About Musique

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Music (as well as any “complex audio”) is an interesting subject to me. Take the recording of Jerusalem (And Did Those Feet, in Ancient Time) by Lesley Garrett, for instance. If you listen to the standard recording of it, you’ll hear her start to sing the first verse of the song at 1:43 (on an unrelated note, she has an absolutely beautiful voice here, I challenge any contradicting opinion). If you listen to it with the pitch a little lower (I usually have Musicolet set to p=0.85), you can hear a five-note pattern at 1:44 that is nowhere in the song, apart from that one moment. It doesn't sound bad, it sounds like an orchestra. Ms. Garrett's voice (obviously) becomes a lower pitch, somewhere around the tenor/alto range, I believe, and the five notes can be heard as if they were played in the “melody octave” (it’s what I call the range of notes that falls within singing range for me, it just helps to have that label) and they're somewhat-more pronounced. At p=0.70, the notes are pronounced, and at p=0.50, most things below that part of the staff, as well as the voice, is distorted.

Anyway, rant over.

The thing I'm bringing up here isn’t to download an app and screw with the settings to see what you can and can’t hear in your music; rather, it’s about how sound is an amazing thing when well and complex, I find music to be the best examples to use. Sound, like so many other things, is often overlooked when you’re talking about complex and delicate things. Sure, it’s just a form of non-electromagnetic waves, but at the same time, there's more to it that just that. Sound is closer to an art than most people realize (so long as it’s not irritating clatter) and, like art, can be deconstructed and analyzed from multiple viewpoints. Look up a picture of the Zaisan Memorial in Ulaanbaatar online, you’ll understand what I’m getting at. Sound, like art, can convey worlds of different meanings and messages, sometimes without even changing the most-minuscule of details.

At some point, I’d like you to take a song and run it through any full-featured audio program (Musicolet for Android & Audacity are both good options) and experiment with it by tweaking some aspects like speed and pitch in small increments. Musicolet is a music player, so it won’t mess up the original song file, but I’d recommend you use a copy of the song of your choosing if you use Audacity, that way, you won’t have to worry about anything getting overwritten that you care about. Do this and listen to how the song changes, listen to what parts become audible or more noticeable and vice-versa. It’s an amazing experience, believe me.

The Golden Record Preview №5

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Preview №5

As I finished with breakfast and had everything sat on the island, Azathoth came through the great room, smelling the air before looking at me as he stood, completely naked, covered only with his tattoos and his hair that now was only pushed back from his face as I froze and my eyes scanned his entire body.

“I… uh…” I said, finally able to blink again.

“Yes?” he said, crossing his arms and looking expectantly at me, “I walked here to find that smell.”

“You’re… naked.”

“So?”

“It’s just… whoa,” I said, closing my eyes and shaking my head as I finished taking up the food, “It- it’s breakfast, I made it for us,” I said, fixating my gaze on the stove to respect his privacy, “Go put on some clothes, Azathoth, and I’ll have it ready when you come back.”

“Of course, right,” he said.

“I made it a point to not turn around until I was certain he was out of my view.

“My God,” I muttered, setting the rest of the food on the island and grabbing the cups and orange juice.

“Right, of course, I’m back,” he said, “I’m wearing clothes.”

“Thank God,” I said, “Azathoth, this is breakfast. I… don’t know if you’re hungry right now, but it’s something we do on Earth. Go ahead, make a plate and dig in. It’s my favorite breakfast ever, actually.”

“If you say so,” he said, filling up his plate and stopping halfw2ay to the table as he tried it, “Khlahng-yeng! This is good!”

“Azathoth, it’s like I always say, don’t half-ass two things; whole-ass one thing and be damn-good at it.”

“This is… I thought food last night was good, but…”

“Fast food is just a quick meal. As actual food, it’s not much past taste,” I explained, “Compared to this, fast food is just garbage food.”

“Tdrakh-vih-nay-yuh,” Azathoth muttered as he savored the bagel and tomatoes in particular, “The food on Tanh Khlokh – Khu'aiy, it’s nothing like this. It’s mostly aintervened on.”

“Here, we call that undomesticated.”

“Interesting,” he said, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Nah,” I said, “I’m an only-child. What about you?”

“I have one sister and she is more into body modification than I am,” he said, showing me a picture of him and a girl.

She was a much different shade of blue, almost mauve. Her eyes were red where Azathoth’s were blue, and she had a dark, long mane that rested on her shoulders and had been dyed in strips from red to yellow, like fire. Her teeth, like Azathoth’s were the color of human skin, but she had eight fangs, which she showed off by holding what looked like a cigarette with her teeth. Each arm was covered in the tattoo of a dark dragon, outlined in the color of wood with dark purple runes adorning her torso, each hand wearing four rings with a glowing, purple gemstone. She had three breasts, unlike humans, and was wearing nothing more than a dark bra, underwear, leg warmers, and metal shoes. From her back was a pair of massive wings that were purple at the bottom and faded to black at the top with the section in her back being a vivid crimson color. On the top of her head was a pair of metal horns and a row of fiery-colored spikes. A dark, spiked tail, however, wrapped around her leg, ending in a larger spike that looked like it was made of metal leather.

