I'm back!!

Well, I'm back! And ashamed that I was away for so long after I had promised myself to be dedicated to it. Why on earth did I make something that would make me feel guiltier than I already feel? WHY!?!? Oh well, I may at least comfort myself in saying that I warned you. My name is Slothlady, and pretty much, I was asleep all last week. No, not true. I have been working on this piece for my portfolio. I'm adapting a short story by H.G. Wells and putting music to it. Electronic Music (Oooooooooh). It's going pretty well, only I don't have a very good way of recording my voice (read good as cheap and non-labor intensive). I tried recording on my mac with the internal mic, but the sound really sucked, and I did it without a pop screen so it is a little .. poppy. So my prof, Milica Paranoic (meh-litzah paranoh-sich... yeah, I'll tell you a story about how much I messed that up someday. This is her website, she's super cool:
http://www.milicaparanosic.com/ ) lent me an old edirol field recorder that works much better.

And can I just say something really quick. My roomate is drving me bananas. He is trying to remix songs from Grease the musical right now and when he's not doing that he's talking really loudly and productively on the phone. Sorry roomie, you're awesome and I realize that you gotta do what you gotta do, but my advice to all humans out there: do not ever live with someone who makes their office in you house. DOn't dO iT. Because not only do you have to listen to it, you have to feel it. A sort of frenetic anxiety that infects your whole house, and seems to whisper "I am working" in a creepy reverby-pitch shifted sort of way. It makes me want to hide out in my room. And I do. All the time. And then I tell myself to Woman-Up and be an Adult. To be brave and go into the living room. And I do. And I get nauseous, go back in my room, climb back into bed, and worry about how I am ignoring my blog.

But more on this field recorder. I thought that it was a wonderful gift from he GODS!!(I am making it an all caps GODS to imply that these GODS are in fact the GODS from Jason and the Argonauts --VIRTUAL SLAP!-- NO! Not the new movie coming out you Foooooool! The old Harryhausen movie that me and my little bro were raised on, with mixed results. Can I just say that I love the score for the movie sooooo much! And the harpies. I love the harpies. There is no way that the new movie will match this one). Anyway, like any gift from the GODS, this Edirol recorder came with a catch.. a few catches actually. The batteries died, and then the compact flash card, overwrought with grief, died in sympathy after I had spent two hours recording on it in my bathroom. Which is not very clean. Some might argue that this is my fault; I however would tell them to eat broccolini (broccolini is foul stuff. You think that its just like broccoli, only smaller and cuter and with an adorable name, but it is more like broccoli's evil, bitter tasting cousin that has the power to ruin any stir fry).


Anyway, when my piece is finished I will put it up here and you can all listen. All one of you. I am really happy with the way it is going, and I can't wait to rerecord the voice, which I will do today, if it be will of the GODS! And after a lengthy discussion with my roomy about ambient sound I am going to make a recording in a pillow fort in my bedroom. I am pretty excited about it.

I have been thinking a lot about grad schools lately where I can study music technology. I can't figure out which one is best. So I am starting a new section in my blog, called

School Schmool

where I will weigh the pros and cons of different schools for my own personal benefit. But if they happen to help you out in any way, that's great.
My first school is ...

Brown

Pros:

For me, the main appeal of Brown seems to be that it has lots of opportunity for creativity and art within the field of music technology. I have got to say that I am most interested in the music part of music technology. I want to learn how to use and make technology in order to create music. I want technology to serve art. And it seems that Brown is interested in that too. It is also a school that lets the student decide what kind of education they get. Very 'multidisciplinary'. So I could study video making, design, visual art or writing alongside my studies in music technology in order to better inform the art I make. They also do collaborative work with risd, which sounds pretty enticing. They also have an electronic music ensemble, which makes me drool. They have six performance spaces, 5 digital recording studios, 3 project studios with 24 hour access, and a multimedia studio too.

Cons:

They only offer a PhD. You can't just get your masters. So that's a five year long program. At 60 000 $$$ a year for international students. Ouch. I could get a pretty good house for that much. If I stay that long out of the workforce, I guess am saying that I am considering a life in academia, which would be ideal really, except that I would have the debt of a lifetime to pay off. And Universities do not, as a rule, pay very well. I mean, my bf gets paid 50 000 a year. Really, if I want to make art, maybe I am better off doing it on my own, because there is nothing like crippling debt and poverty to make you hate everything.

They do offer a lot of different ways to get money while you are in school: fellowships, work-study, teaching assistanceships, graduate proctorships and tuition scholarships. One of the questions I guess I need to ask them is if I get any of these things, how much will they offset the tuition.

Also, Brown is in Providence. Providence is beautiful, and it has a lot of great places to eat, but if I wanted to intern while I was at school, there wouldn't be too many opportunities. I would have to do summer internships in another city.

Of course there is another thing to consider, which is a personal consideration; my boyfriend lives and works in New York City (Is that the proper use of a semi-colon?). He is starting up a company here, so he probably is not leaving anytime soon. If it were just a masters, two years might be o.k. for a little long distance shuffle. But five years seem like a bit of a stretch.

