Visible progress on the 7pm project has slowed. Not for lack of interest, more because I am weighing different options to take moving forward. Right now, I do not feel that processing all those old days of cheering is impactful enough. The initial concept works for me, plus I was learning a ton on the fly in doing it. Right now, it feels more like following formula and just trying to achieve more volume of work, as opposed to quality of work.

Other things on my mind are that there was no cheering on either Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Years Eve, or New Years Day. Folks like Stephanie Zessos, a FEMA Emergency Management Specialist, have told me that this is the way it is with all disasters, there comes a time where the outpouring of good will fades. Here in New York, we are finding ourselves still heavily in the throws of the pandemic. So, I am of the opinion, at this moment, that I should be looking for a way to capture things that are more current. I am still not sure that I know what that is, but I am going to try some stuff.

At this point, I would like to thank all my neighbors and family and friends for being just who they are: caring; resourceful; adaptable; generous folks. Celebrating the holidays in a new way turned out to be great fun. I am very thankful for good health and good fortune. I also miss a lot of people who died during the pandemic. Ironically, almost none were COVID related. I want to make sure that folks who died from causes other than COVID are remembered with the same reverence – and to send a message of empathy to their families who were not able to mourn as they would have preferred, who have been forgotten by the media. You are all in my thoughts.

On the upside, I have continued to learn and do new things. As I am now working, teaching and making everything at home, I have been spending time getting my work space (all 40sq ft. of it) into a good shape. It started with building out a new desk, which then led me into a whole carpentry rabbit hole (rabbet grove?). I upgraded some of my tools and now have a few new projects in process, including building storage/organization for the studio (the 8 sq ft next to my desk which is part of the whole 40 sq feet. I will be posting bits an pieces of the process, resources, and revelations encountered along the way.

Another new thing I started learning about and doing is fermenting/brining vegetables. Last November, before COVID and before it was cool, I started baking Sourdough Bread. That has been super satisfying. I love being involved in a process that is actually alive. Following on, this November I started making Pickles and Sauerkraut. It is truly astonishing to learn that with only fresh vegetables, water, salt and an appropriate vessel, you can make fantastic tasting things – from hot pepper sauce to spicy pickled carrots – and the classics half-sour dill pickles and sauerkraut. Yesterday I took a leap forward and started a batch of pickled beets and eggs.

So, still really busy here. But not doing what I thought I would be doing. And that is all right with me.

Oh yeah – I have been reading a lot of books about musicians – many are autobiographies – many are disappointing. Some have been incredibly inspiring. I’ll do another post on that, perhaps.

To everyone in the world – Let’s lead with Love in 2021
Have a healthy, happy, peaceful, and prosperous year.

Nick

This recording was very different than the one yesterday. The levels were very balanced, though a bit low – it was also a much gentler evening. Completely different attitude from the day before. This change gave me the impetus to add a new processing method to the mix Method G is here (i am not sure where Method F is… I’m sure it will turn up… oh yeah that was the attempt to use Reasons Bounce to MIDI function).

Project Theory

The thing about Method G is that is different from all those before it is that it involves analyzing the audio file, and then software creates MIDI scores for Drum, Melody and Harmony. Now feeding in a lot of random sound, with no set, key, meter, tempo – well that puts a lot of trust into the ALGORITHM (algo for short) to figure it out. As you might expect its pretty glitchy, but it is also very valuable.

Think of it this way – you are an alien and you land on this planet and you whip out your tricorder maybe your… TRICHORDER – it samples the environment and does its best to present you with a representation that will bring the phenomena of this planet into a representation that makes sense to your alien cognition. Maybe it makes up for sensing capabilities you don’t have – like X-Ray or FMRI

Now think about yourself, encountering a new situation. You don’t have a first hand understanding of the situation, but you want to really understand and get involved. So, you put everything at your disposal to work – you translate text – you do image recognition – you analyze the language that might be spoken (is that a language, or just the sound of living?”

At the end of the day, with all the technology but no person to person interaction you are likely to have a very blurry and confused understanding of the situation. What ever decisions you make to benefit the folks in this situation will be based on biased and inaccurate data. You could very quickly cause a disaster. On the other hand, your sensors could pick up something like there are people with congenital hip dysplasia who could be helped with a well understood operation. You can see, what they cannot.

