aisyalam

I had another productive session with Ajoi in the audio lab today, and is it ever terrific to have a good engineer to work with. What a rare luxury to be able to show up with ideas and content and have someone else take care of the technical details! First we captured and cleaned up a sample from the first recording I made here in December, a frog belching after a thunderstorm outside the Palace of Golden Horses. We then loaded the sample into the keyboard so that scales of the frog’s tones could be played. No recordings were made, as I’m waiting to work with my colleague Lydia, who knows how to play the piano, on that front. What I was hoping to do next was record my “Multimedia University” poem (41 lines) and assign each line to a key on the keyboard to create a non-linear, interactive poem. But we weren’t able to figure out how to do that using the software on hand (Reason), which allowed us to set samples into ten keys only. So instead I broke the poem up into ten stanzas of 4-5 lines each and put each short stanza (ranging from 14-20 seconds) into a key, which had a different effect than I’d imagined but worked out quite nicely. The poly-vocality of it is kind of crazy, but the interesting thing that emerges from the din are sounds that I couldn’t have even imagined before. Again, we didn’t make any recordings but will definitely do so before long, and will use the piece in the June MMU performance too, if possible.
Otherwise I didn’t get to work a lot more on my own stuff, just a bit on the texts, and a brief meeting with Sau Bin and Siew Wai where we determined which soundtrack she and I will use at our June 7 performance at SB’s installation. The reason for the diversion was that the “Gamma” Digital Media students were showcasing their projects at an event called “NATURE GESTURES - An Interactive Art Installation, and it took me quite a while to get through all 21 of them. I’m glad I did, however, because it was interesting to see what’s going on in their minds and classrooms. I won’t describe them in detail, but in general there was a lot of touch screen technology involved, and also quite a few pieces that used footwork or stepping to activate the interactive component. One used a light-stick, a flashlight of sorts, to move the cursor; one made use of headphones that vibrated (a sensation I’d never before experienced). I was pleased to see quite a bit of text involved—perhaps even some digital poetry—and a few very interesting infotainment-type games (out of Malaysian Folklore). Most of the projects used “behaviors” in Flash to make works interactive, a few used Director. Each of the pieces also had to be set in a type of decorative setting, so it was far from a barren room with computer terminals and monitors; some were more ornate than others, but the overall effect made the setting much more handmade than you might expect. The students had only seven weeks to prepare the work, which showed in some of the works, but compared to the student works I see at home (which are, admittedly, done by students with different interests) these efforts were superb, particularly from a programming point-of-view: very complex. The most beautiful piece was a virtual aquarium, with sleek user-guided fish; another remarkable work involved like gamelan playing (which the program/projection responded to), and a poem that progressed in moments of silence (which were actually quite difficult to come by in the environment as it was today). Anyhow, ff they were my students, I’d be quite proud. It was quite a scene, too, especially in the late afternoon when the Dean was present and a reception was held. I’m only posting one picture from the event here, but will put a few more up on flickr tomorrow.

In all, a stimulating, perhaps overstimulating, day. Not what I expected, but okay—some pleasant distractions. Looking forward to some focused time at the desk tomorrow.