There are a couple of small nagging sloppy parts to the piece that frustrate me and I think the middle section before the final climax is something that I would do slightly differently, but there’s more about it that I’m still happy with than unhappy, and that feels pretty good.  The more important thing is that fifteen years later it still feels like me – given the same source material that I had back then (which was probably over two hours worth of material), my approach to the composition might be more polished, but the general structure and idea behind the work would still be the same.

It serves as a good reminder that contemporary electronic art music is something that still holds importance to me in some way, and that, along with some other stuff that i’m almost done creating a different blog entry about, is giving me the drive to kickstart some abandoned projects in that realm to complete for the next couple of years.  There’s two electronic projects in particular that I’m planning on doing – one is a revision and a revamp of an old piece I did during my undergraduate years that then carried through to my masters called Surrounded By Mirrors for clarinet, MIDI keyboard, and interactive electronics.  The other, In a Fast Paced World, is a piece that I was originally conceiving of as an interactive octaphonic piece of music using a LEAP Motion Controller.  I’m not 100% convinced that the LEAP is the right controller for the job anymore, but it’s still worth fiddling with since the software side of the tech has improved greatly since i last experimented with it, and they may have even figured out at this point how to get two LEAPs to connect to a single computer.  We’ll see what happens, or if something else comes along that is a better sort of input for that project.

Currently, i’m typing this blog entry in the electronic music studio at Tulane.  I got in here around 22:30 and spent a good hour or so familiarizing myself with the space here – the mapping of the mixing board, how that maps to the 8-channel speaker set up, and also some Reaper basics (since at home I use Audacity) and how to control that 8-channel space.  I had a tough time remembering some of what Rick showed me when he introduced me to the space last week, and 8-channel sound is a very new animal to me, so it took me a bit longer to figure it out than i would have liked, but i figured it out and started building some of the vocabulary of the sounds in Reaper in the way that i wanted as a starting point.

After i did that, i got out of the lab, walked around a little bit in the quiet of the now-locked music building, and started some hard thinking.  I thought about my weekend LEAP experiments, i thought about my experience with the In The Grid concert here, and I tried to put into focus what I wanted to accomplish with this piece – mainly whether or not the piece should be a pure audio-only piece with no added elements, or if it should be an interactive one that potentially uses the LEAP as its interactive instrument and conduit.  Mainly i was trying to answer the big question: would using the LEAP for the piece be something that ultimately enhances it or detracts from it?

In thinking about it, there were a few important elements to consider.  The first is one that i addressed in that blog entry – could I create a visual aesthetic that enhanced and supported what i was trying to accomplish with the piece rather than distract from it?  The second consideration was – if i were to make the piece interactive, how much of the piece did i want to have actually controlled by the performer as opposed to premeditated?  If i wanted, i could make it so that the LEAP acts purely as a trigger conduit – enter the field, trigger a cue.  enter the field again, trigger another cue.  The visual aspect of the piece in that way is more theatrical than actual.  By contrast, i could make it so that the LEAP could control a great deal of the piece.  Control the speed of my sounds, control the pitch of my sounds, control directly how it moves around the 8-channel space.

Instinctively my brain rejected the idea of making the piece too interactive because in my head there was a particular way that i wanted the piece to sound – the pacing, the elements involved, all of those were fixed ideas in my head.  I didn’t want to make that variable, something that was left to chance and prone to error.  i wanted it to sound the way that i wanted it to sound.

But then i thought about it as it related to my acoustic compositions and acoustic compositions in general.  One of the strengths of live performance, particularly in the classical realm is that a single piece of music can sound very different even if the printed music is the same.  One performer’s interpretation of Beethoven or Bartok could be drastically contrasting to another’s, and there’s something about that idea, the idea that music in this form is something that belongs not just to the composer but also to the performer and/or the conductor that has always been appealing to me, even when at times it’s resulted in my music not always sounding the way i initially conceived or wanted it to sound.  If interpretation, imperfections, and spontaneity in live performance weren’t important, people would just stay home and be satisfied listening to their CDs or MP3s.

In that light, you can interpret the music on the page as being the map to the music rather than the music itself, and because of that, it makes more sense to me that I make this piece interactive – that the elements that i want in the piece are the map to the music, a map that is clear to the performer (i’m not planning on making the piece aleatoric), but is still something that the performer can own as much as a performer can own any other piece of music.

Once i made that decision, i had some choices to make as to how the piece itself was going to be controlled by the LEAP – how much is going to be controlled by the performer, and how can i use the LEAP in a way that leaves little room for error in the performance due to counterintuitive use of the LEAP, sloppy programming and/or lack of attention to details and the creation of failsafes.