How to we bring these different views and interpretations of the same situation together? My hypothesis is that you have to just keep trying new “lenses”, adjusting the “parameters” and making observation in a very diverse set of conditions….. and then what??? How can you share that? How can you bring that interpretation, its methodology and data and aggregate it with the interpretation, its methodology and data that someone else has?

This is the Knowledge Building issue of our time. Solving this will have the deepest impact on humanities ability to communicate and forge mutual understanding.

The Technical and Music Stuff: Method G:

OK – so when I listened to this recording and was struck by the more mellow attitude, and there seemed to be some improvement in the overall recording, it was time to try a different approach. Originally I was thinking about something what would be a sort of shimmering fog over everything. So, I tried out a bunch of things rather blindly after about 3 hours, I decided to do something I rarely do – go back and read some notes that I had taken. In there was mention of another Output plugin I had not tried, but was a constant presence in my Instagram feed. Signal is what Output calls a Pulse Engine.. so why not try that out – there is a demo version I used today.

The first thing I realized was that this was not an audio effect, like Movement and the others, this was a MIDI Instrument. So…. I needed to somehow get a MIDI representation of the audio file (WAV, 48,000, 24bit). Reason has a feature “Bounce to MIDI” but this seemed to only give me the everything on a single note. This could not be the state of the art! Well, I did some research and came upon a piece of software from WidiSoft and I gave their demo a whirl. Once I understood the role and usage of the various algos included, I found that I could generate Drum, Melody and Harmony parts. But, I had the demo version – so I needed to investigate further (mostly I wanted to make sure I didn’t already have what I needed – could Scaler2 or Decoda work – they might, but I got a quick easy answer with Ableton Live 10 which has the functionality built in – no fine tuning that I could see – but it worked.

So now I was ready – I created 3 MIDI channels and put an instance of Signal on each. Then I piped the Drum Midi to one, Melody to the second and Harmony to #3. I also had the raw audio going to Master as were the MIDI tracks. It was really very interesting and fun to interact with in finding the setting I ultimately chose. I then just let it play. After V1 was done I wanted to try putting Movement into the Master channel and have every thing go through it. I left the settings to pretty dry so as not to overwhelm. I think the result is pretty good and there is a whole new universe to sounds and technique open to me. It was a good day.

All NYC Data on this day from WolframAlpha:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=all+data+new+york+city+May+9+2020

Weather on this day from WeatherUnderground

https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/ny/new-york-city/KLGA/date/2020-5-9

The News of the day from one of the local New York City papers
https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&endDate=20200507&query=05%2F07%2F2020&sort=best&startDate=20200509

Time has come to just put out what I have for May 8th. While not satisfied at this point, my intention remains to treat this day’s recording with great care because it is one of the first where a new behavior emerged. This new behavior, having someone in the community actually singing and playing guitar, really challenged the processing approach I had been using. I wanted to share some of the reality of the day – the raindrops in the very beginning of the take, my friend and neighbor Daniel Levy‘s impromptu performance of The Beatles Here Comes the Sun. At the same time a technical glitch caused the gain on the microphone to be set too low for the first couple of minutes – and then with the correction the volume really jumps. Also, the community at large was really raucous that day. You can hear them all jump in at 7pm – Daniel had started a bit earlier.

Juggling all these issues, I lost sight of the process I had originally intended which was to move quickly with a first pass through all the recordings and then go back to ones that were particularly interesting and refine them. Instead, I got sucked into a loop of trial and error with no specific goal. Furthermore, I fell into the trap of downloading a whole crop of new plugins, searching for a silver bullet to both my dynamics problem as well as the over all tone of the piece. Rather than keeping it simple and forging ahead, I wasted about 12 days in this vortex – lesson learned.

But on the positive side – this was an exceptional day. Daniel’s performance in the drizzle – coupled with his spot on song selection – along with the raucous and enthusiastic participation of the crowd. It was a day that really had an emotional impact. I hope this early version is done well enough for some of that to come through.

Technical:
Expect that this day will eventually be revisited when my skills and insights have been sharpened. Below is the unprocessed waveform of the file 2020_05_08-2020_05_08-AT825-T-2-_+5-RX 7 Spectral De-noise. The change in dynamics is pretty evident.

