RLPF.ar

Things run a lot differently over here. I've now had two class sessions (when I should have had one) and three small group sessions, without getting such insignificant details as, oh, the students' e-mail addresses. So it's interesting, shall we say. It's very good practice for me in letting go of expectations and just rolling with the tide.

The extra class session is a funny story. The department chair had told me that my Thursday morning MIDI class would not start until September 23, when the first year students have finished their mandatory military training. So I was settling down in the office for a morning of e-mail and composition, when I got a call from the chair's assistant asking why I wasn't in class. What? It would have been nice to know the day before. So I raced over and improvised for the rest of the class period -- and then found out later from the chair that in fact students should not have shown up, but nobody told them!

This is classic China for you -- rigidly bureaucratic at times and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants at others -- sometimes both at once!

I haven't said much yet about living quarters. We are presently in one of the faculty dorm rooms. One could almost call it an apartment, as it does have a separate "kitchen" (that is, room with a refrigerator, counter and sink but no range) and bathroom. But that would mislead about its size. It would be livable for one person (with a bit more cleaning), but for two, it's cramped. Internet isn't available in the room -- a problem for my current situation, collaborating with artists in the US. Professor Tao made some calls and, if I need to get online at night, one of the students will escort me over to a student room that is only 3/4 occupied. That means seeing perhaps a bit more of student life than I should see -- though it was interesting to see that many of the students in that part of the dorm, probably all electronic music students, had their own studios setup in their rooms. That would have been technologically (not to mention financially) impossible while I was in college.

Finding a real apartment is difficult. Real estate agents in China seem to be even less scrupulous than those in the US. We have a couple of leads but nothing concrete yet. Watch this space...

Today was my first day of classes. As is often the case, the anticipation is worse than the event. Once I got in front of the class, coffee in hand (or "security blanket"?), I was just fine but before then... tossing and turning most of the night, butterflies for breakfast. I can't say whether I would have been less anxious if I'd had more time to prepare; it was only last night, about 12 hours before class, when I got the details of what I should do.

I should learn to be careful about posting before I have all the info. My enviable teaching schedule turns out to have been partial information. I now have two large classes -- second/third year audio editing techniques, and first-year introduction to MIDI -- and four small-group tutoring sessions. It's not too much, but neither is it a walk in the park it seemed it would be before they told me the whole story. No puredata or Max/MSP this term.

The students are eager to learn, though some of them may not know what they are getting into! One, a sophomore, is very interested in learning DSP programming. "Well, you've come to the right place." I knew this was one to keep an eye on when one of his first questions was whether he should look first at SuperCollider or Faust. !!

So, onward... always fascinating to see how things evolve.

It's Tuesday morning in the US now. In the evening, and some of the Kennedy Center work will be presented. I hope to remote into the morning rehearsals by Skype -- for my own curiosity, even if it turns out they don't need me.

My first class: Tuesday! That's closer than I thought, but it will be just an introductory session, nothing heavy. I also know my teaching schedule now: Tuesday morning classes, and individual lessons Tuesday afternoon. That's it! The rest of the week is prep time. That sure beats the daily corporate grind I was used to.

The school had a clever solution for the issue of communicating half a world away during their vacation time (during which we would have nailed down exactly what the course(s) would be). My class has a really generic title, something like "Digital audio applications," and with that, I can do basically whatever I want. While I would dearly love to teach SuperCollider, that may be too much too quickly, so I suppose Max/MSP it will be. There are plenty of good reasons, mainly that Max/MSP is more facile at the kinds of things audio-programming beginners will want to do, such as wiring up graphic and MIDI interfaces for parameters. Supercollider can do it too, but first you have to understand SynthDef control inputs and GUI widget callback functions. The connection is "invisible," in a way, harder for students to see, touch and understand. At this early stage, I'd rather focus on audio manipulation than programming details.

Composition: My code demos are coming together nicely, just in time. I dread the final push for the KC performance, but it'll happen -- one step at a time, and simplify, simplify, simplify.

