I did some work in the morning, honest. Then I went for a meditation session at the Croydon Buddhist Centre.
Metta Bhavana (development of loving-kindness) today, and the first time I’ve been to a Centre session for a couple of years. New faces, but on the way in I experienced an interesting feeling of something like “You should definitely be doing this.”
The session leader was talking about imagining the various people we were visualising throughout the various stages of the meditation, then noting our response to them, and sitting with the response, whether positive or negative, for a while before gently trying to suggest a more positive response.
I thought that was very interesting – I had a quick chat with her afterwards and she was saying that she’d struggled herself with “wishing people well,” chanting to the visualised characters, “may you be happy,” because she eventually felt that she was missing her own, genuine response to them. I’ve got a feeling I’m so left-brain that it’ll be years before I even connect with my genuine responses to the people I visualise during a Metta Bhavana meditation, but that idea of separating the wishes you’re chanting from your own emotional responses, then responding to the response with loving-kindness, struck a chord.
Just thought I’d note it here, so I can mull it again later.
I had a little play around in Reaktor last week, after a long break. A post on the forum set me off, a guy called Ned Rush asking about how to get reverb feeding back into itself.
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:
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.
I wrote a song a few months ago. I’d just been for a walk with Alison down in Coulsdon: picking blackberries for an afternoon in Happy Valley, a u-shaped scrap of woods and grass that manages to make you feel you’re in the countryside. I’d just uncovered a recording I’d made of my gran, who recently died, and the whole mash of memories sort of found its way into the computer.
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.
When, like me, you become old, and can look back on a life of material success and disease-free, fertile, extreme promiscuity, your thoughts will turn naturally to recording the narrative of your life to illuminate the lives of your many descendants. Perhaps you’ll begin by looking through the beautiful, grinning faces in your photograph albums, developing a list of your most memorable and fecund lovers, and setting to the research of the throbbing web of sexual liaison from which you yourself condensed, and into which your mighty seed was sown. Continue Reading »