FUTURE BLINDNESS

Some interesting (to me at least) trends in my dreams recently:

I dream that I am working on a problem involving actual objects I interact with and sometimes, more excitingly, I dream a couple steps ahead and later find myself in a sort of functional deja vu.

I will be working with an object and, when I look back at it, its geometric properties will have changed. For example, last night I was working with a bicycle wheel and when I looked at it again, the spokes were not radially symmetric—some spokes were connected to other places on the circumference, and some were missing altogether. I have been reading about Voronoi diagrams and this might be related.

In a really good dream, there is almost always a dog. Most recently, I was playing with a dog in a museum of wearable furniture. The dog took the form of a dog I know here in Somerville (hi, Drummer!) but its colors were the colors of my new shoes.

I am especially interested in the shapes that result from the aforementioned geometric inconsistencies. A shape revealed in a dream, like the gunner’s sight.

I used to have a recurring dream about floating through the schematics of a mechanism that produced a truly random audio signal. I would float through tree-like hierarchies and as I neared each one, I could listen in on what was playing (much like Max/MSP, although I hadn’t known about that yet). Each night that I dreamed further into the structure, it became clearer and clearer that the machine simply skittered between one hundred symbolic/significant sounds at random times and durations. I know it was one hundred sounds because the structure revealed itself to be ten trees of ten inputs each, with a randomized switch at each ten-in-one-out node. I drove myself crazy trying to figure out how the switching between signals was randomized.

I stopped dreaming about this mechanism when I finally floated near enough to a node to peek inside. It was a crystalline petri-dish, and the insides of each dish were a mess of gold foil electrical contacts and the cloudy honey you see on the sides of trees. There was a flap of gold, free to move, inside each dish whose motions were connecting the various outputs and inputs. Inside each node, a fluorescent bee was pushing the gold leaf around, this way and that, making and breaking the circuits. A real natural type of output.

I finally, finally found the VHS of an old performance I did with Teresa Marrin Nakra last week, and have now safely converted it to a .mov.

The music itself isn’t the most awesome thing in the world, but I certainly am glad that proof of this exists…I really need something from this to put in my portfolio! As I try to write more thoughtfully about this project, it becomes clearer how much this served as an introduction to the world of physical computing and, in a sense, the process involved in working with emerging technology.

The carpet itself was very cool but a bit buggy. Factors like heat and prior use would seriously impact the consistency of the output, and it led to some frustrating but now-familiar debugging issues. Other things, like Teresa’s imminent pregnancy and my own unfamiliarity with the medium made this a frustrating project at the time. Thankfully, Tim Ledlie was around to handle the software side of the debugging and help me retain a sense of perspective.

We only had a week from start to finish to make our performances, and the title of mine (DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME, I’LL BE FINE) comes from the sampleset I was using at the time. Snips from Disney’s version of “Peter and the Wolf” and R+H’s “South Pacific” combined with pretty abstract (and, upon later reflection, boring) drum and toneloops to make an endless, atmospheric performance that did not go very many places.

I think the best thing about this project was finally getting to just play the damn carpet. I spent many, many hypercaffeinated hours before that night pressing on the thing and listening for trouble, and even watching it reminds me of what fun it was to make sounds with something so malleable and strange.

Respect to DJ C this week for posting a tutorial on how to make a standard dubstep bassline in Reason.

This isn’t the first tutorial his crew have posted, and I especially admire the step-by-step samples and images of the composition process. Earlier, Wayne and Wax’s “Crunk Geneaology” featured a tutorial in the same format followed by a comprehensive if nonchronological podcast.