Baby, if you’ve ever wondered what I’d do to a 1978 TV sitcom theme song… then take a listen to today’s musical offering.

A long time ago, I loosely picked out some chords to go along with the WKRP in Cincinnati theme song (props to Tom Wells, Hugh Wilson, and Steve Carlisle for it). I love that old contemporary-funk classic 70’s style, but the melody alone was the infectious part of it for me, so I kept it more or less the same. Everything else is kind of mixed up to have an early 90’s kind of dance-remix sound.

I pulled this one out of the archives to freshen it up with some more modern sounds. Overall, my original take on it from when I first started goofing around with it is preserved. Rerecording it was just something fun to do for an evening. I was experimenting with breathing new life back into some old MIDI files. I still dig the MIDI version, but it deserved better audio engineering.

While I have your attention, let me also mention that Cincinnati is brutal to spell. But it was a cool show–gotta love those characters!

Oh, and by the way, those who know me can attest to the fact that I was more into Bailey than Jennifer.

This file is available for download:

WKRP.mp3 (3 MB, 1 min 40 sec)

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I have taken a break to enjoy all my Christmas presents. Over the past few days, I have logged dozens of hours on Microsoft Flight Simulator X, which is pretty cool, as far as distractions go, but let me rewind a little bit first.

My curiosity was piqued on my recent trip to California, on the way back from which I listened to the Air Traffic Control radio channels on the in-flight sound system. I found it absolutely fascinating! Five hours of being babysat through the process of navigating from point A to point B consisted largely of bartering for new flight levels to avoid turbulence, until we got to O’Hare, where we were put in “the stack”, a holding queue where planes fly around a loop waiting for their turn on the runway. It’s one of the few chances you’ll get to see another plane in flight up close while looking out the window of your aircraft. (Don’t worry, they’re usually above or below you by quite a bit.)

But this got me thinking about flight simulators again, and whether the consumer grade flight sim had come along far enough that there was realistic ATC chatter. So I asked for a copy of FSX for Christmas, and got it. (Thanks Santa!) I was very pleased to find that the simulator exceeded my expectations for ATC simulation in all areas. It’s loads of fun! It’s entirely geeky though. With geekspeak like: “World Travel one thirty eight, descend and maintain eight thousand.” I don’t know why it makes me happy, but it does.

It’s the little things that make me happy, like the fact that you can fly in real-world conditions that are downloaded from a weather website. If you choose to fly in real-time, it can use your system’s actual date and time, from which it derives clever things like the season, and whether it is day or night, even the phase of the moon, and the position of the stars. Like I said, it’s the little things.

I was also pleased to see that it had airports for all the crazy places I’ve been. Including places in Ontario like Marathon (where I grew up), Kitchener-Waterloo (where I live now). I even flew in a King Air from Dunnville airport (where I recently went skydiving).

It needs to somehow integrate with Google Earth, though. As I found that the terrain details were a little bit lacking for realism in certain places. (Sorry, Microsoft: you did a fabulous job, but Google raised the bar to a rediculous level.) I really wanted to fly over my house and see my actual house. The terrain data is accurate, but the buildings are more or less random.

Now if I could just end my new year by being visited by the frame-rate fairy!

So as if it wasn’t enough that I was loosing 8 hours a day to playing World of Warcraft, now I feel compelled to simulate the 5 hour flight from California to Toronto too. Like any hobby, it can be an obsession.

There are neat FSX videos available on YouTube and Google Video.

Check out the commercial though.

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I’ve been on a bit of a kick where I try to reproduce things I hear. Sort of a musical life drawing class. It’s been interesting. I need practice playing the guitar–particularly in eliminating the finger slop. I need help engineering guitar sounds. I need some basic mastering lessons too. It’s a chore getting things recorded loud enough that I have good definition, but not so loud that there’s clipping. Then for some reason I have the same problem when I mix, it’s hard to get maximum volume at all frequencies. When I look at typical frequency histograms of production CD’s, they’re all maxed out. But when I mix, I leave a little headroom, particularly in the high-frequencies. Not sure what I don’t know here, other than whatever I’m doing is different than what everyone else is doing. So there’s probably something I don’t know.

One thing that has saved my life is Sony Sound Forge’s Wave Hammer, which has a really good compressor and volume maximizer. It seems silly that I always have to compress and boost everything I do by about 6 dB or so before it sounds good. Somewhere I’ve lost fidelity but I don’t get it.

Anyway, enough whining about audio engineering. Here is part (up to end of first chorus) of my karaoke version of Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Sing along if you wish.

This song is available for download:

Boulevard.mp3 (3 MB, 1 min 14 sec)

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It’s been a while since I have been able to post. Was I distracted? Well, sort of. I disappeared to San Jose for a week. Rode on a couple of jets. Went a few places, among them: the corporate headquarters of nVidia and Adobe. I learned how to multiply 512 x 512 matrices in about 20 μs. I learned about Silicon Valley’s negative amortization mortgage. I learned about how big aircraft get the designation heavy in their call sign to help prevent aircraft that follow them from flipping over on their back. I also enjoyed the last international air travel I’ll be doing for a while without a passport.