It's now late in the afternoon, almost time for dinner. Time for a rest, no heavy lifting tonight.

And I thought the first move to China was turning my life upside down!

Bus trip -- no problem. Meeting Phillips (department chair's assistant) -- also pretty clean, apart from a mixup with the cell phone SIM card that made it unusable outside of Zhuhai. Discussing places to live -- a bit overwhelming. I can't apply for residency with the government until I have a permanent address, and the Conservatory's dorm doesn't count. At present, the Clifford area of Panyu, a suburb south of Guangzhou, seems the most attractive option: nicely equipped properties, reasonable rents, good security, and plenty of transportation into the city.

After lunch, we joined the ranks of the post-Neanderthals in China by getting working SIM cards. We were dinosaurs through the summer without cell phones, but five minutes in a shop and we evolved millennia!

A few minutes online on campus took us right through to a torrential downpour that started minutes after we started walking back to the rooms. Soaked to the bone! Maybe the smaller umbrellas we brought from Zhuhai won't be enough after all.

I'm working away, trying to squeeze in as much coding before teaching duties start. Speaking of which -- a couple of days ago, that was supposed to be when general classes start in a couple of weeks. Now it's sooner -- I have a meeting in a few minutes to find out if it will be easy or hard.

Thursday, first thing in the morning. That's when we go to Guangzhou. I'm eager to go, and tired of stagnating in Zhuhai -- true, I've been working away on music, but it's mostly self-directed activity, not much inspiration coming from people around me. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit the nerves are starting to come back. If we forget something while packing, isn't convenient to come back. Then there are all the official appointments -- residency registration and various attendant procedures, meetings and lunches or dinners with school officials, class planning, and probably some things I can't even imagine yet. Never mind getting work ready for a preview showing on August 31 for the Kennedy Center grant committee.

Just a little pressure.

The work, at least, is going well. Over the last couple of days, I stitched together a couple of clips I prepared over the summer and plugged the sounds into the spatial reverbs (also worked out before). It went from sounding pretty cool to sounding (if I may risk immodesty) crazy fantastic. This will be a nice bit of work to reassure the school that I know what I'm doing!

One of the elements was especially tricky to plug into the reverbs. It's made of individual harmonics at specific frequencies, and I wanted to move them around individually in the virtual space. That's easy. What's hard is applying a formant filter to get vocal-like sounds prior to passing the signals into the reverbs -- each partial goes directly into the reverbs, there was no way to insert other processing in the middle without duplicating the filters once for each partial -- CPU expensive! Instead, I adapted a formula online to calculate the amount that the filter would affect each frequency, and then scale the frequencies by those amounts. Since the frequencies are always the same, it's straightforward to precalculate, and simple multiplication on the audio side is a lot faster than a real filter. It works! The vocal qualities come through and moving the partials around adds another dimension to the overall sound that is better than expected.

I have my to-do list before the KC showing (thanks to org-mode in Emacs -- super-convenient since I write all my code in Emacs too!). Very nice today to tick off a lot of items, and not have to add a bunch of new ones for new problems.

I'm slowly feeling more awake and alert through the day. Yesterday at this time, I couldn't do anything but crash into bed. Tonight, I'm blogging. That's progress.

Contributing to the fatigue has been a new sensation: nervousness about my teaching gig, due to start in the next couple of weeks. I should have expected this -- I've gone through a round of self-doubt before every job I've ever started -- but, also like every time in the past, it snuck up on me before I knew it was coming. Just recognizing it is enough; it will pass on its own with no effort from me, beyond seeing it and allowing it to run its course.

