Virginia's Notes

March 27/18, 2001
I'm realizing now how much work getting the content together for this project is going to be. I've spent nearly a whole day on trying to create samples from downloaded MP3s (and growing more and more fond of Napster by the minute - people have made available hours of Martin Luther King, Jr's speeches, for which I am profoundly grateful). But in the end, I only have collected some pre-done beat tracks in 100 and 110 BPM and three or four completed samples in a whole day of work.

It's tricky business, not just in finding just the right bite and editing it so it's seemless, but also because I'm trying to reduce these wonderful documents to the richest, but smallest soundbite possible. I'm also trying to keep our audience in mind, and attempting to find content that will be particularly rich and meaningful for them.

I guess my realization for the day is that I'm a pretty stereotypical public-radio leftie when it comes to my knowledge of good sound content. I've downloaded piles of Noam Chomsky and Adrienne Rich and Mumia Abu-Jamal. I'm going to have to ask the kids I work with who they're interested in, and balance my ABC's of democratic activistism collection with some stuff that will appeal to a broader audience.

I'm also interested in the fact that we're paying a lot of attention (and rightfully so - it's not going to be easy) to the technical challenges of developing the Mobile DJ setup, but content seems to be a secondary concern. While the technical challenges are fascinating, I think a main goal should be to help the students create a piece of work that is personally meaningful, as well. And for that, we need to pay very close attention to the content we're making available to them.

Tech Notes:
I'm working in SPARK 1.5 to sample from and clean up the sound files.
I've made the samples I've completed available for the team's perusal at http://www.brillomag.net/Learning/Samples/.

March 31, 2001
Had a really great visit with Paul Miller last night, despite the crickets' refusal to cooperate. (Which reminds me: these things have turned out to be really touchy - I often lose cricket rx communication, and have yet to figure out if it's a problem with the crickets, LOGO Blocks, or the serial ports [keyspan adaptor] on my Mac. We should make sure that, if we're using this stuff in a workshop context, that our systems are more stable than this.)

His energy is infectious, and he's quite generous with the loan of his hard-won content. So I came away doubly-armed--with enthusiasm and good stuff--to keep going with the project. I'm realizing that we'll need a fairly sophisticated system for dealing with the wealth of content we've gathered. I'm thinking of a web-like interface, with drop-down menus for each genre or performer. Also, we should cross-reference the samples as much as possible by content, performer, style, genre, etc. A student who wants to do a piece that talks about prisons, for example, might not necessarily know to look under Angela Davis for quotes about the prison industrial complex, or under the American Memory collection for WPA sound recordings of 1939 prison work gangs. I think we need to make the content as accessible as possible, even if it means more work for us.

Paul asks that when we get something more like a working system running, that I bring it back down to the city for him to noodle with. It would be great if we could leave him some crickets, too, to get a feeling for the tools. I think it's a fair trade for the three CDs of amazing sampling material he gave us! Second week of April is going to work for him, so it gives us an excuse to get it together and get our rig working quickly.

Tech Notes:
Over the break, I got the communication between Max and the crickets working - only so far as to get Max to list numbers that a cricket sensor is sending, or to have a cricket beep when it is sent a new IR number from Max - but it is working!

I've continued to collect raw material & plan to make samples from what I've got over the next week or so. More samples will go up to the website tonight.