Les said, the better II

All of you people poking me about RadioShack, knock it off. You live in the bay area. It doesn’t matter if a few folks here or there aren’t as enlightened as you, especially if you know, you happen to be straight. If you did not have any legal protections against discrimination and lived in a place where it was the norm rather than the exception and it happened to apply to you, I can assure you that you would feel differently.

Also, I had zero pages of thesis starting this break. It’s due in five weeks. My concert is April 5th. All the music is not yet written. I am sitting indoors on beautiful spring days listening to Michael Savage call arabs “subhumans” over and over and over again and am not out in the sun and not at the beach and not seeing my friends and have not even been berkeley yet because I need a draft in a week and a half of my thesis and the next person who pokes me will not be a happy camper.
And diamonds are neither feminist or non-feminist as much as they are overvalued, much more common than they’re marketed to be and yet simultaneously soaked in the blood of workers.
what’s with you guys all coming out of the woodwork this week? sheesh.
Tag: Celesteh

Jesse is reporting that radioshack is anti-queer. No more radioshack for me. Boycott ’em.

Update

Some homophobic magazine likes radioshack. You can argue with me about whether or not this is the “fault” of radioshack, but you know, “diversity training” just means putting something about respecting your customers in those boring training videos and telling managers they can’t fire employees for being queer.
Al Lashers on University in Berkeley has more stuff and is usually cheaper and the folks working there are definitely more knowledgeable. Radioshack should also add some electronics training.
Tag: RadioShack

Much like the US celebrates Labor Day in September instead of May Day on May 1st to celebrate the labor struggle (and the Haymarket Massacre), the US ignores International Women’s Day in favor of Mother’s Day. You think of Mother’s Day now as a fake, Hallmark holiday, but in actuality, it has radical routes, founded by women who saw great tragedy in being asked to raise and nurture generations of cannon-fodder.

My friend Jenya, who unfortunately I haven’t seen in ages, told me that as a child in Russia, Women’s Day was a national holiday and that people would bring gifts to female family members, maybe only their mothers. I cannot recall.
Women’s Day is an international holiday, recognized by the UN, which commemorates women’s struggles for suffrage and equality. Remember that women have had the right to vote in the Unites States for less than a hundred years. The sacrifices and struggle made by our foremothers to win this right deserves celebration. We must honor those who in the past struggled for freedom and we must never forget that our freedom is hard-won. The UN has a webpage explaining the history of this holiday. Like so many struggles for equality, it has strong socialist roots. Probably why we ignore it here, alas.
Tag: International Women’s Day

I downloaded an Epson printer driver the other day. It was a HQX file. HQX is an old mac format used for file transfers. It’s called “hex” for some reason. I don’t remember of it is compressed or just provides some sort of protection against corruption on mixed networks. It’s antique.

I opened the HQX file and found a SEA file. SEA stands for Self-Extracting Archive. It’s a file format that provides both compression and an application to decompress. Wow, you don’t see many of those anymore. Also antique, but apparently still kicking as it was an OS X application.
Inside the SEA, there was a folder and inside the folder was a DMG. A DMG is a disk image. These are very popular now and are the usual way that something like a printer driver would be distributed. DMG is a compressed format. I wonder why they felt like they had to compress a compressed format. Normally a DMG is the final layer, but no . . .
I mounted the DMG and within there was an install program, a Vise installer. As far as I know, the Vise installer also provides compression. This vintage of installing software is somewhat older than the DMG and somewhat newer than HQX. So they compressed a compresssed, compressed file, put two applications in there and added a funny format as the very top layer.
Fortunately, when I double-clicked the installer, my drivers actually installed. I can only imagine that they were much smaller than the file I downloaded from Epson, who has a rather slow server. The drivers are fine, but the release engineer is an idiot. This process took more than half an hour.
Tag: Epson

I just got a call for submissions to something called Women Take Back the Noise. They want to raise the prominence of women in noise music, so they’re looking for laptop, noise, experimental, glitch etc tracks of less than 8 minutes. They want tracks not published elsewhere. They give you a CD and it’s a nonprofit project. It doesn’t say WHO is profiting. It doesn’t say how they plan to distribute. It doesn’t say how many CDs they plan to press. Ok, so they don’t want to pay royalties. Fine. What do I get back for this?

