some work in progress

a process piece, similar to my 99th song project. a program sampled all my tunes and assembled repeating patterns of snippets to form two tracks. then i imported into GarageBand to arrange and add some bass and drums, and some background. then into Audacity for some sculpting and mastering it's too easy to slide into hopelessness, and it can keep you stuck. stay focused on staying as positive as you can. yeah, easier said than done

lyrics:

tough / upbeat

Poll-y-an-na, oh don't you cry for me...

from somewhere deep in my soul - do i have a soul?

The auditory cortex exhibits some strange behavior pertaining to the gamma wave frequency. When subjects are exposed to three or four cycles of a 40 hertz click, an abnormal spike appears in the EEG data, which is not present for other stimuli. The spike in neuronal activity correlating to this frequency is not restrained to the tonotopic organization of the auditory cortex. It has been theorized that this is a “resonant frequency” of certain areas of the brain, and appears to affect the visual cortex as well. from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_auditory_cortex

the final frontier is inner space - zero parsecs from here if all civilizations converge to their own inner space - this could explain why SETI has not found anything

For years SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been analyzing data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in search of extraterrestrial signals. But Arecibo cannot see the entire sky. Earlier this year SETI was able to use the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to expand the search to include the nearly 100 potentially habitable planets found by the Kepler Mission. The analysis of all this new data has barely begun, but already a very complex signal has been found. Its quick discovery is credited to a new search algorithm recently added to the SETI@home application. This new algorithm, called autocorrelation, is highly sensitive to certain broad band or spread spectrum transmissions without predicting their characteristics beforehand. No SETI sky survey has utilized this type of algorithm before. The signal apparently originates from one of the recently discovered planets orbiting a nearby star (Kepler-10c in the Draco constellation). Within mere hours, several additional radio telescopes were trained on the star and they have also picked up the alien signal. Data recording is now ongoing. Over 42 terabytes of data have been received thus far. A large team of analysts has been hastily convened to begin the process of decoding. It was immediately obvious that there is a great deal of intricate structure to the signal, so the team has split up into smaller squads to analyze portions of the data stream. Of course there already is controversy emerging about the possible meaning behind any and all of it. A popular conjecture is that the entire data stream might be an encyclopedia of sorts. SETI, with the help of UC Berkeley, plans to post all of the data on the internet to allow wide distribution and analysis. Analyst Votolom Valsechavy has focused in on a particular stretch of the signal that he is convinced is actually a recording of what he terms "alien music". With a large amount of interpretation and guesswork, Valsechavy has converted this part of the raw signal into MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). The many problems of what tempo is to be used, and what instruments should play which tracks are currently unsolved, but here is his first attempt at realizing what this new alien music might possibly sound like.

see http://www.macjams.com/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=22;showtopic=243892

my friends are in trouble

lyrics:

my friends are in trouble but i feel helpless my friends are in trouble but what can i do? my friends are in trouble what can i do? my hands feel helpless what can i do? everyone that i know is facing troubles no one i know is seeing the future "What can we do?" "Where can we go?" my friends are in trouble what can i do? i just don't know i just don't know i don't know i don't know if i had the power i'd just lift them up and help but i have no means there's little i can do i can say that i understand i can say "what can i do...?" but really there's little there's very little i can do my friends are in trouble (c)2011 Bill Grundmann

Averted vision is a technique for viewing faint objects which uses peripheral vision. It involves not looking directly at the object, but looking a little off to the side, while continuing to concentrate on the object. more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averted_vision GarageBand Crystal Soft Synth 12-sided die home-grown tapedeck simulator Audacity

Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you.

dashed

lately i hang around the house (with the windows open) in my bare feet (it is summer after all). so today (again) i was deeply engrossed in working on this tune on the computer and my (black) cat slinks in unnoticed (as usual). suddenly (probably for the tenth time now), she bites my big toe (gently). What The Feline!

