Category Archives: Songs

Beach

While I was at the beach, back in September, I took a little alone time and recorded this happy little song on my iPhone. It's called "Beach".

Garageband is a pretty awesome app, especially for free. And the recording quality of the iPhone's mic is surprisingly good, given that this is just me playing with the iPhone sitting on the couch next to me. iPhone can't help with musicianship or songwriting ability, sadly.

And then there's Steve Lacy.

How The Internet's Steve Lacy Makes Hits With His Phone | WIRED

New Instrument

Behold the Akai LPK25!

It's a MIDI controller; in response to user input, it generates MIDI signals for other devices to use. This one sends its signals down a USB cable into a computer. And that's all it does - it makes no sounds of its own. It exists to tell other things to make sounds: things like a copy of Cakewalk Music Creator, for example.

I can't play piano, but I'm going to learn enough to amuse myself. Here's one of my first attempts.

All of the sounds here are from the software-based synthesizers that come with Cakewalk. Technology is amazing.

I'm still shit for coming up with chords on the fly, but I can pick my way around a scale once I map out the notes.

Amusement achieved !

Field

Artist's Statement

By exposing the flatness and debating the topsoil, "field" removes all ambiguity from the geography and indeed sows seeds of quiescence where later flowers of combinatorial analyses will wilt in the sun. Through this fluoridation and catechism, the uniquely rotund and confloundering ministrations embolden the frisson (and at what expense!) of a single guitar talking to itself across time. And realizing this, then we look down. We have come to the stream running through the middle which is the hydration and the sewer and the catheter, the mouth, the blood, the rectal dispensation, and dipping our naive toes two by two into the muck, we discover the leeches, the manifold rotifers and the pastoral pleasure of "field".

Rain girl

This is one of my favorite pics - a girl walking in the rain outside our first house. I've posted it previously, a couple of times.

I came up with an implementation of Aaron Hertzmann's "painterly" non-photorealistic rendering algorithm. This recreates the source image by using simulated brush strokes of varying size, color and shape. It's not a blurring or filtering of the source; it's a recreation made in much the same fashion that a human painter would copy a picture: look at the source, choose a color, make a stroke which follows that color. Repeat until you're done. As with a human painter, it starts with large brushes to get the background and large areas filled, then it refines the image with progressively smaller brushes.

This video is the algorithm in action, drawing the strokes (20 per frame, to save time). I told it to use short strokes.

The music is called "One Bird". That's me.

Here's one of a pic of Adrian Belew:

Longer, thinner brush strokes.

And, Tricksey:

Tricksey, Painterly

Somn


Sleepy adventures in A harmonic minor.

|-----------------------------
|-----------------------------
|------------------------1---2
|------------0---2---3--------
|0---2---3--------------------
|-----------------------------

  Caug       Bb5           F         E          Am
|----------------------------------------------------------
|----------------------------------------------------------
|-------------------------------10---------9---------------
|-----7----------9-10-9------10---------9-----------7---7--
|---7---7------8-----------8---------7------------7---7----
|-8----------7----------------------------------5----------

Start Your iPods

Random three, described.

  1. Guided By Voices - Motor Away. A great band. This song is one of many on its album which make you think that these guys can toss out these ridiculously great pop songs which would all be top-40 hits in a sane and just world. Except that they've recorded the songs to sound as radio-unfriendly as possible, because Fuck The System! or Artistic Vision! something, so they linger in obscurity by their own choice because Gimmie Indie Rock! or whatever. But then, their later albums are as slick as possible (produced by people like Ric Ocasek!), and the songs just as good; and the albums went nowhere.
  2. Sonic Youth - The Sprawl. The "Sprawl"? No. This will always be the "Come on down to the store" song.
  3. The Men - Oscillation. A nice indie rock jam. Reminds me of early Feelies, or Yo La Tengo, or even fieldfresh.

Play along, if you dare.

Stars Falling On NC

Here's a longer series of star pix. This was taken over multiple nights, with different lenses and exposure times. All stitched together...

Song is "Even The Simplest Things".

The video is actually in HD, and does look better in hi-res, full-screen.