A rock I am.
0Friend and fellow ridiculous composer Steven Eiler has embarked on a project to learn and record a different song each week, so when he asked me to join him this week, how could I refuse? I grabbed the closest piece of sheet music to my desk (which so happened to be Simon and Garfunkel’s I am a Rock, for reasons I won’t explain), a bass, and a banjo, and headed over to Château Eiler for some extended recording. This is what emerged:
Deskbuilding!
0I’ve written/posted pictures about my workspace before (most recently, here), but through this semester I’ve been thinking about increasing my desk space. This all started when I was working on the Thesis, and had to move my dining room table into the office to handle the oversized staff paper. My current L-shaped desk is fine, but I’ve been thinking that I’d really like to have a dedicated computer desk. Like a writing desk. A mission-style writing desk. Since I’ll be moving around for a while until I’m settled, something portable. How about something that folds? A folding, mission-style writing desk. That’s cheap.
No one makes that desk. So in the great Vanderburgian tradition, I decided to design it myself. Luckily, while I was back home for Christmas, dad and I were able to build it. Here’s how that adventure went. It all started with a basic plan.
Basically, the desk is built in panels. The back panel, about four feet in length, is attached to the two side panels, which are about two feet in length. These side panels are hinged to the back, and fold in to save space while traveling. The skinny part of the top is attached to that back panel, and the dark line across the desktop is a piano hinge that allows the top to be folded down.
The basic measurements I decided on for the desk are 30” tall, 4.5’ wide, and 2.5’ deep. So how does the building process begin? With a sheet of mahogany plywood.
I’m going to skip some of the pictures, because cutting boards isn’t all that exciting, but they’re all over on in a flickr set. We decided to build the panels out of 1×6 hard rock maple, which dad had stored in the old car shop (that’s right, the Vanderburg family compound includes a woodworking shop, an upholstery shop, an automotive shop, and a classic car shop, where mine and dad’s mustangs spend their time). For some reason, our collection of maple was in the classic car shop. Here’s one of the side panels, disassembled, with the slats cut.
And here’s a picture of the slats glued to the top and bottom boards. We used dowels for these. Guess who got to drill all the holes for the dowels?
And here’s what it looks like with the sides glued on. We used a biscuit joiner for the joints here. Fun tip: If you don’t hold onto a board properly when using a biscuit joiner, it is within the realm of possibility that the board will fly across the shop. Not that this…actually…happened…more than once.
Multiply this by two, and you have your sides. The back, on the other hand, requires a bit more wood, but overall is the same. We decided on 10 slats in this one instead of 5. Here’s some wood:
And here’s what it looks like all clamped together and waiting to dry.
We tried several different colors of stain (on scrap wood), because someone wanted them to match his dining room chairs, without knowing what stain we used on those chairs. We ended up mixing a color that’s close enough. Here’s a picture of the three panels, stained (the third panel is hiding behind the rightmost slat on the back. They’re standing on end because the laws of physics don’t apply in Poplar Bluff. Or, they’re wired together in a delicate balance. Your pick).
Add a coat or two of varnish to all of that, and of course, to the desktop (with trim added to the edges), and it’s ready to assemble. Here’s the desktop.
I don’t have any pictures of the assembly because it was essentially screwing piano hinges to everything, and usually required all four hands. But here’s how it turned out:
I unfortunately don’t have a picture of it folded (yet), but I’ll include that when I load it into my car.
So overall, I have a desk for almost-free. The only things we had to buy were 2 4-foot piano hinges (one of those was cut in half and used for the two leg-back joints), and 50 screws for the top hinge (because somehow the half-inch screws that were included went all the way through the half-inch wood). Overall, it took around 56 man-hours to complete. I’ve left out a lot of the measurement errors, equipment problems, and a lot of time waiting for the glue to dry. And of course, it helps to have a fully-stocked woodworking shop.
Once I return to Norman, I’ll be reworking my office, and I’ll hopefully have something moderately interesting to write about that process.
Go give Wikipedia some money. No, really.
0I donated to Wikipedia earlier this year (like I did last year). If you use it often, send some money their way. It takes a lot to run something that large.
-Kyle
——————-
Dear Kyle,
Here’s how the Wikipedia fundraiser works: Every year we raise just the funds that we need, and then we stop.
