So for the past few weeks I’ve been reading Molecular Gastronomy by Hervé This (pronounced ‘teese’). It consists of 101 short essays where a wide variety of cooking-related concepts are explained with science. The book was a gift from Eve, and it’s a testament to how well she knows me, since two of my favorite activities are cooking and explaining things with science.
I’m only about half done with the book (reading collections of short works from cover to cover is another one of my favorite activities), but I felt like I had to write about this book now because IT HAS CHANGED KEANU REEVES’S LIFE. According to the internet:
After reading the tome, Reeves has been spending his spare time experimenting with recipes.
“I’m dabbling in it and looking at becoming a chef. [Hervé This] is fantastic. I didn’t really cook before but this book may be changing my life.”
My first reaction was disbelief. I’m sure Mr. Reeves is a great guy, but I’ll admit that I didn’t picture him getting through a book that contains the term “glutamate receptors.” But even if we accept that Keanu has truly been inspired by this book, this kind of situation is exactly why the phrase “don’t quit your day job” exists.
The career ambitions of Keanu Reeves aside, Molecular Gastronomy strikes a respectable balance between science and interestingness. Some of the articles don’t really discuss the “who cares” aspect–how to utilize the scientific explanations to improve your everyday cooking–but overall the book paints a great picture of what’s going on inside your food.
Macarena lessons? A support group for elbowless people? Nope, this photo was taken at a Netflix distribution center, where envelope openers are taking a stretching break. It turns out that at Netflix facilities many tasks, including opening envelopes, inspecting discs, and stuffing envelopes are performed by hand.
The article linked above was pretty light on details, but this one has some great photos and a very informative video (embedded below). I imagined a Netflix distribution facility to include a warehouse filled floor-to-ceiling with DVDs, but apparently they only need a small handful of shelving units:
Which makes sense, I suppose, when you consider how densely the discs can be stored. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that on each shelf in the photo above, they can fit about 3500 DVDs. I can see at least 40 shelves in the photo, which means they’re storing at least 140,000 discs. Netflix claims they stock 100,000 films, so that lower bound feels about right, but I bet their distribution centers have closer to 2-300,000 discs not out on rental at any given point.
Netflix’s operation is remarkably efficient and well-engineered, which isn’t surprising for a company that’s offering a million dollars to anyone who can improve their recommendation algorithm by 10%.
In the wake of Michael Jackson’s death, I keep thinking about two videos. The first is the South Park episode pictured above, in which it is revealed that Americans must ritualistically sacrifice Britney Spears by photographing her to death:
Kyle: What is going on?! Why do you want Britney Spears to die?! Bob Summers: Well nobody wants her to die, little boy. We all simply… need her to. Do you understand? Kyle: NO! Paparazzo 8: Look, kid, throughout history people have found it necessary to engage in… human sacrifice. Bob Summers: In ancient times, humans would commonly pick one lovely girl, adorn her with jewels, treat her like a goddess, and then… watch her die. Paparazzo 9: We like to think we’re more civilized now, but the truth is our lust for torture and death is no different than it was in gladidator times. Paparazzo 10: Only difference is that now we like to watch people put to death through magazines and photographs. Canadian Paparazzo: It’s a damn shame too. Old ways were bettah. Used to be we just picked someone by lottery and then stoned them to death. Woman: Stonin’ to death was too violent. Rather have the sacrifice kill itself. Kyle: You mean everyone has been wanting Britney Spears to kill herself? Man: Britney was chosen a long time ago, to be built up and adored, and then sacrificed. For harvest.
In typical South Park fashion, our society’s obsession with celebrity, especially celebrity “meltdowns,” was comically exaggerated in a most unsettling way. Everyone knows that a big part of why famous people exhibit self-destructive behavior is the pressure imposed by fans and “the media.” Michael Jackson was subjected to this pressure for virtually his entire life, not to mention his father’s treatment of him.
The other video touches on a similar theme in a much more thoughtful way. At the most recent TED conference, Author Elizabeth Gilbert gave a fantastic talk on creativity and how it is conceptualized in different societies. The bottom line is that in western culture, our focus on individualism puts an incredible amount of pressure on talented artists to live up to their best works:
[In] ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then. People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity “daemons.” Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. [...]
