Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Miranda’s Words And Caliban’s Music




Part One: Miranda’s Words


MIRANDA

When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.


The Tempest
Act 1, Sc. 2



Bookstores are closing. Libraries throw away books.
People called “writers” now might as well sell snake oil
or take money to bring rain to drought-stricken towns.
Typewriters didn’t wreck things. Good books got typed up.
Even an insect who could love an alley cat

could craft poetry by hurling itself at keys.
(Maybe that’s the mystery: The pain from the keys.)
But word processors or computers running them
somehow in a mystery raptured away books
and words now are just things people say on the phone.




. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What Is Electric Sugar?

Things Libraries Throw Away

Tanya Tucker’s “Lizzie And The Rainman”

meeting archy and mehitabel

archy and mehitabel
at Wikipedia




Part Two: Caliban’s Music


CALIBAN

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.


The Tempest
Act 3, Sc. 2



What is the future of sound design in your opinion? Are there notable trends and tendencies?

“As computers get more and more powerful, it will get easier to be able to tear sounds apart and put them back together in different ways. Just as in the past, things that now must be rendered offline will eventually happen in real time — especially the kinds of things we currently have to do in spectral editors. The ability to analyze and edit existing audio recordings is becoming so sophisticated that we can now alter audio performances with nearly as much precision as we used to edit MIDI performances. I expect this trend will continue and will become faster and more accurate.”


Scott Plunkett
Musician, Sound Designer
quoted at ABOUT SOUND DESIGN AND HALION
Steinberg Media Technologies



Computers now are taking away the music,
rapturing it away so it can be with words,
making songs in some other place, some distant place,
where people would hurl themselves at machinery
if the machinery could make words and music.

Computers now have made words and music easy
and machinery is rusting, oxidizing
something in the fashion of a person praying.
And every time the ringer on my phone makes noise
I feel something like crying and going to sleep.



























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