Currently my thinking is to still use palm data rather than finger data and have most of the piece controlled by tracking the X position and velocity.  Y positioning and velocity may come into play too and/or replace that if the X plane is too small.  The way that it would control the piece would be: triggering entrances, triggering some basic speed of the samples themselves, and triggering how it moves around the 8-channel space.  What it won’t control is pitch – when the piece reaches the middle of its development that starts to make pitch that much more important, the amount of error-control i would have to program would be too much effort for very little return.  Exactly how that section gets dealt with visually is still something i have to work out.

Time to start building some patches.

The quality of the pieces varied – not unexpectedly since the students had a wide range of experience with the software and hardware that they were using for the concert – but the concert itself was pretty awesome because the program itself was very varied, a great showcase of exploration and experimentation by the students.   There were a few “tape pieces” which was to be expected, but there was also a piece where someone did some improv with an iPad controller and a pd patch, there was a guy that used a LEAP motion controller to control not just the music, but a projection of images that were aimed at two huge irregularly-shaped boxes that were suspended from the ceiling, and there was a piece that involved projecting varied light patterns and sweeps amongst a constant machine-generated smoke screen in which three dancers danced as silhouettes, an integrated music/light show/dance visual thing.

As i was listening and watching the concert, it started me churning on the piece of electronic music that’s been on my brain for a little while now that i’m going to put some serious work into this summer and how i feel about the performance aspect of the electronic music paradigm in the first place.  Because on the one hand, i’ve always generally been opposed to the idea of pure digital audio pieces, favoring the idea of interactive electronic music instead because i feel like the human element of music performance is a very important one, not just to potentially add nuance to the performance that a pure electronic piece can’t always provide without some meticulous micromanaging of notes and/or some “human element programing”, but also because i feel like the visual element of performance, even if it’s as simple as watching a player play their instrument or hit a bunch of buttons on a computer is a fairly important one for creating a greater connection with the audience.

That said, a lot of the ways in which visual performance of acoustic music correlates with the music itself is built upon an already known set of expectations and standards.  If a cellist was playing on the telly and you muted the sound, you could still have some idea of whether the cellist was playing softly or loudly, a bunch of high notes or low notes, fast or slow.  Not all instruments have that direct correlation, mainly wind instruments, but enough people know what those instruments are that the more subtle visual performance aspects of those still make sense, and with certain performance styles that can be compensated for by the dynamicism of the performer himself – when a trumpet player or a clarinet player plays loudly or plays a hard lick, they might put more emphasis on their body movements, particularly in, say, the jazz idiom.

With electronic music, the visual-to-aural music correlation has much more freedom to it.  If i play middle C on an acoustic piano, it’s going to sound exactly like you’d expect middle C on the piano to sound and there’s no other way to get that note to sound.  But if i were to play an electronic cello, wind controller, or synthesizer, i could play notes and have the resulting sound be a bunch of farm animals.  In order to get a loud note on a cello, the bow has to move faster, period, but in the electronic realm, I could wave my arms frantically and have music play quietly in reaction and i could be perfectly still and have the music go batshit crazy.

More weathered and memorable interactive electronic music systems in my experience typically decide to not go against that grain because it can create contradictions of expectation that can’t be reconciled.  If i wave my arms around frantically and the music plays quietly in response, that’s enough of a visual contradiction to what people expect that it can detract from the experience instead of enhance it.  Such a system could be a deliberate “gimmick” choice, which has its own sense of purpose and validity, but it takes true craftmanship to define or redefine an audience member’s visual and aural expectation in such a way that will make the piece still work.

There’s an electronica duo that i listen to pretty obsessively called Plaid.  They’ve been making music and albums as Plaid for the past twenty plus years.  I’ve seen them perform live a few times, and while the live show is good because hearing their music in a club setting with a slew of avid Plaid fans is awesome and because all of their shows involve integration of video with their music that has anywhere between some and heavy correlation with the music itself, they themselves are not very visual performers, and they have admitted that they don’t do a lot of improv of their set.  They bob their head slightly to their music, they cue entrances and exits, and they fiddle with EQ knobs to make adjustments to the sound, but it all looks very cerebral and introspective and therefore makes it so that focusing on them during their shows is pretty boring even though the music itself and the visuals are fantastic.

In a recent interview promoting their new album and tour, they address this, saying:

Weâ€re aiming for a bit more freedom within the performance, particularly in trying to arrange the visual aspect of the show in such a way that it can be triggered live as much as possible. That allows us to adapt the music for the specific evening. Weâ€re using a variety of other midi controllers to give us more flexibility… Itâ€s about trying to make it more physical. Weâ€ve found over the past few years that we didnâ€t get fully involved in the live shows. It felt a bit alienating for us – as well as those who were watching. To have a bit more physicality makes it a bit more of a challenge – upping the risk more than just a computer crashing. That adds an element of excitement every night.

