TMBWOD Audio Production

A full day working on the production for The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death audiobook. This is the fun part, made so much easier by Prometheus! After maximising the basic recordings I apply basic dynamics, then load those waves into Prometheus to apply effects, always a high pass filter (plan voice recordings are always too bass heavy), a noise gate, and a tiny bit of reverb.

After that, special effects for the work in hand. I've applied a tinny voice filter to Arturo, the funny robot man, a reedy voice to the gramophone, a telephone effect for God, and a thinner voice for Adam, the mechanical child. For the main computer of the trans-dimensional gateway, I used the very retro sounding AnalogX speech synthesizer. I experimented with the DEC Talk synthesizer (as used by Stephen Hawking!) but that sounded too realistic!

One tricky voice was for 2me, the emotional spirit entity. I read it plain but thought that a female squeaky voice might work. Turning up the pitch sounded good enough, but not intelligible enough, so I decided to tag on a sine wave which tracked the amplitude. This seemed to work well, fitting the description of a 'smooth glass' voice.

The main song was included, and I made a small edit of music, a few notes, for the introduction.

Then it was a matter of rendering out the final files and making tiny volume adjustments so make all waves between -20 and -21dB.

All is set for proofing now. I may re-record parts if I'm particularly unhappy with elements, though this would be troublesome at the moment. The entire book is a little over 5 hours.

TMBWOD Audiobook First Draft, Complete Game Bundle

Completed the basic recording of The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death audiobook today, and started the process for the balancing and volume levels. The first chapter is, unusually, a song, so I had to sing this today too. More than a song, it's one of the most difficult songs to sing I've ever written! It ranges from G2 to A4 and changes key too, all in 8 short lines.

If I had the opportunity I would perhaps make a few changes to the text, a few. The punctuation needs some changes, as I tended to read this differently to how it was written. I spotted one or two actual mistakes, small words here and there, and there were a few moments of 'I could do better' - but on the whole I still like the book a lot. I'm still proud of it, still think it's one of the best things I've done as an artist, and it's still tragic that the world of literature is oblivious to it. Some parts, like the telephone, bed-side LED clock, and computer references place it firmly in the late 20th or early 21st century, so it's not timeless, but much of it is.

I'm in a flux of emotions. The year I wrote it, 2012, was something of an annus mirabilis for me; that book, The Love Symphony, the Richard Dadd painting and cabinet, and many great artworks as I charged from one thing to another. Can I do the same? I must try twice as hard to better myself.

The year feels special, like a year of change, and I want to push to do better things, the best things, to try to improve and learn, to strive.

Another job done today is the release of a 'complete set' bundle of my games on Steam. There are one or two games not deemed worthy of the $100 release fee; Bool, Firefly, Breakout Velocity, Outliner. There are always more I could add. I could make a better, bigger Yinyang, and could improve most of these games. Almost all of them were made in 2002, another annus mirabilis, in which I founded Bytten, Cornutopia Games, and IndieSFX; the foundations of my first period of growth.

I'll spend tomorrow working on the technical audio for TMBWOD. There are opportunities for special audio effects, but it's a big book, a huge job, perhaps not worth it. The readings did make me feel like an actor, I enjoyed some of the character voices, and inwardly laughed at others; but all are good experience. All showcase myself as an author as well as performer.

If I did more of these I would choose my next most popular books; How To Organise Your Computer Files, and the William Blake poems, which I get nothing for (despite my illustrations, Amazon consider it public domain). There are probably countless version of Blake's poems in audio form, probably read by great actors, but it would again be a showcase of my skills, and something of a legacy if I am lucky.

The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death Audiobook

Two more days of audiobook recording for The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. I've already read as much as all of The Intangible Man book yet am only about 60% of the way through. Many chapters are 40 to 50 minutes.

My mood is stoic. Life is about the survival of the fittest. The fittest are whom? The most resilient. Fitness is not about strength or power or surging forth but informational resilience to harsh conditions.