Last night, on a lark, I listened to a CD that I bought in college, which includes a singular work by David Maslanka, A Child's Garden of Dreams. It's well known in wind-band circles, but not so much outside that community. (Contemporary wind music suffers a double whammy: the obscurity of new music in general, and the marginalization of the wind band next to the symphony orchestra.) The wind ensemble at Butler played it while I was there, and I thought I got to know it fairly well in rehearsals. Not so! I found myself listening more deeply this time around. One thing that changed for me is my study of techno and house in grad school. Maslanka often favors complex textures made of simultaneous layers, each with its own rhythmic and pitch profile. His music is not danceclub music, but last night, I could understand how the layers fit together better than I could as an undergrad. I think listening closely to a lot of techno (which is also organized around the interaction of distinctly-profiled rhythmic layers) has something to do with that.

The most obvious precedent for Maslanka's music is Mahler. This is unusual for living composers, who more often admire Mahler but don't show it in their music. Both composers' use of the ensemble ("orchestration") is light-years ahead of their contemporaries. Last night, I caught myself more than once forgetting that I was listening to a wind ensemble; usually, wind music is easy to identify from the smaller color palette, but Maslanka blows the ensemble's supposed limitations out of the water. Both have overtly religious/spiritual overtones. Both could be criticized for the use of themes "beneath" classical music -- Mahler for quoting and mimicking Austrian folk songs, and Maslanka for the occasional hint of pop music -- and both transcend those materials.

It would be a tall assertion to put Maslanka on the same level as Mahler, but I can say this: the piece has more of an effect on me now than when I first got to know it, even as I have become a more critical listener. It's aged well, and it leaves the sensation of more layers waiting to be peeled away. That, in my book, is a marker of good stuff.

While in LA, I spent more time with my Duke colleague Penka. One day, we went to Little Tokyo for lunch with another Duke colleague, Chris Adler. It was very nice to see them both and catch up on what they are doing. Here we are in front of the tall tower at the entrance to the crowded plaza.

Not much to say now -- well, there could be plenty to say but I've been up and about for a couple of days solid (except for a few hours of "sleep" in the contorted positions demanded by economy-class seats), leaving me a bit less lucid than I normally like.

It was my first time through Beijing's updated international terminal. The last time I flew to Beijing was 2005, long before the 2008 Olympics which were, no doubt, the impetus to expand and modernize the terminal. The architecture soars overhead, somewhat like the National Theater (also known as "The Egg").

Early to bed tonight, after a walk around the neighborhood. It seems like ages since I've been able to walk somewhere without lugging heavy bags behind!

More tomorrow, after a good night's sleep.

This was one of those trips where the flight was the least eventful part of the journey! (The alternative could only be worse.) The skinny --

• Some heavy flash storms gummed up DC traffic as badly as I've ever seen. The storms themselves were brief, but the aftereffects on traffic last for hours. Normally it takes roughly an hour to get from Northern Virginia to BWI. Yesterday, it was 2 1/2 hours. We planned for the worst and left at 3:30 PM for a 7:20 PM flight, and needed every minute of it. I got through security, grabbed something to eat on the plane, and made it to the gate just in time to hear them call all the boarding zones.
• My suitcase weighed 59 pounds at check-in -- 9 pounds overweight! I guess I didn't make as many of those hard decisions as I should have. So, I was one of those dweebs kneeling on the ground frantically moving things between bags. Fortunately, I have a magical carry-on bag. No matter how much I put in it, no matter how overstuffed it appears, it always fits in the overhead bin!

The new machine is working nicely. I put in a full afternoon of coding on it, after sorting out some new-environment configuration issues. SuperCollider itself runs beautifully, after getting past some fiddly bits that are specific to my working arrangement (that is, my software engineering weaknesses, not SuperCollider's).

Dictation was another of my worries. I'm actually using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 to write this now -- Windows software, in Linux under WINE. Functionally I'd say it's about 80%, good enough to use as long as you avoid some specific actions that will make it unstable. The alternative is to boot into Windows whenever I need to write something extended. You can guess how I feel about that.

Penka and Daniel's cat Jenny, who is extremely skittish around new people, paid me the courtesy of not running away when I saw her dozing in the back room around lunchtime. She stayed put just long enough for me to grab a photo! Then she got suspicious of this big creature looking at her, and she ducked under the sofa -- which would have worked as a disguise apart from the tail sticking out.

