meditative blogging

This is the second day in a row that I have posted a blog. I’m not sure if this is more of an effort to procrastinate on school work or some sort of way to think outside the confines of my skull. It does seem to be therapeutic, and decent writing practice.

I made a pi estimation program for my Java class tonight. I should have been studying math for my test tomorrow, but I didn’t since this program is due. I would post the source but the formatting gets fucked every time I try. It was a load of crap, but I suppose it practices the things we’ve learned. Actually, I didn’t learn anything until I made the program. This class is painfully slow and I can’t pay attention. I wouldn’t go to it but the teacher sometimes surprises us with graded in-class activities. It’s fun to plug a number like 1,000,000 into the program and watch it scroll super fast through the approximations.

I’ve been using this Japanese Dictionary Denshi Jisho for some of the words on this page. It’s a really good one, and the sentences are helpful. It has been really fun to play with.

Listen to ‘Imaginary Cuba’ by Bill Laswell. This album is amazing! Parts of it give you that psychedelic tingly feeling in your spine like Shpongle or Tipper. The vocal parts are somewhat infectious, I hear them ringing and looping in my head. I’ve listened to it twice in a row tonight. The percussion is truly sublime. The rhythms flow like water in wonderful syncopation. Often they culminate into a bouncy break beat. One of the songs has a rhythm that really reminds me of Nightmares on Wax. I wonder if perhaps Nightmares on Wax sampled this CD, or if perhaps it is the other way around.

a night of audio fRustratiOn

Recording should be like cutting out the pages from a magazine for a collage. It’s fun arranging those pictures into the final piece, but the real creativity is born from the snippets used. Recording should be blissful en devour, a joyous extrapolation of the sweetest waves one can obtain from their environment. Alas, it is not so…

Whilst the best of plans had been formulated, they did not follow the predefined structure. Four microphones were neatly arranged in an empty room with a bucket and an array of vessels, pots and pans in the center. We, being me and Mr. Neville, were gearing up to record some high quality water samples. We had the methods and tools to create wonderful droplet and percussive sounds, as well as strange tinny, pitch-shifting reverberations. We just couldn’t eradicate the signal noise from the setup.

<audio nerd>
We are constantly running into issues with amplification of the mic signal. Unfortunately the mic pre-amps in Mr. Neville’s Presonus Firebox interface are low powered in order to make the device more portable (it can be powered by a 6-pin Firewire port alone, without an AC adaptor). We are borrowing Judas’s Presonus 8x Pre-amp (can’t remember its name) to amplify the signal further, but at this distance from the relatively quiet source we still can’t seem to get a strong signal. We’re using SM57 mics primarily, and for what little I know about them I understand them to typically have a low volume signal. They sound great, but even doubling up on pre-amps is not getting us the levels we need to record this stuff well. We also were running a fair stretch of our cabling with unbalanced TS cables, which likely brought our noise floor up significantly.

Furthermore, our software is giving us grief. FL Studio is usually decent about accepting signals from an ASIO source, as the Firebox is, but this was our first time doing 4 channels of audio. That seem to work fine, but we had some severe performance issues and the program was doing this obnoxious unnecessary over-dubbing of our recordings. We would have used an application more suited for audio recording, but it seems Sound Forge does not support recording of more than 2 channels and Audacity won’t play nice with ASIO.
</audio nerd>

Why should you care? You shouldn’t! Stop reading! It feels good to complain. At the end of the night, we had little to show but a mangled recording of delirious maniacs making cat sounds and banging on walls, pots and the floor. It seemed to be a largely fruitless exercise, but perhaps we have learned some things from it. We need a better multi-channel recording application, and some balanced TRS cables. And perhaps coffee? Cheerleaders?

Hurrah!

- seed