From Wednesday Nov. 18 thru Saturday Nov. 21 The Yale Dramatic is presenting Merrily We Roll Along. Come see it if you are in the New Haven area. Details here.
Sets by Reid Thompson
Costumes by Hunter Kaczorowski
Lights by Solomon Weisbard
Sound Design by Matt Otto
and Directed by Ethan Heard.
Tomorrow! One night only Is Alamat: Stories of Philippine Gold! preformed at the Asia Society, produced by Ma-Yi Theatre Company
Directed by Jack Tamburri
Original music & sound design by Matt Otto
Set & lighting design by Kristen Robinso
Costumes by Martin Schnellinge
with Alyssa Howar Stage Managing
If you have the time we’d love to see you at the Asia Society! Details here.
Today I did my first live stream of my composition work! I was writing the top of show cue for A Tilted Place. I’ll usually be streaming when I’m working on cues or programing in my studio during the day. Feel free to follow me on Twitch so you’re notified when I start the broadcast!
I also archive the videos over at my YouTube channel so if you miss one please head there to check them out.
If you have thoughts or ideas please let me know in the comments below.
I just finished adding all my future productions to my upcoming section of my website. Please head over there to see what I’m up to from now thorough December!
Bright Room Called Day
I added a bunch of music and sound from three productions I designed last season. Please check out my work from Bright Room Called Day, I’m Miserable but Change Scares Me and Square Peg Round Hole.
People behind Trinity Rep's Facebook account posted great photos from two wonderful productions I worked on up in Providence. The first being Tooth of Crime by Sam Shepard directed by Dan Rogers and the second is Stone Cold Dead Serious by Adam Rapp directed by Flordelino Lagundino. You can check out the photos here for Tooth of Crime and here for Stone Cold Dead Serious.
Another image of Lupita Nyong'o performing in YSD’s 2010 production of Uncle Vanya.
I do not talk a lot about my photography here, but I did want to point out this cool little tidbit. People.com published a photograph I took of Lupita Nyong'o performing in Yale School of Drama’s 2010 production of Uncle Vanya.
I feel very privileged to work with so many talented people at Yale School of Drama and I look forward to seeing many more people I know doing good and making the rest of the world take notice of their talents.
This past week I was asked to be in two opera pieces as a Foley artist this past weekend which was just a ton of fun! The pieces were called Mutt by Matthew Welch and I Need Space by Jason Cady and Ann Heppermann both were part of the Experiments In Opera: Radio Operas. Sadly there were only two peromances, but we are recording them tomorrow and Tuesday at WNYC to be streamed by Q2 Music on demand during a “special week" in March. As I know more details I will post them on this blog. In the mean time there was a nice write up about the show in The Wall Street Journal.
When you are listening to music for the first time ever what does the fox say to you?
A friend of mine posted this link to Facebook today. It is an interview with a deaf person, Austin Chapman, who is now able to listen to music for the first time ever due to his new substantially improved hearing aids. The interview isn’t that long but it really gives a ton of insight and revelations.
The first being how much modern music is relative and referential. The silly cleverness of What the Fox Says is kind of lost on him because he hasn’t been over exposed to that kind of dance beat over and over again. He also goes on to say that modern music is "too loud" and "over exposed." Something musicians, producers and sound people are very familiar with. We call it the loudness war where over time little by little year by year track by track the producers of songs have squashed their dynamics so throughly to get to their particular song to be heard over the din of daily life that we have reached a kind of pinnacle where all songs are overly loud.. He is experiencing that gradual increase of level so quickly that it is the most obvious thing to him. Where as the rest of us experienced this so slowly that only people in the know recognize the pattern. Its kind of amazing to have these great insights put out there so plainly.
The other thing that was truly interesting to me is there part about which he discusses sounds he does not like. He mentions an obvious one like the roar of a motorcycle, but also the sound of a toilet flushing. That particular sound is similar to white noise which contains all frequencies at equal levels. The fact he didn’t like it or it was too much for him that he had to turn off his hearing aides shows how much work the brain does to process sound. And if your brain isn’t used to doing that it can be overwhelmed by simple sounds others hear every day day in and day out.
I do wish that the the interviewer went further on the emotional side of Austin’s journey into the hearing world. He kind of hints at the shear joy of hearing music for the first time but the interviewer doesn’t go much further on the issue. I’d love to hear more of this side. Hopefully Austin will keep posting on Reddit and we can to come along for the ride.
WinAMP 2.0
Today I read an article that spoke of the demise of one of my favorite pieces of software. I ever used, WinAMP.
For those who don’t know WinAMP was the software MP3 player in the early days of digital music that allowed skinning, library management and cool visualizations known as AVS. Ultimately what killed the player was mismanagement via an AOL acquisition and the iPod + iTunes combo. But it was nice to know it was still there. In the same way that knowing your childhood house still exists.
That is to say I am truly sorry to see this little nugget of the Web 1.0 go away. This piece of software was the most used program on my computer from 1999-2002. I loved the attitude it had and the fun easter eggs hidden through out it and AVS. My high school Senior Project involved some AVS programming that responded to tracks by The Who; something I did on a much larger scale for my MFA thesis and much better results.
I also sometimes catching myself thinking about WinAMP's cool RTA and graphic EQ built into the player that I would be mesmerized by. I even setup my computer to be a router so I could stream my music collection over SHOUTcast. (Soon I hope to be streaming my song writing sessions in a similar way on Ustream.)
In the end I think this piece of software turned me on to so many different aspects of my future more than anything else outside of drama club did in high school and for that I will be eternally grateful to Justin Frankel and the rest of the WinAMP team.