Category Archives: thought - Page 26

creativity and notebooks

Posted by on February 4, 2009 No comments

i’m not a fan of the GTD method. the idea of stuffing my life into three bins and forcing myself to deal with items through an algorithm seems silly to me. it works for a lot of folks, but that’s them. personally, i work on a very simple set of rules. if i’m at work and something comes up, i take care of it immediately. this is due to the fact that sleeping will likely remove the task from my memory. with my creative work it’s a little different.

i have roughly 100 notebooks lying around. i’m no johnny come lately to the moleskine notebook. i’ve been using them for years to keep track of my progress with my creative work. there are several flavors. there are journals which are meant to be places where i dump my brain. it isn’t the kind of writing that i want to have read and it had best not be during my lifetime. that’s my head in there people. stay clear. then there are notebooks. i treat those like a free form list. i block of each day with a line and run down it adding things like “call the doctor” or “think about strings and tin cans.” all ideas are the same and they get reviewed weekly. if something is really important, i will put it at the back of the notebook where i keep the TODO list. it seems wanky. it probably is.

but for most of my journaling needs, i use software. i was addicted to journler for almost two years after moving away from notebook by circus ponies. journler was/is pretty keen but i fear for it. it isn’t open source and the developer could pull the plug any time. so i have gone back to notebook. no, it’s not open source either but it isn’t a solo developer who appears to be burning out. this change is both good and bad. it’s nice to have a new piece of software to screw around with and it’s neat to shake up my routine now and again, but it’s shaking up my routine. i’ve mentioned about 1,000 times that i don’t have much time available for the creative work i do so mucking it up with a new piece of brain dump software creates danger and opportunity.

in any case, digital notebooks are nice because i can dump in all kinds of media clips. web pages can be copied and pasted. it can house PDFs and the other miscellaneous junk that i dump into my “hey this might be useful” bin.

so that’s that. i have new software. this does not excuse my lack of a sketch this week. the fact is, i have a sketch out to a friend of mine for some collaboration. more on that later. in the mean time, i am mixing and re-mixing earlier recordings to see what i’ve got now that i’ve been sitting on the stuff for a while. i’m enjoying it. some of the stuff that i thought sucked really doesn’t and some things that i thought were great haven’t aged well.

more music soon.

also, we should all sit back and see if kevlar updates his blog this week or fails miserably again as a member of the web 2.0 content generation online community. insert tag cloud here.

whispering

Posted by on January 27, 2009 No comments

things are moving briskly around here and lately it’s been all about quantity. the inner critic has been pretty quiet and that is likely what has been pushing my process along. a critical ear deep inside is a very useful thing but it gets in the way of doing the work. sometimes it’s better to slap something together and think about it later. all of the recordings and songs that i put together become ipod fodder the next day. putting them online puts me in a position to get some feedback and more importantly, motivates me to continue posting.

keeping the momentum is the hardest part.

the piece that i finished up tonight features the badly mangled voice of my good friend Amy. i don’t think that she has anything web-ish that she’d want to have linked (let me know if i’m wrong) but if she did, i would! i don’t think that you’ll hear it when you listen to this, but her voice brings a cadence and a color to this very static almost wind chime-like backdrop. it doesn’t really matter if you hear it. what’s important is that it pushed things along for me. check it out in the link below.

heavy nerd content ahead. you were warned.

today i did something pretty significant in my nerd life: i dumped my subscription to the linux audio users mailing list. the fact is, though i was an ardent supporter of gnu/linux and all of its promise, i don’t have time for it. i have learned the hard lesson that with gnu/linux and the audio software that runs on it you may not pay in money but you do pay in time. right now, i have no time. in fact, it’s been almost three years since i last fired up my debian box for any reason.

i have a full time job that doesn’t relate to my creative work. i have a wonderful family. i have a thousand things to do and one and a half hours a day to create when conditions are perfect. my laptop (yes, it has to be a laptop) has from the time i lift the lid to the time i put my fingers on the keyboard to be awake and functional. as i am launching my software, it needs to be finding the nearest network connection and negotiating my connectivity without any need for my intervention. when i plug in a peripheral, it needs to find it and make it useful immediately. and when i’m done i will close its lid and it had better suspend itself and be ready when i open it next time. sounds like a mac to me.

