Writing
Notes on sound, tools, teaching, and creative practice.
The archive brings together essays, reflections, and technical posts from across the site’s earlier years.
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Is Anyone Listening?
I’ve been posting my music on SoundCloud for the past couple of years. It’s been an interesting experience, to say the least. I began by posting a bunch of old compositions that had been languishing on a hard drive for a very long time. Before long, I began to post new compositions at the precise moment that they
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Does Attendance Matter?
I find it ironic that, while every K-12 school in the country emphasizes attendance as one key to academic success, we in the higher ed community pretend like it doesn’t matter. Or at least that’s how it seems to me when I’m told that I can’t count attendance as a graded component of my classes. Now I
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Mentor
Last night I attended a memorial concert for Mark Trayle at Mills College in Oakland. Mark was my mentor while I was in graduate school at CalArts many years ago. He passed away from pancreatic cancer just before he was scheduled to play on the Electroacoustica festival that I produced at Foothill in April 2015.
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Textbook Boogie
I was looking forward to a (relatively) relaxed winter term this year. For the past couple of years, I been busy taking classes for professional growth and writing curriculum for my own new classes. (And composing music, and producing an electronic music festival, and raising two kids, and trying not to get divorced, and…) My plan this quarter was
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The Script
As I mentioned in my last post, I make a ton of screen capture videos for my various classes. Over that last few years many of my colleagues have asked about the tools I use and the basic workflow, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about it. Tools First, let me say that there are
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Showtime
I just returned home from the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show this evening before sitting down to write this post. It’s one of several conferences that I try to attend every year (although the Audio Engineering Society conference is the most relevant to my field). Anyway, in spite of the usual long-haired metal heads that seem
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So Many Hats
My wife offers zero sympathy whenever I’m stressed-out about my job. She loves to quote some unnamed study that (she says) scientifically determined that being a “college professor” is the least stressful job in the universe. My usual response, borrowed from a fellow music department colleague, is “not if you’re doing it right.” Still she
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Electroacoustica Recap
Electroacoustica 2015 wrapped up last week, and it was a real success. The quality and diversity of the performances was really great. And the audience was just as engaged and appreciative as I’d hoped it would be. Here are a couple of images from my set, including my collaboration with Ed Goldfarb on piano and
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Electroacoustica 2015
I’m happy to announce that Foothill College will be presenting its first electronic music festival, Electroacoustica. I’ve been working to put this together for the last year, and it’s super exciting to see the plan come together. Here’s the little press blurb for the concert: An impressive lineup of experimental electronic composers will perform their
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Showing Up Is Half The Battle
I’ve been teaching full time for almost three academic years now. In that time, I’ve learned some valuable lessons about myself, my students, and my field. One thing that has become very clear is the difference in student success between those students who participate every week, and those who do not. I just finished grading