Because you and so many other Wikipedia readers donated over the past weeks, we are very close to raising our goal for this year by December 31 — but we’re not quite there yet.
You’ve already done your part this year. Thank you so much. But you can help us again by forwarding this email to a friend who you know relies on Wikipedia and asking that person to help us reach our goal today by clicking here and making a donation.
If everyone reading this email forwarded it to just one friend, we think that would be enough to let us end the fundraiser today.
Of course, we wouldn’t turn you down if you wanted to make a second donation or a monthly gift.
Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 679 servers and 95 staff.
Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 470 million different people every month – with billions of page views.
Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.
When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.
Thanks,
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder
Looking forward, looking back
0Every December 27th for the past several years, I have spent the day reflecting on the past year, what went wrong, what went right, and what I was going to do about it, creating a sort of “state of Kyle Vanderburg.”
But that’s not what’s going to happen this year. Starting this year, my focus will be less concerned with where I’ve been, and more concerned with outlining where I’m going. And it will chiefly be concerned with my professional life and NoteForge than with my personal life. So let’s get started.
Operations in 2011 were focused on a few large ideas. First was putting out the fires from 2010. 2010 was a weird year, and efforts were made throughout this year to fix all of that. Second, and less vague, was simplification. NoteForge’s website got a makeover, I let go of some domain names (such as Vandermusik and vdbg.us), and I worked toward unifying the NoteForge-created technology. This simplification idea led to the idea of streamlining as much of the NoteForge operations as possible, allowing for more time to do what I’m supposed to: Write music. With that in mind I wrote (and then re-wrote) SPADE, the Score and Parts Automated Download Engine, and conceived and produced HOE, the Hammer Opportunity Engine.
So as things stand, I have a self-hosted, multiuser, robust composer management system built to
streamline submissions to calls for scores (HOE),
Automate the delivery of digital scores (SPADE),
Sell products,
Keep the website and calendar updated,
And it’s all based on proprietary NoteForge technology, running on a custom-configured modular server instance named Anvil.
I have a highly brandable company that isn’t locked into music publishing (Ex, it’s not named “NoteForge Publishing).
I have the very beginnings of a recording studio.
I have the infrastructure to run all of this.
And I have a catalog of works.
So where do we go in 2012? Here’s what I’m thinking:
Continue developing Hammer-Based technology.
Anvil will require system updates (Apache, MySQL, PHP), which will be installed in March, July, and November. Also, I will be investigating the move to a different server platform.
Hammer, HIT, HammerSP, and others will continue to be developed. Immediate plans for Hammer include a bug reporting engine, with invoicing and other functions to be determined. These upgrades and cosmetic updates will be released in Hammer 2.2.
I’ll be partnering with Jennifer Tripi, and we will be coding a music-teacher specific integration of Hammer named Keys, which will be based on a fork of Hammer 2.1. Methods for licensing this technology will be explored, but currently the technology is covered under VBIPA.
Renew domain names and revise usage.
By the end of 2012, NoteForge domains should be primary domains, and KyleVanderburg domains should be used for branding purposes. Current URL shorteners, the NoteForge CDN, Analytics, etc. are based at kylev.net. These will need to be moved to ntfg.co.
The majority of my domain names will need to be renewed this year, with the following dates:
KyleVanderburg.Net 2/24/12
NoteForge.Com 7/7/12
KyleV.Net 6/9/12
Vandromeda.Com 10/21/12
Ntfg.co 6/1/12
KyleVanderburg.Com 11/1/13
I’ll be keeping these six domains for the time being, for branding purposes. Vandromeda is currently unused. Perhaps the KV names should be on odd years and NF names should be on even years.
Move away from Google/Reevaluate the NoteForge Email System
NoteForge/KV.net currently use Google Apps for mail purposes. I’d prefer to move to an exchange server or to a self-hosted solution. This will likely involve moving to Office365, Microsoft’s hosted solution.
For the time being, KyleVanderburg.Net serves as the primary mail domain. I’d like to change this to NoteForge.
Shift current cloud services to Windows Azure, and shift more of NoteForge’s data to the cloud.
Currently, I use Amazon AWS as storage for various files (personal archives, QUART files, sound backups, Anvil backups). To achieve platform unity, this information will be moved from AWS to Azure.
