When the computer crashes, it seems like it’s frozen. Actually, it’s still working as fast as usual. It only appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over. Computers have become …
Continue reading “The Minus World and the Blue Screen Of Death”
Engineers describe a system whose input and output behavior are known and whose inner workings are otherwise mysterious as a black box. Bruno Latour describes the black box as: the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one …
In my laptop band Revival Revival, we use Reason for all of our instrumental sounds and sample playback. The newest version has a handy color-coding feature in the sequencer, which makes it easy for me to be able to keep track of which part of which song happens in which order. Having all the tunes …
Continue reading “In the sequencer, the notation is the performance”
My experience with Auto-tune has felt like stepping out the door of a rocket ship to explore a whole new sonic planet. Auto-tune entered my musical life mainly from my work with Barbara Singer, who I met in 2003. She posted in the Craigslist Musicians section about this gig she had at the now-defunct Korova …
I find myself in the new and delightful position of writing for money. So I needed to step up my game in terms of workflow and file management. The last time I tried to write something long, I was in college, using Windows 3.1 and good old Wordperfect 6. Then the Microsoft hegemony set in …
Continue reading “How to write something long and complicated”
