In praise of Auto-tune

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 Milk Bar in the East Village, and how she was looking for a guitarist or some other instrumentalist. The idea was this: she would mix beats on a Roland MC-909 groovebox and sing, and I would improvise textural guitar sounds on top. Her repertoire was a set of pop songs in a variety of genres, sung in a flat, affectless voice thickly coated in digital abstraction: delay, harmonizer, distortion, peculiar reverbs.

Continue reading “In praise of Auto-tune”

Visual outlining with Flickr

I’m a visual thinker with an art background, and through playing with Flickr, I stumbled on the idea of a visual outline to complement the written one. Continue reading “Visual outlining with Flickr”

Social bookmarking is delicious

The most practically useful thing on the whole entire social web is Delicious. Its original point was to store your web browser bookmarks online. That’s reason enough to use it. But the real value of Delicious is how it connects the thoughts in your head to the thoughts in the heads of innumerable internet strangers. Even more useful is the way it stores, reorganizes and reflects your own thoughts back to you. Delicious feels less like a web site I look at and more like a new module of my brain. It’s also like a slow-paced but highly absorbing text-based computer game, a loosely organized internet scavenger hunt. Continue reading “Social bookmarking is delicious”

How to write something long and complicated

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 and I switched to Word, along with the rest of the industrialized world.

Word started off pretty useful, but each successive version was a bigger and bigger drag. There were more toolbars and menus and animated characters giving unwanted advice. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I followed the geek example and switched over to plain text editors and HTML.

But this year I wrote a book proposal and some other long-form, complicated stuff. It got to be difficult keeping track of which thoughts were in which text file. Then I read a blog post by Steven Poole called “Goodbye, Cruel Word” that hipped me to Scrivener, and I’ve never looked back. Continue reading “How to write something long and complicated”