I haven’t written in a while. Just busy, I suppose. But there are a few posts I’ve been meaning to get out of my system. I’ll list them out here if only to hold myself to it:
- Why I didn’t like Hamilton
- Responding to a negative review of Past Lives
- Tourism bad???
- A half-hearted attempt to construct a crossword about the Islamic interpretive tradition
- A Hofstadter-esque dialogue about the various ways in which The Mummy (1999) is decidedly un-woke
But tonight, I am just posting something small, hardly anything at all. Here’s a short video I made for a film 101 college class I ended up dropping.1 The protagonist may seem familiar.
My professor didn’t have to grade my assignment - I dropped the class soon before submitting my video. He did though. He sent me a sweet email that ended with:
I saw today that you’re no longer in class - I am hoping it’s because you’ve moved into another film section, or a class you really wanted to take (totally understand - that’s part of college!) - but I hope that you keep making things.
I think the process of making stuff can feel really embarrassing, and so his email meant a lot to me. I keep it saved in a special folder.
When I was 15, I stopped listening to music completely. It was a religious thing, and I was indeed very religious. I sat one night, missing Marika Hackman’s Claude’s Girl, and yet I couldn’t remember how it went. So I wrote my own Claude’s Girl that night. The poem is both an earnest attempt to remember some of the lyrics to the song and a reflection on missing something you no longer remember:
It’s quiet at the museum –
The wind, your missing piece too.
A thief must have been enamored
And screwed the whole thing loose.You say your dreams are maggots
That rest in the grass where you lay.
And I cannot help but reflect the thief
And think of the view as I lie awake.
Today is the start of a 3-day weekend for me. Long weekends always feel a little weird. I feel restless; full but not satiated. You miss something, but you don’t know what.
And so, since I have the time, and since I miss making things, I played around on my laptop to produce this:
For the curious, the process of making it was something like:
# `say` is a built-in mac text-to-speech program (https://ss64.com/mac/say.html)
# To filter for english voices, run `say --voice='?' |grep "en[_-]"`
# poem.txt contains the poem
say --voice "Good News" --input-file poem.txt --output-file=poem.aiff
# `say` typically can only output .aiff files (mac-specific)
# But I figured I would convert to .wav since its compatible with more things
# `sox` is a self-described "Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation"
# Install via `brew install sox` or via your preferred package manager
# My introduction to `sox` was via [this](https://garten.salat.dev/087-hello-audio-in-c/)
# blog post from programmer/musician eddyflux
sox poem.aiff poem.wav
# I don't know anything about audio manipulation
# I read through the 'effects' section of the `sox` man page and picked what I liked
# `speed 0.75c` slows it down a little
# `echos 0.8 0.7 40 0.25 63 0.3` adds an echo. The man page says this sequence of (delay, decay)
# pairs makes it sound like the sample is being played in a garage
sox poem.wav processed_poem.wav speed 0.75c echos 0.8 0.7 40 0.25 63 0.3
# I don't really know how to play music via `sox`. I know you can though.
# I just generated some brown noise. I think it adds to the 'I miss something but I don't know what' feeling
sox -n brownnoise.wav synth 55 brownnoise
# Then, I wanted to layer the two sounds, but I needed them to have the same sample rate first.
# Sample rate is in the audio file header, which you can query via the `soxi` command
% soxi brownnoise.wav
Input File : 'brownnoise.wav'
Channels : 1
Sample Rate : 48000
Precision : 32-bit
Duration : 00:00:55.00 = 2640000 samples ~ 4125 CDDA sectors
File Size : 10.6M
Bit Rate : 1.54M
Sample Encoding: 32-bit Signed Integer PCM
% soxi processed_poem.wav
Input File : 'processed_poem.wav'
Channels : 1
Sample Rate : 22050
Precision : 16-bit
Duration : 00:00:53.38 = 1177089 samples ~ 4003.7 CDDA sectors
File Size : 2.35M
Bit Rate : 353k
Sample Encoding: 16-bit Signed Integer PCM
# I changed the sample rate of the brown noise to 22050
sox --rate 22050 brownnoise.wav resampled_brownnoise.wav
# I also lowered the gain so it wouldn't be overwhelming
# Gain is the loudness of an input signal before processing
# while volume refers to the loudness of the output signal after processing.
sox resampled_brownnoise.wav resampled_brownnoise_less_gain.wav gain -12
# And finally, I merged them
sox -m processed_poem.wav resampled_brownnoise_less_gain.wav mixed_poem.wav
# When I resampled brownnoise.wav, it got extended from 55s to 1m59s
# So I want to trim it back down. I set it to 60 because I liked the little bit of silence at the end
sox mixed_poem.wav finished_poem.wav trim 0 60Footnotes
The assignment was to pick an alter ego and then answer a question of your choosing from the Proust Questionnaire as your alter ego. I picked the question: If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?↩︎