For me, one of the more important aspects of multimedia works in which the music is the most important is that any visual element of performance to the piece is something that at most i want very clearly to enhance the connection between the music and the audience, and at the least is something that feels like an appropriate contextualized accompaniment.  What i don’t want to have happen is for any visual aspect to distract from the music or, come to think of it, vice versa.  This is why a part of me wrestles with the belief that In a Fast-Paced World may be better suited as a stand-alone digital audio piece, a very contradictory stance to my normally strong stance about preferring interactive performance over stand-alone digital audio pieces – because I don’t want the live performer’s method of interaction to distract from the experience of the music itself.

Part of that is definitely influenced by one of the “In The Grid” concert pieces, the one that involved the LEAP motion.  That piece had three distinct elements to it.  One was the music itself, which seemed to me to be a pre-conceived set of sequences that had elements that could be semi-randomly manipulated.  The second was the performer who was moving his arms around that was being tracked by the LEAP controller.  The third was the light show that was being projected onto the two huge irregularly-shaped boxes.  All of those things independently were very cool things and were crafted fairly well, but as an audience member i struggled with finding the central focus of the piece because all of those elements didn’t come across as having a strong sense of high direct correlation.  When the piece was done, i remember thinking to myself, “i remember that there was music, but i don’t remember what the music sounded like.  I remember that he waved his arms around, but i was never confident that i understood what his arm waving actually meant.  I remember that there were lots of lights and patterns happening, but i can’t recall at all what it actually looked like.”

In a way that’s the same thing that happened with the piece that I wrote a couple of years ago Shifting Signals Zero.  If you go back and watch the performance and rehearsal of that piece, it definitely feels like there are a lot of elements to keep track of that in retrospect i think needed to be better honed in its conception so that it didn’t feel so “kitchen sink”.  That was tempered a little by the fact that the music itself was fairly minimalist and the performer’s movement and resultant “video feedback” was fairly correlated dynamically to what the performer was actually playing, but it still feels like it’s something that I need to tweak in my brain more before i try to tackle it with a new piece.

I give that piece and the LEAP motion piece both some degree of tolerance quality for the same reason i can give the concert itself tolerance quality – part of what those pieces are all about are about learning and the exploration of all of those things as beginning vocabulary for what is potentially useful and could therefore create more polished pieces and use of the technology in the future.  A lot of my undergraduate compositions and even a few of my graduate ones were of that mentality, where i was still discovering how i wanted to use instruments whether standard or electronic and have that define my musical voice as a composer and music programmer, and as i start to revitalize my music career and also attempt to try out new technologies and/or break out of my comfort zone with the kinds of ensembles i write for, i’m prepared to fail as many times as i succeed to help further hone and identify my musical voice.

And ultimately that’s why going to the concert was so exciting, because hearing everything on the concert helps me identify more things about myself.  There’s a lot of music and art that meanders and/or has a lot of things going on like that LEAP motion piece did, and while i can enjoy those sorts of pieces, watching that (along with the other pieces) further enforced that that style is not something that i as a creator personally usually identify with.  Fundamentally I have been and always will be the composer that prefers to take a single idea, focus it, microscope it, and let it evolve gradually over a long period of time.  The common label for this if you’re into labels is “minimalism”.  That’s an oversimplification of what my music (and minimalist music, actually) is about, but as a baseline, it’s the easiest way to describe what i’ve always identified with, even before i took a single music theory course.  When i was a freshman in high school, one of my friends exposed me to the third movement of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, and i thought it was one of the most amazing pieces of music i had ever heard.  I bought the album and played the piece on my sony discman on repeat over and over again along with my CD’s of Def Leppard’s Hysteria and Genesis’s Invisible Touch.  That early exposure and how much it immediately resonated with me planted the seeds of the sort of composer that i am today and what i’m trying to achieve with any of my art.

So as it relates to In a Fast-Paced World, the question rummaging around in my brain is, will a live performer who is interacting and controlling the piece ultimately enhance or distract/detract from the piece?  On the one hand, you want to be able to hear the surround sound ideas that i have without any external visual distractions, to establish the baseline just through the ears and take people through the journey through the ears only.  But on the other hand, having someone controlling the sounds or cueing the sounds through a LEAP or through other means might help lead the audience on my intended journey, be the visual element that makes live performances great.

Ultimately i think it comes down to careful deliberation in the delivery mechanism – what sort of controller do i use with the piece and how do i make it feel like it’s a truly integrated part of the piece itself.  That will be key as i start exploring these options and make what i feel is the most key decision about the piece – whether it will be interactive or not.  This particular piece is not about the medium that i would perform it, it’s about the music, and i don’t want to lose sight of the importance of that.

  Maynard Ferguson photo courtesy of Easton Express Times, photographer Joe Gill

I’ve never seen the kind of fireworks that are super coordinated presentations all sync’ed by a computer program.  I bet that if composed well i would like that quite a bit, but it’s hard to make a judgement call without having any first hand experience in it.

During the Tulane homecoming fireworks show, as i found myself annoyed at the lack of form and tension and real understanding of how to make that more effective to the common viewer, this idea started to form in my head for a minimalist composition of fireworks that would span over the period of a month or more.