I ate at a fancy ($60/plate) restaurant, and realized that you don’t always get what you pay for. I discovered my Spanish hasn’t rusted away completely. Had a sandwich in Chicago, and discovered that people from the area aren’t talking about martial arts when they say you are doing a good jab. Realized that O’Hare airport really does blow–avoid it if at all possible. I also ate mole.

I reaffirmed my opinions that Americans are very different from Canadians. But most of all I was reminded of how much I love my family, my home, and my country.

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What was I doing one year ago? Well, I was playing with Adobe After Effects. My challenge was to do a flying car. This week I’ll discuss what I learned and what I’d do differently.

Masking the car wasn’t too hard. It takes a bit of time, but it’s not so bad, especially with modern software. It’s important to get just the right level of masking. Pixel-level mistakes are obvious. Take too much and you see some of the background travel with the car. Take too little and the car thins out as it moves through the air. The sub-pixel level masking is important too, you want to remove the amount of background colour from the pixel, but leave the foreground colour. To do this you need to not only mask the pixel, but change its colour to be closer to the colour of the nearest interior neighbour. If I had it to do over, I’d give more consideration to the sub-pixel masking, but I’d rather have some software that did this automatically. To approximate it, I contract the mask slightly, then feather it a little bit. An overly soft edge always looks more convincing than a hard edge with wrong colours. In moving video, errors in the masking are more forgiving, but in still-image work, it’s worth going the extra mile.
I also had to choose a frame of the background to fill the gap where the car was removed. This is mostly easy because the camera wasn’t moving, but there are always little tell-tale signs where the seam is formed. To hide the seam, there’s actually a band where the background and filler frame are blended.

The ambient occlusion of the car causes shadows on the floor even under soft light. To compensate for this, we keep the shadowy remains of the car for a few frames as the car rises, approximating, artistically, the new ambient occlusion of the car on the floor. Also, we have to assume what the shadow of the car on the floor looked like where the car covered the gap. I assumed it was mostly a shadowy blob. As the car rises, we reduce the size of the shadow. I approximated it with an ellipse, but if I had it to do over again, I would actually shoot a couple of test frames of the car held in place by hand to use as a guide for drawing the new shadow behaviour. It’s just a rule of art to observe the world around you. I knew with Decartes-like confidence what the behaviour of the shadow should be, but I didn’t actually try it out. Take 2 would definitely involve a little more observation.

Finally, the animation of the car was kind of poor. This is extremely hard and I think that people who can animate objects well using computer programs are gifted. There are subtle things to capture about the way things move, and a car that flies by “magic” doesn’t really look like anything. It would be cooler if the car fired some thrusters, or sprouted legs or something to give it some kind of reality rather than just anti-gravity. It would allow the animation to capture and exaggerate the characteristics of that kind of motion. I’m not really great at this stuff, but I’d love to learn more.

Here’s the final product.

This video is available for download:

CarTestDV.wmv (114 kB, 8 sec)

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At the request of a friend, I examined a few things about my voice.

First, my vocal range. I just about destroyed my voice today trying for hours to dig deeper than my lowest note, or push my voice to break the high pitch barrier. What I found out is that I have almost a three and a half octave range. From C#2 (two octaves below middle C, or about 69 Hz), to G#5 (one and a half octaves above middle C, or about 830 Hz). I can accurately hit D2, but not with much volume. And G#5 is not easy to hit but it sounds good enough. Just one semitone above that is unachievable for me.

VocalRange.mp3 (5 MB, 2 min 37 sec)

Since I can comfortably sing D2 to F#5, I thought I’d sing a large D Major chord with myself for fun.

BigD.mp3 (585 kB, 18 sec)

Then the other request was to identify if there was any overlap between my falsetto voice and my regular chest voice. The answer is, of course there is! Quite a bit, in fact. Although I couldn’t come up with a test to accurately measure whether I was singing falsetto or not, especially since at the extreme ends of the pitch range I can pass in and out of what I consider falsetto quite easily without much distortion or breaking, so I don’t have an exact range to tell you. But I do know that there was enough overlap to sing a verse of a song in both falsetto voice and my ordinary voice. So instead, I decided to sing a verse of a song in my ordinary voice, and then again in my falsetto voice, and then a third time with harmony using both a falsetto and ordinary voice (and a little piano and some additional vocal colour). Here’s a little Enya for ya.

