shinkoyo and wheelchairs

I discovered this interesting music collective called shinkoyo, a group of people living a la squat style in an industrial space in brooklyn. Some members of the collective are electroacoustic composers and you can listen to their music at shinkoyo.com.

From what I know of this arrangement there is considerable sharing of music technology between members. I was thinking about whether or not I would be comfortable with this type of arrangement, and I decided that I don't think I could do it. For me, a computer has become an integral part of the way I compose and to lend it, would be like lending a personal instrument - a great deal of trust is required. I worked at camp a few years ago where all of the clientele were from at-risk or special needs populations. I had a very interesting conversation with a man who was paralyzed in an accident and now requires a wheelchair to be mobile. He talked about how he was sensitive about his wheelchair, for a stranger to touch it was the equivalent of having a stranger touch him. "It's my legs", he said, "you don't just touch someone's legs." This led me to think about my own attachments to objects, whether they were necessary for basic needs such as movement or whether they were things that I depend on to function in other ways. I find that my dependency on computer technology has increased over the years, I have become so accustomed to recording my compositions with a computer that it would be hard to do without. I had a computer die at the beginning of the year and I became aware of how depedent I was on it. Just as instrumentalists spend hours a day practicing, I spend hours a day composing and recording with a computer. In many ways my computer is my musical legs.

Crash

As Dr. Gilbert poignantly put it, "technology will always fail you." I have experienced this many times, but the strongest blow came a few weeks ago. This summer I decided to convert all of my CDs to mp3 files via iTunes. I bought a 500 GB USB drive and transferred everything over. It worked wonderfully, very compact, I could access any song I could think of with a few keystrokes. But as you have probably guessed it turned sour. One day the drive would not wake up and I lost all of my music. And of course I was foolsih enough not to make a back up. A lesson I have already learned a few times before, but somehow forgot. Maxtor/Seagate (the manufacturer) offers a full waranty, they will replace your drive for free. But what about the data? gone. I'd much rather have my data than a new drive that will likely fail me in a year, the way I see it, it's delayed pain. So I decided to venture into the world of amateur hardrive repair. It was a failed mission. So I'm starting fresh, if you have any suggestions for music I should listen to, please send them this way. I'm open to anything, except John Mayer.

Digital Divide

I recently read an article entitled "Information Technology for People with Mental Retardation" which discusses the idea of a digital barrier for people with disabilities. The barrier stems from a lack of opportunities to learn ICT (Information and Communication Technology). The authors cite that in Hong Kong for example, 90% of the families have a computer at home. In a study involving about 350 participants with mild to severe mental retardation, about 40% could not use an internet browser. There were other more basic barriers mentioned too such as a third of the participants not being able to 'use' a computer. With regards to music technology, I believe there is a largely undiscovered realm of opportunities that we as technology users and music makers need to pursue.

Alternative to iMovie for PC?

I was poking around the internet looking for something akin to iMovie for PC. I found one person who thought that Adobe Premiere Elements is almost identical to older versions of iMovie. From what I've read older versions of iMovie were more versatile and allowed more user control. So if you're not a mac user and you want to try something different than windows movie maker perhaps you can get a trial version of this program and test my claims.

movie posted

I've just posted my movie entitled "Blizzard." I've provided a link below:

movie

Canadian Thanksgiving

This past weekend was Canadian thanksgiving and I met up with a friend who works frequently and in depth with adobe photoshop. He works for the school of dentistry at the University of Toronto and as an employee he gets to enroll in courses for free. Funny enough he's taking a course entitled "intro to html" and a course on "dreamweaver". Sound familiar? We've decided to keep tabs on each others' work to compare notes. I think this could be a fun exercise and only one that can be done thanks to the internet. We discussed the 'power' of photoshop and he described some of the applications he used it for and explained how it does have its limitations. For example he designed a large banner/poster on photoshop and he felt that if he had more familiarity with adobe illustrator the task would have taken less time. This just goes to show that as we become increasingly competent with an application we are able to evaluate how it serves our purposes and consider if other choices might be more apt for a given task.

1st post

This is my first attempt at a blog post. I assume I 'll get better and more interesting with practice. The first thing I'd like to point out is that I reattempted a gif animation, so you can see that on my assignments page. I used the information from the last class on photoshop to make the frames for this animation. I found that no matter how poor the gif animation program is, with photoshop you can make excellent frames and therefore more interesting animations. I'm slowly learning how to use some of the different elements of photoshop, but I'm still finding it overwhelming.