I heard about a piece of music that La Monte Young wrote in which a heavy weight was placed on one of the notes of  a huge pipe organ in a large church in europe somewhere and was essentially blasted at its loudest volume for the span of a couple of weeks.  The idea was based on that basic minimalist principle that an extended sound and a repeating sound isn’t the same as the time you’ve heard it before because the context of time makes it different.  There’s also the idea that the piece served as more of an installation piece – you got to walk around the church and hear how the note was different depending on the particular acoustic area that you were in, and could get yourself lost in the absolute pureness of it as it echoed in grand style that those cathedrals promote.

Thinking about pieces of music or sound installations with that sort of time scale and vastness is what brought about this idea for a fireworks composition.  Pick any beautiful night scene area – in my head i picture a waterfront – and have a single firework go off one night at a designated time.  Chances are, no one would notice it happening – they might hear the sound of it, some may see it, but they wouldn’t think much of it.

The next day do the same thing, but do it with two fireworks.  The next day do three.  All at the same time at night, all at the same location.

At some point, people will catch on to this.  You set it up like clockwork, you create that pattern of one more firework every day, and you start to create expectation.  The number of fireworks that go off have to be easily countable – everyone needs to deduce that gradually the fireworks are adding more and more.

And of course, like all great music, at some point, that pattern needs to be broken.

Exactly how it would be broken is something i don’t know yet.  The “dick move” thing would be to not have fireworks at all one day, but in my head the piece isn’t supposed to be about alienation or pulling the wool from people’s eyes.  The point is to make people excited, and bring people together.  And while i may want to play with that a little, maybe create the hint of disappointment, ultimately i would want to do that as a means to generate new excitement based on the unexpected.

Two easy ideas: first, delay the fireworks by five minutes.  People will start to get restless, maybe some people will wonder if it’s even going to happen, if it’s a wasted trip.  But five minutes is a reasonable delay – start it five minutes later, people whose expectation started to waver will find some small or large degree of exultation when the fireworks actually begin.  Suddenly the event is revitalized, becomes exciting in a new way.

Then for the next week, delay it anywhere between zero minutes and ten minutes.  You don’t want to wait longer because you don’t want to waste people’s time too much – and by creating a variable expectation that no one can really track, people who really want to see the fireworks display will show up on time or early, and in that potential wait time, strangers might talk to each other.  A sense of community develops. people strike up conversation, share in snacks and drinks.  it becomes an event.

The other variation that could get added to the mix is to change the location of the fireworks themselves – in my head i see it as “the audience is facing one way where they’ve always seen the fireworks, and then one day they go to the same spot and they have to turn around.”

The whole thing would happen with no real explanation except that in the area where there’s an optimal viewing vantage point for watching the fireworks, i’d put up a pedestal of some sort with an unmarked QR code on it.  Capture that QR code and you get taken to a website that explains what’s happening.  Maybe right away, or maybe the information will be revealed gradually.

In my head, i think the piece would last about two months.  That feels both long and short – i have to think about it more.

I wore Glass a lot during my vacation time in Oregon, Washington, and Nevada these past two weeks, and i quickly discovered that Glass was another conduit for random stranger interaction.  There were quite a few people who recognized what it was and were very “fanboy” regarding the device, and there were others who may not have recognized it but were curious enough about it that they would come up to me and ask me what it was all about.  Wearing Glass made me more approachable – and while the resultant interaction had much more to do with me and Glass than the strangers i was interacting with, it was still pretty neat to see their reactions to seeing it and trying it on.

As a result, i’ve decided to start creating a blog series that document the more interesting of these Random Glass Encounters, something that hopefully over time will evolve and refine itself as a means of sharing great stories about strangers and about humanity.  The interaction I had with a street worker on Fremont Street is what inspired this idea, so it feels appropriate to start with him.

These two guys were working Fremont Street in Las Vegas, walking up to passersby to convince people to go into the Plaza Casino.  The guy in frame was about to hand me the pamphlet and probably give his marketing schpeal, but as soon as he saw that i was wearing Glass, all thoughts of his job went out of his head and he immediately asked very enthusiastically, “Is that Google Glass??”

One of the Glass Explorers forum topics that i see on our little elitist discussion forum is the question “What do you do if someone wants to try it on?”  I haven’t read through that because i’m sure that opinions are pretty polarized.  I know that people are probably fairly wary of someone running off with a device that they sunk $1500 into, there’s also potential issue of privacy for all of the data on the device, etc.

For me, one of the reasons i got the device in the first place was to share it.  The likelihood that someone is going to run off with the device feels pretty low probability, and the reward of giving someone the unique experience of wearing it far outweighs that low risk.  In fact, i’ve found that in some cases i have to take a fairly aggressive approach regarding sharing the device – most of the people who approached me asked questions about it, but didn’t ask if they could try it on, probably because they’re afraid to ask or assume that i would say no, so I’m the one that has had to say, “do you want to try it?” and help them put it on.  Almost everyone has had that “opening up Christmas presents” look on their face when given that opportunity.