[During the Renaissance] people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius.
And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is the vessel, the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.
I highly encourage you to watch the full video below:
And to bring it around full circle, here’s a portion of the 2003 documentary Living with Michael Jackson. This segment begins just moments after Jackson infamously dangled his baby son from the balcony of a Berlin hotel.
Update (2009-06-29): This isn’t to say that I consider Britney Spears an ‘artist.’ Rather, the fact that Michael Jackson was both a huge celebrity and a gifted artist created a unique set of pressures that, at least in part, led to his downfall.
So a few days ago, I talked about the mixtape I made for my friend Matt. Overall I think I did quite well; he’s gotten really into Sparks and The War on Drugs, and he at least liked the vast majority of the songs. Here’s the mix that he made for me (no links to artists because I’m lazy):
1. Disco Inferno – It’s a Kid’s World
2. Pulp – Mis-Shapes
3. Television – Friction
4. The Fall – The Classical
5. Built To Spill – Distopian Dream Girl
6. Can – Paperhouse
7. Gang Gang Dance – First Communion
8. Phoenix – Lisztomania
9. Dirty Projectors – Cannibal Resource
10. Aphex Twin – Girl/Boy Song
11. Cocteau Twins – Heaven Or Las Vegas
12. Au – RR vs. D
13. Beat Happening – You Turn Me On
14. Mclusky – Alan Is A Cowboy Killer
15. Magazine – Definitive Gaze
16. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Death To Everyone
17. Silver Jews – Advice To The Graduate
I was pleased that there were a good number of artists I’d never even heard of before: Disco Inferno, Au, Beat Happening, Mclusky, and Magazine. I’ve listened to albums by Can and Aphex Twin before, but had kind of forgotten about them even though I liked them the last time I checked them out. I had been meaning to listen to Built to Spill, Gang Gang Dance, Dirty Projectors, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and the rest of the artists weren’t really on my radar.
After just a few listens, the artists that grabbed me were Disco Inferno, Cocteau Twins, Au, Gang Gang Dance, and Beat Happening. I picked up the Cocteau Twins album Treasure at Second Hand Tunes(buying a CD! Imagine that!) and it’s been in constant rotation in my car, a rare honor.
I wasn’t sure how effective a mixtape exchange would be with someone who likes so much of the same music as I do. The goal, after all, is to expand one’s musical horizons and tastes. In this case, I realized that the result wasn’t so much about expanding horizons as filling in gaps. More than half of the songs on Matt’s mix for me came out over 15 years ago. Many of them are bands that influenced contemporary artists that I like. All in all, the exchange was a success, and I highly recommend trying it out if you have a friend or two with similar tastes in music.
So as you may recall, I take the task of creating mixtapes very seriously. My most recent mix was an exchange with my friend Matt. This exchange presented a unique challenge, since our musical tastes are incredibly similar, and he keeps pretty good tabs on my Last.fm profile. Despite these hurdles, I’m pretty happy with how the mix came out.
I started assembling the mixtape by comparing our Last.fm profiles, which keep track of every song we listen to. Out of the 100 artists I listen to most frequently, Matt had zero listens logged for 20 of them. I was able to toss out many of them based on what I know about his taste in music. Out of the 20 artists, I wound up putting five on the mix.
Then I did the same comparison, but looking at my top 100 artists over only the past six months. There were about 35 artists that Matt hadn’t heard, which I found to be surprisingly high. Seven artists from the short-term list (but not in my overall top 100) made it to the mix. The remaining five songs either came from artists that I don’t listen to very frequently, or artists that Matt had listened to once or twice, but not recently.
The other day I got this email from the ol’ alma mater promoting a career center-sponsored meet-and-greet-type event:
I’m not sure who came up with the idea of hosting a mini-career fair for a bunch of unemployed college graduates at a restaurant called Rock Bottom, but bravo. I’d love to attend, but I’ll be busy collecting aluminum cans in an old shopping cart.
