick and not having my teeth cleaned for the last 6 years (ew) is really what they’re looking for.

However, since I’ve lived near Berkeley for so long, I’ve had some musical encounters with them. For instance, in 2002, I went to see Pauline Oliveros improvise at CNMAT with David Wessel. She played the accordion. He played that thing he has. It might be a Marimba Lumina. Some Don Buchla – built digital instrument controlling a granular synthesis patch that Professor Wessel created. His patch was playing grains from CDs released by Oliveros. I think he was using a cloud algorithm. The sounds were droney and their original beginning and ends were lost, but the source material, chanting, for example, was still somewhat evident. It created a lush background of sonorous sounds which Oliveros played accordion over. I had heard of granular synthesis before then and had even used a program called GrainWave which used it to create sounds, but I had never used it to process pre-existing sounds.
It was the most convincing demonstration for this (very hot at the time) technique. I bought a book that covered algorithms, but implementing them in MAX/MSP was a major pain in the ass, so I didn’t get around to it until I learned SuperCollider at Wesleyan.
Speaking of MAX/MSP, berkeley publishes a HUGE collection of MAX objects. When I was trying to do list operations in MAX (oh what a pain in the ass) I used Berkeley’s multislider object to hold values for me. It was hackoriffic. Berkeley is the place to look for MAX objects.
and, of course, last summer, I went to the OSC conference there and took copious notes. the keynote speaker got me all gung-ho about RSS and RDF-based operating systems and gmail-like storage and sorting systems for data. (The db-based Mac OS XI is coming… and not soon enough!)
OSC is a transport protocol so isn’t really exciting in and of itself. However, it’s an integral part of SuperCollider. At the conference, they discussed adding pieces to the specification. One of the tings they talked about adding was an authentification layer. Right now, there is none. so SuperCollider gives you wide open access to a high-priority thread running on your machine. Something called SwingOSC just came out. It adds java graphic libraries and the like to SuperCollider applications. I haven’t gotten a chance to play with it yet, but one of the things spooking me about it is that it is a GIGANTIC security problem. It runs java stuff via OSC. Meaning an unsecured open port which will run any java code that you send. I’m going to unplug my modem while running it or modify it so it only accepts connections from localhost.
Authentication is obviously necessary for these sorts of nifty add-ons for OSC and supercollider and at the conference, they tried to recruit people for workgroups. With my MA thesis looming, I did not volunteer for anything. But the obvious and pressing need for authentication makes me want to volunteer for it now.
As much as I like coding, however, it’s not really my main focus in life. I like to create tools that I need that let me do what I want and I like to share such things when they’re useful to others. But what I need the tools for is making music and that’s mostly what I want to do. What’s great about CNMAT is that they have and make all these neat tools, but they also are very focussed on making music with them, as evidenced by that nifty concert I saw back in 2002.
Coding, making music and improvising is a killer combination. (killer is good like sick is good. Berkeley is sick.) I want to go and spend the next few years doing these things. So if they let me in, they get a coder, a composer and an improviser who sees the need to work on projects, even if they’re not the most exciting thing in the world if the need is there, like OSC authentication. And who will use the tools that are created by myself and others to make tunes.
Now, if I can just distill this blog post down to a thousand well-chosen words in the next 3 days, I’m set. Hopefully.
Tags: UC, Celesteh

Cola and I went out to go Xmas shopping. As we walked to Republique, we noticed a godawful traffic jam with even more horns blaring than usual. A bunch of garbage trucks were blocking the path of traffic around the Place de Republique. There were a bunch of people waving communist flags around, lining up in the street. Somebody with a bull horn was chanting something about the Catholic church. There were signs that said something about “1905/2005” and “Ni Eglise Ni Maître Ni État” I could not figure out what was going on, except that there were a lot of pissed off drivers and a lot more people showing up all the time with red and black flags.

