02024-02-27 | HuHeartDrive, Music, Rain Music
Turn off the alarm on March 1st, the CD won’t be going on sale on that day. :-)
Here is what’s been happening. Found the Verbatim CD upon my return last night. Burned a copy this morning. It played in two out of three of my players. I know that this third player is thirty years old and has always been finicky, but still. I will go over to every friend and acquaintance and will ask them to put the CD into their player to test it… If it plays in everything, great. If not, I will have to rethink. Not many people still have CD players, I have noticed.
I remember always writing with a sharpie directly on a CD-R in the studio but those CDs were used to check the recording or a mix and were not meant to last. The ink probably leaches into the plastic over time. So I’ll probably have to buy blank CD labels that I can attach to the top of each CD for me to write on. I know, I know, I could have these CD made for much less money than what this is going to cost, and having them made will be a last resort, but I would prefer to have the CD look homemade, with a handwritten label.
I’ll keep you posted.
I have been giving a lot of thought to containers, especially as they pertain to music. There is the LP and the cardboard cover. Substantial, legible, large images. Then there are the music cassette and the compact disc, both invented by Philips and Sony. Not much visually, rather small, but nice containers. Part of the joy of these objects lies in opening and closing the container. This action turns listening into a ritual. A ritual must have a beginning and an end. An opening and then the closure. That’s very different from playing something from a streaming service.
What could a digital music container look like? It could be a virtual container or an actual container… perhaps something that has a flash drive attached. Whether the container is real or virtual, it would need a way to open and close it. I am going to work on a flash drive (with regular USB plus USB-C connectors) that comes in a book. Perhaps the drive could be skinny and made to look like a bookmark. Or maybe the drive could be connected to a large paper clip that allows it to be attached to a page of the book. Or there can be a number of pages in the back of the book that have the paper cut away to allow the drive to rest in the book. Maybe I should design the book pages to leave a hole in the center for the drive. Lots to play with, for sure.
What would a virtual container look like? It should open and close. It should contain a virtual booklet. It should be able to play all of the music contained in the proper sequence…
02024-02-24 | Uncategorized
Voyager kept going, and kept going, until it was over 15 billion kilometers away. At the speed of light, the Moon is one and a half seconds away. The Sun is about 8 minutes away. Voyager is twenty-two hours away. Send a radio signal to it at lunch on Monday, and you’ll get a response back Wednesday morning.
Death, Lonely Death — Crooked Timber
Great post about Voyager, which has been flying through space since 1977. It flew past Saturn. It officially left the Solar System and entered interstellar space in 2012.
Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens. Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds. The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age.
…between a dog training school and a Micky D!!
02024-02-17 | Uncategorized
Ted Gioia shared the above book cover and Tim posted it on his blog – here.
My name is fairly unique. I was usually able to get a handle that was just my first name. I used to be @ottmar at Twitter, for example, before I deleted that account around 2009.
So if you see an album by Ottmar Duros or DiMeola or Ottmar De Lucia, or Ottmar plus any other name… you can be pretty sure it’s got something to do with AI.
Tim wrote a good post about AI on his blog. Check it out.
02024-02-17 | Uncategorized
I discovered that I wrote the following into my diary eight years ago, today.
Devices will become smaller and will be used like a secondary brain. They will increasingly contain more and more personal information, like passwords and logins, banking details, info about our health, diary entries etc. Pretty soon they might actually be in/on our body.
In other words we do need to have this discussion now. Is a phone an extension of my person? If yes, is breaking its security equal to torturing me?
02024-02-16 | Touring
Wednesday night we performed at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. It was the first performance of this tour and, like every first show after a few weeks off, it had some of that glowing and raw quality that comes from trying to remember all of the arrangements, especially new ones. The first performance is a little bit on edge but also full of new ideas, a delicious tentative freshness. We played Duende del Amor for the first time in years. We had a new section for dreamy afternoon that changed the time signature for a break. We also did a medley of Dancing Alone and Uma Dança. We played Arabesk, from Rain Poems, during soundcheck but decided to delay the first performance of that piece. After soundcheck I heard Robby humming the melody from Arabesk, always a good sign. :-)
33 years ago we performed at the Coach House for the first time. The venue opened in 1980 and was already legendary when we arrived in 1991. Hundreds, maybe even around a thousand signed photos line the walls. Everybody has played on that stage. The website mentions B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Chris Isaak, Tori Amos, Tom Jones and the Black Crowes by name but there are so many more. Ray Charles, Chick Corea, Joe Walsh… the list is endless. I walked along the walls and looked at the framed 8×10 publicity photos showing performers. Most of the artists are still living, others have already passed. It was like wandering through a museum. In a few years the venue will be fifty years old.
Thursday night we played at Belly Up in Solana Beach. We performed Arabesk for the first time. We play this piece faster than the recorded version, upbeat and catchy.
