I am sipping some Theraflu, trying to nurse the final stages of the weekend illness that gave my family a microbial uppercut, and poking through images of old modular synthesizers. The weekend just went and dissipated into the blurry atmosphere, and it’s difficult to turn one’s mind back to work already. So it goes. So no clever turn of phrase to end this post, just one last sip of medicine-flavored lemon drink and then it’s off to tuck my head into a pillow of sleep. Or something that resembles sleep, which is just about where things are at, at night, in this hilltop aerie.

In honor of the truth, the picture above is not my audio set up — but oh, how I wish. No, it is an image from an MIT Media Lab veteran who has been building this thing incrementally, for years, or so I just read today. Here are some audio works from the owner’s webpage.

Posting the “cart” before the “horse” is an attempt to trick myself into disciplined action — now that I’ve put it out there, I need to fulfill it properly or know myself as truly, deeply “lame”.

Yeah, haven’t actually written too much lately, instead letting the Twitter module take over & capture the fragmented thoughts of any given day. Night time has been spent experimenting with recording, incrementally carving, remapping, knob-twisting, and the like, moving slowly– but ever– onward. Lingering favorite from last week has to be the Tuba samples, thrown through some distortion pedals set to mid-growl level. Sort of a dirty heroic fanfare, which makes my sternum go all a-flutter.

Just last night/this morning, was checking out WaveBurner, and realized just how far the distance between an .AIFF and an .MP3 … if you listen, if you really listen, there is a lot wrong with the .MP3 compression; it’s like some sub-psychological mud– a mud that’s almost not audible, but rather something sort of felt.

Which makes me excited for the time I actually permit myself to buy the near-field monitors I keep thinking about. At the very least, it will give me some sort of gold standard from which to measure deviation(s).

Ok, so a sort of boring update-type post. Nothing too useful. So it goes, my head is down in the waveform, swimming in the frequency bands. Better philosophy when I actually look up.

update: actually, got to hit the recording room again, since Yana stayed ’til 3pm; managed to give insectile birth to one more musical idea, one that hopefully emerges from its larval stage with wings.

OK, wait, back up, important point skipped: Aunt Jenny gave Lucian a sleep-noise machine (I forget what its real name is) which has several different settings. Currently, he is in there past the gates of deeper slumber whilst digital waves crash with white-noise crests on the virtual shore. Lest you think I am making fun, I am not: I love white-noise machines, could listen to them all day long (cf. my sound art). I am ‘monitoring’ the baby through a ‘monitor’ which is sitting next to me, god’s-eye view of my son curled up asleep.

A highly compressed, noisy, distortish-type sound comes thru to me, through this monitor, but I really didn’t notice it before, mostly because I had on my recording headphones on which heavily (though not completely) filter out ambient sounds.

Anyway, I set up some synthesizer through a series of compression, eqs, and distortion, then played with an EVOC Filter which, in total coolness, allows one to chop up the harmonics in two ways and gently morph them into each other, fueled by an LFO. I got the sound meditatively cool, deep grainy distorted breaths of sound heaving in waves, sort of liquid noise undulations. I looped it for a while, trying to think to what purpose I might put the sound…

Now to the meat of the story: taking off the headphones, blinking my eyes, and realizing the sound i just spent 20–30 minutes crafting and zoning on was pretty much the sonic equivalent of the waves being hushed out by Lucian’s sleep-noise-machine. I mean, nearly identical. Must have leaked through and bent the synapses towards the sound. Sort of viral, or invasive. Or maybe my brain is just sort of ‘yield’-y lately.

There you have it, the funny/odd/interesting thing. Two ends of a psychic electrode touch. An aural ouroboros. Sort of.

Except, in the end, i have to say: my sound was better.

I had just bounced down a few recent changes in my current roster of songs, and was giving them a listen on the open-air Bose speakers (note1) and was surprised by what got buried v. what got emphasized. Part of this, of course, is my own lack of skills at mixing. But part of it isn’t …

Anyway, interesting to hear of the current pressures on producers and engineers to mix for the overcompressed-mp3-plus-crappy-laptop-speakers, since this is now the standard state of listening affairs for a good chunk of the crowd out there. I don’t yet know what I think about that, since it’s the old artistic-ideal-vs.-commercial-reality conundrum, and i have heard similar arguments about the compression for normal radio airplay, but for this latter there was always a radio.edit different from the studio album version, so that the sonic quality was optimized for each different scenario.

The truth is, I tend to like the modern– well, 90’s and 2000’s era– productions. I think that we have a vast amount of technology and knowledge that tweaks our aural perception, and i find many albums today a resplendent soundscape. Granted, I listen to a lot of Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, two bands who have invested a lot of studio time in creating sounds and atmospheres; but I do get a bit of the younger bands unnamed but implied in the article, both from my own passions and research, and from catching echoes of the adolescent frenzy of my daughter, 16 years old and everything that tends to mean. And truth is, as John Oswald says, the world is a noisy ball. You have to shout sometimes to be heard. But then you have bands like Low, like Sigur Ros, like Kings of Convenience, and like the Black Atlantic (my recent late-night addiction): bands who swim only in the soft, the meditative, the glacial, and/or bands whose whole ethic is dynamics, meaning the softest softs and comparative ‘louds’ that are an orgasm’s release of tension. So I don’t know. On this, I am agnostic.

Meanwhile, the practical side is that I have to make sure that these songs, being built in an incremental recording process that is all I can afford right now, sound good on an mp3 as well as full-fledged CD audio aiffs. I will overcompress where I have to. I am not afraid.