NoteForge Hosted sites currently use AWS as asset storage. This will need to be changed.
Eventually, via the NoteForge Stovepipe project, selected Hammer/Anvil functions will be moved to Azure.
So that’s the plan for 2012. Let’s do this.
Working from Home
0Of course, it being Christmas vacation and all, I’m back in Poplar Bluff juggling family engagements, taking care of those things I can only do during those 4 weeks I’m in PB, and trying to actually get some work done. And finally, after 4 years of college and 2 years of grad school, I’ve finally figured out how to get a decent workflow going. Which is good, since I want to complete a lot of stuff this week.
I’ve mostly been working on the Pipe Dreams Band Orchestration this week, and I’m nearly halfway done with my first pass of orchestration. And it’s going…better than expected. In addition to that, I’m thinking of my Missouri piano piece, my upcoming Kansas piano piece, and my prepared piano work.
But, for the time being, I thought I’d show off the workspace that I’ve built in my basement.
I think most of this is self-explanatory. The speakers are my Mackie MR5MK2′s and the mixer is an Alesis Multimix8USB, all from Oklahoma, the piano and the drafting table belong to my parents, and the ridiculous green bass on the wall is a Vanderburg original.
As far as what I’m doing here? Wait and see…
New Piece: Creatures from the Black Bassoon
0I finally finished my first electroacoustic piece! (for those of you who aren’t familiar with the genre, it uses recorded sounds as a basis instead of traditional notation and instruments. Wikipedia has plenty to say on the subject). This new piece, Creatures from the Black Bassoon, uses bassoon sounds to create a variety of animal-like characters. The form is more or less based on the golden section, with a number of contrasting “windows” in the sound.
Here’s what it sounds like:
This piece was composed with Pro Tools 7 LE (Steven Eiler’s copy), 8 HD (OU’s copy), and 10 (my copy), with processing by DigiDesign/Avid’s usual audiosuite plugins, GRM Tools Classic and ST, and Sonnox Oxford Reverb.
Those of you familiar with my music (both of you) will notice that this is pretty much unlike anything I’ve written. After all, if I’m wanting to be an acoustic composer, why switch to electronic music? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First of all, marketability. Most academic job listings for composers now require some sort of electronic background, and if I’m looking to get a job in academia, this can only help (Will I get a job in academia? Do I want to? That’s another blog post). Secondly, the process of creating this piece has been valuable in learning how to use Pro Tools (an industry standard) and has allowed me to listen to (and think about) sounds in a new way. This is similar to my work with New IMPROV! Century Ensemble, where any sound is fair game. And of course, there’s also the value in having an 8 1/2 minute long piece of music that requires no performers.
So what’s next? Prepared piano? Instrument and tape? Pipe Dreams for wind ensemble? We’ll find out.
Pipe Dreams, take…4?
0Back during my last semester at Drury, I needed something for the annual composer’s recital (because there’s no way that the Mass was going to get played), so I wrote this short piano piece. Carlyle said it’d work better as a percussion ensemble, so I rewrote it for that, hijacked the “percussion methods” class going on that semester, and had it performed. And people loved it.
So I set that aside, moved to Oklahoma, and…picked it up again and revised it. I added a couple of movements, and somehow managed to get the third movement played by the K-State percussion ensemble (my first validation as a real composer!)
And for the past couple of years, I’ve largely left it alone. I’m still not comfortable with the percussion writing (I think the difficult parts are too hard and the easy parts are too simple for an ensemble to play it), and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it.
And that’s when I decided that Pipe Dreams needs to be a band piece.
Well, at least that third movement, the first part that I wrote. It’s a lot of fun. It’s short(ish). It’s catchy. It’s the closest I’ve come to Steven Eiler in terms of melodic genius. And it needs to be played more often.
So that’s my plan over Christmas break.
Prepared Piano Preparations: Shopping List!
0So I decided I should write a prepared piano piece after I finish with Creatures from the Black Bassoon. This should be fun.
Of course, I’ve never written a piece for prepared piano. Nor have I played much with the inside of a piano (unless you count this). So what am I going to do?
PREPARED PIANO RESEARCH!
