studionebula.com

Let me state up front that I find this more amusing than anything else. One of my old cohorts at Cycling ‘74, Gregory Taylor, brought this video to my attention:

I don’t speak Spanish(?) so I can only guess at what’s being said, but it appears to be an excerpt from a Peruvian television show in which someone is showing off various things made with Max/MSP/Jitter. The amusing part is that this person must not be terribly creative, because one of the installations is nothing more than a demo patch that comes with Jitter. I know this because I built the patch. (It was about the only thing I did with Jitter; I didn’t have the time while working for Cycling ‘74 to learn Jitter, and I didn’t have the inclination to learn it after leaving.) Its output is quite distinctive. It’s the wavy abstract stuff that first appears at 0:30 in the video and then again at 1:30 through 1:50.

This speaks to a broader issue that I’ve mulled over at various times and in various contexts: what constitutes original work in the digital age? If I get up on stage with a Korg KARMA keyboard and plunk my finger down on one key and let the KARMA engine generate myriad patterns, am I the artist or is Stephen Kay, the KARMA inventor, the artist? If I use U&I’s lovely Artmatic software to generate a number of images, then print those images in a large format and hang them in a gallery, am I the artist or are Eric Wenger and Edward Spiegel, the creators of Artmatic, the artists? (Yes, I know that exactly this has been done.) If I string together a bunch of loops with ACID or GarageBand, am I the artist or are the creators of those loops the artists? If someone else grabs my Jitter patch from the demo folder of their Max/MSP/Jitter installation and projects it onto a screen in a gallery, I can’t help but think that they’re not the artist. No, I don’t think that I deserve any compensation or even necessarily any credit, but personally it would be a violation of my own integrity as an artist for me to present someone else’s work in this manner.

In case it’s not obvious, I don’t mean at all to disparage KARMA, Artmatic, ACID, or GarageBand. I have a great deal of respect for the respective creators of those products and admiration for their work. (Well, okay, maybe not so much for GarageBand…) But the inherent power of these products, and the sophistication of what they generate, raises questions about who’s doing the creating when they’re used.

Tags: Studio Nebula, Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

I was pleased to learn today that Raymond Scott’s son is producing a documentary film about his father. Here’s the trailer:

I’m happy to say that Audio Damage contributed to the funding of this project as soon as we learned of it.

If you’re thinking “who’s Raymond Scott?” that’s exactly why it’s important that this film is being made. Raymond Scott was one of the most significant figures in 20th-century American music, and he really deserves to be bettern known, even posthumously. The Wikipedia article provides a good overview, and there’s lots more information at the Raymond Scott website.

Tags: Audio Damage, Studio Nebula, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

I’ve been meaning to track this video down for awhile; thanks go to Ann Blake for sending it to Tracie. It’s of a speech given by a neuroscientist named Jill Bolte Taylor. Ms. Taylor suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain and, as a result, achieved unusual insight into the operation of her brain and perhaps insight into the operation of the human species as a whole.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

We just saw The Happening, the new film by M. Night Shyamalan. Let me state up front that I really like his previous movies. The excellence of The Sixth Sense goes without saying but I loved Signs and The Village also and certainly enjoyed Unbreakable and Lady in the Water. Hence it pains me to say that his newest film is really not very good. Coming from any lesser filmmaker it would be so-so; coming from him it’s a major disappointment.

I’m not going to say much about the plot since I personally hate it when someone spoils the plot of a movie for me. I suppose, though, that this review is something of a spoiler in itself. What I’ll say is this: it has a (mostly) very good, strange, suspense-laden build-up, and then it utterly fails to deliver. In retrospect it comes off as a few interesting ideas and some resulting odd situations thrown together in the framework of two plots competing for supremacy, and the competition ends in a draw.

I will say this: if you have any interest in seeing it, you might as well see it in a theater rather than waiting for the DVD. There are some nice bits of cinematography (although nothing as spectacular as, say, the night scene in The Village with the villagers moving through the houses with the dolly camera tracking them) whose impact would be diminished to nearly nothing on a small screen. On the other hand, those scenes might not be worth the trip to the theater. There were certain aspects of the camera work that I found annoying. I was entirely weary of the close-up-on-face-through-wide-angle-lens gimmick even before the film ended. That’s the first time I can recall being actually annoyed by camera work in one of his films.

Mark Wahlberg might be the movie’s strongest point. He’s a good actor; given his youth he might well be an excellent actor down the road. His character is at least convincing, which is more than can be said for many of the others. James Newton Howard did a nice job on the score. It’s not stunning but it works.

I dunno. Maybe I missed the point altogether, but as far as we could tell, if the movie had a point, it’s been made many times over in much simpler ways, and without completely letting down the audience.

I’ll make a couple of other pithy comments in the Comments section which will probably be spoilers, so don’t look at the Comments for this post until you’ve seen the movie, if you think you’re going to do so.

Tags: Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

One of the best things about music videos in the 80s (and probably other decades, but the 80s was when I was paying attention to music videos) was that some of them made no sense whatsoever. To wit:

New Order was one of my favorites at the time. Man, they were good.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Not long ago Chris posted a photo on his blog of his current workspace, which generated some amount of interest and a thread of comments about why people find it interesting to look at other people’s gear and stuff. This included at least one query about my workspace. (Hi, Jeff.) So, here are a few photos taken earlier today. It’s possibly worth mentioning that the lighting in that room is a little dim (which is actually fine with me, under most circumstances) and my camera was struggling a bit.