I think that projects designed to promote women’s stuff are great, but my stuff has value and I need to know what you’re planning with it. I’m not going to just be overjoyed that you care about noise by women and send you something. Like, we’re all sitting here wetting our pants at the slightest possibility of notice. Maybe it’s a sugar crash here, but pleas for free stuff from women for free just makes me feel disrespected. I’ll prolly drop them an email, but in the meantime, if you’re planning a project for women or queers or some minority group because you want to show how valuable their contributions are, you have to act like their stuff has value.
I’ve been on stuff for free before. Heck, I paid admission to hear my tape played at Woodstockhausen. But geez, I knew what I was getting in return.
Tag: Feminism

The sky is clear and blue. Birds are chirping. Flowers are blooming. At night, the breeze carries the smell of them around to where I walk. The windows are open. It is warm enough for short sleeves. People in shorts and t-shirts play sports in the park. The farmer’s market has two stands selling fresh strawberries. I bought a fennel bulb, dug up that morning not many miles away. The people smile warmly like the weather. I go back indoors, in the shadows of walls and ceiling, open the windows and type on my thesis concert pieces. The sound of George Bush’s voice drowns out the birds.

Tag: Spring

all my dreams last night were of Pbinds. I went looking for a good online definition/ description of a Pbins and could find none. I think this must be significant.

My four channel dubya piece is now semi-successfully spatialized. in 2 channels.
I just have to finish spatializing my bell piece (and find new bell sounds and re-implement the wind chimes as being based in a pattern instead of random) and then write detailed program notes for everything and then i can write some new music.
Oh, and figure out what to put on ym application cd and drop it in the mail on monday. i’m thinking rush limbaugh, high squeally tunings, ann coulter, airwaves #3. i like my bell piece, but it’s in progress and all those other pieces are done, except coulter is a bit tweakable.
my concert is one month from today. i have 2 weeks to generate a thesis draft, basically from scratch since my supercollider documentation project is kaput.
Tag: Celesteh

Did I miss a memo?

Ok, so some teacher in New Jersey his a kid or something and there exists a video tape, so people have been taking about it, including Hannity and Colmes. They had a right wing nutjob on to comment. Here’s a transcript I want to draw your attention to two quotes

In the good old days, back when AIDS was an appetite suppressant and when gay meant you were happy, back in those days there was discipline in public schools. But not today.
. . .
And I hope the students in New Jersey, the former home of Governor [James] McGreevey, who had his own difficulties — I might add that Jersey, of course, is a blue state. We don’t have these kind of problems in Ohio —

Do you know what the fags are doing to our school system?!! Me neither. This all must be the fault of the alien other, though. Also, he said,

Sean, I went through a public school system. I assume you did also. And back 20, 30, 40 years ago, that kind of behavior was incredibly impossible, because of the cultural circumstances in which the students — the fellow students would have so criticized that kid named Jay — I don’t want to use his last name — because it would have been culturally unacceptable.

Um, yeah, cuz highschool kids totally had a reputation for being respectful in 1985. Was this guy alive in 1985? I was. I remember it. Oh, and 1975? Kids were totally respectful and completely patriotic. They were 100% in support of every government action. Especially the draft. If only those homos hadn’t come along and ruined everything. So are queers the new communist plot like red is the new black? Or are queers actually, really, a communist plot, hatched out by Stalin and secretly still running with the help of ex-KGB agents still loyal to the party?
Tag: Scapegoat

If anyone has any comments about my “brief” statement, you should leave them. Is it lame to mention books I was reading? I want to sound like I care about theory. In fact, it’s only recently that I’ve begun caring in an articulated way.

I want to have lunch and dinner and tea and fun parties with all of you and spend hours getting caught up and jam with you and go to concerts with you and I’m not going to have time until this summer. I am home writing my thesis. However, I am not a jerk, so I will have dinner with those who I have previously promised, but not for the next week. I am trying to re-work something from fall 03 from a 4 channel work into a spatialized 2 channel work and I spent all day yesterday on the airplane fixing a bug with the main part and a teeny bit of last night and all this morning fixing a bug in the adjunct part and when I put the adjunct part back in, the main bug was back and I can’t remember how I fixed it and since I did all the work on the airplane, it’s not in CVS. Curses and die. I have a plan B, which involves re-using almost all of the original code, despite its general wonkiness. SuperCollider 3 was pre-alpha when I wrote this and it is full of weird bug work-arounds and functions to do things I’ve now incorporated into my library. It could be much more lovely. But my hacking “fixes” are now at least 3 times as long (lines of code-wise) and they don’t work.
Any day now, I’m going to stop documenting and re-implementing the past and write something new.
Tag: Celesteh

Pleased write a brief background statement regarding your
interests/experiences in electronic & computer music. Include
information
on compositional styles in which you have worked, software/hardware with
which you’re familiar, publications (if any) and the name and
institutional
affiliation of the electronic music/composition teachers with which
you’ve
worked.

