Friday, June 25, 2010

Sound Environment for OPENED3:SPATIAL

Z in lightA week from tomorrow, Saturday 3 July from 2-4pm, I will be creating a sound environment for a choreography by Edd Schouten, to take place at the lovely Daghdha Space, St. John's Church, John's Square, Limerick, Ireland. Edd has worked with over a dozen performers on his investigation into spatial engagement. This is a perfect fit for my own recent sound works.

I have been busy creating custom software instruments that will allow me to dynamically augment the sound environment of this space, one I know so well from previous performances and installations. I will experiment with two modalities: simple sine tones and phonography (field recordings). These will be organised vertically (simultaneously), horizontally (sequentially) and spatially using a system of six speakers.
Thursday, June 24, 2010

Choosing An SD Card

There are so many SD cards on the market, and their prices vary so wildly, that it is often difficult to know which to buy. This is not helped by a labelling scheme that generates more confusion that clarity. In this article I will simplify this state of affairs and recommend cards for digital photography.

I don't need to tell you that you need to entrust your photos to a good quality SD card. It used to be that I might recommend slower cards as being sufficient for your digital camera, reserving more expensive higher speed cards for multi-channel digital recorders and the like. But today most DSLRs have burst mode shooting that might suffer in throughput if inferior cards are used. If you find that your camera takes a long time to process a bunch of images, your SD card might be the problem. (Though such performance is also a factor of the internal processor, the memory pipeline and how much buffer memory is internally allocated to this function.)
Thursday, June 24, 2010

Computer Frozen at Windows Resume Loader?

windows resume loaderServes me right for bragging. A friend asked me yesterday how my new computer was getting on, the one I blogged about extensively in a four-part series starting here. I said "fine -- never had a problem" and then returned home to disaster. My power button is set to restore Windows 7 from hibernation, a great feature that pops up the OS in a second or two. Except that this time all I got was a faint grey screen. Had my monitor failed? Was it a loose VGA cable? Had my boot drive gone south? Was it a virus? No, in fact it was none of the above. Read on to figure out the solution and how you can recover from the cryptic screen posted above.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010

See You In London

I'm going to be in London and vicinity for a week. If you happen to see me wandering the streets with a dazed expression on my face, that's because I just finished four submissions in two days (one remix, one new radiophonic piece, one conference paper and one other I don't even remember). Then I will be down in Kerry at a literary festival for two days before hopping a flight over to old Blighty. (I hear that's what the cool people call it.)

If you're interested in meeting, I will be delivering a paper Wednesday 9 June at the conference Interactivity and the Audio Arts, held by the Department of Music and Audio at the University of Kent campus in Medway. That's not too far out of London.