I remember very clearly that when I asked this guy if he wanted to try it, his eyes got wide and he asked, “are you sure?” and i said of course, no big deal, and helped him put it on.

He was immediately enamored with the device – it was clear that he was pretty fanboy about it and knew about it generally (he knew that it was in limited beta, he knew i had to pay $1500 to get it), but he didn’t know a lot about the specifics of what it actually did and how it worked.  So i walked him through the basic functionality of taking pictures and video as well as the other features of the device.  I discovered fairly early that Glass can pick up my voice commands even if someone else is wearing it, so I did an “okay glass, take a picture” while he was wearing it to get another of what people have been terming “selfies,” and the reaction on face when he realized that i was giving it voice commands to take a picture was priceless.  I did the “okay glass, record a video,” and ended up taking a 13 second video while he had it on:

The other guy knew about the device too and asked a couple of questions but was otherwise pretty sideline about the whole thing.  After another minute or so of talking, mainly speculating about what the price of the device was going to be when it went public, they both walked off.  He never did hand me a pamphlet or even tell me which casino he was promoting – i had to look at the picture afterwards to figure it out.

I wish i had gotten his contact information so i could have forwarded the pics with him wearing it.  I’m sure he’s told his friends about it, likely posted something on facebook or google plus about it, and knowing that Glass created that sort of personal story for him makes me pretty happy.

So the response i’ve given most often to answer the inevitable “what do you think about Glass?” question, is “it’s interesting.”  Google Glass is interesting.

My appointment for Glass was for 11:00, but Jenni had a yoga class that she wanted to go to one block away that she needed to register for at 10:15.  I arrived at the appointment at about 10:30 to see if it was an issue for me to get there early.  There were people outside the office milling about, one had Glass on her head, but the others didn’t.  I walked up to them and got assigned to a guy named Pat who was wearing a very non-descript gray shirt (that everyone else i think was wearing also) who introduced himself and took me to the Glass area after giving me a guest pass.  Before he got me through the paces of picking out my Glass and set up, he walked me over to a very quaint food/drink set up – small plates of snacks, as well as tea, water, soda, and beer options.  The whole thing was strangely ceremonial but in a common way.  Nothing negative, but it had a tinge of “not quite rightness” to it that i couldn’t quite place.  It wasn’t terribly important, so i let it pass.

All of the Glass units were set up in a display – five different possible colors.  I had picked out a color online, but i had the opportunity to change my mind, which i did – online i picked up one that was more grey, but when i put that on my head, i didn’t like how that color went with my hair color at all.  The other options were white, light blue, black, and orange (the official brand names of those colors are different, like “sky” and “charcoal”, but i forget the names of the other two).  I didn’t like the orange or the grey, i liked the other three well enough, but i decided that the black looked the most subtle – as subtle as a cyborg-looking tech thing on my face could possibly be.  After picking that out, he sat me down at a table and we started going through the unopening and the set up of Glass.  The unboxing was interesting too, another one of those ceremonial things.  He passed the box to me but otherwise didn’t touch it which made me realize that  i forgot that there are people that make a big deal out of an initial unboxing of a product.

So i unboxed it.  I was very into the branding and the overall packaging.  it fits my minimalist sort of aesthetic, something i’m fine with despite the fact that that’s pretty trendy.  The box contained Glass, the charging cable which is a nice high quality flat-cord style USB to miniUSB cable, a small documentation pamphlet that was a duplicate of the FAQ that i read online, and an extra set of nose pads. Towards the end of the appointment, he also went over the accessories bag which contained a sunglasses attachment (that looked pretty good when i put it on), a clear “i’m pretending i’m wearing glasses” attachment (that looked really ugly when i put that on), and a strange microfiber carrying bag that contained a hardshell case on the bottom that you stick Glass in for extra protection.

He ran me through the basic Glass functionality, and i asked some very detail-oriented function questions. I think he was impressed with the level of detail of the questions that i was asking, but i could be fooling myself. Doing the set up i also talked about how i think i’m going to potentially use it – in the context of the marching band, and in the context of other potential creative musical/visual installation performance pieces of some sort way down the line. because of some of the ideas i had, he pointed me to the developers site figuring i could have an interest in making my own apps and/or thingys using the Glass API (which i am, but i do not have time for until mid-to-late 2014 at the earliest). I noticed that he was very precise and careful about the kind of vocabulary he used when talking about Glass – consistent language when it came to the color definitions, consistent language when it came to the user experience wording, and talking about “use cases” for Glass, a term i haven’t heard ever since i left my corporate job. I asked him flat out about it and confirmed that everyone who was a part of the Glass team was trained in how they were supposed to talk about it, making sure that they used a consistent language.

