Ninjarous

Saw a poster in the Whitgift shopping centre men’s toilets for an organisation called “Autism Mothers”. Subtitle: “Succeeding where governments fail.”Picture: about half a dozen madeover, skinny women aged between 20 and 50, looking businesslike/defiant, steely/blank stares, all wearing black. All very definitely wearing black… not wanting to wear anything different. Not wanting to rock the boat, more comfortable with routine, order, consistency. All skinny. Obsessed with weight, control over body shape. The body as deterministic machine, a system whose components can be understood, analysed, controlled. It annoyed me that their organisation exists to agitate about absolutely all currently trendy diagnoses… ADHD, Aspergers… what do you expect kids to behave like when they can pick five different kinds of university course to tell them how to manage a gymnasium? When they’re hosed with conflicting bullshit 18 hours a day, every day of the week? They’re going to NEED to simulate autism just to get to the level of specialisation required by our lunatic jobs market, and of course they’re going to look like there’s something wrong with their attention span because they’re being forced to filter through the equivalent of a tennis court sized area of microfiche full of garbage to get to any information remotely worth having.

Someone walked past me saying, “T.K. Maxx,” then someone walked past me saying, into a mobile phone, “I think I can see you.”

Newspapers become more constrained in terms of what they can print as their content co-evolves with a readership that learns to trust what the newspaper has to say, and in fact starts to invest self-esteem in thinking in accordance with the newspaper’s values: if the newspaper changes its mind too frequently, it’ll haemorrhage readers.

So… human beings are very tribal, so very keen on allocating each other to social groups and deciding on that basis whether to behave in a hostile or friendly way to each other. Maybe that tendency also impacts on how we categorise non-human objects: people like to categorise because of their very tribal nature. We have this… very objecty, very categorisy wasy of looking at the world because of our past as an species whose members organise themselves using the sounds they make, not just techniques of tearing each other’s nuts out with their teeth.

There’s a TV in the Sony Galleria in Centrale, offering the smoothest picture ever. Rolling, repeating footage of a guy playing keepy-up, and gobsmacked onlookers with their eyes bugging out and their jaws on the floor at the quality of the motion interpolation, up to 200Hz refresh rate. The Panasonic shop’s showing BBC HD preview footage of a guy with rhubarb-and-custard skin making a documentary about people playing violins and singing in a Regency stately home. Interested to know whether there are conferences at which broadcasters, network providers and technology companies decide the timebase and order of rolling out all these changes, one by one, a new TV every year, £1000 per year to keep up.

I would like to define “grown up” as being in control of my mind: being free of the influence of the media or others’ opinions; of the influence of symbolism. … Wow, Swarovski watches!

I was in Maplins, and I was distracted at the time because I wanted to buy a USB voice recorder (achieved), but in the background – in fact in the foreground, because it was quite loud and pumped-up, and the music wasn’t particularly delicate music, it was thumping, side-chain compressed electro-techtonic-trance-dance bollocks… on a radio station. Which played an interstitial which went: “All the best tunes, no egos, just music and celebrity gossip.” The problem’s knowing where to even start, to be honest.

Bullshit this transparently ridiculous

We can do anything

If they will swallow

Bullshit this transparently ridiculous

We can make them do anything

It took various people and many years to convince me that you do most of your work on a mix by taking things away, not adding them.

“Subtractive EQ” means cutting frequencies from a sound rather than boosting them, and results in a more laid-back, less distorted sound that’s easier to mix with everything else. And I’ve learnt to enjoy turning things down – now, my mixes typically have one or two sounds up front, then a much quieter layer of sound off in the distance.

And of course there’s classic analogue synthesis, which is also subtractive: your oscillators typically make huge, wideband sounds which you filter and chip away at until you’ve sculpted, revealed, the (lesser-yet-better) sound you want.

I’m now convinced that this principle applies to the rest of my life, too. I won’t become happier by eating more food, or if the food I eat is richer; I won’t become happier by watching more TV, or seeing more films, or reading more books – by consuming more culture. The best solution to a cold winter might not be simply to turn our central heating constantly on and high.

Perhaps I should be looking for subtractive solutions. If winding myself up with films and music hasn’t made me happy, how about seeking some silence? If 3000 calories, three lagers and seven coffees a day haven’t made me blissfully satisfied, what would happen if I ate and drank more simply and sparingly? If working 14 hour days and preparing every night for intensely agenda’d meetings the next day didn’t bring me wealth or pride, what would happen if I sought a simpler job, one which paid less than the last one? Which aspects of my life could be improved by consuming less, by seeking less, by doing less?

Because… when I try to meditate, I struggle with too many thoughts, too much mental chatter, too many distractions. That means I’m suffering from having too much, so the key question is what I can give up, not what I can gain.

My idea was an instrument which makes sound by listening to the unplugged inputs of the computer’s soundcard (just listening to very, very quiet hiss), then feeds that back on itself; it also listens to the loudness of its output, turning the feedback down if it’s getting too loud, and up if it’s dying away altogether. I dropped a couple of filters into the loop too, to colour the sound.

What’s nice about the idea is that it’s negative feedback:

Output too loud? Turn it down. Output too quiet? Turn it up.

Which controls positive feedback:

Apply reverb to input. Send some of the output back to the input.

What I didn’t quite expect was how beautiful it would sound:

Download audio file (Dave_Pape_-_Reverb_Experiment_01.mp3)

It’s a little loud at the beginning, but after a quick tweak of its sensitivity to loud signals, it began to produce a rolling flow of gorgeous harmonics, which even managed to sound musical every so often.

So when there’s another window of sound design opportunity, I think I’ll have another play with it.

Here it is, anyway. Thanks for listening, I hope you like it – if you like it enough to buy it, it’s available on Soundclick.

Download audio file (Dave_Pape_-_We_Become_This.mp3)

It felt quite medieval: it’s a big, castle-like block of flats, and it was as if the residents were defending it.

Here’s the recording – enjoy.

Download audio file (croydon_march_2006.mp3)

The recording keeps my memory fresh, but I’m shocked that it happened two years ago. I should record more often…