there is a lot to be said for gnu/linux and i will continue to push it as a great server solution, but for the composer on the go with little to no time for continuing education and system maintenance, it’s just not going to work out. keep up the good work and thanks for the memories!

thus endeth the nerding.

if you have some time, please take a listen to my latest and drop me a line on facebook or twitter or comment either here or in an email. i love the feedback!

white whisper

Creative Commons License
white whisper by j.c. wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at othertime.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://othertime.com.

a little navel gazing

Posted by on January 26, 2009 No comments

i listen to a lot of podcasts. why? because i live in houston which means that i have to drive 45 minutes to get to work and another 45 minutes to get home. this is because the city is a complete cluster to navigate. you could live 10 miles from work and it would still take 45 minutes because the surface streets don’t allow for easy passage. for me it’s 45 minutes of zipping down the freeway/tollway. with that much time in the car, my music collection gets stale so the best solution is to make a playlist of podcasts. it’s like making my own little radio station. this pleases me greatly.

one of the podcasts that i listen to is the interview features podcast from echoes.org. these are the artist interviews with various producers of heavy gauge new age stuff. to be honest, part of the reason i enjoy it so much is because it makes me laugh.

now anyone who has spent any time with me knows that i am a seriously pretentious dude. i went to a conservatory. i used to wear all black and have long hair. for years i sat in a tiny room writing art music that the unwashed masses just wouldn’t understand. when it comes to pretension, i am a master of the craft. but i understand it. i’m aware of it. i’m amused by it and i do my best to amuse those around me with it.

that said, what i find so compelling about this podcast is partly in the voice of kimberly haas. her voice is the voice of your college girlfriend’s roommate. you know the one, the art major who is just one tenth of one percent too hip for you. this may sound mean, but it’s not. every time i hear her voice i flash back to college and i’m falling over myself to get a cappuccino and my free jazz collection. it brings a smile to my face.

the other thing that draws me to it is what started me writing tonight. i just finished up messing around with something that is completely arrhythmic, atonal, and really a timbre experiment. it is unrepentantly static but constantly shifting. nothing stands still, but it doesn’t go anywhere either. imagine watching the oily rainbow in a puddle on the sidewalk with its colors moving like some kind of laconic amoeba. it’s like that only with sound. and no bad similes. it sounds almost like something you’d hear on echoes. almost. what’s the difference? well, this is where it gets a little harsh.

the difference is that it isn’t boring. most of the music that i pick up as a result of these interviews that i hear (and thank goodness for emusic so i don’t have to drop iTunes money on the albums) are actively boring. what i mean by that is the music is trying so hard to make me not listen that it’s distracting. i catch myself locked in a war with the music: i’m trying to focus on any development of themes or shifting of rhythms and it is bound and determined to make my eyes glaze over and drive my mind to thinking about composting or when the last time i changed the oil in my car was.

i should blame myself, but i don’t.

maybe this is music that isn’t meant to be heard. maybe it’s part of a deeper experience that i just don’t get. but i have a pretty decent musical education and all of the comparisons to arvo pärt make me think that they do intend for people to listen to it and believe in it. but pärt they ain’t. or they don’t get pärt and that i can forgive.

why all this ink? because i’m sitting here, listening to this piece that goes nowhere, fascinated with it and wondering. and i’m thinking about those interviews.

the composers and musicians that are featured go into such deep detail about their creative process and their history with the music. each one tries to be ever so much more unique than all of the other composers of similar tunage that i find myself breaking into a smile. i would love to sit down and simply ask, “really? you found some old recordings of a factory fan and decided that it would be the basis for 5 concept albums?” because that’s how it comes across. this guy is trying to sell me on the idea that a 30 year old accident of a tape was worthy of spinning off into 5 albums worth of loops that sound more like the last than the next. the snippets that are played behind the interviews make me giggle. again, not being mean here, simply wondering if people think about the things that they say when put in front of a microphone.