There were a few questions that he couldn’t answer because he was basically the equivalent of a first-level support person – kind of like what i was at Symantec. Some of the questions i asked him were things like, “how does the video do with white balance and brightness change if you move in and out of different lighting conditions?”, “once this gets released to the public, what does having the explorer version of this product do for me if anything?”

Overall the appointment took an hour and a half. It was pretty low frills, but very casual and friendly. I got connected with the Glass Explorers community page which i haven’t gone and explored fully yet, but will probably spend regular time looking through to see how people are using it.  I gathered all of my stuff, he took me out of the building, and i waited for Jenni to get out of her yoga class.

I put some thought into what i wanted to do as an initial alpha test and decided that I have too much on my plate right now to try to mess with my original idea using Musclewire/Flexinol, so opted to do something that i could set up in 5 minutes instead.  Currently, turning on WIMSI does the following:

a) Turns on a light

b) Turns on a fan that’s supposed to (but currently fails to) set off some wind chimes

c) Turns on a cassette deck that plays whatever cassette i decide to put in there at the time, identified by the placard on the video stream.  The first one is a cassette tape that happened to be in the deck when i bought it at WalMart (even though i bought it “new”) which is interestingly enough some record of a woman doing some piano and voice lessons of some sort.  It’s a pretty fantastic tape, and i almost don’t want to switch to anything else.

I toyed with the idea of making the background TIX clock also a part of the setup, but opted instead to have that be powered independently so that it can show the correct time and create at least some visual interest while WIMSI is turned off.

It’s unfortunate that IFTTT functionality currently makes it so that if someone tries to activate it remotely they have to wait up to 15 minutes before it actually turns on.  I also don’t have a good way to turn it off automatically after a preset amount of time (i could turn it off instantly, but it’s so brief that it defeats the purpose), so i’m probably going to do some manual manipulating if i ever get a wemo email, but i’m okay with that for the moment.

it’s incredibly crude, but it’s a start.  Feel free to toy with it any time.  send me an email or a comment with any feedback or issues.

For those that don’t know, IFTTT stands for “If This Then That”.  It’s basically a web-based scripting website where you can automate mainly web-based tasks by creating what they call “recipes”.  If the weather forecast calls for rain tomorrow, send me an email.  If i take a picture with instagram, automatically upload it to my Dropbox account.  If I star an email from gmail, create a text version of that in Evernote.  etc. etc.

All of the recipes involve the manipulation of software services on the web with one notable exception: WeMo products.  The WeMo Switch is an electrical outlet that you plug into another electric outlet.  A plug into a plug.  The difference is, the WeMo has its own WiFi network, and you control the WeMo through an iOS app (I bet there’s an android version too, but i don’t know that for sure).  The WeMo Motion is the same thing as that but also has a motion sensor in it as well.  The iOS app recognizes all of the WeMo devices that you have set up on the network and puts them into a list where you can individually turn them on or off through the app.  You can also set a schedule for them based on absolute time (turn this WeMo switch on during the hours of 18:00-21:00) or with the Motion based on relative time (turn this WeMo Motion off fifteen minutes after it’s detected any motion).

As it happens, the WeMo can be integrated with IFTTT – so if, for example, the forecast calls for rain tomorrow, instead of sending an email, i could opt to have it turn on my WeMo switch.  This has spurned this idea for me creating some sort of physical sound and motion installation in my living space that i want to be controlled by the internet.  Someone sends any text message to the WeMo and it will activate.  Someone sends me an email with WeMo in the title and it will activate.

The problem is that IFTTT is mainly geared towards single-user manipulation.  For example, the facebook “channel” options i have for “If this” are mainly actions that i control – if i post a status, if i post a link.  The only external control is “if someone tags a photo of me on facebook”.  Similarly, i can’t tell just anyone to send a text message to x telephone number that will activate my switch – the rule of SMS is that it can only send SMSs to IFTTT’s telephone number from a single incoming telephone number that is has been pre-approved as a link.

The way i want to use IFTTT and WeMo is more public than that – i want the internet to control something in my house.  Currently i have a rule set up where sending me a gmail with “Wemo” somewhere in the subject will turn on a light in my front room.  I’m probably going to tighten that up to have it route to a specific email address instead, wemo@mendellee.com or something so that there’s more potential diversity in the subject line, but that could have a side effect of constant activation if spambots get a hold of that address.

The other issue right now is that currently IFTTT only supports activation and deactivation of a single WeMo device on a single network.  That’s fine for right now since i only have one WeMo, but in the final installation i want to create, i want to have at least two distinctly controlled WeMos – one by a random outside source such as the weather, and one by people who choose to interact with it.

IFTTT does have a statement that they want to add multi-WeMo support at some point, and with the scope of what i’m trying to do with my installation which involves some custom instrument building in which i have no clue how to do, it’s likely that they’ll get support of that before i’m ready to use it in that way.  At the very least I know that the basic idea works and from there i can see what i can do with it, and in the meantime people can have fun turning my front room light on or off whenever they please.