when the insane go clubbing

driving along the "Pass It On" road - and took a wrong turn vocals by renrugj

a little guitar love song ~ sound samples: loud-dense-crickets.aif (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=124583) By alienistcog (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=296888)

this is for the Pass It On challenge - many thanks to Joe (jgurner) for organizing this challenge Joe kicked it off by creating a really great song called "Imaginary Numbers" providing four tracks: bass, guitar, vocal, and drum loop. Joe posted his original version with his lyrics, so i won't copy the lyrics here although the challenge rules gave me three days to do my work before passing it along to Jack (davisamerica), something came up and i ended up having only one day to complete this i did a small bit of arranging, removed a brief break between the chorus and second verse (it seemed like it needed to keep moving along there) and repeated the chorus at the end an extra time for the fade. cutting the tracks went fairly well, although removing the clicks from the bass track was a pain (why does bass always have click troubles with splices?) i also replaced the chords for the bridge: the original just didn't work for me. so i found something new to fit the existing vocals and bass on the vocals, i layered the chorus repeats over each other to get a double-tracked effect. i also doubled up the verses by mixing in a copy with pitch correction turned way up - it adds just the right amount of flanging in a way, the bridge is the most profound part of the lyrics, so i layered on some voice transformed copies: an octave up, and an octave down, with ridiculously huge matrix reverb, and some choir backup to boot. i hope it worked since i changed the chords for the bridge (and therefore i had no guitar track for it), i doubled all the guitar track on piano throughout the verses and chorus. that way, when the bridge shows up there is still some continuity provided by the piano since the guitar had to drop away there. i left the bass track as is, except for those splices, and one little fade in during opening of the bridge i totally tossed out the drum loop, and made up my own. i thought the feeling of the song was better suited to one-two-THREE-four. but i did steal a few fills from loops and modified them. it would be much better with real drums finally, i added a little echoey piano motif at the beginning and the end just because, plus added some rumbling universe-sized noises for intro and extro i hope you like it. i had lots of fun doing it!

for the World Listening Project location: this is a suburban neighborhood - Monday morning 9:20 or so sounds: rumble of interstate 495 which is about 1.5 miles away, the sound of the wind blowing through the trees, cars driving by, a few bird calls i filtered out some of the low end using a simple high pass filter

all done with the TAL NOIzE M4K3R some sounds i made from scratch, most started out from one of the dozens of presets and then modified from there there are 44 tracks only volume and panning automation were used, no other automation or other effects it does actually mean something, the song pic is a clue

started with "Fair Weather Friend" and took it in another direction

requiem for Spirit

rock man

this is for LIOLI 10 includes the challenge loop (chopped up various ways) as well as some other loops and original material a sequel to "Break The Loop" from the original Loop It Or Lose It challenge erased memories and nostalgia for Clementine as i (it's all in my mind) sink into oblivion again

we knew this day was coming... tired of waiting, yet ashamed of being tired

take me away calgon!

lyrics:

saturday morning hang on to the wheel as i loosen my tie it's friday afternoon and there's no where we must fly why don't we just drive until the sky gets dark where ever we end up we can just sleep in the park and greet saturday morning god knows where saturday morning without a care life gets in the way as we try to build our team there's always more to do as we chase that corporate dream why don't we just drive until the sky gets dark where ever we end up we can just sleep in the park and greet saturday morning god knows where saturday morning without a care (c)2011 Bill Grundmann

perhaps not such a bad friend to have after all...

lyrics:

fair weather friend welcome back i've missed your happy smile and now you're here come have a drink with me tell me- where you've been have you been having fun through these trying times? i know i'm happy how about you? ~ it's about time you and i laughed have a good time now the time slips a-way we forget to stay in touch and yet i know you are my friend even though you've been gone (c)2011 Bill Grundmann

ASCII code is a very old way to convert printed letters into binary code for use in computers. the original teletype version had only 6 bits per character and could only represent capital letters and punctuation. (think telegrams.) the 7 bit version included the lowercase letters and a few more symbols. 7 bits encodes 128 distinct values. as does MIDI pitch codes. so... i set up some software to convert text into pitches by directly mapping the ASCII code to pitch codes. the thing to be aware of is that spaces and punctuation map to low pitches. and capital letters map to fairly low pitches as well. lowercase letters map to rather high pitches. so you can actually read along in the text and follow the word breaks (the same low pitch every time), and the sentence breaks (the period, space and capital letter are all low pitches). the part of the text with lots of capital letters should grab your attention. and those double capitals stand out too. it starts out slow to help you get oriented and speeds up as it goes along... i did a little cross fading of instruments throughout the piece. lyrics from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency

lyrics:

The frequency of letters in text has often been studied for use in cryptography, and frequency analysis in particular. No exact letter frequency distribution underlies a given language, since all writers write slightly differently. Linotype machines sorted the letters' frequencies as etaoin shrdlu cmfwyp vbgkqj xz based on the experience and custom of manual compositors. Likewise, Modern International Morse code encodes the most frequent letters with the shortest symbols; arranging the Morse alphabet into groups of letters that require equal amounts of time to transmit, and then sorting these groups in increasing order, yields e it san hurdm wgvlfbk opjxcz yq. Similar ideas are used in modern data-compression techniques such as Huffman coding. More recent analyses show that letter frequencies, like word frequencies, tend to vary, both by writer and by subject. One cannot write an essay about x-rays without using frequent Xs, and the essay will have an especially strange letter frequency if the essay is about the frequent use of x-rays to treat zebras in Qatar. Different authors have habits which can be reflected in their use of letters. Hemingway's writing style, for example, is visibly different from Faulkner's. Letter, bigram, trigram, word frequencies, word length, and sentence length can be calculated for specific authors, and used to prove or disprove authorship of texts, even for authors whose styles aren't so divergent. Accurate average letter frequencies can only be gleaned by analyzing a large amount of representative text. With the availability of modern computing and collections of large text corpora, such calculations are easily made. This Deafandblind link details examples from a variety of sources, (press reporting, religious text, scientific text and general fiction) and there are differences especially for general fiction with the position of 'h' and 'i'. The example differs from the linotype 'etaoin shrdlu' to come out as 'etaoHn Isrdlu'. There is an unproven statement[by whom?] that conversation is similar in frequency to general fiction. Herbert S. Zim, in his classic introductory cryptography text \"Codes and Secret Writing\", gives the English letter frequency sequence as \"ETAON RISHD LFCMU GYPWB VKXJQ Z\", the most common letter pairs as \"TH HE AN RE ER IN ON AT ND ST ES EN OF TE ED OR TI HI AS TO\", and the most common doubled letters as \"LL EE SS OO TT FF RR NN PP CC\".[1] The 'top twelve' letters comprise about 80% of the total usage. The 'top eight\" letters comprise about 65% of the total usage. A spy using the VIC cipher or some other cipher based on a straddling checkerboard typically uses a mnemonic such as \"a sin to err\" (dropping the second "r") to remember the top 8 characters. The use of letter frequencies and frequency analysis plays a fundamental role in several games, including hangman, Scrabble, Wheel of Fortune, Definition, Bananagrams, and cryptograms. Letter frequencies had a strong effect on the design of some keyboard layouts. The most-frequent letters are on the bottom row of the Blickensderfer typewriter. The most-frequent letters are on the home row of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.

we knew this day was coming... tired of waiting, yet ashamed of being tired

the Earth and the Moon

lyrics:

Lovesong for Luna wait for the dark into the blue through the night waiting for you scanning the park searching for you all my life i've been true my hand on your hip as we spin through the stars our billion year dance to the tune of guitars (c)2011 Bill Grundmann

a rework of http://www.macjams.com/song/66776 replaced the acoustic guitar, added strings, and remixed

lyrics:

Fleeting gummy bears and lemon drops the cat's meow is asking how, the here and now celebrate the holiday the setting moon, it's gone so soon behind the dune i don't know why you must leave and if you're gone i know i'll cry i run to you, i run to you i know i'll cry and wonder why loneliness and happiness a sunny day, the quiet way of yesterday treasuring the solitude inside my brain the silent pain, the falling rain i don't know why you are gone and since you've gone i cannot cry my thoughts return, return to you i cannot cry and don't know why (c)2011 Bill Grundmann

tempest

just keep smiling

fun

fleeting

lyrics:

Fleeting gummy bears and lemon drops the cat's meow is asking how, the here and now celebrate the holiday the setting moon, it's gone so soon behind the dune i don't know why you must leave and if you're gone i know i'll cry i run to you, i run to you i know i'll cry and wonder why loneliness and happiness a sunny day, the quiet way of yesterday treasuring the solitude inside my brain the silent pain, the falling rain i don't know why you are gone and since you've gone i cannot cry my thoughts return, return to you i cannot cry and don't know why (c)2011 Bill Grundmann