i will own up to being that bad. i was interviewed when i was in school about a piece that i wrote which was performed by a rather prestigious ensemble. the title of the work was “the mirror for string orchestra.” a critic grilled me over the title and its significance. i tried to spin it and in the end he simply told me, “i don’t hear that at all.” and he was right. i was busted. two things happened that day. first, i gave up laying down overly creative and deep explanations of my work and secondly, i stopped titling my pieces. the titles i give to songs now are often the first couple of words i think of when i’m done mixing. that helps me avoid some of the more painful explanations.

this might be my longest post here in the history of othertime. it’s funny how a 7 minute interview piece can really set me off.

now i need to get back to mixing up my art music. it’s an exploration of the greater oversoul of the world wide web and an ode to my sister-in-law’s long dead hamster. not that i expect you to understand.

a lost two months

Posted by on October 30, 2008 No comments

around our house it feels like we’ve lost two months worth of “getting stuff done” time.  there were two weeks of hurricane, a week and a half of the family being sick at the same time, business travel, and two weeks when my mom was here.  aside from the visit by my mom, there was mostly a lot of stress.  as a result, i’m just now getting back into the studio and the process of recording my tunes.  it got so bad that i didn’t even do my update last week and along with kevlar i failed the blog challenge!

but that’s all in the past now.

i hope to have something up soonish, but i’m not holding my breath.  we have a really busy week coming up and i can’t imagine getting enough studio time to mix up what i’ve managed to record this week in a scant two sessions.  next month:  fewer excuses!

stay tuned!

if it’s not one thing it’s another

Posted by on October 8, 2008 No comments

this week’s excuse for not getting into the studio is brought to you by: a gastrointestinal virus!  seriously, there is nothing more disturbing that having to hold a one year old while he wretches until empty.  that was sad in a deep way.  my catching it was not only inevitable, but painful.  so five days came and went and i’m not really sure what happened.

in lieu of useful musical goodness, i will instead post a little bit of a thought piece i’m working on.  my general thesis is: do the tools we use to make music make too many decisions for us?  in other words, does someone who uses a particular piece of software for recording, composing or editing gravitate to certain styles or characteristics because the tool being used makes it more difficult or much simpler to do what the composer would do otherwise?  this might only be of interest to me and it might be that way simply because i use a million different pieces of software to do what i do.  but is that because i am not particuarly drawn to any one environment or is it because i use what i need to use to do what i need to do?  i see in many forums people who live and die by one package.  that just can’t be healthy for the user or for the art.  all of that said, here is my introductory sketch for what will likely be a silly essay that a dozen people might read.

Introduction

When electronic music came into being, there were very few places in the world with the equipment necessary to produce it.  Those with access to these studios were those who had enough background in very specific disciplines.  Every piece was an experiment of some sort.  While thought was given to the composition of the work, it must be said that perhaps more of the effort and inspiration went into devising the methods of producing the work.  After all, these composers were building their entire tonal palette from scratch with each work.  With the technology of electronic music moving as quickly as it was, there was always something new to learn and the studio was more of a laboratory.  The level of detailed knowledge was incredible.

Computers quickly changed the game.  There was still a lot to know and a different set of skills to acquire, but as microcomputers came onto the scene the barrier to entry was lowered drastically.  More and more people could create music with the slowly but steadily growing number of pieces of software and hardware for making sound.  Slowly but surely, digital audio became a stock component of even the lowest cost personal computers.

With the hardware readily available, the software followed.  As the computer allowed the composer to step away from physical patch cables and oscillators, it also took on more and more responsibility for the details of sound creation.  This came at a price.  After all, if the software that one is using takes care of the low level items such as setting the sample rate where should its responsibilities and functionality end?  To see the opposite ends of the continuum, one need only compare Csound and its orchestra and score text files to GarageBand’s “Magic GarageBand” feature that actually creates a song for the user.

This is where the questions begin and the discussion takes flight.  The composer has taken necessary steps away from the technical side of producing electronic/computer music.  No longer is it necessary to understand the mathematics behind sample rates or the various forms of synthesis.  A computer music composer doesn’t even need to know how to program a computer.  But how far away from the inner workings of the computer is too far and to what extent do our tools make that decision for us?