Tuesday, May 09, 2006
The only thing that I’m lacking here is more hours! At this point I’m feeling completely stimulated, inspired, and the days are full of engaging activity. It’s great to have such focus and space to work on all of the various projects, with only the mild pressure I put on myself to contend with. More ideas constantly emerging, and every day is productive. Actually, there’s not much of anything to complain about—everyone in the family is having a great experience and learning new things every day. All I really need to do is put together the database that’s been festering in my mind and keeping me awake at night, and organize the campus performance in a couple of months. I guess time was just a little too tight today…
A few things happened, in any case. I finished the bibliography for the eBook lectures (at Amy’s insistence, I was going to blow it off and make it a “Selected” bibliography but she convinced me the more authority I could muster, the better), and made it about a quarter of the way through hyperlinking the .pdf file (finding a system that should enable me to finish it in an hour or so tomorrow). Towards building the database project, started a list of images (pictures) of Malaysia I want to include, and will match the final number (will probably be less than 10) with an equal number of texts and soundtracks, which will be programmed with controls so that their consumption (viewing/hearing/reading) won’t repeat until everything has been seen once. The whole thing is going to be pretty tricky to make but hopeful that I’ll be able to pull it off (with a little assistance of course); if so the time here will be a success on all fronts.
The session in the audio lab was terrific, and also fruitful. Ajoi (whose real name is Dzulhafidz Dzulkifli) was very instructive, easy to work with, and seemed very interested in working on something different than the norm (I was also pleased he too is a fan of Brasil futbol). Although his main interest is rock’n’roll, and his professional background is mainly producing dance/pop music for a Malaysian group called Cru, he was aware of experimental composers like Cage and was receptive to my atypical ideas (which are no doubt different than the usual things students ask him to work on). After showing me the programs that he recommended I use, Sonar 4 (to record and mix) and Reason (sampler) we recorded four strikes of the rin gong then processed three of them with different “Morphoder” filters (Oager, Whisper, and Robbie), looped and layered them, and then added a track where I was playing one of the samples via keyboard. This process took less than an hour, and for me, the result was fantastic. The piece we made is about five minutes long and I will certainly use it as a soundscape in future performances. I was impressed at how easy the software was to use, and will certainly be making an investment in some new hardware and software in the coming months. If I have to go back to New Jersey (and I do), at least I’ll have some new tools and skills to work with during long cold months in the solar studio. Meanwhile, I’m going to think of some other audio projects to cook up with the faculty members I know who are involved with sound. I still want to make an interactive audio piece too. The initial idea was to do something where the user spoke to the text to navigate, but now I’m thinking that the installation may have to be done using a keyboard as an interface. With Reason a different sample can be assigned to each key, and maybe I’ll try to put something together with sound and (spoken) text this way.
I also managed to add the soundtrack for the Spam poems into the Flash animation I made for last week’s performance, which is now posted at http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2006/spam.html. It is a fairly large file by WWW standards (3 megs), so only for the broadband audience…
(Now if I could only track down and remove the mosquito that buzzed by me in the apartment a little while ago the day would be complete)
A few things happened, in any case. I finished the bibliography for the eBook lectures (at Amy’s insistence, I was going to blow it off and make it a “Selected” bibliography but she convinced me the more authority I could muster, the better), and made it about a quarter of the way through hyperlinking the .pdf file (finding a system that should enable me to finish it in an hour or so tomorrow). Towards building the database project, started a list of images (pictures) of Malaysia I want to include, and will match the final number (will probably be less than 10) with an equal number of texts and soundtracks, which will be programmed with controls so that their consumption (viewing/hearing/reading) won’t repeat until everything has been seen once. The whole thing is going to be pretty tricky to make but hopeful that I’ll be able to pull it off (with a little assistance of course); if so the time here will be a success on all fronts.
The session in the audio lab was terrific, and also fruitful. Ajoi (whose real name is Dzulhafidz Dzulkifli) was very instructive, easy to work with, and seemed very interested in working on something different than the norm (I was also pleased he too is a fan of Brasil futbol). Although his main interest is rock’n’roll, and his professional background is mainly producing dance/pop music for a Malaysian group called Cru, he was aware of experimental composers like Cage and was receptive to my atypical ideas (which are no doubt different than the usual things students ask him to work on). After showing me the programs that he recommended I use, Sonar 4 (to record and mix) and Reason (sampler) we recorded four strikes of the rin gong then processed three of them with different “Morphoder” filters (Oager, Whisper, and Robbie), looped and layered them, and then added a track where I was playing one of the samples via keyboard. This process took less than an hour, and for me, the result was fantastic. The piece we made is about five minutes long and I will certainly use it as a soundscape in future performances. I was impressed at how easy the software was to use, and will certainly be making an investment in some new hardware and software in the coming months. If I have to go back to New Jersey (and I do), at least I’ll have some new tools and skills to work with during long cold months in the solar studio. Meanwhile, I’m going to think of some other audio projects to cook up with the faculty members I know who are involved with sound. I still want to make an interactive audio piece too. The initial idea was to do something where the user spoke to the text to navigate, but now I’m thinking that the installation may have to be done using a keyboard as an interface. With Reason a different sample can be assigned to each key, and maybe I’ll try to put something together with sound and (spoken) text this way.
I also managed to add the soundtrack for the Spam poems into the Flash animation I made for last week’s performance, which is now posted at http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2006/spam.html. It is a fairly large file by WWW standards (3 megs), so only for the broadband audience…
(Now if I could only track down and remove the mosquito that buzzed by me in the apartment a little while ago the day would be complete)
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 4:09 PM 
