Friday, April 16, 2010

Saturn Song (take 0)

Here is the Cassini spacecraft "recording" (brought into the audible range by NASA), turned into a 10-beat loop and mixed in with some drum samples from the Steve Tibbets loop library. Photos courtesy of NASA.

I would be interested in getting some feedback about this... see the poll on the blog page.

The Idea of Sharing Ideas

I guess I have to really decide the purpose of this blog. I want make my own creative process vis รก vis music transparent. And to do that, I have to share with you my half-baked, or completely uncooked ideas, and the badly-performed or recorded works-in-progress. The unfinished work. The stuff that you know is just awful. The stuff that nobody but you is supposed to hear.

I have been reluctant to do this out of fear that someone else will "steal" my idea and do something fabulous with it and they'll get all the money and fame and whatever else. Today, I have to laugh about my hubris. Today, I realized that it's a ridiculous attitude to have at this time in my life (and I'm not sure if this attitude ever benefited me in any way in the past, either).  I need to remember that any idea that I may come up with from the various triggers in the world is highly likely to occur to a few thousand other people within a few days of me coming up with it, because they are also exposed to the same set of triggers. The odds that any of them will act on it is small, and the odds that of those who will act on it will do it in the same way as me are negligible.

So.

This is what I'm working on in the stolen moments between work and family and other commitments. I got an email from NASA about the Cassini probe detecting lightning on Saturn. They recorded it in the visual and audio spectrum. The few seconds of noise from Saturn had to be processed by NASA because the frequencies were out of the human audible range (and I suspect out of dog-hearing as well), and they replaced it with some sort of static noise. But it has rhythm to it. And I'm working on turning it into a drum track and build up from there.

Over the next few weeks, I'll treat you to the building blocks as I create them. Expect some interesting noise coming from me.