It’s me in an artistic frenzy now, drooling as I feverishly manipulate the virtual faders and hysterically laughing, as they say Papa Haydn did in his final days at the harpsichord, and whipping up The Ultimate Meow Mix. Since a few people have asked for copies, it was of the highest urgency to create a finished product worthy of the download time. The picture of Claudette at the laptop from last evening happened because that’s where the sound was coming from at that time. She even found the correct key combination to suspend the computer (Alt+F4). But, before that happened, there were sounds coming from the tiny speaker that disturbed me, sounds I had missed on both the desktop speakers, headphones, and home stereo (Boston Acoustics). It was a spike of phase noise that sounded like a dentist drill echoing in a thermos bottle. I’d fiddled with one track too much.
I thought it was the track with the Pounce treats shaking, but it turned out to be the one where I’d say “Twyla” and she’d respond by meowing. So I edited that track and put a narrow notch filter on just my voice at 172, 645, 2627, and 4177 Hz. That helped, but I had dicked with it way too much for that to rescue it. So I put 4:1 compression on the squawkiness and that pretty much buried it.
It was the phase modulation that had pretty much FUBARed that track, but I’d already recorded another Pounce track so I decided to use them both. To overcome the residual phase modulation in Twyla’s meows, I made another track where I lowered her voice an octave, and that’s where the strangeness began.
When I played that lowered track by itself, I could distinctly hear Twyla saying my name. Not in a pissed off sort of way, but just answering me when I said “Twyla.” At other times, it sounded like she was saying “Hmmmm…” or “Hey,” so I cut those verbalizations out and pasted them into a sentence, which I placed at the end of the cat appetite stimulant sounds. It still didn’t seem finished, so I faded it out on an echo-laden Claudette meow.
Now anyone following this creative saga is aware that both Liz and Claudette thought that my “Here Kitty Kitty Kitty” with the Doppler shift sounded too demented, but I overrode their editorial judgment and went with my intuition - which was that it was not quite demented enough - and brought it up in the mix. With the Twyla talk and echoing Claudette coda, the length of this piece is now 38 seconds, but it’s better this way. If audio engineers can make Britney Spears’ undulating crotch sound like a musical instrument, I can make my cats talk.
6:36:27 PM 
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