Monday, August 30, 2010

The Tracks I Currently Have Up on Soundcloud

posted by Speculativism at August 30, 2010

All work of my own placed here is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

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Friday, August 27, 2010

Time for Another Rant About History and Cutting

Time for another rant about hair and haircuts.

I've realised that short hair is a form of self-harming.

Up until 96 years ago it was normal for men to have long hair. Then the 1914-18 World War broke out and men were forced into the trenches. Their hair was cut and they were subjected to one of the most extreme processes of brutalisation ever devised.

The collective trauma didn't end with the Armistice. The men who survived came back changed and the convict-style "short back and sides" was the symbol of that psychological change.

50 years later, in the 1960s, normal ordinary long hair, just as men have almost always worn, came back into fashion, but 50 years of self-harming and psychological punishment were still symbolised by the regular trip to the barbershop.

The return to normal long hair was viewed as anything but normal.

The centenary of the outbreak of World War One is coming up in four years (or six years for the U.S.A.). Will we ever put the self-harm of haircuts behind us and truly return to normal? It remains to be seen.

posted by Speculativism at August 27, 2010

All work of my own placed here is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

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The Studio Typewriter album: "Kitchen Sink" - The way the tracks originally sounded

posted by Speculativism at August 27, 2010

All work of my own placed here is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

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Studio Typewriter - Fourier Transformations

I've become very interested in the translation of sound into image and image into sound. Recently I've been using a programme called "Bitmaps And Waves" or BW.exe coded by Victor "X" Khashchanskiy (http://www.elisanet.fi/victorx/) which applies a Fourier Transformation (http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/LOCAL_COPIES/OWENS/LECT4/node2.html) to translate from the pixels in the image to the sound samples in the wav. The virtue of this method is that it's a true mathematical relationship and so it works both ways. That is to say, when the reverse process is applied to the image produced from the sound it reconstructs the exact same sound.

When some change is made to the image, such as a resize or a photoshop effect, turning that image back into the sound carries with it the mathematical distortion and thus changes the sound.

As an experiment I converted all of the tracks from the Studio Typewriter "Kitchen Sink" album into wavs and then used BW.exe to create bitmap images of them. Then I resized all 14 images to a uniform size (640x480 pixels) and then turned them back into wavs. Finally I converted the wavs to mp3s and uploaded them to last.fm. (As I write this I'm still waiting for some of them to upload - a last.fm glitch is blocking some of the uploads).

Here are the images created from the tracks:



























posted by Speculativism at August 27, 2010

All work of my own placed here is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

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