Here’s an overview:

Yes, that’s a cat at the lower edge. Her name is Widget, in the somewhat unlikely event that you haven’t heard about her already. Here’s a somewhat closer shot of the desk:

For the gearheads in the audience, here’s the equipment rack:

Note that these photos are hosted by Flickr, so if you click on any of them you can go to their corresponding Flickr page and see them at different sizes, including their original 6Mpix resolution. This should enable you to zoom in obsessively and look at stuff like the Mobile Suit Gundam figures perched next to the SST-282. This also marks the beginning of the end of my use of Gallery, the software I’ve used to put photos on my site. Gallery’s nice enough but it’s a pain to keep up with their updates (partly because their updating process tends to not work) and I’m always colliding with the upload-size limit. (There’s a nice exmaple example of getting what you pay for: Gallery is free but it drives me bats, so I just paid for a Pro Flickr account because it worked seamlessly the first time I tried it.)

Tags: Studio Nebula // 4 Comments »

Here’s a nice example of the woeful state of affairs that the spammers of the world have created for us. Last night, Tracie’s email to her aunt started bouncing. Her aunt uses MSN Live Hotmail Whatever. The error message says that Tracie’s email is being rejected because either my domain has been blocked, or my IP (which is dynamically allocated, of course) has been blocked, or something. It’s kind of vague on the exact reason.

Now, just for the record: I’m not a spammer. I hate spam. This site doesn’t have any sort of mailing list and I don’t harvest any sort of information about who visits it. (Now and then I become curious and look at my server logs, but I’m looking only at information like total number of visits, not information about individual visitors.) To the best of my knowledge, none of my machines are being used as spam relays. My home machines are locked down tight as well as being behind a firewall, and I know from experience that my domain host comes down hard on any account that they even think might be compromised.

It’s entirely possible, however, that my domain name has been hijacked and used for spam. To the best of my knowledge, there’s nothing I can do about this. If someone sets up their bulk mailer to make its effluence look like it originated from my domain, there’s really nothing I can do.

Okay, back to the story. The MSN rejection message actually provided a link for investigating this sort of mail problem, so I hunted around on the site. It quickly became obvious that the site was oriented towards two audiences: people who use MSN for their email, and people who run mail servers. I’m in neither of those audiences. My outgoing mail is handled by Comcast. I couldn’t tell you much of anything about the process other than what I learned from their support site when I was setting up my email clients.

I found a form for submitting a request for help. The form was, of course, oriented towards the audience that handles mail servers. Basically the form was set up for someone who does run some sort of bulk email service (or is just a business with a big mailing list for sending out ads and stuff) and manages their own servers. I filled it out to the best of my knowledge, inserting pithy comments about how irrelevant much of it was to someone who was merely trying to find out why, exactly, MSN had decided that Tracie shouldn’t be allowed to send email to her aunt.

Some hours later I got a canned response from “Peter” at MSN that asked me to provide information that the form had already asked for. I wrote back and explained that I can’t provide some of the information because I don’t have shell access on Comcast’s SMTP servers and reiterated the information which I’d already provided. No response so far. I’m not even sure whether the message went anywhere because they somehow cleverly hid the Repy-to: field so that when I replied to the message, the To: field came up blank. I copied the address from the message but it was some ridiculous long address with lots of periods and stuff.

Anyway, in my humble opinion, this is not a good way to combat spam. My IP address is dynamically allocated. Maybe someone did send spam from it, but it wasn’t me and I can’t do anything about the address that Comcast hands to me. Maybe someone did use my domain name for spam, but there’s really nothing I can do about that either. Heaven knows that hotmail.com has been used for plenty of spam; does MSN block their own email?

So, Linda, that’s why you haven’t heard from Tracie yesterday or today. I have no idea how to resolve this situation. You could try contacting MSN and telling them that you’d appreciate it if your niece was permitted to send email to you, but you’re likely to encounter the same sterling level of customer service that I’ve encountered.

UPDATE:

Just after making this post I received a new response from MSN:

Hello Adam,

Thank you for contacting Windows Live Hotmail Domain Support, my name is Jaime.

We are aware of the situation and are working with Comcast to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your patience.

Best Regards,

Jaime

Windows Live Hotmail Domain Support

Of course, that doesn’t really answer all of the relevant questions. For instance, why do they need to work with Comcast at all? MSN initiated the blocking of my email–they can just as easily unblock it.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

It’s One Of Those Days, it seems. Nothing actually disastrous has happened, just stuff like having to go to the hardware store to exchange something that didn’t fit after the first trip and then going again to get something forgotten during the second trip–all on a day on which I’d planned to work and not go anywhere. Then there’s been some ongoing drama with the paper business that I won’t go into. Tracie’s been dealing with a migraine that finally seems to be giving up after a couple of days. Oh, and the power went out for six hours yesterday. Anybody who says that power outtages are times for old-fashioned family fun is crazy. Power outtages in a house with two businesses, six computers, and an electronic music studio are a royal PITA and no fun at all.

So, in that general frame of existence, I could do little but laugh when I got home from the day’s second trip to the hardware store, brought my main PC out of hibernation, and it presented me with this:

No, I have no idea what happened. I restarted it but decided to pause for a cup of tea before I find out whether it’s happy now.

Tags: Uncategorized // 2 Comments »

I’m sort of rethinking and reorganizing bits of my studio, and I’ve decided that I no longer need my Expressionist MIDI/CV converter. I’ve never really used the LFOs and stuff in it, and I recently purchased an Omega8 poly analog synth, so the Expressionist is more or less overkill for how I use my modular these days.

It’s in nearly new condition. There’s sort of a smudge on the panel which is almost unnoticeable and I think it may have been there when I bought it. I have the manual and the original box. I’m asking $450. I accept PayPal only and ship only to U.S. addresses (sorry, I hate dealing with international shipments).

The product webpage is here but if you don’t already know what an Expressionist is you probably don’t want one anyway.

UPDATE: Sold!

Tags: Studio Nebula, Uncategorized // 2 Comments »