The next step is to set up a streaming video camera.  The camera is the easy part, a constant 24hr stream may be trickier just because i’ve never looked into it before.  But i’ll set that up, and then after that I may change the WeMo to some different sort of application other than the light – although the reason i set that up in the first place was for the practical purpose of giving my front room light when i open up the front door since the chandelier that’s connected to the front room light switch is broken.  We’ll see where this goes – it has to be a background project more than a foreground project in any case since i have too much other stuff to do.

1. my wind ensemble piece entitled beauty…beholder is almost done. I feel a lot better about it than i did about a week ago because things in the end finally started to click into place. It’s not my best work mainly because i’m out of practice writing original stuff for large groups – the last large ensemble piece i wrote was somewhere around ten years ago, and between 2004-2009 i wasn’t writing any music at all. I’m happy enough with the piece generally, it’ll just need some revision if i ever get it performed again. Hopefully it’s well received, i’m a bit tickled with the shock moment towards the end of the piece. John Cage would be proud.

2. This spring i’m going to try to start writing a percussion quartet for the Portland Percussion Group. Originally i was going to have it be all thematic about my family, but these days i tend to do better writing music based on a musical concept that i then translate to a real one as opposed to starting with a real concept that i then translate to a musical one. I think that will change as i start writing more music again and get reacquainted with how my voice translates to solid ideas.

3. Also this spring i’m planning on putting the pieces together for my musical internet installation project. Basically what i’m planning on doing is buying some muscle wire and playing with it in the hopes that i can attach it to some guitar strings and have a mechanism for heating/cooling the muscle wire and a mechanism for playing the strings that is controlled and activated by both random and controlled actions from the internet. This is very early experimental stages so i can figure out what’s possible.

4. Aside from my nienteForte concert happening this spring, Mark and i had a conversation earlier about trying to pitch playing a percussion duet for the percussion ensemble concert run by Doug Walsh, and we’re already talking about trying to write a duet for the nienteForte concert in 2014. I already have a guest ensemble tentatively lined up for that, and i want to write a piece for *that* group too, which i’ll probably start in early summer right after Jazz Fest.

5. Also in mid-spring i’m going to start thinking about marching band arranging again for Hermiston. Paul was very happy with what i did this past season, so i don’t doubt that i’ll be able to write for the group again.

6. I’m planning on putting together a new music seminar class sometime in the spring semester, a volunteer thing since i can’t officially register a course with the university at this point. I just want to get people excited about some of the music that got me excited in college as well as going out there and finding other music, newer stuff that i don’t know to keep my own creative brain fresh and current.

7. Also this spring i imagine that i’ll be in some final talks with Galaxy Interactive to figure out exactly how my contract is going to work for TerraLife, a project that they anticipate will start occupying a lot of my energy this summer.

8. Sometime a year ago, Tyler and i talked about trying to put together some sort of DDR reunion this coming summer. Originally it was going to be another sight-read tournament, but the context for that sort of thing has died out as far as we’re both concerned, so more and more i’m thinking about making it into some big Johann Sebastian Joust competition or something.

I know i’m missing something, but that’s okay. Brain will continue firing off on all of this probably until next fall. Then i can relax.

In general something that’s come to light from this past fall is that I shouldn’t try to tackle a lot of creative projects in the fall. Thankfully i had the foresight to turn down an opportunity to write a piece for Kim Walker’s fianceé who wanted the piece by around christmas. I said no mainly because i knew that the wind ensemble piece was going to take a major chunk of my time, but the thing that i didn’t anticipate was how busy the fall season was – partially brought on by my rather sudden medical issues, but also because the marching band season was much busier than i anticipated it would be and i didn’t have a whole lot of energy to devote to independent projects.

Granted, it’s not like my spring and summer isn’t occupied a great deal as well, but the method behind that busy is much more in line with creative and original efforts as opposed to the fall semester teaching and administering a marching band organization. Clearly a lot depends on exactly how the football schedule falls out, but i’m starting to come to the conclusion that my creative calendar should be much more dense in the spring and summer than in the fall.

We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, much needed website updates coming soon, time to try to send my Timpani piece off to another publisher for consideration of publishing, and keep the ball rolling.

five things i like about facebook more than google plus:

1. degree of interaction on my own posts. Part of it is that i know that i’m quirky and i don’t try to conform posts in a way to get more hits, something that can be very prevalent on g+. Another is that i’m not an attractive female who works in a geeky tech industry. Whatever the reason, if i post the same thing on fb vs g+ (of which my readers are pretty much a completely different group of 1000 people each), many more people will interact with me on the fb side than the g+ side.

2. visibility of interactions on pages and groups. when someone comments on something on the TUMB page on facebook, i can see that as a little notation-number on my main feed, so i get notified even if i don’t actively visit my page. on the TUMB page on g+, i need to navigate to that page first as an admin before i see whether or not i’ve gotten any interaction, and that’s an extra step that can be easily neglected, and thus make me lose some of my audience unless i’m actively diligent.

