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Got out my MIDI keyboard this afternoon and made this. It’s synthesized, but it’s a nice sample set, and it’s all me on the keyboard. I think it sounds pretty cool.

Sunday Afternoon [ogg vorbis]
If you can’t play this, here’s how. If you still can’t, here’s an mp3.

I’ve been listening to “Army Corps of Architects“ by Death Cab lately, so it may have had some influence.

Just a little event—I’ve been learning piano, and today I played through a transcription of “Evaporated” (Ben Folds) all the way through. I don’t know what it is about the piano that makes such a beautiful sound, but it has always been one of my favorite instruments, so this little milestone is cool. Even though it is a very easy song, it’s so musical and expressive that it sounds impressive. If you ever catch me next to a piano I can play it if you like.

Life has been school has been life lately; so I’m busy. I’m taking a class on compiler design, and the projects are killer. Very interesting though. With that and algorithms, and a couple humanities classes, there’s no time left to think except late late at night, and all I can think about then is too deep to be useful or interesting. I’m getting weird here I know, so I’ll cut it off there. Let’s just say I’ve been thinking a lot about things that I can’t write about here. But life is good! Never fear. Always, even in the darkest times, something about it breaks through into some beauty or wonder, completely unexplainable and completely true.

I live for thoughts like these at two in the morning; gone by sunrise.

I’m in the market for some new headphones… my $29.95 Panasonic HT355’s (which I now consider the most bang for your buck in headphones) died last week—the volume control dial wore out and now there’s no right channel. So I’m gonna need some new ones I guess….

I listened to a friends’ pair of Sennheiser HD555’s yesterday, and I was blown away by the quality. It made me realize that my old ones had some real issues. It also made me realize that I didn’t want to take them off my ears. I had heard Sennheiser HD 570’s before (my roomate owns a pair—hi John) and though they were very nice and detailed, I thought they were way too airy and unnatural sounding for my taste. They were very good for classical and instrumental jazz, but not so much for vocals. The HD555’s on the other hand were nearly perfect to my ears in all genres, and had an amazing realism to them; exactly what I’m looking for.

I’m sure there are other worthy headphones out there, so if you have reccomendations, please let me know. And if you even think the 4-letter B word, I’m gonna whack you upside the head with a stick.

The end of spring break in Southern California meant a trip to the beach, which is covered with a whole lot of bamboo driftwood—dry as a bone and perfect for two things: forts and flutes. I found one good stick and decided to make a flute out of it, so I made the original tone (mouth) hole by grinding it thin with round rocks and boring it out with a sharp stick. It was actually amazing how nice the tone was off the bat. After a good deal more walking and talking, I got home and looked up the calculations and other instructions (and programs) for making the finger holes (this PDF was by far the most helpful).

It was very cool to drill the holes in the right places and tune each one with sandpaper and eventually come out with an instrument that actually sounds good. My main mistake was making it too short to begin with, but I didn’t have much choice considering that I had already made the hole with a rock. However—I still have 4 more sections of bamboo on this stick, which I’ve cut up for easy air transportation.

Hopefully I’ll make more flutes and share some recordings! It’s fun and rewarding, so if you play flute or any musical instrument, give it a shot.

Let me give you an example of how the music buying process should work:

Last week, I found a band called The Decemberists on iTunes, and since I liked their sound from the samples, I went out and bought their CD “Castaways and Cutouts” at Ameoba the very next day. The CD was so good that I listened to it nonstop for the next three days, and found out that the band was releasing a new CD (Picaresque) the very next tuesday.

Preface: Keep in mind that the only reason I care about audio fidelity and sound quality is that I care about good music. I love music of all kinds, and I believe it deserves faithful reproduction. I make it a point never to forget why I strive for better quality audio.

The trend in recorded audio quality has been a bell curve over the last hundred years or so. From the phonograph to the LP to higher quality recording and digital mastering, to the slight step down with the move from vinyl to CD, music is moving today toward a huge decline with the advent of “perceptual compression” like mp3 and other formats. The music industry should know that it’s their fault entirely that this decline happened, and that it led to the entire mp3 revolution, the file-sharing predicament, and the eventual decline of the physical media.

My favorite song of the day is off the new Postal Service single We Will Become Silhouettes—it’s called “Be Still My Heart,” and it gives me chills. If you liked Give Up, go grab this single just for this song. It’s like The District Sleeps Alone, except happy and optimistic instead of depressing and slow. The now playling list will say I’ve only played it once, but that’s because it doesn’t update when you play the same song over and over 15 times in a row. I might manually edit the database to reflect that…

It’s raining here in Berkeley, and as I like to do when it’s raining, I sit down at the piano and improvise some rainy day music. I used my iRiver to make this quick little recording of about 10 minutes (9:57 to be exact) of that, and considering I’ve got all the space and bandwidth in the world now, I thought I’d share it with you.

Note that the recording is decent, but not that good. I basically took an old pair of headphones, plugged them into the stereo mic jack, and placed them inside the piano. It sounds pretty cool. Very ambient.

“Rainy Day Music” by Tristan Harward
30-second mp3 Sample – 352 KB
mp3 – 4.6 MB - 64kbps
Ogg Vorbis – 5.3 MB - Quality 2 (~70 kbps) *

*(The Ogg Vorbis file is about twice the quality of the mp3 version)