So I bought a communist newspaper for 2€. I didn’t notice at the time, but the woman gave me a July/August issue and a September/October issue. Sheesh, you’d think communists didn’t like Americans. Anyway, since I’d purchased a magazine, I could ask her what was up. And I could not understand anything she said. So her english-speaking comrade came over and explained that in 1905, France passed a law mandating the separation of church and state. The protesters wanted to re-affirm that law. (It was then I noticed the “Athéisme” banner.) They also told me the march route. I am 100% in favor of secular states in every country. But France is not my country, so I did not join the march. Instead I walked to le Marais and did some window shopping, but not much actual shopping. My goodness, it was crowded! We bought falafels and then walked home.
Cola looked up Harry Potter on the Version Originale website (which I leanred of from the ex-pat blog Dispatches from France) and so we hung around for a bit and then walked to a movie theatre by the Place d’Opera. The website gave us entirely the wrong address, so we went to a later movie than we meant to, but we did get to see it in English. It’s nice to see a movie with such a strong feminist subplot. There was a real gender-balance of champions in the wizard tournament and the women always placed first or second. Ha. Sorry. I meant to say that the only female contestant came from a single-sex school and placed last in every event. Oh, and the magic of the school mostly involved being feminine and doing cheerleading routines, as far as I could tell. Also, they’re French and we all know that French culture embodies femininity in every way. And, every single Hogwarts student is straight.
Got out of the movie too late to go back to le Marais, so maybe tomorrow we’ll go to the 3w bar. That stands for Women with Women. Hopefully, no wizarding challenges will pop up while we’re in such a helpless, female environment.
Tags: Paris, Secularism , Harry Potter, Celesteh

Isn’t it fascinating when people post their dreams?
So it was a wednesday. I had finished my morning classes and was sitting on the patio of Café Strada listening to Rudy and others talk about celebrity gossip that I could barely follow. Jennifer who is with Brad? I looked at my watch and said goodbye to go to a meeting of my Transgender Peace group. (Trannie peace activists? I don’t even know.) After the meeting, I hopped on my bike and rode down to the Acme bread company and bought a loaf of sourdough and popped into Kermit Lynch next door and got a bottle of wine. then I biked home and walked my dog around the block. We stopped to play with a dalmatian, Lotta Dots, that my dog is friends with. Then I came back and spent some time playing long tones on my tuba to help prepare for a gig I was going to play on Friday. I grabbed some homebrew beers and stuck them in the fridge because my band, Rides Again, was coming over for rehearsal. Cola came home from work and took Xena for another walk, while I programmed some granular synthesis algorithms I would need for the next night. the band showed up and we smoked some weed on the back porch and then took the beers into the studio to play. We practiced incorporating Anthony Braxton’s hand signals into grooves. The drummer recorded the whole practice onto minidisc, so he could post the best five minutes to the band’s podcast in the morning, keeping our fans psyched for our gig the next week. Then we all walked to Lanesplitter pizza, smoking pot on the way and having more beer once we got there. The waitress told me she liked the tuba playing I’d done the week before at 21 Grand. I gave her a flyer for Rides Again’s upcoming show the next week at the Stork Club. After dinner, I was walking Xena around the block with Mitch, too buzzed to read the 50 pages I needed for class the next morning, but talking about an idea for an installation that we were going to submit to the San Jose Museum of Art.

The Cola started awake and I woke up too. I’m sure my life will be just exactly like that if I get into Berkeley! I did once have a waitress at Lanesplitter recognize me though, over last summer, after I played some tuba improv at the Luggage Store as a part of quartet.
Tag: Celesteh

“Lock Up Your Children” was composed in 2005 in response to the controversy surrounding Buster the Bunny. In one episode of this children’s show, the cartoon rabbit goes to visit a Vermont family headed by two moms. He says hi to the moms once in an extremely brief scene. This caused a controversy as the United States government withdrew funding for the show.
This piece uses clips of the controversy being discussed on Frontline, of Bill O’Reilly and other pundits discussing the controversy, and of Fred Phelps, a radically homophobic preacher. I wrote a SuperCollider library to analyze buffers of spoken text and look for pauses. The program for this piece cut the buffers at pauses and analyzed the later ones to find the dominant frequency, which is played underneath as a gong sound.

This piece has been performed at my thesis concert and at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco.

“In 5ths” was composed in 2004 and performed that year by the Flux Quartet at a concert at Wesleyan University. The performance notes and score are included here. Terry Riley’s In C largely inspires this composition. I navigate the circle of fifths because of the tension in stacking three fifths on top of each other. The listener wants the 2 to go to a 3, but instead, another fifth is added. Also, fifths in equal temperament are very close to 3/2. Since the Flux Quartet only allocated minimal rehearsal time, I wanted to write something they could play easily that was within a margin of error of just intonation.