It turns out I didn't read the fine print about KXStudio. Since having those difficulties with it, I found other reports online that it isn't an especially stable Ubuntu flavor. So I wiped it out and put standard Ubuntu 10.04 in its place, and found... both the WiFi and sleep/wake are working with no problem! So they aren't general Ubuntu bugs like I thought last night.

SuperCollider compiled from source with no particular problems -- I have that down to a science by now. The next adventure is to apply the real-time kernel. I wish there were step-by-step instructions online but it might take a little fiddling. I hope not too much.

I'm starting to pack for the flight tomorrow. On the way out in May, we were limited to two 50 pound suitcases apiece and faced with some interesting choices. (Put yourself in that position: Which 200 pounds of your stuff would you take with you, knowing that everything else needs to go into storage?) The choices are still interesting, but an additional 50 pounds is some relief. I'll have to pay a baggage fee for the domestic flight, but it's still cheaper than shipping the same amount overseas (which could easily run up to a truly insane $300!).

(geek stuff)

On my to-do list for this trip: Get a new machine that will eventually replace my four-year-old MacBook Pro. It's mostly a precaution; I'm not seeing any behavior on my Mac that would suggest impending hardware failure, but... laptop hard drives are more fragile than their desktop counterparts, and usually the first thing to go in a laptop (being the only constantly-moving part). The tight deadline for Affectations is giving me paranoid fantasies of a hard drive crash at any moment, and I certainly wouldn't be able to afford taking unplanned time away from composition to shop, install Linux, configure software etc.

Well, now I don't have to do this in an unplanned way because I have the machine now, mostly set up.

What's working

• Supercollider! The most important thing. I like to build my own from source -- I've been through that a few times before and already made the most likely mistakes, so no particular problems here: install the required packages, check out the latest version from SourceForge, "scons" and "sudo scons install." It launches FAST!
  
  That's the big one. If I couldn't get this working, there would be no point in continuing.

• KXStudio Linux (based on Ubuntu 10.04). Well, mostly working -- good enough for my immediate needs.
  
  In case you haven't heard the rant before -- I do not like Windows. There's a difference between tolerating a working environment (which I can do with Windows) and liking it. I need a UNIX kernel under the hood to like it. KXStudio is also prettier than Windows and highly customizable.
  
  Speaking of Windows: The machine comes with Windows 7. Supposedly this is an improvement over Vista. Maybe so, but it's still sluggish compared to KXStudio. Take booting, for instance. KXStudio boots even faster than my Mac, and the Mac is already faster than previous Windows versions I've used. Windows 7? Still lagging behind. Time from power-up to login is uncomfortably long, and after that, the interface is far less than snappy -- i.e., click on the Start button at bottom left and wait 3-5 seconds before anything happens onscreen. This is a brand-new laptop that hasn't had time for the registry to get bloated, so... huh? The less time I spend there, the better.

What's not working

Ubuntu 10.04 has some bugs. Rather obscene ones, as it happens. I can't go with an earlier version, though, because they don't work with the Intel Core i3 CPU.

• Waking from sleep or hibernation: From everything I read online, this is basically broken in 10.04, unfortunately labeled the Long Term Support version. At best, waking from sleep disables the network (actually, putting it to sleep disables the network, and waking up doesn't reverse that). More likely, the machine becomes unresponsive, calling for a hard reboot.
• WiFi: Ubuntu is supposed to have native support for Atheros WiFi cards. That's buggy. It detects the card and identifies the network, but fails to clear WEP security. Grrrrr. When I have time, I'll try to set up the Windows driver using ndiswrapper.

I can live with it. KXStudio boots so fast that shutting the machine down instead of sleeping is not much of an inconvenience, and I expect to have wired Internet access in most of the places where I'll use the machine. But it gives me a bit more appreciation for people who would rather tolerate Microsoft's corporate evil in exchange for an operating system that works out of the box.

The other win? The $500 price tag, vs. a couple grand for a new MacBook Pro. I could get used to that.