3. currency of contact information. a lot of my real-life friends and acquaintances keep their information up to date on facebook and use facebook regularly enough that it has made it possible for me to travel anywhere and know how to get in touch with someone to hang out. particularly for holiday travel, i’ve been able to touch base with people who i’d otherwise have no idea how to contact to get together with them. contacting people privately on g+ is clunkier given that it’s much closer to a twitter paradigm than a facebook one, which makes it more difficult to have quality private interactions.

4. there are less spam accounts on fb than g+. There are many times when someone circles me on g+, i go to look at their profile page and their stream, and it’s either a spambot whose entire stream is filled with links back to some fishy and phishy website or it’s a real person, but they’re using their personal account mainly to push their own marketing and otherwise has very little original content. With a few exceptions, all of my fb friends are just people being people and not trying to be a business, knowing that if they want to do more of that sort of marketing business it should be more in the context of a Page.

5. …okay. i can’t think of a number 5.

five things i like about google plus more than facebook:

1. quality of posts on my stream. hands down, my g+ is much more interesting for me to read. What flows through my stream is a combination of personal things by awesome people, posts about similar interests to mine, quality images taken by some phenomenal photographers particularly in the realm of world architecture, and other shares of some incredibly innovative technology ideas, deep political analyses, awesome recipes, or whatever. A lot of this comes from my very direct ability to control all content that appears in my stream through circle management – i don’t circle people who post an insane amount of #caturday posts or use their stream to just share their favorite music video of the day or are too anti-Apple or anti-facebook (which can be prevalent).

2. image quality. photographs and pictures are just better on g+ in what people opt to post and share and how those images are dealt with on g+/picasa. if i upload a 1440×1280 picture on g+ i can redownload it at the same dimensions and same quality as what i uploaded. If i do the same on fb, the only download i can do is the version that fb has compressed and reduced in pixels and quality, and although i’m no professional photographer, i do consider myself an amateur and boy does that irk me.

3. trust in google over facebook there’s a faction of anti-google people out there for whatever reason, people that see it as Just Another Huge Evil Corporation. Google has made its share of mistakes, but in general the quality of the products they put out is outstanding and the mission of the corporation from the top down is something i think is pretty amazing. I’m not a huge google fanboy exactly, but i do believe in the company, particularly since i soemtimes talk to my brother about it (who is a google employee) and i trust his judgement a great deal. I trust how they do their business, what experience they try to bring to the world and the reasons behind it. I have no such trust in facebook. i believe that zuckman is pretty much just out for #1, and the decisions that are made regarding data privacy, how they try to change the user experience, and the general integrity of the company do not make me trust it.

4. google plus promotes embracing a larger community and meeting new people in a way that facebook doesn’t. With the Prolific community on facebook being the noted exception, facebook is comprised 99% of people that i know in real life whether casual acquaintances or close friends. It’s not a platform in which i can discover new people easily. On g+, almost everyone in my circles is someone that i met only through g+, and some of them have become very good friends. In that way it reminds me much more of the way that livejournal used to be when that was the dominant social platform – strangers discovered each other, interacted with each other, and could have meaningful relationships and interactions. g+ is designed to foster that same sort of discovery, and has resultantly exposed me to a wider new orleans community as well as a like-minded base of people from everywhere across the world that i feel absolutely comfortable hopping into a google hangout with and just shooting the shit.

5. i completely control my stream content on g+ and it will never involve ads. One of the big differences between g+ and facebook in this regard is that g+ is just an aspect of a larger company that already has a hugely successful model for generating revenue, so there’s no need to put ads into g+. Especially since facebook’s IPO, Zuckman is under a lot of pressure to generate much more revenue and at a much higher pace than before facebook went public, and as a result facebook has seen more intrusive advertising on both the website and the mobile app. This is absolutely the right thing for facebook to do from a business sense, but it creates a tainted user experience which can already feel cluttered as it is as well as biased with the introduction of Promoted Posts.

The Bottom Line

Facebook and Google+ are different experiences. facebook is where i go to see what my friends decide to randomly post and is also my largest audience for personal and business content. google+ is where i go to meet strangers and read content from around the globe from fascinating people that have embraced google+ as their conduit, and it’s also a much more open platform where strangers from anywhere across the globe aren’t afraid to video chat together and find some amazing connections. They both have their roles and these days i’ve been embracing both accordingly.

That said, one thing that sticks out most between the two social media platforms is my attitude about migration. As in if all of my friends on fb migrated over to g+, then the only reason i would keep my fb is to administer the TUMB pages i control for my work. By contrast, if all of my friends on g+ migrated to fb, i wouldn’t give g+ up – i would go out and find more people or different content and likely use that as my primary place of internet surfing because there’s always new stuff to discover in a way that i can tune however i want.