I also missed the deadline this year to apply, so I have to almost two years before I could go.

What I would have to do to get in:
I need to do a GRE, whatever that is. I hope it doesn't involve math, but I have an eeking sensation in my brain that it might.
I need to have a portfolio, with three or four good examples of my work. Also possibly a website. They primarily judge you on your artistic abilities.

What I still need to look into:

-The faculty: I want composition lessons, so obviously there has to be a good composition teacher there who has experience working with technology.
-How to offset my tuition if I go there?
-Maybe find a way to talk to students who are there and see how they feel about it.
-Look more at the courses they offer and possible paths other students have taken. Figure out what fancy terms like '3D audio' actually mean.
-Get a tour of the facilities, maybe go to a few concerts.
-Also, will my boyfriend will dump me if I go there? Will you sweetie?

Sunday Fantasy Continued

Well, here I am again with another post. I know you are all surprised, saying to yourselves, 'what kind of a Sloth is this lady?' Well, let me tell you, you should be asking, 'what kind of a lady is this Sloth?' I have been exploring the new and exciting field of staring at a wall or a window for a really long and then closing my eyes tight and trying to name all the colours of the colour splotches that appear under my eyelids. This activity is best done lying down. Ooooh lavender.
There is something, however, about me that is very unsloth-like. Guilt. When I am not in a sleepy stupor, I am consumed with guilt. Guilt about all the things that I really, really should be doing. Sloths never seem like they feel guilty about anything. I mean, look at them. I love this video because of the guy just cracking up in the background. Anyway, sloths do not look guilty, probably because they have nothing they should be doing other than being a sloth. Sometimes, well most of the time, I feel as though what life requires of me is much more than what I was meant to be. Like, for instance, I feel that human beings were never supposed to be fiscally responsible, or have bank accounts. And when I feel this way I start staring at walls.
But I am like a sloth in a lot ways. Watch this video to find out why. Or I could just summarize: my muscles have been 'reduced to thin ribbons' through inactivity, I generally defecate in the same place (unfortunately David Attenborough rarely stands by and watches), and I move really slowly. I do not however choose to do less instead of eating less. I just do both. And I don't eat leaves. often. Also, why does Attenborough pronounce sloth like 'sloath.' I wonder if sometimes he pronounces things wrong, only no one tells him because even if it was wrong, after he pronounces it a certain way, it's right. And it has always been right. It's called the Attenborough effect. I also wonder how much I do in the time it takes David Attenborough to eat lunch.

Anyway..

I have been working a little more on my H.G. Wells piece(I am making a kind of musical radio play using an H.G. Well's short story) only I've been stuck for the past few days, unsure, musically, where to go next. I am sampling my own voice and adding effects and doing a little audio processing, and so far it sounds pretty cool and creepy, but I'm just stuck for ideas now. It's an interesting challenge. How can you properly underscore speech so that both stay interesting. It seems to me that one always takes away from the other. That's why in movies they always bring it down low, though I don't know why they always use strings under dialogue. It would seem to me that strings, sounding so much like the human voice, would draw attention away from the dialogue. But it seems to work. Maybe because they use a string section, or maybe because the string sound blends with the voice so that there isn't any competition. Like there might be between say a saxophone and a human voice, or an oboe. Or maybe its just a musical symbol. Woodwind instruments always felt more like voices to me, regardless of whether or not they are similar in sound to the human voice, because they are often used as individual voices, as solo voices. So maybe when you hear an oboe, you think solo voice, because that is what it usually is, irregardless of whether or not the sound itself is especially distinctive. Hmmm, I wonder what an oboe choir would sound like. Oh God NOOOO!! Wow. That there is a very good reason why there aren't a lot of oboes in an orchestra.
Oh well, so far, I'm underscoring human spoken voice with human sung voice (it's all my voice actually). I used my own voice to make the music (sat around in my room singing pitched syllables like 'na' over and over into my laptop and then put them onto a sampler). I am glad that I did that. The human voice is so variable and has so much in it to work with. Maybe I should try using just audio files instead of midi instruments. I'll think about it.
Besides, the snowpocalypse is keeping me away from the lab at school, so I can't do much now anyway.

Here is some more of that story I was working on:

