Is this preferable to silence? (We are winning the war on terror)

For anyone familiar with This American Life (all of you), you might remember the segment that they excerpted from the WNYC show Radio Lab about a year ago. Radio Lab doesn't have new episodes quite as much as This American Life does, but it's consistently incredible. But that's not the point.

The point is, Jad Abumrad, the host of Radio Lab, has come out with a 4-part series on WNYC called "Wordless Music," after the Wordless Music festival which features indie rock performers on the same ticket as classical musicians: Beruit will play in the same night as someone performing Osvaldo Golijov, or Jonny Greenwood (guitarist from Radiohead) will just play. Check out Episode Two of this especially--I'm not crazy about the middle piece, but all of you need to hear Arvo Pärt's (pear-t) "Fratres," especially you, Mom. The Crash Ensemble did a whole half concert (part of a Dublin-wide festival) on Pärt, an Estonian-born expatriated composer with strong mystic Eastern (Russian Orthodox) influences.

In other news, I found a sample of George Bush saying, "We are winning the war on terror," and I mapped it to my keyboard, with multiple filters and distortion effects controlled by knobs, looped in layers. Also, if you hold the button down it loops "on terror." It's more of an improvised setup than a real composition, and really the kind of thing that needs to be heard live over giant speakers. So reserve the date of August 16, my backyard, private concert by Andrew Smith feat. George Bush.

The Harmonic of the Fundamental

If you take a particular signal (13 Hz, for example) and you multiply it by 2, you get an octave. If you multiply that by 3, you get a perfect fifth. If you multiply that by 5, you get a major third. If you multiply that by 72, you get the six octaves and a perfect fifth up from your original 13 Hz. If you plot a bunch of these on graph paper in colored pencils (to designate different wave forms), you get my day. Each horizontal square is one second; each vertical square is one harmonic (the first square is 13 Hz, second is 26 Hz, third is 39 Hz, etc.) Blue is a sine wave (obviously), orange is sawtooth, red is triangle, green is parabola, yellow is pulse, and brown is noise with an added sine wave for color. Brown only comes in the 64th harmonic, by the way.

And if you keep wondering to yourself, Why do I keep reading this blog, when it's usually unintelligible rambling about waves and ultimately irritating noises?, then I'll tell you why: Cousin photos.



It's only a minute long; it's not like you haven't listened to more irritating things for 60 seconds.



http://www.willamette.edu/~acsmith/struktur.mp3

Gas Tax Holiday

I figured, call them in the afternoon my time, because how many people are making credit card fraud claims at four in the morning? Apparently enough to keep me on hold for a while. Not that I have anything else to do, while Mozart or something equally vile is playing in the background, and I am adding my own special layer on it with my multi-oscillator software synthesizer and two-octave keyboard. It's something in E major, and it's been going on for ages. I think it's a rondo, either that or it's just on a continuous loop.

7:56

Someone has been using my debit card to buy gas in Beaumont, which I thought meant the Beaumont Shell Station just up the street (near Beaumont Hospital) but which apparently means Beaumont, California, seeing as how whoever it is drove to Pomona, and unless it's an amphibious craft (which would explain why they guy spends $450 on gas in a week) it doesn't look like he lives in Dublin.

12:52

Pretty sure this is Chopin, probably early Chopin, because it still has the minor-key arpeggiated bass with some rocking tuplets in the right hand.

15:28

Turns out it's my OTHER debit card, which I had never cancelled, so I get to keep this one. Good news, although now we're up to about $540 in charges. I'm starting to support Hilary's gas tax holiday.

22:00 or so

Well, getting that credited back to my account temporarily. Plus I get to sign an affidavit and mail it back to them, and keep my current debit card. So, back to programming synthesizers to make weird noises. I found a sweet vocoder effect, but more on that later.

Okay ja ja ja

When I was in Berlin, I turned on my recorder and held it in my lap on the train. There was this kid in the seat in front of me talking to her mom, and at one point said "Okay, ja ja ja." So, I did what anyone would do: I looped part of it until it sounded like a beautiful singing voice. It took some reverb, equalizers, and a high bandpass filter to cut out the sound of the train, but I think it worked out. Wear headphones for this one. There's some stereo madness going on.

Original sample

Beautiful music

An Ice Skater and a Violinist?

Seriously, you have to be kidding me. Russia won the Eurovision Song Contest with a cheesy singer, an ice skater, and an over-dramatic violinist. To be fair, Ireland's entry was a puppet making fun of Eurovision.

Background: Eurovision, in its 53rd year, is a song contest between all the European countries (also Israel, for some reason, and Turkey, which is up for election, and Russia apparently, which is pretty anti-EU to begin with) which is pretty much American Idol on a continent-wide scale. The winner of the previous year holds the competition for the next year--Belgrade, Serbia, this year--and the whole thing is fairly political. The Nordic countries all vote for each other, the UK and Ireland vote for each other, all the Eastern Bloc countries vote for each other, and Germany, France, and Spain pretty much just got destroyed. Although, to be fair, Germany did a pretty bad job, France was a bit aloof, and Spain had its own dance (uno! the breakdance, dos! the cross-over(?), tres! the Michael Jackson, cuatro! the Robo Cop).

So, apparently Ireland had won five or six years in a row, due to some pop star with massive club beats and fireworks. It wasn't a total loss, though. Finland had a metal band, complete with pyrotechnics and a guy playing the drums with maces, while the guy from the UK was straight-up disco, and Denmark was probably the happiest song I've heard in years.

Really, you just have to youtube this to believe me.

Spain: http://youtube.com/watch?v=udVl4XNx4PM&feature=related

Ireland: http://youtube.com/watch?v=-n--JnAwirk&feature=related

Review session

On a sunny day like today, the spaces between the houses grow smaller, and the lady on the left suns herself in shorts, reading The Sun, while the construction workers on the right chisel shingles off the neighbor's roof and into our garden. The dog (left) is strangely quiet, either dead or deciding to take a break from its unnecessary and yet dedicated barking.

I, however, am studying for the first time in two or three weeks, and having a tough time with it. Keep in mind that the last time I was working was also the last time I posted something here: try to find a pattern. I re-read the beginning and the end of one of the novels for class (What Are You Like? by Anne Enright), and I highly recommend this practice. Granted, I'm studying like mad after getting my computer working again (power adapter, Madrid) but let's be honest, studying "like mad" is for me like how I do anything else "like mad"--that is, maybe disappointed or a little annoyed, but far from mad.

Let's just review:

1. I finished my score for the string quartet, "Wallace," still looking for players
2. I went to Madrid, got sunburned, left my power adapter there
3. Cousin Adam visited, took a cousin photo on top of Bray Head south of Dublin
4. Played Super Nintendo games on my computer
5. Felt guilty for not studying Community in Contemporary Irish Literature

Yes, this will be on the exam.

Of Mere Being

It was a great success. The performance (re-listening) had a few mistakes, but I would much, much rather have mistakes than a flawless, lifeless performance. Here's the recording from tonight. It cuts off weirdly at the end, before the applause, but that's my own fault since I was the one recording it. Really, there was applause at the end, trust me.