Smaointe.mp3 (3 MB, 1 min 18 sec)

So now I’m even more interested in this, and I’d like to learn more about head voice, throat voice, and chest voice. Maybe even learn some phonation exercises. A few other things I’ve learned along the way: I don’t have fantastic pitch. I mean, it’s okay, but I’m definitely off by a little bit much of the time, and not because I don’t try. I’ve never been taught to sing and I haven’t spent much time practising in an effort to improve these things. I just sing for fun in the car and in the shower, you know? I don’t have much control, and I feel my voice slipping away from me when I try to hold a note. It takes much effort to maintain timbre, volume, breath and a steady tonal center. Singing lessons would be interesting.

So to take this a little further, here’s a complete song in almost my full range: from F#2 to F#5. I select this song as a confluence of three questions posed to me today: What’s my vocal range, who wrote Carol of the Bells, and when am I gonna post some Christmas music?

Ring Christmas Bells.mp3 (2 MB, 1 min 23 sec)

I also learned to do some basic Tuvan throat singing along the way. But I’ll save that for another day.

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I got the chicken pox for my 21st birthday. It certainly wasn’t what I asked for! Getting the chicken pox as an adult is far more serious than getting them as a child. I didn’t realize that having them could affect so many things about your body. From your brain to your intestines. It was very painful, and it actually caused my digestion to pretty much grind to a halt. I was in the hospital in agony. Going to the hospital with chicken pox is interesting too. You have to sit all by yourself away from the other patients. I find that usually a hospital does a pretty good job of making you feel better, at least in spirit, but having the chicken pox, I just felt like a disease.

I could deal with the itchiness, which is what most people complain about. But for me there was just a lot of pain and agony that came along with it. In trying to explain to people how I felt, I did what any respectable musician would do: I wrote a song about it. The song was supposed to mimic in a musical way exactly what I was feeling. There’s throbbing of all my muscles, the pounding of my head, the moaning and difficulty breathing, stabbing pain of my gut, and even the complete deliriousness of my mind. (Nobody said I would be losing my mind either, which, in retrospect, makes me wonder if I had a bit of VZV encephalitis–which plays a role in the movie Awakenings, by the way.) You’ll find this song has exactly these things, and nothing more. It’s a kind of sound-sculpture. It really brings back the memories of what it felt like.

Eventually I got better, after about a month of feeling lousy. On the first day that I felt normal again, I decided to write another song that captured how I was feeling. It doesn’t have the exact correlation between feelings and sounds that the other piece has, but it did capture how good it felt to be feeling normal again.

I’ve always told people the story about how I wrote a song when I had the chicken pox, and that I wrote a song when I felt better, but never in the same breath like this. And even I had never listened to them back to back. So with great pleasure, I present to you recordings of the two songs that I co-wrote with the varicella-zoster virus: Pain and Recovery. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which.

These songs are available for download:

Pain.mp3 (3 MB, 1 min 38 sec)
Recovery.mp3 (4 MB, 2 min 16 sec)

Music | 1 Comment »

Friday was spent at Mike’s house, where a three-quarter-dozen of us played Karaoke Revolution Party till the wee hours of the morning. This is a cool game! Technically, the game measures the pitch of your voice and start and stop time. You can duff the lyrics, or even just hum along, as long as your pitch is good.

I’m a fan of these kinds of games. I love Donkey Konga for the Nintendo Gamecube too. By the way, I was introduced to the original Japanese version of this game called Taiko No Tatsujin, which was played on a taiko drum. The Japanese have lots of these kinds of performance oriented games, involving music, rhythm and coordination. There are specific variants for dancing (the famous Dance Dance Revolution), cheer leading, and other instruments including guitar. In fact, Karaoke Revolution Party lets you use the dance pad from Dance Dance Revolution so you can sing and dance at the same time.

Karaoke Revolution Party also had duet modes with true duet parts (fun!), and knockout modes in kind of a head-to-head Karaoke game. I found it hard to get back on track after getting the giggles too. I was surprised to find that my improv training only helped me with general confidence. Other skills are quite independent.

I’m sure the fact that that it was a party atmosphere and that the songs were mostly ones I know contributed to the fun of the experience. But, if you have a musical predisposition, then you’ll probably enjoy this game.

Since the official site is in Japanese, visit the fan website at KaraokeRevolution.net.

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Some songs are really poignant. Every time I heard this song it just stopped me in my tracks. So last week I started learning it to play it on the piano. The song is Mad World from the Donnie Darko soundtrack (music by Michael Andrews, lyrics by Gary Jules). Donnie Darko was an excellent movie, by the way, and I highly recommend it.

A very sad thing happened this weekend though. One of my daughter’s classmates died of cancer, at the very young age of only 11. I suppose I am, in my own way, preparing to deal with the emotion of attending the funeral of a child tomorrow. So with a heavy heart, but steadfast determination, I resolved to finish recording this song today. And so I dedicate this recording to Luke.

This song is available for download:

MadWorld.mp3 (6 MB, 3 min 1 sec)

Music | 4 Comments »