Music of Sound

Ok serious question time, and if you can read this question then you should feel obliged to answer it! – preferably from your instincts as opposed to your intellect/google etc…. So you’re heading off to spend a couple of weeks on a desert island (ie Samoa for me) and if you have travelled at all you will know there is one essential rule of travel: take a good book. A good book turns a delayed flight into a flight of imagination and a welcome break. A good book feeds your imagination.

In preparation for Samoa I seriously thought I would take my iPad with me, just incase. Just incase I got stuck somewhere and need 200 hours of music and 73 books to read. But I saw the following image on one of my favourite blogs and laughed at how ridiculous that idea was:

Stupid future indeed! But in many ways I did not need to see this image. When I headed off to the South Island for Xmas holidays I took my iPad with me. But this shows how much I use iBook to read books with; I randomnly went to see what books I had installed and guess what? I got an error, “iBook needs an update” and it would not let me open even a single book until I had updated it. But where do you find wifi in the middle of nowhere? (Answer: nowhere) At first I thought what kind of a stupid app is this that I need an update just to read a freaking book!? It worked last time I used it, how exactly did the functionality of reading a book need an update FFS?? Then I remembered I had all the books I want to read available in another app (Good Reader) but it also made me think: what books have I actually read on this thing since I got it? The answer? None! I haven’t read single book! But by ‘read’ I mean from start to finish, which after all is the primary purpose of a books existence. The same way watching a movie doesn’t mean channel grazing across it, it means watching it from start to finish & engaging with it. I’ve skim read plenty of books, the same way I’ve skim read plenty of websites, but the actual books I love? I have read them from front to back…. Huston we have a problem….

Anyway, battery life & lame-ass software updates aside, back to the original question: you are off for two weeks to a desert island. What two books would you take with you?

Shots, Edit & Music – Mateusz Zdziebko

> These are brilliant (but you should only be allowed to enjoy them if you know/own the album/s) Animated album covers – warning #nostalgia alert!

“Cryoacoustic Orb is a sound installation involving multiple illuminated acrylic orbs filled with slowly melting ice. Hydrophones frozen inside the ice amplify the sounds of the melting process, which are electronically processed and spatialized throughout the darkened gallery space. The result is a unique ambient soundscape that evolves over the course of several hours.”

> Is this a scene from the secret Borat sequel or what?

>Interesting article discussing the end game of social media

> check out my new mixer!

> What is more important: Creativity or Results?

> Great video discussing all the models of Nagras (via stretta)

There is a fascinating article quoting a letter from Walter Murch with his thoughts on the issues with 3D films, below is a small excerpt but read ROGER EBERT’S JOURNAL post for the whole piece.

“The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues – darkness and “smallness” – are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen – say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now “opened up” so that your lines of sight are almost – almost – parallel to each other.

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn’t. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the “CPU” of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true “holographic” images.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to “get” what the space of each shot is and adjust.”

thanks for the tip Ray!
photo by Dominic’s Pics on Flickr // licensed via Creative Commons 2.0

One film I am very keen to see in 3D is a new film by Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams:

In response to my comment in a previous post about ethnomusicology a few people have been in touch with reccomendations and contacts and I’m meeting up later this week with one local who is very experienced in the field, Paul Wolffram, who has spent considerable time in Papua New Guinea. His PhD thesis in ethnomusicology involved 25 months of fieldwork among the Lak people of Southern New Ireland, PNG and it is so amazing to be able to share some of the results from his work and for us to experience a tiny fragment of his experiences.

“This is a short ethnographic film that I shot in the Duke of York Islands in Papua New Guinea in January 2010. This film will eventually be expanded into a feature length documentary that includes sorcerers from several regions in Island Papua New Guinea.”

“At this stage this short is a test screener to help me decide on and approach and style for the feature length ethnographic film. I want to allow the content to be impressionistic, for the sorcerers to speak for themselves, let the images and their words tell the story and leave the viewer with an impression and some mystery around these practices rather than a prescriptive account of what its all about.

Shot on Sony HDV Z1P and Canon 5D mark II.”

Paul Wolffram, Handmade Films