8/31/11

362. come and gone

An interesting site is this Piano Migrations project, which turns cities along a route you pick in Google maps into virtual music box notes. Samples in this project are all variations on my route from Pittsburgh to Champaign, and back again.

Tomorrow is the official last day of the one-year blog; it'll probably be a double blog, which will bring the total count of posts to 365, so that I may soothe myself with the thought that I at least tried to follow the spirit of my own rules. I plan to assemble some sort of "best of the blog" playlist; if you're reading this and you've been a visitor to the blog before, do you have any favorites to put on the list?

8/30/11

360. so hard to keep try 361. princess daybed and her consorts

1. Flute and drums at the same time!!!1 which might be a live performance thing someday for me.



2. Most ancient of keyboard samples. Gonna be a dance party at my house where everyone brings a Casio from the '80s and we get down to the sample drum tracks.

8/29/11

359. elbow dancing

My dancing is confined to where I'm sitting these days. Well, maybe I'm just lazy. Or really, really pregnant.

8/28/11

357. mimesis, 358. lovely fade

mimesis: very noisy pseudo-techno, featuring blender sounds. Do not listen to if over 45 years old.



lovely fade: doesn't actually fade and isn't all that lovely, but has lots of kazoo-singing in it.

8/26/11

355. you have a kitty

Just a lovely and sentimental melody. Hey, there's only a week of the blog left! (cough)...plus the four or five extra blogs to make up...

After a year, it's going to be odd to be free of/finished with the blog, with nothing to distract me from the exciting duties of dissertation-writing and baby-raising.

I'm sure I'll think of something.

8/25/11

353. hydration, 354. overhydration

hydration: two water glasses full, with ice cubes; gradually the pitch changes as I drink from one glass while rattling the ice in the other. Exciting! and good for you! Also, some sounds made by a salad spinner filled with rocks.



overhydration: the same thing, but with the sounds altered to create a richer harmonic quality, plus the sound of John's pocket watch.

8/24/11

352. aquarium

Some cello pizzing and more water glockenspiel! (That's 'pizzing' as in lots of pizzicati.)

8/23/11

350. sandings, 351. a kitchen that smells of beats

two blogs: me sanding a table and other things (like a music stand and drums); and me playing water-glockenspiel, having taking off some keys and dangled them from a string.




8/20/11

westward again

Old saxophone stuff, back from the good ol' days of me trying to play the sax for the blog. Don't run shrieking in horror though! Other good things will follow.

347. flotille

A short soundtrack by me to the first three minutes of a video of some very delicately unfolding water origami, by Etienne Cliquet, a visual artist who does both high-tech programming and low-tech paper folding art (you can watch the entire video here).

8/18/11

345. cluster duster, 346. harping on it

1. Electric organ, located in Ben's dining room. How many times has something of Ben's ended up on this blog? Answer: around seven, or a lot.



2. Harp samples found on someone's wedding-music-advertising website; it no longer sounds like Pachelbel's Canon or My Heart Will Go On.

8/16/11

344. these shorts will do

As I get larger, my options for clothing get limited; it's down to men's basketball shorts for today. So, yes, on that note, lots of effort went into this partiklar blog. Better one later! maybe with video again!

8/14/11

343. my dizzying route to the light bulb

Hey, a normal one-blog post for once.

These might be old oboe samples? Don't know. It was a long day on the road. Back visiting Pittsburgh this week. It's a little weird, I keep wanting to go home to our old apartment. I'm sure the new tenants wouldn't mind.

341 and 342. two blogs: five tool player, weighing wind and time

Number one, flute and drums. Number two, a storm brewing, a bathroom scale, and a carriage clock.




340. clock music

I've wanted to do video and music projects for sometime, as a way of doing something special as the blog draws to a close; here's one of a clock in Switzerland. They love their fancy clocks, the Swiss do.


8/11/11

336. left of the dreams, 337. paint and no walls, 338. friendly cat blues, 339. slide grease summer night

Four blogs from the last four days...in order, featuring a skipping Soul Train record, some filtered sine waves, guitar and toy guitar, and Jonathan forced to play trombone for the first time in years.


left of the dreams:



paint and no walls:



friendly cat blues:



slide grease summer night:



And the blog is winding down...soon. Hoping to come up with some neat things before it's over.

8/7/11

335. succotash

What's in it? I don't know exactly. Neat things. Greetings from Rantoul, IL.

8/6/11

333 and 334. two blogs with lots of bells

Hey, I like these two. But then, I like glockenspiel. Not like better than any other instrument, but probably more than the average person. There are also samples from my Music11 piece, singing, and some shakuhachi bits in there too.

I have run out of shirts that fit.




8/1/11

325, 326, 327, 328, 329. Quintuple blog! [the blog lives!]

Greetings from the Great Beyond, AKA Champaign, Illinois! - the new setting for my new adult life. But neither packing and moving nor unpacking a forest of boxes nor impending motherhood have stopped the blog. Lack of internet access has kept me from posting them, but here are blogs for the past five days.

P.S. - to get the internet we're hanging out in the sketchy cafe of an extremely sketchy supermarket (County Market), which must be what Giant Eagle was like in the '80s, plus a bad smell. Hey to everyone.

#1 - tap me and slap me

Shakuhachi comes back this week, first with a lot of finger slaps, plus tapping on glockenspiel and drums.



#2 - generous kittycat

Stealing an elastic-strung cat toy, I make a modified version of the bass-drum-with-resonant-string that Amy Kirsten used for her Music11 piece.



#3 - a much sadder glockenspiel song

I will miss Pittsburgh. Wouldn't you?



#4 - orchestra of chairs

One squeaky chair sample becomes a vast array of beautiful* chords.

*beautiful = very subjective



#5 - light drumming

First sample from the new house = the chandelier buzzing when the dimmer switch is down low. Plus many lovingly recycled drum samples.