The wind whistled in her ears as she ran, or rather slid, down the mountain. The enormous bird's shadow was just about to overtake her when she suddenly remembered a movie from her childhood, In Search of the Castaways, an insidious Disney adventure film starring Hailey Mills. At one point in the film Hailey little brother is captured by a giant eagle who lifts him up by his shoulders. A native shoots the bird down and it falls like a leaf, slowly spiraling to the ground. When she was a little girl she knew two things about this sequence that she still knew now:1)the bird wouldn't hold onto her shoulders with its talons, it would rip through her shoulders with its talons, and 2)if she did manage an escape from the bird in midflight, obliging native or no, she would not fall to the earth like a leaf, she would fall to the earth like a human being.
It might also, very probably, gauge my eyes out, she thought in an inexplicably calm inner voice. Her outer voice, which up until now had been waiting for her inner voice to finish, decided to start screaming.
Up ahead she saw a thick forest and she made for it like as if her feet were skis. She made it just in time. The bird flew back up into the sky and screeched dejectedly.
Immediately upon arrival into the forest, she wrapped her arms around the friendliest looking tree and threw up. Afterwards she let out a few comforting sobs.
She looked back up the mountain. She looked up and saw the bird still circling in the sky.
'Well, I can't go back that way,' she said.
She looked down the mountain and into the forest. It was dark and quiet. A piece of snow fell off a tree in a menacing kind of way. It made no noise. Snow dampened, she thought.
She sighed and started to make her way down the mountain through the forest.
As she walked the air grew warmer and she started feeling a little better about things. All I really have to do, she thought, is make my way up that other mountain. So long as I don't get mauled by some animal or something, I should be just fine. The forest started to sing with birds. Tiny birds, she thought.
Mingled with the birdsong, she started to hear a strange melody played on an instrument a little like a flute only more woody. The sound went in and out. It bounced off and trees, and she couldn't tell where it was coming from until she was standing right in front of the musician.
'Oh,' she said.
His skin was alabaster white. He looked, from behind, like a statue in a museum. She imagined she could almost hear the marble grinding as his back muscles moved. He was sitting on a rock covered in snow, and being so white himself he was well camouflaged. He was playing a pan pipe, and when he turned around she noticed that his eyes were a deep green flecked with gold. She also noticed that he had goat legs. And little horns.
'If you are a nymph, a nereid, or a dryad,' he said, 'I am feeling a little bit down right now and I am not interested in chasing you and ravishing you. So please leave me alone.'
'Uh.. goat legs,' she replied.
'What?' he said.

Elegy, Precision Skating, Stranvinsky and Stews.

Hmmm... Well, today I spent most of my day in the lab working on a short piece for solo violin. An Elegy. Here is the definition of elegy from wikipedia:

The term "elegy" originally denoted a type of poetic meter (elegiac meter). It commonly describes a poem of mourning, from the Greek elegeia (ἐλεγεία) derived from elegos (ἔλεγος)—a reflection on the death of someone or on a sorrow generally. As such, it may be classified as a form of lyric poetry. An elegy can also reflect on something that seems strange or mysterious. Additionally, "elegy" (sometimes spelled elégie) may denote a type of musical work, usually of a sad or somber nature. The term "elegy" is not to be confused with "eulogy."

Wow. Thanks wikipedia for giving me a word that sounds a lot like elegy, and that is related in meaning to elegy, in order to avoid confusion. That'll help me a lot.

Anyway, my prof said that the piece is supposed to be about specific event, something tragic in my life. But I can't think of anything. Not to say that nothing tragic has ever happened to me, but just that all my tragedies have been small tragedies. Tragedies not necessarily worthy of a piece of art. Trifling tragedies. Like being snubbed by animals in general(why don't they ever want to cuddle with me?). Or feeling upset because someone thought I was lame for wearing fake louis-V, only I didn't even know it was a fake anything-at-all. I just thought it was a watch my mom gave me. Or being made a spare on a children's precision skating team called Capitol Blades. I wonder if they are still around. Hmmm.. well I just did about three minutes of internet searching and couldn't find them. I guess they failed. snicker snicker. Or changed their name.

Actually, after watching this video,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0poMM6BPZXM&feature=related

I'm not sure that my exclusion from the world of synchronized skating was so trifling a tragedy after all. I mean, look at all the sequence. Just look at it. You have no idea how much hair gel went into that event. All I am going to say is : whale-bladder-ful.

I guess there have been some real sad things in my life, but somehow writing a piece about them feels wrong. Like I could never do real tragedy justice through art. Besides, I never can seem to write programmatic music. When I sit down to write it's all notes, rhythms, phrases, textures, and harmonies. The emotional and visceral content must eek out subconsciously. Which is kind of nice, because that way I can just sit back and enjoy listening to my own music on a level that has nothing to do with notes, rhythms, phrases, textures and harmonies. As if I didn't even write it myself.

I think the elegy I am writing sounds like it fits more in the vein of the mysterious or the strange than in the tragic It has a little march half way through it that is a little nervous. It is for two voices, like Stravinsky's elegie written for viola, which I have got to say is one of the most beautiful pieces I have ever heard. I have been playing it over and over again for myself on the piano. There is something kind of ritualistic and addictively repetitive about it. Like a lot of Stravinsky's music that I have heard, it is sparse yet powerful. Kind of like the poetry of H.D. Here's a link to a video with the music and some sweet pics of Stravinsky (one of them is a drawing by Picasso!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4pGbFwC1s0

Now I know you are all waiting for the rest of my story, and believe me it has been a stewin' and a brewin' in my brain. But you know how stews are; the longer you let them do what stews do, the better they taste. Unless you let them sit forever, in which case they turn into a dried out paste that eventually burns down your kitchen. Soooo, what I mean to say is that I will write some more tomorrow. I am tired and still have a cold so you, my invisible and so far nonexistent (except for Cody) readership, will have to wait.

Slothlady out.