jkndrkn

We decided, after all, to go see Hillary Hahn play on campus. I'm glad we did. I valued the opportunity to re-enter the auditorium where I've played many concerts and dragged many a stack of chairs and stands around onstage. Hillary herself was impressive -- she played some tricky and expressive solo pieces composed by one of her teachers, Ysaÿe. She also played a number of typically challenging and cacophonous Yves pieces and a number of gypsy-inspired pieces of Brahms and Bartok. Her playing was technically flawless and expressive, but I got the sense that she hadn't quite mined the emotional depths in some of her playing. I was unhappy that the piano accompanying her sounded thick and muddy. Perhaps it is in need of service or maybe our position in proximity of a wall caused bass frequencies to accumulate and distort the piano's timbre. Regardless, I enjoyed being able to set aside the hours it takes to watch a professional soloist demonstrate their musicality and share them with Dr. Brew. We exchanged grins whenever a Hillary played a particularly rousing dance number and rolled eyes during the murky depths of the Yves pieces.

I've been afflicted with a sense of lethargy. Physical and mental. Despite Prolog's power and unique usefulness with regards to quickly writing language parsers, the topic of natural language understanding is just not that appealing to me. I gladly forgot all of the formal rules of English grammar more than a decade ago only to now have to delve deeper than ever into its particulars and inconsistencies. It's been difficult for me to muster the level of interest I have been able to during the rest of my graduate school career. Creatively, I've felt somehow both drained and deeply inspired. I performed as a dub bassist on a rhythmic improvisation along with Sir Dubbio and the percussive member of Owl of Minerva and enjoyed the experience of being able to finally meld the attractive qualities of electronic improvisation with deeply rhythmic and melodic music. I have a huge backlog of unrecorded bass riffs and melodic fragments that we might be able to mine and combine with their ideas into several songs.

I've put together a demo using one such riff that illustrates what our sound may end up evolving into. Incidentally, it also shows off a really convincing dub bass synthesizer patch that I programmed on my Alesis Ion. Listen for it near the end. I think I use only two oscillators: a square wave or saw tooth with a highly resonant lowpass filter cut down near the 200hz range layered with a quiet but present sine wave to lend a strong and firm fundamental. Both oscillators are tuned to the same unison pitch. The volume envelope has to be carefully tuned to provide an attack similar to a finger pluck. The electric bass I used is my passive five-string Jazz tuned EADGC with an old set of DR Jonas Hellborg strings. The tone knob is all the way up and the bridge pickup is dialed down to give me a stronger fundamental tone with the airy top-end and clarity (and RF noise!) you get with single coils and no phase cancellation. I recorded direct and used the Amplitube LE guitar amp plugin to dial in a warm tone using just the smallest hint of overdrive to warm and color the sound and reverb to liven the top end a bit. I've been experimenting with guitar-like tones and effects on my bass since I tend to use it's upper ranges quite a bit. Drums are synthesized, not sampled, using Pluggo percussion synthesizer plugins and the warm melodic lead was improvised live on my Alesis Ion.

• I've been purposefully seeking out and correcting loose ends and broken relationships recently. As a result, I've reconnected with someone that deeply changed my life and contributed to my growth as a person.
• I've been spending more time considering how my introversion and other personality traits makes others perceive me. I've been realizing that my self-contained nature can be externally perceived as self-interest and rudeness.
• I'm still floating in the bewildering sense of freedom, confusion, elation, sadness, and uncertainty that finally and firmly severing my ties with conventional mores, values, and ideologies has lent me.
• I've been making some effort to be more social at local music events and have made some very small successes. I have a feeling that my not drinking alcohol makes this more difficult for me than for others.
• I was alone up here in Gainesville for a few days before Christmas and before our trip to Washington DC. I met a man at Gyros Plus that noticed me sitting and eating alone while reading my copy of Clocksin and Mellish and assumed I was a student. He asked me what kept me going as a student. I told him I had graduated already but returned to school because I missed it and enjoyed myself while I was there. He told me he had recently retired from the military at age 40 and was working in a hospital. He told me he was on the bottom rung but that his job was important so he did it well. He told me he wanted to go to school to study nursing, and I agreed that nursing was a great career that could afford him much flexibility. He was talkative and free with his words, but something in my demeanor unsettled him -- he stopped himself at one point and seemed to defend himself by claiming to me that he wasn't crazy. He was basking in a new sense of possibility and freedom in his life. He was transitioning.

The only other programmer at my job quit a few days ago now. So now the burden of bug fixes, feature implementation, and maintenance will rest solely on me for a while. I was pretty bummed to see him go. We have been interviewing replacements, but it seems that most of the talent pool we are interested in seems to be picked up by a hip local startup. I've considered applying there since I am familiar with some of the elements in their web frontend, I live within walking distance of their office, and because I'm sure to find many musically compatible people there. While I appreciate the fact that the internet has radically re-structured the way people's creative output is distributed, I don't agree that you should participate in the act of "freeing" an artist's creative output without first seeking their approval to do so. Change is necessary and often positive, but it can inflict harm on those individuals that are not quite ready to embrace it. A change that has been mutually agreed upon by all affected parties is the most positive kind of change.

Read the following books:

• All the Stops by Craig R. Whitney - Last year, during our trip to Ireland, I happened to notice an organ in one of the centuries-old cathedrals in Dublin. Desptie having encountered them many times over the course of my lifespan, I really noticed the organ for the very first time. It suddently struck me that each and every organ is a custom-designed and custom-built mechanical behemoth designed for solely for the production of music. The intersection of engineering and music has always interested me. The organ, with its very long history was sure to be rich with stories of brilliant and eccentric engineers and passionate and demanding organists.  Since then, I've been itching to learn more about the organ. Dr. Brew kindly provided me with this book. It seems that the very kinds of individuals that nowadays labor to build IT systems and software of dazzling complexity are the same individuals that might have worked to design and build the immensely complex pneumatic, electrical, and mechanical systems that link a human musician with an array of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of hand-built and hand-tuned organ pipes. This particular book does not delve too deeply into the technical aspects of the organ. Instead, it focuses on four individuals. Two engineers and two organists. In this group of four, there is one engineer and one organist that are firmly traditionalistic. They are opposed by another pair that is more progressive. It's interesting how the struggle between preservation of long-held historical values and traditions and the urge to move forward and abandon the past manifests itself in every corner of our society.
• Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler - A bit of a heavy book. It's been resonating strongly with me since it addresses matters of spirituality, mob rule, fundamentalism, fascism, patriotism, group think and subjugation of minority groups. Read it if you are in the mood for something dark, profound, gritty, and pessimistic. If you enjoy post-apocalyptic scenarios, you might also enjoy the book. I agree with many of the points in this review: http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-446-61038-0.html