0603 Sunday 06 August 2023
I’m waiting for my coffee to brew.
It’s early Sunday morning and I’m not feeling well.
A box containing fresh electronics for a DIY line signal amplifier sits on the project shelf upstairs. It needs to be completed before I can start my next piece.
Next to the box, a stack of Polaroids and an old photograph wait patiently to be added to the digital menagerie of images.
The photograph shows Mother sitting comfortably at an outdoor table with a cigarette, surrounded by her male friends. A hand-written caption on the back reads “Rhodes, 15.6.1971”. The sevens and ones curlicued in that distinctly European way.
The Polaroids are “transitional”, meant to capture the texture of chemistry to existing images. I prefer the inherent imperfections of an analog filter. The damage is more interesting. Like vinyl over lossless Apple Music. Like life in meatspace, over pictograms of influencer perfection. The flawlessness becomes tedious and desperate; its perspective flattened and desaturated.
Mother bellows a ragged solo that sounds like fire underwater. Her cough distorts, and shifts the air.
Through the sunroom glass partition I see her Samsung television, tuned to a local news broadcast. Scenes from the city spin across the scene, obscured by books, furniture, and glass; framed by an imperious chyron.
The time for handheld objects of Time and Place is long-past, replaced by the flat glow of pixels yawning in the deep shadow of morning.
1325 Monday 07 August 2023
I’m pulling off my latex gloves when the Klein multimeter beeps, warning me that it is shutting down. I was done with it anyway — having checked and rechecked the resistors before soldering them to the small PCB board. I should probably test the unit before putting it away. I’ll assume it’s ok.
The heat from the soldering iron always makes me clammy. I should probably open a window to evacuate the sweet smoky scent of flux burning off the lead, but it’s always such a fuss.
The completed unit sits on the silicon mat waiting to be put away. I’ll be able send audio out of the computer interface through these passive amplifiers and into a chain of guitar pedals to transform the sound before sending it back. The interaction of the guitar pedals is what I’m after. Easier to dial in the sound when I can twist knobs, patch cables.
1717 Monday 07 August 2023
I’m on the Roland website, downloading old software for discontinued hardware called the Roland Torcido. It’s a distortion box that is controllable with “control voltages” generated by synthesizers.
The software can generate an audio file to configure the hardware through a “control voltage” port.
Mother rings the bell from the sunroom, materializing a request.
I walk into her room, and ask her if she is hungry. Yes. I’ll make you something. Ok.
There is a faint smell of urine and unspoken shame.
What I wouldn’t give for the ability to upload a new configuration into Mother via sound. Verbalize a configuration change that’s durable. Instead, with a compromised memory, she can only operate in a configuration created long ago against requirements that have long since disappeared.
The Roland Torcido hardware was bought used a few months ago. It is unclear to me how it was configured by the previous owner. It sounds great — especially on drums. I can modulate every parameter of the distortion it is generating. The configuration it is running provides the preconditions for that modulation. Setting up those preconditions is what I’m after here. The software I am downloading will read the memory and show me the config.
If only I could rearrange Mother’s preconditions for perceiving reality, I’d be able to optimize the resources she has left. She’s been sleeping much more the past few days. The bed has become a cocoon for her.
She struggles to articulate what she wants for dinner. The heavy Austrian accent rounds her consonants and trills her vowels.
I don’t know why I ask her; I already know the answer.
It’s a polite construction; a shared, undeclared understanding that sets up the preconditions for modulating reality.
0518 Tuesday 08 August 2023
The sound of white-noise rises through the living room. It’s the sound of water coming from the sky, reprogramming the biological configuration on the ground. It’s also the sound that will reprogram my Yamaha piano sitting upright in the dining room, striving not stretch itself out of tune. The tuning happened last Friday, and, for the last 4 days, I have enjoyed the Equal Temperament 440hz configuration.
I can already feel the humidity rising, and with it, the temperament of the strings.
The sound of static is intent to be acknowledged. The sound of noise. The sound of all sound combined like the merging of all color: it’s the sound of the color White.
The piano will stretch to meet the water vapor, pulling against its strings. Piano practice this afternoon will sound like a phaser pedal has somehow been grafted into the wood. A tinny, modulating sound reverberating through the air after that first fundamental note.
A bit sharp, no doubt.
The dining room is splashy; lots of wood and glass conspire with the piano to create a wash of sound, swirling around you. As the harmonics phase in space, chords become three-dimensional.
Nothing sounds better than a slightly out of tune piano.
As the rain falls, I can hear the rhythmic percussion of Mother’s sleep apnea cutting through the noise floor. She’s still here; still breathing.