Rush Limbaugh<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The
\nfirst pundit that I downloaded was Rush Limbaugh. His voice is not polished,
\nbut he’s been current for many years and is unfortunately not likely to go away
\nsoon. I downloaded some audio
\nfiles from Media Matters. His
\ncomments were what I was seeking, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I tried looping them in quick
\nsuccession, so that the same file would start to play and then another copy of
\nit would start to play only a few milliseconds later and then another one a few
\nmilliseconds after that, until there was a dense texture. This made a nice sound, something like
\na washing machine. I wanted to
\ncall it Spin Cycle<\/i>.
\nThis technique seemed similar to Steve Reich’s audio loops in pieces such as It\u2019s
\nGonna Rain<\/i>. However, the dense texture obscured
\nLimbaugh\u2019s words. I feel that the content of Limbaugh’s speech is fundamental
\nto exploring his meaning and the seductive lies of the right wing. However, all meaning was quickly lost
\nby my looping and the text was totally obscured. <\/p>\n
I
\ngave up on Limbaugh and moved on to create Coulter Shock<\/i>, returning to Limbaugh when I could no
\nlonger stand Coulter.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rush
\nto Excuse<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My
\nAnn Coulter piece had a proposed third section that I did not complete. This section was going to find the
\npitches of all the short grains of vocal sound that made up the last part of
\nthe piece. I used the program I
\nwrote for that instead with a clip of Limbaugh mocking, downplaying and
\nsometimes praising the torture of prisoners at American-run Abu Graib prison in
\nIraq. His statements were
\noutrageously offensive and included imitating the barking of the dogs used to
\nterrorize and bite prisoners, calling officers "orrifcers", etc. <\/p>\n
I
\nhad an idea that I would play equally-sized short grains of text in a loop
\nwhile computing their pitch material.
\nAs the pitch of a grain became known, a pitched sound would replace the
\noriginal audio content. Then,
\nafter all the pitches were known, the program would then progressively \u201cforget\u201d
\npitch content until the grains returned to their original text state. Meanwhile, like in the second half of
\nmy Coulter piece, I would gradually reshuffle the order of the grains. My experiments with these methods were
\nunsatisfying.<\/p>\n
Then,
\nwhile I was working on it, Alvin Lucier played Paul De Marinis\u2019 work Odd
\nEvening<\/i> for his
\ncomposition seminar class. I told
\nthe class that Marinis had already written the piece I was trying to write and
\nhad gotten better than I was going to.
\nAlvin told me to write the piece anyway, so I carried on. <\/p>\n
I
\nnoticed that shuffling the grains made their meaning disappear too quickly, so
\nI mixed them with longer phrases, which were automatically discovered, just as
\nin Coulter Shock<\/i>. I decided to change the grain length on
\neach pass through the loop. I
\nthink this is a good compromise between the musical interest of hearing the
\npitch of spoken voice and political interest of hearing content. Also, like with Bush\u2019s speech, the
\nrepetition of phrases makes their meaning more evident.<\/p>\n
The
\nspeech starts with an introduction of the just the pitches of the last 20
\ngrains of the clip. Then it plays
\nall the grains of the clip, in order, with both the pitch and the text
\nmaterial. I then scramble the
\ngrains and play them back mixed up with some longer phrases from the start of
\nthe clip. Then I double the size
\nof the grains and again play them back in random order with pitch and voice,
\nintermixed with longer phrases that come from a bit further into the clip. I repeat this process until the grains
\nare long enough that words like \u201cfear\u201d can be clearly heard. The piece ends with Rush\u2019s mocking
\nquestion, \u201cIs that allowed in the Geneva Conventions?\u201d<\/p>\n
I
\nhave submitted this piece to numerous festivals, but it was rejected. Surprisingly, Limbaugh\u2019s comments
\nfailed to generate much controversy just as systematic torture of prisoners
\nfailed to be reported outside of the Pacifica Network and the left wing
\nblogosphere. I worried the piece
\nwould slip into irrelevance before anyone ever heard it. I posted a realization of it, my
\nCoulter piece and my Bush State of the Union piece to my website under a
\nCreative Commons license that makes it possible for people to download, share,
\ncommercially use and remix the piece as long as they include attribution. The
\ncommercial value of these pieces to me is near negligible, especially as the
\ncontroversies fade into the forgotten past. I would rather have people hear them than not hear
\nthem. Unfortunately, I have not
\nhad time to adequately promote my downloads. A log search shows that it has been downloaded by one person
\nunknown to me in the United States and one in Britain. As far as I know, it has never before
\nbeen performed in public. In the
\nfuture, I want to launch a podcast of my music, which I hope will garner more
\nlisteners.
\nThis post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n
My thesis is so strange Rush Limbaugh The first pundit that I downloaded was Rush Limbaugh. His voice is not polished, but he’s been current for many years and is unfortunately not likely to go away soon. I downloaded some audio files from Media Matters. His comments were what I was seeking, but I wasn’t sure what to do … Continue reading draft – rush limbaugh<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3353,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103\/revisions\/3353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTag: Rush Limbaugh<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"