As I mentioned a few posts back, I had the opportunity to perform in the final concert for my electronic music class. For the performance I developed a Max/MSP patch from the ground up that allowed me to record samples from a microphone and alter then in real-time.
[Choose your own blog adventure: If you just want to hear the recording of the performance, scroll to the end of this post. If your eyes didn't glaze over when I said "Max/MSP," continue reading below]
When I started the project, my goal was to develop a super-flexible framework for performing live sample-based music. I’ve never been all that impressed with computer-based musical performance. There’s a fine balancing point where the performer needs to have enough control to be able to express himself, but if there is too much flexibility, or if the interface isn’t intuitive, the performer can’t affect the sound in a meaningful way. My humble attempt at cracking the most difficult problem in electronic music resulted in a Max/MSP patch I call Phonogene. The original phonogene was a device invented in the mid-1950’s which first allowed the pitch and speed of a sound to be varied independently (more here). Let’s take a look at the Max patch’s interface:
Other than the blinding ugliness of the UI, you’ll notice that there are four identical channel strips. Each channel has number boxes for pitch, length, and speed. The vertical fader is a volume control, and the two knobs are “drunkenness” controls. These add an element of randomness to the playback. The top knob controls how much the pitch will vary on its own and the bottom knob adjusts the variance of the speed. Below this section is a waveform viewer which shows the sample that has been recorded into each channel. On the far right side are two volume level meters: a master level and a meter for a backing track.
Since the keyboard and mouse are kind of lame, I opted to use a MIDI keyboard controller to operate the patch. Since I wasn’t interested in making traditional tonal music, I just used it as a box with a bunch of buttons and knobs:
"Custom" MIDI Controller
Here’s how it works: you select a track or tracks by holding down its respective key, then change a parameter by using the corresponding wheel or button. For example, to reset track 1 to its original pitch and speed, I would press the “Track 1″ key and the “Reset” key at the same time.
I used a footswitch to trigger recording, which allowed me to keep my hands free for percussion instruments or other soundmaking toys. The patch remembers the last track to be selected, and records into that track when the footswitch is held down. Let’s look at Phonogene’s UI one more time, now in the middle of a performance:
The waveforms for each sample are at the bottom of each track, as is a black vertical line showing the playback position within each sample. The red square at the top of track four shows that it was the last track to be selected, so when the “record” pedal is pressed, the microphone will record into track four.
I’m not going publish the patch at this point because it is pretty messy and there are still some changes I’d like to make to it. In the coming months I’ll probably write some shorter posts about specific parts of Phonogene, complete with downloadable code, but for now here’s just a picture of the top-level patch:
Top-level Phonogene patch in Max/MSP
I wish Max/MSP had a decent text-based syntax. I’ve had it with these stupid little boxes and wires.
Finally, here’s the recording of “Music for Headaches” from my performance at the concert. To clarify, not everything you hear was recorded and manipulated live. After rehearsing many times, I decided that having some pre-edited backing sounds would expand the—excuse the term—sonic possibilites. All the live samples were vocal-based, except for the jangling keys sound.
Apologies for the lack of posting, I’ll have a more substantial post later today, but for now, something I came across on BackstageJobs.com:
Props person needed immediately for Bat Boy: The Musical, which opens May 29th. Few items are difficult to locate: goose filled with blood, baby bat child, rabbit filled with blood, cow’s head filled with blood.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been building a Max/MSP patch to use in the final concert of my Electronic Music class. The patch is my version of a real-time sample recorder/looper/whatever, designed for creating abstract soundscapes as opposed to rhythmic/dance music. I’ll cover the patch itself in more detail after the concert on Tuesday, but I thought I’d post a short demo I edited together from my experimentation. All the sounds were recorded by me, and the only transformations are speed and pitch shifts.
So previously, I’ve reported on Google’s bug that shows just-sent email as being sent “-1 minutes ago.” The other day I sent an email and it appears they’ve cleaned up their act a bit:
Old version:
New version:
Note that I don’t have the “undo send” feature enabled. I’d love to hear an explanation for this change. It would be easy enough to just round the time to “0 minutes ago,” but instead they actually put forth a small amount of effort to make it perfectly clear that you’re sending the email in the future.