My interest in computer music began as soon as my family got a computer in the 1980’s. I wrote programs in BASIC that were early attempts at algorithmic composition. I did not return to electronic music until I attended Mills College in Oakland, California from 1994 -8. I went to Mills College to study Computer Science, but I quickly found myself gravitating toward the Center for Contemporary Music. I studied electronic music and composition with Maggi Payne. She taught synthesis techniques on a large Moog Modular Synthesizer. I fell in love with the Moog and the intuitive approach to sound creation that went with it. I graduated with a double-major in Computer Science and Electronic Music.

While at Mills, I also studied MAX with John Bischoff. I no longer use MAX, but Bischoff’s primary lasting influence on me was his emphasis that the weaknesses of any musical system were also its strengths. While I disagree in the case of MAX, I’ve found this to be a very useful way to explore any tool.

After I graduated from Mills in 1998, I went to work in the computer industry and found time for music on evenings and weekends. Music was a hobby for me at the time. I used a MOTM analog modular synthesizer at home with protocols on my Macintosh to create experimental electronic and noise pieces. All of my work at the time was for tape. I recorded source sounds, such as field recordings or interesting synthesizer patches and mixed them together, so that mixing was much composing as finding or creating the source sounds. Often, there was a metaphor or idea that tied all of the source sounds together, but sometimes I just recorded interesting patches until I had “enough” of them and looked for interesting ways to mix them together. I loved doing this because of the focus on pure sound and also because of its tactility. I had tapes played at a few festivals and released a noise / experimental electronic CD that is now out of print.

At my job, I was web programmer and a release engineer. However, when the American economy began to downturn, it first hit the technology sector. I was laid off from my job in 2001. I took a few months to travel and then decided to do freelance programming and dedicate as much of my time as possible to music. I played bass guitar in several art rock bands, including one that was entirely improvisational and I created more tape music. I learned some new methods, like data bending (playing a piece of computer data as if it were a sound file) and built a few musical electronic kits, including a theremin.

I began to see my intuitive approach to composition as a limitation. I sought a theoretical underpinning. I experimented with some algorithmic compositional ideas in MAX, but I was frustrated by it’s inability to easily manipulate lists. Some of my friends and I collaborated on a few installations, including two that were installed for an evening at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California. One of them used long delay lines to create feedback loops and find resonances and the other used contact mics attached to moving parts of the exhibits in the museum.

Meanwhile, I was reading many books on compositional theories of composers, like Philip Glass’ book Music by Philip Glass, John Cage’s book Silence and Pauline Oliveros’ Software for People. I also got interested in tuning theory. I found that the Java version of the Just Intonation Calculator had been open-sourced and then abandoned, so I adopted the project. I fixed some bugs and added new features and one day I hope to have time to clean up the graphics.

I decided that I would benefit most from a structured, school environment. I applied to Wesleyan University based on my admiration for the faculty. I was accepted and started in the fall of 2003.

Since being here, I have taken classes with and received composition lessons from the entire composition faculty: Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, Ron Kuivila and Neely Bruce. Ron Kuivila is my advisor and my primary composition teacher. I took a class from Kuivila in Supercollider my first semester and have used it as my primary compositional tool since. Kuivila teaches a conceptual and theoretical approach to composition and time structures, mostly based on the theories of John Cage.

I study free improvisation and composition with Anthony Braxton. I am working with him to develop Supercollider programs that will respond to his improvisations in real time, so that he can play along with the computer.

I studied Just Intonation and tuning informally with composer Ellen Fullman, who is not affiliated with a school.

My work recently has been in Supercollider. About half of my pieces use just intoned computer-generated sounds. The other half use granular synthesis techniques to create Text Sound Poetry. Charles Amirkhanian and Paul de Marinis and the recently released OU archives have influenced me in this genre. I use the recorded voices of right-wing pundits as source material. My programs analyze the audio files to find breaks in phrases and re-order the words of the pundits, or find the pitches of their voices. I use repetition in these pieces because subtexts of violence and fascism are clearer after hearing the same phrase several times.

Aside from Supercollider, MAX and Protools, I also use Soundhack, and Audacity. I have used OSC to communicate between a Perl script I wrote and a Supercollider patch. My primary non-musical computer languages are Perl, Bash and Java. I have avoided doing sound programming in Java, except for a small part of the jJICalc, as most Java sound libraries are not cross-platform. I programmed in C and C++ when I was an undergrad and have dabbled in many additional languages. I have Linux/Unix experience, including some system administration. My main system now is OS X. I can navigate in Windows, but am not a power user. I have experience with PC hardware, including assembling systems and doing repairs. I know how to read a schematic and use a soldering iron and a volt meter.

I feel like SuperCollider offers a vast ocean of possibilities and I’ve just been wading close to the beach. Studying Xenakis’ theories will help me more fully engage with computer music, give me a deeper understanding and help me form my own compositional style. I hope that you accept me into your program.

Tag: Applications