“Morpheus’ Snare” was created in 2005. In this piece, I have detuned the left and the right channels. As the piece starts, the detuning falls randomly in between 2 Hz and 20Hz. As it progresses, the range narrows until the left and the right always differ by 10Hz. Alpha brain waves are generally around 10Hz. There are rumors that listening to pitches detuned between the left and right ear at 10Hz will make the listener sleepy and cause them to enter an alpha state. All of the tones in this piece are based on the undertone series 19/17, 19/19, 19/21, and 19/23.

This piece was performed at my thesis concert and at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco.

“Rush to Excuse” was composed in 2004. This piece applies granular synthesis to a 47″ sample of Rush Limbaugh’s radio oratory. There are two processes involved. The first cuts Mr. Limbaugh’s voice into hundreds of samples of equal length. These samples, or grains, are then analyzed to determine the average pitch for each. The second process cuts the same clip into unequal pieces based on silences, or pauses in speech. I mix the output of these processes together, repeating the first process several times with longer and longer grains. Content and pitch material are then juxtaposed.
In the sample used, Mr. Limbaugh excuses torture at American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and mocks the Geneva Convention. He describes a photograph of a naked prisoner being threatened with a dog, and justifies it by claiming there’s no actual assault, the prisoner is merely being frightened. As it happens, a subsequent photograph shows the actual attack. On being apprised of this later in the program, Mr. Limbaugh offered a correction and a weak apology.

This piece was performed at my thesis concert and at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco.

“No No Nonette” was created in 2002 for an installation of nine MIDI controlled player toy pianos, created by Trimpin. The installation, Klavier Nonette was in place at Jack Straw Productions’ Media Gallery in Seattle in the early part of 2003.

“Breaking Waves”, created in 2001, uses a destructive loop. The original sound is ocean-like noise. I encoded this as an mp3, and then I decoded it back to aiff. Then I re-encoded that aiff to and mp3 and repeated this process several times. Mp3s are supposed to have transparent compression, so the user never hears the lost information. However, after repeated processing, the wave sounds break down.
This piece was released on Ibol Records Random Spheres of Influence compilation in 2001.

“Bell Tolls”, composed in 2004, plays triads with a sound that resembles wind chimes. It uses a spatialization algorithm so that each “chime” sounds like it is coming from a different location. It is especially evident if the speakers are places three meters apart. The pitch of each new set of chimes is based on the pitch of the chimes that precede it. The pitches come from a 21-limit tuning table.

This piece was performed at 21 Grand in Oakland and at my thesis concert.

The spatialization code is included here and is online at http://www.celesteh.com/music/wesleyan/Locator.sc [note to blog readers: I finally published my SC libraries to: http://www.celesteh.com/music/wesleyan/]

“Airwaves #2”, composed in 2002, was the second piece in a three part series. At that time, I did most of my compositions using a MOTM analog modular synthesizer running a direct line to Protools. The direct line sometimes created a sound that seemed too large. This series was an attempt to create synthesizer tape pieces with more “air” in them.

This piece was played at Woodstockhausen 2002.

“Pro Manko de Edzino”, was composed in 2003 for a concert of five-minute piano works at Wesleyan University. Neely Bruce was the performer. Unfortunately, I do not have a good recording of that concert, so only the score is included in the portfolio. [Note I said “good” recording.]

All of the pieces on the CD can also be found online at http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/podcast/

[Not included but almost: “Phase“]
Tags: UC, Celesteh

I want to finish my UC Application by Wednesday. So what should go in the portfolio and in what order? I think I should include stuff from Wesleyan and later and not earlier things.

definitely included

• The string quartet

other candidates

• The bill o’reilly / fred phelps piece
• detuned left and right piece
• tuning piece with bells
• Rush Limbaugh

gah I can’t take this piece anymore

• Ann Coulter does have a performance history

maybe a UPIC piece?

• I dunno about this

Errr, so everything that I could send it on my podcast. I dunno. Bah. I also have pieces with the softwear I’m writing, but I dunno about them.
Tags: UC, Celesteh