So basically, I get to fill pianos full of things. Specific things. So I went shopping for miscellaneous small things at Amazon today, and here’s what I ended up with, which will undoubtedly screw up my recommendations for the next year:
4 dozen Glow In The Dark Bouncing Balls
200 Cats Eyes Glass Marble / Sling Shot Ammo
12 dozen Ping Pong Balls / Table Tennis Balls
In addition to all of that fun stuff from Amazon, I’m planning to also use:
The aforementioned cell phone trick (from the video)
Magnets
Spoons
A Slinky
What sorts of sounds will these make? No real idea. I’ll be trying them out on Tripi’s piano and recording the result.
Progress
0That title is misleading. I’m not actually getting anything done. Well, not as much as I should be doing. Oh, how about I just tell you and let you decide?
First of all, I moved. Well, my website moved. So did this blog. I had my reasons for picking KyleVanderburg.Net several years ago, but I finally decided that it was time to move to a dot-com. So I’ve been carefully moving everything in such a way to where search engines and people don’t get confused. And I finally moved the blog from WordPress at Kylev.net to WordPress at NoteForge. Hopefully this will free up some space so I can upload more ridiculous things.
I also built some stuff into Hammer, but we’ll get to that in another post.
I’ve been practicing for an upcoming performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. I have the first two movements down, now I’m working on the third.
Yes. This is the actual printed sheet music to 4’33″.
Some Assembly Required didn’t make it as a finalist in the OU 4×4 Prizes, which is one of the few contests I’ve actually paid attention to recently. Luckily, it’s one of those pieces that leaves an impression, so I’m hoping that it’ll still get performed somewhere. I’ve mailed it off a few places, so, we’ll see.
I’ve been completely slacking off in writing music, which I’m sure has nothing to do with my parents being in town two weeks ago and my girlfriend being in town last week {Sidebar: it probably does}. That said, Creatures from the Black Bassoon is coming along somewhat slowly, but at least it’s getting…done? Written? What’s the proper word for the act of creating a piece of electronic music? Distilled? Forged? It sounds something like this:
http://img.kylev.net/mus/CftBB-20111107.mp3
Tara and Tripi’s performance of Foi dans l’aleatoire from 2 weeks ago is online over at Listen (note that it’s now listen.kylevanderburg.com! How cool is that!?), and it’s pretty much great, as are they.
Also, I’m playing around with how everything from the blog gets updated to Facebook, Twitter, and all that stuff. This should be fun.
Looking at Sound
0This year, I finally decided to dive into electroacoustic music, which causes more than a couple of problems. To begin, I knew next to little about electroacoustic music. While I’m pretty fast with Sibelius, I had only a marginal idea of how to deal with Pro Tools, and I was vaguely aware of how awesome Max/MSP was. What I did know is that working with electronic music was something that I needed to pick up if I wanted to someday land an academic job, and the process of relearning everything I knew about composing was going to help in the long run.
What ended up happening was some intense questioning of what I’m doing in a DMA program (Which is another, lengthy, blog entry), and a lot of difficulty with the aesthetic of computer music (which is another lengthy, ranty, blog entry). But those problems were resolved (more or less), and the piece (my first work for fixed media) is coming along, and if you’re really curious to see it, it’s over on Soundcloud. I’ll update it as it becomes more of a thing.
But one thing that I’m learning so far that can immediately inform my future acoustic writing is how to look at sound. I mean, it’s easy enough to get used to thinking in terms of notes and rhythms, like this passage from Foi dans l’aleatoire.
Of course, the work is slightly longer than three bars, if you’re curious the full score is here.
But what does this piece look like if you could actually look at the sound? Well, using GRM’s Acousmographe, that sound looks like this:
The different colors are strengths of frequencies (it kind of reminds me of a weather radar. The weather for Foi dans l’aleatoire today is sunny, with a high of 74 and a chance of octatonic flute scales). This graph is actually of the Sibelius rendering of FDL, while the real recording of the work looks a little more alive:
Kind of a difference between the clinical sound of the MIDI rendering (with no higher frequencies) and the 2011 University of Arkansas-Little Rock performance, isn’t there? I thought so. How useful is it as an acoustic compose? Well, it’s certainly another way of thinking about music. (More spectrograms are available over on Flickr)
On the subject of Foi dans l’aleatoire, Jennifer Tripi and Tara Burnett performed it fantastically at OU’s fall Student Composers Recital this weekend. I’ll post audio over at Listen as soon as I get it.