I’ve expressed some uncertainty about this blog, and then last night I read some of the entries, found it to be much better then I thought it to be: it would seem my powers of self criticism are limited.

A little while ago I read a blog entry, as a result of a tweet link from Chip Griffin, on the subject of writing and public relations.  The gist of it was on the importance of writing simply, the complexity of the task, and how to do it.

I feel as though I’m lucky if I can write at all.  Lots of people tell me, wether its a blog or podcast of mine, that I’m talking over there heads.  This would seem to be a bad sign.  This is particularly true if I’m viewing blogging and podcasting as communications tools.

On the other hand, when we are talking about blogging and podcasting, there is the importance of speaking in your own voice.  (This would be a slightly different challenge then if we are writing a press releases.)  My voice is, I think we can all agree, a rather intellectual voice.   Still, I don’t want to be unaccessible.

All this is made a little more challenging if we are talking about a kind of developmental stage, where in experimentation is key.  Experimentation is something you don’t usually manage from a user centric perspective.  The experimentation, in my case, is at least partly about finding my voice.  There’s also self exploration:  How do you build a personal brand when your notion of who you are is in flux?

In many ways what I think I’m trying to do is to create something, and then see what it is. For the thing I’m creating, I have no idea who the audience is.  The process is more one where you listen to your inner voice, and see where that takes you. The voice is leading you in the direction of becoming, the process is one of exploring an inward mystery.  So, this would all seem to bring certain challenges to the communications process.

Then a few days back, I was listening to some of my older podcast episodes, and tweeted on them.  I don’t remember what episode it was, but essential the sound was awesome and my talking was terrible.  My friend Greg PC, who also happens to be in public relations, commented on my tweet.  His comment was something to the effect of “scripts can be a good thing, though sometimes unnatural.”  I only picked up on his comment, do to Google Alerts, today. I suppose here’s my response:

Listening to some of my podcasts, there’s clearly problems, and something needs to be done if I’m to take my podcast projects seriously.  I’ll give you my basic thinking, and process, and then go from there:

Process 

What I’m trying to do is “capture the magic.”  If there’s no magic to be captured, as is frankly the case in some of my episodes, this process wont work so well. The idea is, I have a portable recorder that I take with me most everywhere, and if I have a thought, I record it.  The recordings then reside on a hard drive.  When it comes time to put together an episode, I go through the recordings, and do a kind of production where in those recordings are regarded as elements of the episode.  The elements are bought in, along with music, and whatever else.. and a certain amount of creative mixing, editing, and general production, happens.

This kind of a production is a lot more labor intensive then that of most podcasts. In many ways, I would regard it as a kind of exploratory process: Interesting things can happen in various places: #1 The actual recording, #2 The editorial process of selecting clips from the recordings, #3 The other sonic elements that are selected to be a part of the episode, #4 musical elements that are custom composed / produced for that episode, and #5: the way all of these elements are mixed together.

Theoretically, you could have a recording that was kind of bad, lets say in terms of content, and via the rest of the process, it could be turned into something good.  So, the exploration comes in how all of these parts of the process interplay:  It’s really about both the parts and the ecology.

Aesthetics

Now there’s the matter of my aesthetic thinking.  For better or worse, I have some strange ideas.  I’m interested in a recording aesthetic that basically makes the microphone a kind of stand in for Freud, with the idea that we can pear into the soul of whomever is talking.  (This is a complex matter I deal with else where)

Another part of this aesthetic thinking, borrowed from Andre Bazin (an important film critic in post WWII france), is to preserve the “spacial temporal integrity of the event.”  In terms of sound, the idea is that sound production is largely a manipulation of reality, which has large effects on how we interpret what we are hearing.  If you listen to a 1940’s Jazz recording, you know those guys are really playing, but in modern music you may be listening to “a good take,” or perhaps what you were listening to has the performances digitally “fixed,” so everyone is playing perfectly on the beat.  There is also the fact that the sound you are hearing is not one you’d ever hear in reality, everything has been miced in such a way so as to produce an “ideal sound.”

Deeper in my philosophical thinking, there’s no such thing as an ideal.. or all things are ideals.  Ideals have to do with underlying questions, they are ideal resolutions to questions or conflicts, so that an ideal is a part of a relationship, and not an independent thing or idea.  So it’s somewhat of a Buddhist idea to go explore what a thing is, and find its inherent perfection.

Without going into it here, this ties into bigger cultural criticism.  To get to the point, how music is produced effects how we appreciate the music.  This having to do with age old philosophical questions like “how do we know what we know.”  

This then becomes a central subject of my art.  Wether we are talking Andre Bazin, or microphone as stand in for Freud, we are really talking about a kind of ultra realism.  In my work we have, on the one hand, ultra realism, and on the other extreme manipulations..  and so my work explores these interrelationships.

Production Values Problems 

The trouble, from the point of view of sound production, is the further something gets away from the microphone “the worse it sounds.”  Some of this has to do with distinctions between the way we listen to natural events, versus what the recording and production process does to sound, and how we hear this. This all being a part of psychoacoustics.  The result then, of a naturalistic approach to the problem, of having sound sources far away from a microphone so as to preserve a spacial integrity of an event, is that you’re sound quality suffers.

Yet another issue is that I’m interested in capturing both the sound of the people speaking, and the sound of the space the people are speaking in.  The latter part greatly complicates how you can manipulate the sounds.

Strategic Considerations

We have a lot of ideas on the table here, and while these ideas are all well and good, we also have the demands of “the market place.”  Even if content is free, we are still talking about “economies of attention,” and how media aesthetics plays into people’s consumption patterns.  How do we balance the deeper ideas of the work with our strategic considerations?