How the raw files are initially processed:
This makes me think I should give a bit more insight into the recording and processing process. The recordings were done live (um… that’s obvious, yeah?) using the microphone in the filename – in this case it is the AT825 which, incidentally, I had borrowed from Daniel Levy a few years ago. Then during the month of July I began reviewing the raw files. This is just after my remote recording rig failed – more on that later. One thing that was clear, all the raw recordings had a lot of wind noise. To clean up the recordings, I was fortunate enough to have a demo version of iZotope’s RX7 (now RX8). In the filename you will find “RX 7 Spectral De-noise” because that was the processing I used. Each recording was individually analyzed and the results were outstanding. It took a couple of days to do, but it was worth it. The resulting files were now ready for action.

May 8 processing – Process E

As mentioned ad nauseum, this was a tricky one. The initial work was done to try and boost the gain on the beginning and bring it down when it was very hi. In the end, I put a limiter in there and managed the gain level from there live when recording the track. At this point I was still using Process D which I had used on the 7th, but it seemed all wrong. I stripped everything back and went silver bullet shopping. A few very frustrating days ensued. Finally I decided to step back to what I had felt was my initial success – using Output‘s Movement plugin. Why not see what else they had to offer. So, I decided to try out Thermal and Portal and there was plenty to work with there. I had 5 effects loops total, the other two were using the stock Reason 11 effects. During the recording of the track, I was managing the 5 Effect Sends and the Limiters Input gain. So, this is the first track where I am doing some sort of “performing” during the recording of the processed track.

Weather from Weather Underground – https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/ny/new-york-city/KLGA/date/2020-5-8

All NYC Data on this day from WolframAlpha:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=all+data+new+york+city+May+8+2020

It was the 50th anniversary of The Beatles Let It Be album – see below.

From the NY Times that day: https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&endDate=20200508&query=05%2F08%2F2020&sections=Health%7Cnyt%3A%2F%2Fsection%2F9f943015-a899-5505-8730-6d30ed861520&sort=best&startDate=20200508

Context Capture Sketching
As mentioned in the project introduction, this project is related to another one – currently called Context Capture. As I move through the 7pm project specifically, though I have had a feeling/frustration/pain for my whole life, the unbelievable difficulty in making statements or expressing ideas in a manner that effectively captures the universe of experiences and influences that shaped that idea or statement. That, if someone doesn’t understand all (or at least a good chunk) of what underlies and informs what I say/play/draw/write/share, they can’t really understand it – that they are only getting a superficial understanding.

As I write this, it is clear that communication amongst humans, in the age of global information with free distribution, is making it harder and harder to be understood at a time when being able to understand, or at least get a sense of, someone’s life experience has become more and more important – imperative really. For me there are those who have blazed this trail – many years ago – and they are largely forgotten by the current digital elites and the people deciding what ideas have “value” and are worth “investment”. I look back, always, to Vanevar Bush and his Memex, “Ted” Nelson and his Xanadu, Claude Shannon and Information Theory to Alan Kay and his DynaBook as the ones who have plotted the course, we need a new generation to heed the call and work for a new mode or medium of communication that is much richer and simply conveys ones context along with the immediate message. This is also critical for the true formulation of knowledge on an individual and collaborative nature. More on this later. But here is a sketch of part of the knowledge graph that makes up this post — I only spend 2 minutes on it – its missing a lot.

Project Theory and Development:
Today – in real time – that is September 23, 2020 there was a piece on NPR about a new movie – The Secrets We Keep – staring Naomi Rapace. In the interview, she gives a brief plot synopsis that mentions that the plot revolves around her character hearing a specific whistle – one that she instantly recognizes from her past. This is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about when structuring this project – the calls of the community member – that you could know them without seeing them – that the calls are personal and unique.

Technical Stuff:
On this day, I decided to switch microphones from the AT2035 Large Condenser to the AT825 which is a Stereo Mic more suited to field recordings. The results were much better – better rejection of the in-house sound and better pickup of the community. Also, the crowd was much more active

All NYC Data on this day from WolframAlpha:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=all+data+new+york+city+May+7+2020

Weather on this day from WeatherUnderground

The News of the day from one of the local New York City papers
https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&endDate=20200507&query=05%2F07%2F2020&sort=best&startDate=20200507