Uffington Horse, Linux, Found Sound.
Jul. 12th, 2003 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsFirst off, an apology to all of you who were at the Uffington Horse concert. It was poor judgement on my part that I thought the kids could sit still or, barring that, at least be quiet. They weren't that bad, but Kouryou-chan's only three and Yamaarashi-chan's often living in a dream-world where what's going on outside is sometimes not relevant at all to her. I should have also brought water; I hadn't anticipated it being that hot in there.
Still, it was a damn fine concert, the half of it I was able to attend. The sound system needed help; Heather's voice was terribly fuzzy and off-kilter from the back. And I'm so glad that she did a nifty fiddle solo in the middle of Black Unicorn; the guitar solo on the Phoenyx album is completely off-genre and inappropriate.
And I must say that I haven't been in a room filled with quite such a high quotient of sexy people in it in quite a while. Heh. Having parental responsibilities just sucks sometimes; I wish I could have stayed late and practiced those nascent flirting skills Jenkitty accused me of having.
Got the kids home, got the changed, got them into bed. They were actually very good about the whole thing. This "sitting still and just listening to the music" thing isn't quite there yet, though.
I've installed the new Linux kernel (2.4.21) onto my laptop and I'm really, really happy with it. Supposedly, the new virtual memory manager and I/O channel were meant to help big systems with massive I/O needs. To save power, this little laptop has a 4200 RPM hard drive, so even a moderately large write, say about two hundred megabytes, would lock up the kernel for up to five minutes as the drive sorted itself out. Such write sizes aren't even unusual when transferring MP3s and videos.
No more! The new kernel is way friendly about chunking writes in time with the drive speed. MP3's playing at the same time still stutter, but only for four or five seconds at a time, not for minutes on end. And the keyboard buffer loses nothing-- I can keep writing while sucking down massive bandwidth wastage. Huzzah!
Speaking of massive bandwidth wastage, I'm really intrigued by this album, Nymphomatriarch, by the band of the same name. They're of the "found sound" school of studio musicians-- instead of using classical synthetics or acoustic instruments, they use sound samples of ordinary life. The band The Art Of Noise was one of the pioneers of this: the video of their hit, Close to the Edit, depicted them disassembling a piano with various tools, which the critics understood, because their music was made with digital sound samples of the act we were being shown, modulated and repeated and arranged into something indistinguishable from music.
Nymphomatriarch does that-- and, okay, it's cheap nowadays to own a digital recorder, sampler, and arrangement software. But you've got to admit that they've finally gone and done what should have been obvious. The raw sound library they used for production was sampled completely from the two bandmembers having sex. Nifty stuff, like Aphex Twin in a really horny mood. And not bad twisty electronica either.
Still, it was a damn fine concert, the half of it I was able to attend. The sound system needed help; Heather's voice was terribly fuzzy and off-kilter from the back. And I'm so glad that she did a nifty fiddle solo in the middle of Black Unicorn; the guitar solo on the Phoenyx album is completely off-genre and inappropriate.
And I must say that I haven't been in a room filled with quite such a high quotient of sexy people in it in quite a while. Heh. Having parental responsibilities just sucks sometimes; I wish I could have stayed late and practiced those nascent flirting skills Jenkitty accused me of having.
Got the kids home, got the changed, got them into bed. They were actually very good about the whole thing. This "sitting still and just listening to the music" thing isn't quite there yet, though.
I've installed the new Linux kernel (2.4.21) onto my laptop and I'm really, really happy with it. Supposedly, the new virtual memory manager and I/O channel were meant to help big systems with massive I/O needs. To save power, this little laptop has a 4200 RPM hard drive, so even a moderately large write, say about two hundred megabytes, would lock up the kernel for up to five minutes as the drive sorted itself out. Such write sizes aren't even unusual when transferring MP3s and videos.
No more! The new kernel is way friendly about chunking writes in time with the drive speed. MP3's playing at the same time still stutter, but only for four or five seconds at a time, not for minutes on end. And the keyboard buffer loses nothing-- I can keep writing while sucking down massive bandwidth wastage. Huzzah!
Speaking of massive bandwidth wastage, I'm really intrigued by this album, Nymphomatriarch, by the band of the same name. They're of the "found sound" school of studio musicians-- instead of using classical synthetics or acoustic instruments, they use sound samples of ordinary life. The band The Art Of Noise was one of the pioneers of this: the video of their hit, Close to the Edit, depicted them disassembling a piano with various tools, which the critics understood, because their music was made with digital sound samples of the act we were being shown, modulated and repeated and arranged into something indistinguishable from music.
Nymphomatriarch does that-- and, okay, it's cheap nowadays to own a digital recorder, sampler, and arrangement software. But you've got to admit that they've finally gone and done what should have been obvious. The raw sound library they used for production was sampled completely from the two bandmembers having sex. Nifty stuff, like Aphex Twin in a really horny mood. And not bad twisty electronica either.
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-12 12:48 am (UTC)**most favorite celtic album of ALL TIME**
**DROOOOOLS IN ENVY**
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Date: 2003-07-12 07:36 am (UTC)Sorry I missed the concert, despite the sound problems. I would have liked to see everybody!
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Date: 2003-07-21 02:01 pm (UTC)I must say that I truly enjoyed Heather more the week before at the Filk concert she did, solo and unplugged, at the Doubletree Inn.
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Date: 2003-07-12 12:42 pm (UTC)Don't worry too much about Yamaarashi-chan living in a mental place where she's not entirely cognitive about the world around her--it's age appropriate. I remember going through that same stage when I was her age, and my own kids did exactly the same thing. She'll grow out of it, or rather, she'll grow into being able to be aware of her own internal processes and the external world at the same time.
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Date: 2003-07-13 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-21 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-21 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-21 02:00 pm (UTC)And I still worry about Y's fantasizing. It's to the exclusion of everything else, and it gets her into sticky and sometimes dangerous situations. I worry because I fear it's a defensive mechanism against something else happening in her life.