A client needed to send me some production materials–a script and some audio recordings–in order for me to begin work on a short project tomorrow. Normally they’d just upload the files to my FTP sever, but in this case everything was a hard-copy: the script printed on paper (with hand-written notes) and the audio burned to CD-R. These hard copies were also in midtown Manhattan and I’m in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Someone had to go pick them up.
Just to be clear (least my colleague read this and get the wrong idea) this wasn’t a big deal and I’m not really complaining. I only mention it as another one of ways I see my digital and analog lives blurring. I’ve grown so used to making these kinds of exchanges online that taking a few extra minutes to make a physical hand-off somehow seemed…maybe not antiquated so much as unnecessarily inefficient given the tools at our disposal.
Again: NOT a big deal. The subway makes New York City a reasonably good sneakernet. Besides, I enjoy reading on the subway. I had just finished a book, so I grabbed one of my roommate’s magazines on the way out the door. (I tend to read magazines online these days.)
Settling into my Q train seat a few minutes later, I opened to the first page and caught myself thinking, who turned off Adblock?
One memory in particular I have about Rev 105 is being in 6th or 7th grade and listening to special feature about Soul Coughing. They devoted a whole hour of air-time to the group, featuring live and unreleased tracks interspersed with interviews and pre-produced segments about the band’s history and development (narrated, I think, by Mary Lucia). It was cassette-tape “gold,” and tape it I did. (Where is that tape today? Did I record over it?)
Remember how we used to collect our music?
You’d hear a catchy song on the radio but miss the ID, so you’d call the station. “That song. What was that song?” and you’d hum a few bars for the DJ, approximate a few misheard lyrics. “I think there was a trumpet?” And then she’d tell you what it was.
The next day you’d call the station to make a request, and they’d promise play it sometime within the hour. You’d wait at your parent’s stereo, your finger hovering in anticipation over the red circle on the tape deck. 90 minutes passed, and then:
“By request, here’s…,” the first few bars already creeping up beneath her voice. You’d fumble for the “rec” button.
And so you collected whole shoe-boxes of mixtapes with no particular unifying theme, each song missing the first few seconds because, of course, you needed to hit “rec” and “play” at the same time.
Occasionally radio producers in other parts of the country hire me to do “tape synch” recordings. For any non-radio folks reading this, a tape synch is a way producers can interview people remotely without having to rely on the scratchy sound of “phone tape” (recording the actual phone line). Instead, they’ll hire a guy like me to go to the interviewee’s home or office. They’ll conduct the interview over the phone while I sit unnaturally close to the interviewee getting a high-quality recording of our end of the conversation. Afterward, I’ll upload the audio file so the producer can synchronize recordings of both sides of the conversion on a computer, as if the conversation had taken place in person. It’s the next best thing to recording an interviewee in a good studio and transmitting the audio feed via an ISDN connection. So the next time you’re listening to All Things Considered (or whatever) and you hear, “Mr. X comes to us from his home in Brooklyn Heights,” that’s how it happened.
(In case it’s not obvious, these aren’t “live” conversations. In fact, the majority of public radio is very highly edited. Most people don’t realize Car Talk isn’t live. True live shows usually rely on some combination of phone tape or a remote studio via ISDN connection.)
I’ve recorded dozens of interviews with authors, politicians, actors, musicians, and heads of corporations. Every now and then (twice so far this week) I’ll be listening to the radio and hear some of the same people on-air again. I don’t really know these people, of course, and most of them certainly wouldn’t remember me. But I’ll hear their voices and remember the hour or so I spent with them, the small talk before and after the recording.
His grandfather clock was ticking loudly throughout the recording.
I biked to her apartment. It was raining and she offered me tea.
I was allergic to his cat and holding back a sneeze the whole interview.
It’s Friday night, so I’m going to make this one short.
Earlier this summer I put together a project that I called “Wikimixing” for the Megapolis Audio Festival. Here is a blurb I wrote about it at the time:
“Mixing on a computer is usually a solitary endeavor: one person controlling one mouse and keyboard making one decision at a time. We’re going to try to fix that. Part workshop and part experiment in “crowd-sourced” audio art, this is like editing Wikipedia but with sound instead of text. We’ll … collectively mix and manipulate sounds as a group in real-time using a bunch of colorful customized keyboard controllers, all connected to a single computer. The idea is to get as many hands/ears/minds at once collaborating (and competing) on the same soundscape, so that whatever strange, beautiful, or frightening noises that emerge are the product of our group’s collective will. Everyone is in control at the same time and yet no one is!”
You can read more about the ideas and technical aspects of the project here. But for whatever reason, I never got around to posting the final mixes on my own site…until TODAY. So unless you’ve been to the Megapolis 2010 Archive, they’re NEW TO YOU!
from explodingdog.com
I got a brief mention on New Hampshire Public Radio’s program “Word of Mouth” for one of the production exercises I did last weekend at the Megapolis Festival.
It’s not exactly the most creative example of what I can do (or rather could have done)…but I’ll take the shout-out!
I’ll write more about Megapolis in an upcoming post (spoiler alert: I had a blast), but right now I’ve got to go cut and FTP some tape.