How Far We've Come

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I was playing around in 86Box yesterday, and something occurred to me about getting on the Information Superhighway: I don't need to try to install a DOS driver for the NE2000 Ethernet card, I don't need to install WinPKT, I don't need to remember to do it before I type in WIN.COM, I don't need to screw around with Trumpet Winsock 1.0a and hope I get it right, and I don't need to have any more browsers on my computer (save for the glorious Mozilla Firefox, even though it's nothing like what I fell in love with years ago anymore), and I don't need to know if I'm running in Real Mode, Protected (Standard) Mode, or Virtual (386 Enhanced) Mode for access. I just need to make sure the telephone lines at my house are doing their freaking job for once and that I'm connected to WiFi (or Ethernet, if I'm at my desk). The above screenshot was taken at my dock setup, the computer itself was running Microsoft Word with one of my "Writer's Block Shorts" (just my way of making myself write every day) and, in 86Box, PFS:WindowWorks Word Processor running on Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on MS-DOS 6.22 running on an emulated Am486DX at 33MHz.

It occurred to me the other day that I might be getting old, even though I'm not thirty yet, but moving on!

The reason I'm writing this is because, in The Golden Record, the society Azathoth comes from is akin to what most science fiction would still call futuristic, even for today. Seth comes from a time when getting on the internet involved making sure nobody was on the telephone (in most cases, at least. We've all heard of dial-up, right?) while most of us live in a time where Covid-19 is either ending or about to end and the reasons to leave our homes are dwindling. The society that Azathoth comes from has already mastered faster-than-light travel, no further explanation is needed, even if it makes us look like cavemen who've just learned that getting bonked on the head with a club is painful (I know the Neanderthals were more intelligent than that, I'm not good at humor). The reason for the story being written in that way partially hails back to my younger self. I was always invested in anything 90s and the portrayals of the future that were around were fascinating beyond belief, even if I was born a month before the millennium. Remind me to post a story about SheepShaver, Mac OS 7, and a Hackintosh when I was in ninth grade.

Explaining myself a little bit further, I consider myself to be (somewhat) a student of history and a Cold War Enthusiast, which is a double-edged sword, living in the Southeast US- it causes headaches, to say the least, but it does give me context for the present in so many situations that arise, even if I'm not always right about things the first time. Most of what happens, I solely believe to be the fault of egotists wanting to be right (to put it nicely), though what I do know to be right is that, to a degree, everything is subjective, and nothing has a one-size-fits-all context, no matter what you want to say about it. I remember seeing a… very illuminating graphic on Facebook one day, as shown to the right. Of course, this is, at best, highly oversimplified, and of course, I found it while I was scrolling through Facebook waiting for something to finish downloading (it was a few years ago, so I couldn't tell you all of the details if I tried, beyond it was several gigabytes over a DSL connection), but I think it illustrates my point… fairly-well. I'm sure there are better ways that it could be articulated and better people to do it than me, but I'm typing this while waiting on someone and I do not claim to be a professor, doctor, or anything of that matter. I just know what I'm talking about most of the time.

To sum up what I'm trying to say, generally, the context behind the present is in the past, and while I know that, to most people, context doesn't seem important, in reality, it is very important.

 

The Golden Record Preview №4

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I didn’t sleep for as long as I wanted, but we had a large can of coffee, so I went through a pot while I made my favorite breakfast, bar-none: pan-fried tomatoes, eggs over easy, crispy bacon, a cream-cheese bagel, and orange juice. Whether or not Azathoth would like it, I wasn’t sure, but if he didn’t… it mean that he just didn’t know what good food was. I’ll admit, it’s not a normal breakfast, but it’s better than what you can get in town, especially if you’ve got time.

I glanced over to the telephone and answering machine as a sigh escaped my lips, knowing full-well that no matter what I did, there would be a telephone message later. Then again, I was in good-stnading with enough of the teachers that they might be able to push anything back until Monday, not to mention the secretary in the front office was friends with Mom, so she might be able to weigh-in and say I just overslept or something. She knew both of my parents were in Canada.

Before middle school, Grandeddy would always come up to watch me when Mom and Dad would be gone on trips, though sometimes I’d go with them or stay in Alabama for a few weeks. In middle school, Dad taught me how to ride his old motorcycle and ended up giving it to me after sixth grade. It wasn’t meant for the highway, it could only do fifty miles an hour, but it was a good way to get around town. In ninth grade, Grandeddy won an argument against Dad that led to me getting my car. The line he used? “Ever’one needs t’learn how to drive’n a Vo’kswag’n!”.

Dad couldn’t come up with a counterpoint, so I ended up with the keys later that day and Grandeddy stayed up here for over two weeks until he was certain I could get my license in a stick.

As I finished with breakfast and had everything sat on the island, Azathoth came through the great room, smelling the air before looking at me as he stood, completely naked, covered only with his tattoos and his hair that now was only pushed back from his face as I froze and my eyes scanned his entire body.

“I… uh…” I said, finally able to blink again.

“Yes?” he said, crossing his arms and looking expectantly at me, “I walked here to find that smell.”

“You’re… naked.”

“So?”

“It’s just… whoa,” I said, closing my eyes and shaking my head as I finished taking up the food, “It- it’s breakfast, I made it for us,” I said, fixating my gaze on the stove to respect his privacy, “Go put on some clothes, Azathoth, and I’ll have it ready when you come back.”

“Of course, right,” he said.

“I made it a point to not turn around until I was certain he was out of my view.

“My God,” I muttered, setting the rest of the food on the island and grabbing the cups and orange juice.

“Right, of course, I’m back,” he said, “I’m wearing clothes.”