It seems to me that these are the questions I must explore moving forward. Allow me to give you some examples:

Dynamic compression compresses the dynamic range (variations from loud to soft) of sounds into a smaller range then we were originally at.  You can then turn up the volume of your compressed audio in the mix, and it will sound louder then the original.  To our mind and ears, louder equals better, a result being that modern music if often over compressed.

You will no doubt notice that dynamic compression manipulates the dynamic range of the original recording, and thus removes us one step from the original event.  If reality is what you’re after, then dynamic compression might carry some problems with it.  

On the other hand, if a podcast listeners is listening to your podcast while riding a bike through traffic, any sound that is lower then the sound of the traffic will not be heard.  So, if you look at your episode, you can ask the following question: “structurally, what must be heard in order for this episode to work?”  You could then compress, and pump up those parts, while allowing the other elements to exist in a fuller dynamic range.

Scripts

I have an inner anarchist that’s not much in favor of scripts, and then there’s the problems scripts present to my aesthetic ideas.  That said, just as there are many ways to skin your cat, there are many types of scripts:

One type of script is one where you write out, word for word, everything you are going to say.  Particularly if you’re a podcaster, the trick here is to write as you speak, so it might all sound natural.  The next trick is in how you read and perform that script.  The challenge is to both be in the moment, and really feel everything you are saying.  (It probably wouldn’t hurt if you committed it to memory to.)

Another type of script involves bullet points:  These are the topics we are going to talk about, and we’ll just improvise on each topic. An advantage this has over fully scripting every word is that it’s much easier to be in the moment.  

The next type of script, I’d like to tell you about, I call “the avant guard script.” Generally, these scripts are more like “strategies for interesting results,” then they are traditional scripts.  I take this idea from people like John Cage, whom composed with chance and indeterminacy.  

How about a short 2 part thing on Cage, to help give you a sense of where I’m coming from?

 

There are two things I should like this video to drive home here:  #1 Cage is, one way or another, dealing with many of the same questions, problems, and issues I’m dealing with, and #2: Cage is a very different artist then I am.  A third thing you might note, is his untraditional looking scores.  A score is, after all, a script.

Besides all of the above types of script, there is also the subject of improvisation. Sure, improvisation is making things up as you go along, but it is also true that improvisation can happen inside a limited set of parameters, which could then allow for certain types of structural ideas to be work out on a compositional or “script” level.

For instance, one approach to acting involves a strict adherence to a script, but free improvisation as to how you deliver that script.  This can both be a means to explore the possibilities in that script, and of delivering a performance.

Beyond Scripts 

Ok, enough about scripts.  Do you remember how I was talking about “trying to capture the magic?”  This is a documentary process, which is to say, one where we are documenting the unfolding of life / reality / something or other.  My inner anarchist, the same one who doesn’t like scripts, is again making rules against scripts, even if that would seem to be incompatible with a documentary process.

Still, I can tell you how I think some of my most successful episodes were created:  Before the episode was made I would mediate on it’s subject.  When I went to record the episode, the subject would be fully thoughts out, and I would just take you through my thinking.  The episodes were often powerful, simply because my thoughts would take you to a whole new way of thinking about the subject.

I guess where all this leaves me is with one question “where should I go from here?”   Hmm.. well before we address this, how about we get to broader subject of communications:

Communications 

I don’t have a communications background.  I don’t really regard myself as too great a writer, though with the help of a really good editor, there could be some hope for me. If I put my mind to it, I’m sure I could write a decent press release.

This blog is about complex ideas.  This is it’s virtue.  The virtue is in trying to illuminate subjects in new ways:  I provide a take on this that is unique..  It’s a take that is hopefully thought provoking.  Even in this entry, where I discuss the various issues of my social media aesthetics, and what not, as backwards as my positions may or may not be, they are hopefully at least interesting to think about.  

There is, of course, the question of intended audiences.  I don’t think my intention is really to communicate to an 8th grade level, as is the case with so much modern communications.  I mean, anyone who’s interested in what I have to say, you’re probably pretty smart / well educated to begin with.  If you were not, why would you be interested?  And of course, when philosophy takes such a prominent roll in things, I believe there’s got to be some license for my going off the deep end here and there.

Still I do want to try and break down, my more complex ideas, into simple bite sized chunks that anyone can understand.  The trouble is, understanding some of my more complex ideas is contingent on understanding lots of other ideas.  

For this reason it seems that each entry of mine is full of various puzzle pieces. The puzzle pieces, at least to me, sometimes look to be full of loose ends, or at least unestablished points.  These unestablished points are a problem, when they outline positions that are contrary to the readers position, at least in some cases. I’m specifically thinking of times when, from the surface, it could look like this or that part of my thought isn’t well thought out.  The way the puzzle piece system works is..  sooner or latter I’ll get into that point, and properly establish it.  Of course, while this might be a grand process for artifice building, it’s probably not ideal for communications.

Ok, now to the “where do we go from here” problem:

I think I basically just need to put more energy into my podcasts.  It may very well be that my process is too labor and energy intensive, given all the directions my energies seems to be going, in which case there’s a need to economize, which means different strategies.   

Latter still:

I’m just now attempting to edit this entry.  Dear lord is it long!  Too long I think! And how much of it was really self criticism anyway?  Ahh, screw it.  It’s something.  

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 5:29 am and is filed under Media Arts, Music Production, Uncategorized, musical composition, philosophy, podcasting, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.