aparrish@itp

Point of Disgust (DR. WILY mix). (Listen to the Low original here, from their album Trust, which is excellent btw.)

My process: I don't have this song on CD, so I converted it from MP3 to AIFF in iTunes then imported it into Audacity. The non-Low portions of the song were sequenced in Schism Tracker, using samples I mostly generated myself; I used the "Change Tempo" effect in Audacity to match the BPM of the Low song to the new backing track I had already started to sequence. Then I exported the relevant vocal snippets to Schism Tracker and worked for a while to integrate them into my arrangement. When I was done, I exported the whole thing back to Audacity, where I did some fades and compression and then exported to MP3.

I really wanted to do some kind of mash-up for this assignment, but my most ambitious ideas (e.g., Alice Coltrane meets the Kinks!) were thwarted early on by my inability to gain any mastery over GarageBand. As Wednesday approached, I realized I'd have to stick to more familiar tools. So I came up with the concept that I eventually executed, namely, to give an upbeat, 8-bit arrangement to the most unlikely song I could think of: Point of Disgust, Low's direst dirge!

Problems I encountered: The "Change Tempo" effect ended up making the vocals sound a little janky. (I sped up the song from the original about 40%.) But I think the low-fi nature of my new arrangement helps mask that. I tried for a long time to tune out the backing track in the original, but unfortunately that damned piano is taking up the same space in the spectrogram as Mimi Parker's vocals. If the piano were a little quieter, I don't think my inability at beat matching would be so evident (especially in the second verse). Oh, and it doesn't help that the song doesn't stick to a constant tempo.

Posted by Adam Parrish at 02:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's the key quote from McCloud's response to Mr. Shirky:

Suggesting we need fewer choices for our own good betrays a dim view of the user's intelligence

Shirky isn't taking a dim view of the user's intelligence. He's claiming - correctly, in my opinion - that, when faced with two ways of doing something, the user will always choose the easiest option. He's not calling users stupid, he's saying that users prefer usable systems.

This is why people will spend 99 cents for a song on iTunes: Not because the song itself is worth 99 cents, but because it's worth 99 cents to not have to find the songs some other way, to not have to worry about formats, about badly tagged or ripped MP3s and so forth. The content is important, of course, but Apple's iTunes business model only works because the user experience is so breezily convenient.

I pay $9.99/month to eMusic for the same reason: The site has music reviews from music journalists I trust, user comments to help me make decisions about what to download, high-quality rips at good bit rates, etc. I have the technical expertise to skulk around on file sharing services and BitTorrent, but because I get everything I need from eMusic in less time than I would spend otherwise, I generally don't.

So here's a theory. Any delivery service (whether online or off) needs to succeed in doing three things in order to make money. First: clear pricing; second: ease of use; third: ability to prove that the content is worth buying. Both iTunes and eMusic meet these criteria, I think. The iTunes Music Store charges 99 cents per track for all tracks and makes it perfectly evident when you're buying music and when you're only browsing. eMusic has a flat subscription fee. Both services go to pains to show that they provide a long-term time benefit, which pays off the user's initial investment in signing up for the service, and continuing investment in paying for the service.

Free distribution meets the first criterion, and the last, but often fails on the second. Ease of use stems from design (user interface) and infrastructure (no one wants to download large files at slow speed), both of which are far easier to do if you have some kind of budget. Then again, having a budget for infrastructure doesn't necessarily mean you'll have content worth buying.

Posted by Adam Parrish at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This device consists of five photoresistors and a superbright LED strapped to a servomotor, all inside a circular, opaque box. The photoresistors are taped to the box's inner wall and the servomotor is secured to the bottom of the box, dead center. (See below the cut for a photograph, sound samples, and source code for the Processing and Arduino programs.)

Here's how it works. A program on the Arduino instructs the servomotor to turn the LED toward each photoresistor in turn, returning to the first position at the end of the sequence. The Arduino program keeps track of a value for each photoresistor; this value is incremented proportionately with the reading from the photoresistor each time through the loop() function. The Processing applet reads these values via serial connection and uses them to control the volume of five pitches.

The Arduino, in turn, reads a value between 0 and 128 from the Processing applet. This value corresponds to how close the current time is to half-past the hour (e.g., at 9:30 the value would be 128, at 10:00 the value would be 0, and at both 9:45 and 10:15 the value would be 64). The Arduino uses this value to determine two things: First, how fast the values in the photoresistor array should "decay," and how frequently the LED should turn on and off. The net effect is that fewer notes are played at the beginning of the hour, with a faster decay, while at half-past, notes are played more frequently and decay more slowly.

Sound samples:

Mystery Clock: Top of the Hour - 0' 41" (192kbps MP3)
Mystery Clock: Half Past - 0' 43" (192kbps MP3)

Source code: Arduino, Processing. (Processing code requires Ess.)

Posted by Adam Parrish at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Understanding Comics gobbled me up! I couldn't put it down. It's passionate and clear. You couldn't ask for a better introduction to the genre.

My comics literacy, I'm now convinced, is woefully lacking—I'm planning to go up to Forbidden Planet and buy up the whole store.

On the assignment: Tom had already read Understanding Comics. I think my new-found enthusiam for the book probably skewed our assignment toward the most obvious axis: levels of abstraction. Tom did the sketches and the drawings; I made the "amorphous blob"/blocking/iconic levels and the textual descriptions. The most interesting part of the process for me was having to decide which of Tom's visual elements were salient enough to be included in the iconic and textual layers. Even though our comic had no explicit narrative, I found myself resorting to constructing my own narrative, in order to narrow down the number of elements that were to be part of the comic's "abstract" representation.

If Tom and I hadn't decided to focus on narrative and abstraction, I would have wanted my assignment to comment on the relationship of space and time in comics and the varieties of panel transitions. These are the most insightful observations in Understanding Comics, in my opinion, a simple yet powerful example of what makes comics tick.

I do worry, however, that McCloud would draw so sharp a distinction between the medium of comics and its content. His obvious contempt for some comics is a barrier to any recognition of how the form of comics dictates its content. The medium, ahem, is the message, after all, and maybe something about "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in sequence" enables certain styles, narratives, characters, whatever. There is a risk in using emotional criteria to devalue certain exemplars of a phenomenon, which is that you might end up excluding those exemplars that conflict with the theory you're trying to advance.

Finally, the concept of "closure" interested me. In linguistics, the same concept—when applied to conversation—is called "implicature" (see Grice, uh, 1979 I think). McCloud's explanation of closure is more generally applicable and I wonder if some of the conclusions he reaches about comic panels might also be true about, say, sentences.

Posted by Adam Parrish at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Link to Corrine's blog with web image, PSD and source images. My commentary below the cut.

This assignment was fun. The finished piece doesn't yet have a formal title, but I would probably call it something like "McLuhan and the Mediums (The Message)." The bodies in the photo belong to three rather fearsome Polish Karate enthusiasts; I'm not sure where they figure in that title. Maybe they're the Message.

Corrine and I both immediately gravitated towards a kind of Dadaist/Surrealist interpretation of the assignment. Looking over some of the blogs of my classmates, I can see that interpretation isn't uncommon. I suppose that, given the instruction to use "disparate elements" but otherwise having free range, individuals will tend to explore their own dream world, much as Miro, Kandinsky, Magritte, etc. Unlike these hallowed artists, however, ITPers' dream worlds seem focused nearly exclusively on pop culture icons.

Posted by Adam Parrish at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)