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Archive for category Academia

Electronic Music Final Project

Dec 15

Posted by Aaron in Academia | 5 Comments

DownloadA while back, I had posted a project I did for my Electronic Music course. With the close of Fall semester, I have my final project completed. (FINALLY.)

This particular song is a full-length track, mixed, mastered (as best as I know how) that involves actual vocals recorded.

It’s worth knowing a few details first:

The song was composed and written by Melissa. I took her original chord progression and elaborated from it. The reason it’s called the “Epic Fail Mix” is because every time I would play her what I had made so far, she would just shake her head. Not that it’s bad, per se, just that it’s very different from her original folksy acoustic version.

Give it a listen — it’s about 5 minutes long; get ready for a bit of music whiplash about 3 minutes in. :) Details about the production are below the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

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Short Song – Class project

Oct 18

Posted by Aaron in Academia | 1 Comment

Download

For my MUS-K 361 course (Intro to MIDI / Electronic Music), my instructor gives us assignments for each unit where we have to create a short 30 sec – 2 min song and demo it in class.

reason rack

Cartouche (Precursor)

One thing I really like about these assignments, and this may seem counter-intuitive, is that we are restricted to only using the instrument covered in that unit. In this specific assignment, where we discussed synthesis (using the Subtractor in Reason), the assignment restricted us to using 3 – 6 Subtractors only — no effects processors, no drum machines, not even equalizers.
A game designer, Mark Rosewater,  that works for Wizards of the Coast once wrote an article about game development (specifically for Magic: the Gathering) where he debunked various myths about design. One point he made that has always stuck with me is “Restriction breeds creativity.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Tracking Motivations, pt. 2

Aug 18

Posted by Aaron in Academia | 1 Comment

I am almost ready to prepare the book for printing. (UN — your copy will be sent to you immediately when the prototype is done, thanks for your willingness to participate!) I’m still finalizing the metrics I want to track for this project.

As I mentioned in part 1, the challenge has been in developing a simple way of objectively recording a rather subjective topic: our level of motivation for various things.

After some ruminating and many pensive bike rides, I’ve come up with what I believe will be effective at broad-stroking the level of motivation over time. The daily metrics should actually track the *RATE* of motivation, rather than the absolute motivation.The idea is that if you take a large enough sample size, patterns should emerge where periods of “doing” it is measured by spikes in motivation, and “thinking about it” is represented by a very slight increase. Not thinking or doing it will be represented (upon final analysis) by a slight decrease in motivation, until it decays entirely.

This metric would be based on two factors that will be very easy to track:

  • “Did I think about doing ____ today?”
  • “Did I do ___ today?”

Thinking about doing something is worth “0.25″ point, and actually doing it is worth “1″ point. This isn’t to say that “doing” takes 4x as much motivation as “thinking”, but I expect that the resulting graphs will reasonably reflect a pattern of fluctuation in motivation if the activity itself is periodic. Any items not mentioned, in final analysis, will lose 0.5 points until they decay back to zero. These values may all need to be tweaked in the end, but it really won’t matter for the purposes of tracking, since the test subjects will only be checking “Thought it” or “Did it”.

I’ve also considered that recording other incidental details — phase of the moon, number of hours slept, calories / meals consumed, and a quick assessment of mood “good, meh, or bad” for the day — may prove to be useful.

My goal is to have the journal take only 1 to 2 minutes per day TOTAL to ensure maximum “sticking-to-itness”. Indeed, the motivation to track your motivations may become a factor. :D

I’m still mulling over some of the fine details, but I expect to have a prototype up here in the very near future (this month). It will be available for free download, and printed copies will be available via Lulu.

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Tracking Motivation

Jul 20

Posted by Aaron in Academia | 2 Comments

As I have mentioned previously, I often struggle with task-completion and self-motivation with some things.

Example: After commencement, when summer “break” began, I had started to read some Bioinformatics textbooks. One of my Profs is lending me a textbook they’ll be using for one of the courses, and I started reading it and taking notes — purely because I find it interesting.

Then I got a new book (Reason 4 Ignite, which I previously reviewed), and obsessively started doing that every day. Bioinformatics got shelved for the time being, along with all the passion and sincere interest in learning it. The thought of picking up the book and reading it actually repulsed me — normally, this might give some pause, but it’s nothing new; I’ve been through it many times. I know that eventually, that interest will come back around with the same intensity; I just don’t know WHEN.

What was different this time, though, is that it got me thinking: What if I could track these interests somehow? If I could collect enough data, perhaps I could find some cyclical nature to my interests and develop some reasonable expectations of myself. Heck, maybe a predictable periodic function would emerge, and I could create a differential equation to plot my interest in differential equations. The question is, of course, how do you quantify interest? Read the rest of this entry »

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Taking the Phun out of Photography

Jul 3

Posted by Aaron in Academia | No Comments

My “Day I Left Pennsylvania” led me to some archived website posts (before blogs were invented) I had written many years ago. I’m re-posting them now. Bear in mind that most of the content in this series is over 5 years old. I have left the content more or less intact. I have removed some links and added some others — but that’s it. Enjoy!

I went to the Ohio Institute of Photography & Technology for approximately a year. I think it was 3 semesters total. Took a lot of really neat classes, and a lot of really good (in my opinion) shots. They’ll be up here some day. I also learned a lot of the very precise and interesting aspects of shooting well-composed photos, and I’d like to share them here. The following is some of the very basic rules and laws that are involved in shooting photos of any kind, be it digital or wet, large format or slides. They’re even just good rules of composition period.

The Law of Reciprocity

This is the most fundamental law of photography. It is derived from the basic idea of balance. All things must remain equal in order for the the end result to be satisfactory. The law is:

Exposure = Light x Time

What this is saying, in more simple terms, is that to have an exposure (eg. a “picture”) you must have light, and the light must shine for some amount of time. Make sense? In order to apply this we need to get a little more specific though: Read the rest of this entry »

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