Le Mythe de Sisyphe

Here's my latest sound design project. Have a listen to Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, then stick around for the explanation.

Le Mythe de Sisyphe

For this piece, I took Albert Camus' essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) in the original French and isolated all the letters that also represent musical notes (A-G). To make the chord progression that carries throughout the piece, I used only the first paragraph and determined the total number of letters in the words from which these letters came and translated them into musical intervals. For example:

"par" has one musical note, A. It also has three letters in it, so I made a chord with a root A and a third interval.

I did this for all the musical notes in the first paragraph and used whole notes for the chords.

Taking the second paragraph, I again isolated all the musical notes, then used the remaining non-musical letters to determine the rhythm of these notes. I counted the non-musical notes after each musical note and based on the number assigned the preceeding note either a whole(7+ non-musical intervening letters), half (5-6), quarter(3-4), eighth(1-2) or sixteenth(0) note rhythm. Here's an example:

The phrase "ce long" has three musical notes- C, E and G. The C has no non-musical letters between it and the next musical note E, so it gets a 16th note value. The E, on the other hand, has three non-musical letters between it and the G, so it would be given a quarter note vaue.

I repeated this process for the remaining pargraphs in the essay, and assigned intuitively each paragraph an instrument. I then staggered the instruments so they entered and exited in an acceptable fashion.

Finally, I concluded the piece with all instruments playing Albert Camus' signature, a chord composed of two As, a C, a B and an E.

A Flawed Call to Arms

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, Unite!

You "have nothing to lose." That's not enough to motivate me. "A world to win" is too abstract. Give me something tangible to gain.



Count me out. I prefer the status quo.

A 2 am rumination

In reading the Communist Manifesto, I'm coming away with one major thought. Too many of the authors' defenses hinge on "You fault us for wanting to do away with X? Well nine tenths of the population do not have X, so this is not a change," or "...X is a bourgeois-created illusion."

I want to tear apart this book and lay out all the arguments based on assumption and faulty logic. It makes me mad that a book like this changed the face of the world.

Here We Go Again

The fish laid eggs again. I didn't think any were viable at first, but second inspection showed me some have little baby fish growing in them. Get ready for round two...

A Writing Prompt

Taken from Dan Wiencek's "Thirteen Writing Prompts" on McSweeney's:


Write a scene showing a man and a woman arguing over the man's friendship with a former girlfriend. Do not mention the girlfriend, the man, the woman, or the argument.

Write a story that ends with the following sentence: Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.

A husband and wife are meeting in a restaurant to finalize the terms of their impending divorce. Write the scene from the point of view of a busboy snorting cocaine in the restroom.


I found these to be worth sharing.

Original

Sound Time

Maybe it's the fact that I haven't slept more than 4 hours in the past two days, it's nearly 6 am and I'm hopped up on caffeine, but I'm really getting a kick out of the "songs" I did for my sound design class. We had to fiddle around with the es2 synthesizer in Logic and we weren't allowed to use anything else. Here's what I came up with. For some reason everything I do for this class is nonsensical, but I can't stop laughing (mostly at the Leprechaun Parade, put on headphones and close your eyes, you'll see what I'm talking about).

Theoretical Music
Parade of the Leprechauns
Crystalline Fructose

Oh, Christ.

x

happy bright and smily post.

i'm taking more requests for the future as well.

Fish Update

They're all dead.

The aquarium taken over by fungus, only a few baby fishes hadn't entirely decomposed by the time I came back from break.

I suppose ten days is too long of a time to leave newborns with a babysitter. Lesson learned.

Fish Update

I went home last night and did a new count of the fry-lets. Some of those I previously thought dead moved about and relocated to the side of the tank with their brethren. New count is 63 living baby fishes.

Some of the larger ones were swimming around. Exciting times.

Another shoot.

More stills coming soon.

Frying

I came into my room today to find a bunch of tiny white balls floating around my goldfish tank. After staring at them wondering how the tank got so polluted for a while, I decided they were eggs and started trasferring them to my holding tank. I got a good amount of them moved over and then consulted the internet for information on how to properly care for my potential new fishlets.

Much to my dismay, the internet said goldfish eggs that are white and opaque have fallen prey to fungus and will not hatch. Bummed out, i started to throw them out.

Then I noticed a little wiggling black line. I looked closer to find two little dots on one end. Fish fry!

I went back to the main tank and started seeing tons of them!

Nobody ever told me I was observant. Not only did I not notice viable eggs floating around the tank for 5 days, I hadn't noticed my approximately 5 day old fish babies either. Oh well.

I set to transferring them to the small tank so the parents wouldn't eat them. When all was said and done, I have approximately 28 living fishlets clinging to the side of the tank, and almost as many dead ones lying on the bottom. I guess my method of scooping them up in a pint glass and dumping them into the tank was a bit too much of a strain on their fragile little bodies. Oops.

I'd post pictures, but the camera I have right now wont focus on the fishlets because they're too small. More updates will come when things happen.

Wish me luck in raising my new little babies.

On a side note, now I understand why Betamax was chasing Pongo around the cage all the time, pushing into her. Turns out they weren't fighting over food; turns out they were making sweet sweet fish love. Oh, and Pongo is apparently now a girl. Who knew?

First Sign of Life

The production's been plagued by scheduling problems and logistical nightmares.  However, there's been two successful shoots.  Here're some stills.

A Preview

A Preview of things to come using old footage.  Rough effects test video.  

Hello, Sound World!

I just finished my first sound design assignment. We had to cut apart a song and edit it to make something else entirely. I chose the Bad Brains' "Sailin' On" as my source material and came up with this. The nuances are essential to the listening experience, so throw in your smokin' buds, toss on your ultrasones and have a listen.

Here's a link to the source material. The song's right but the video isn't. Close your eyes.

Artist Statement

We had to write artist statements for our thesis catalog recently. Here's mine:

The world itself is an absurd, unfair and frequently hostile place. At any point a meaningful life can lose all its meaning. It is during an existential confrontation with unrelenting external forces and the resultant breakdown of assumed truths in which we are most in touch with our condition as humans. Matt’s work eschews the idea of cinema as mere entertainment or a vehicle of escapism and favors a sense of realism that strives towards revelations of the human condition. Matt finds kinship in Joseph Conrad, who once stated, “My task…is to make you hear, to make you feel – and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.”

He's Not There

Click here to view.

Slightly edited for internetableness. Click above to play video.

Potato Pirates Video

Quality kinda sucks, but hey, it's Youtube.


Sadly, I had absolutely nothing to do with it.