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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Monday, June 13, 2005

The shinkenspeck is finished. If you check in here occasionally, you’ll know that I started the wet cure on this in the middle of April. Sister Ruth and Sister Bubbles were even here to see it in the beginning! Now, two months later,  it has finished the aging process and I cut off the strings – kinda like cutting the ribbons at a bridge opening ceremony. Tomorrow night I’ll slice it and post some pictures – and that’s no baloney!     9:28:33 PM    comment []

Now we start cooking. After the 4 weird bell sounds, the floor tom kicks in. That’s the first thing you see over on the left here. Some people call it a “bass drum.” It’s one of the loudest and lowest sounds in a mix, so it generally gets placed dead center in a stereo mix, just like the bass guitar. That allows both speakers to play it as loudly as possible. Notice how quickly it decays, but not as quickly as that little vertical line about ¼ of the way in. It sounds like a “pop,” very loud but very quick. After the first pattern (not shown here), there are two successive kick drums at the beginning of each measure and they’re doubled with a snare that you can hear, but not see here. You can see the closed high hat after the second set of kick drums. There’s a little snare roll at the end to set up the next pair of kick drum sounds.   This “loop” gets played eight times, a nice round number for both music and computers. The weird bell sound gets repeated 4 times in this part, with two repetitions of the drum pattern for each, so this gets us over 40 seconds into the tune and we’re just laying the groundwork. Mr. Cale has a a little story to tell us and this is just the exposition, and he’s got all the time in the world. You know why? He’s a musician and time is a just plaything for him.   That’s all for tonight, we’ve already looked at 40 seconds and the whole piece is 360 seconds, so we’re over 10% done!   Update: I changed my mind. This is not two measures, but one. I sliced up this sample (which has more than three notes, so I'm unclear whether I could "steal" it or not - see Supreme Court indecision) and liked it better at ~92 beats per minutes with one 4/4 measure than I did at ~185 bpm with two measures. Now I wonder how a court might decide on a drum beat. If I analyzed each of the slices in this sample and used a synthesizer to choose similar sounds in the same timing and same order, would that be plagiarism? (Good spelling rule: There is no "I" in "team" but there is one in "plagiarism.")     7:25:38 PM    comment []

I zoomed in one the 4 bell sounds here, mainly to verify that most of the sound is in the left channel. It is! The waves are a little thicker in the top window. The sound is maybe more like a glass harmonica, you know, the think Ben Franklin invented which was real popular until the beginning of the 19th century when they discovered that people were dying from lead poisoning they got from the musical crystal ware. Hell, he was lucky he didn’t get killed flying that kite, the man lived dangerously.       6:09:59 PM    comment []

Here is what the whole of “Zen” looks like as a waveform. It reads from left to right. The bell sounds are the little bumps way over on the left. The whole piece is a little over 6 minutes and the bells’ 4x make up a little over 20 seconds of that. Notice how there are vertical lines jammed against the top and bottom for most of the piece. That’s called “clipping” since the normally rounded peak of the waves are clipped off. It is generally considered a bad thing, something you should avoid, but it can also be used dramatically and here it is – to make the sound of the bass drum as loud as possible. To me, the relentless drumbeat is one of the unifying features of this CD, so making them as loud as possible is good, even though it means – horrors! – clipping. The left channel is on the top, BTW, and the right on the bottom, pretty conventional.     5:55:35 PM    comment []

Zen   I’m a bit versed in traditional musical analysis, but it doesn’t really help much with all the electronics that make up much of the music that I really like. The basic concepts do carry over, however, and in a last desperate attempt to become a good audio technician I’m going to do a little analysis from time to time online. You learn by studying the masters and John Cale is without a doubt one of those. His Hobo Sapiens CD begins with a composition called “Zen” and here you see a spectral analysis of the sound that starts it off. Adobe Audition calls the sound D-sharp, but I don’t really trust it all that much. You can see there’s a peak at about 516 Hz and another at about twice that, or an octave higher, but the sound is like a bell with many complex overtones. It “rings” 4 times before the drums kick in, mostly in the left channel. With a little more listening you’ll hear a bass drone and the tinkling of a distant piano glissando.     5:42:08 PM    comment []

The BBC this morning is reporting Dick “Head” Cheney’s ruminations about not closing Guantanamo. They say, “It’s important to remember that these are, ‘as he put it,’ bad people.”   As he put it. Yeah. These guys are an eternal source of found humor. Bad people. Yeah. Why didn’t he just say “genetically inferior?”     1:38:55 AM    comment []