TMBWOD Audiobook, Proto-Viral Philosopher

So many options for things I may do, and anything is really possible. Creating new things feels different than working on old things, but then working on old things often means creating new things for them! The small video talking about The Myth Of Sisyphus is fine, and perhaps it's a good idea to make a promotional video of sorts for each album, and each book, and each painting, and each game; but again, there is the question of workload vs. value. Everything is ultimately valuable, and anything justifiable if rationalised.

I've sold a couple of audiobooks, after recording two in January, and, as with having sheet music for all of my albums, having audio versions of all of my books seems like a good idea, so today I've charged into recording an audiobook for The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. Recorded 3 of the 14 chapters today, though the first chapter is (I'm sure you know) a short song, so there are really 13 chapters.

I've been postings paintings and links to existing works almost daily on social media this year and my Philosopher painting has had an explosion in views overnight and on BlueSky today, a first such result for me which, on its own has been an inspiration and source of some happiness.

Deborah's holiday and the Olympics have both been a distraction in the past week, contributing to a lack of focus. Hopefully this focus on TMBWOD (and perhaps even afterwards, another book, perhaps Deep Dark Light, perhaps another) will acts as a stabilising force.

Wuthering Heights, Einstein

Many slow days, at the end of the sheet music project and searching for new directions. Watched the new 'Wuthering Heights' film with Deborah on Tuesday and rather liked it, though the overtly artistic moments seemed consciously arty rather than genuine somehow, so much borrowed from Lynch, and many painting references; Vermeer, Ingres, Millet, even Francis Bacon. Excessive borrowing is not influence it's struggling for identity, someone without a creative soul desperately trying to appear artistic.

I have many possibilities for direction. I've considered everything from a new album, to more sheet music, to more audiobooks, or painting plans, or even revising my old game Bool.

Today I've toyed with a music sequence for a song called 'Einstein' but, working on the music led to a melody which didn't fit good words. I wrote some better words but these have bent the melody in strange ways. Stll unsure if I should work on it at all. Too split. Too many choices.

Ironverb II

A slow day. I had hoped to do some work on promoting my music but did not even begin.

I did, instead, develop a new reverb for Prometheus, Ironverb II. The original Ironverb is a tinny plate-type reverb, with a band-pass filter and limited settings (not even bandwidth for the filter). For Ironverb II I've added an internal delay to the reverb tail, plus left/right (and front/back/up/down - Prometheus is natively 6-channel) controls over the delay gain and diffusion. Diffusion affects the hardness of the reflection, so it's useful for creating new surface-spatial types. I added a 'Preverb' parameter, which is the amount of reverb tail that isn't in the delay. When zero, this makes it only a delayed reverb, creating an odd effect. All of these settings are useful for creating lots of variety. The Dry (original sound) can be turned down if required too.

Doing this revealed a small bug in Prometheus, so that's now updated to v3.83.

This feels like a distraction. I must target something new. Life is short.

Digitisation Devaluation and Targeted Advertising

I thought about shadow libraries, archives of books shared without heed to licencing or remunerating authors or publishers, and I was struck with the idea that the reason that much of the world has lived in poverty and economic stagnation since 2009 is not the real-estate 'global financial crisis' of that time, but due to the rise of the internet. Over time, everything digital has become increasingly devalued and increasingly worthless. This applies particularly to text-based factual information. Encyclopedias were once expensive, rare, treasured, even bought as investments. Now these are nearly worthless, as is so much journalistic content. News media and quality journalism has been all but destroyed by free news found online.

The things of value are those things not digitised, or not yet digitised, but it seems that the trend for digitisation will continue, and with it the devaluation of that content. I wonder if the total amount of value online is constant? It would be interesting to know the ratios of valuable digital information (some digital items are, of course, sold) vs. cheap or free digital information. Of course, much data is also lost over time, also something of a tragedy.

The value of digital items is mostly lost by piracy or free acquisition in legal ways. There are, of course many digital items intended to be low value from the outset, such as automatically created content.

That which retains value is that which is not yet digital, or that, like paintings and sculpture, which cannot be digitised fully. AI perhaps represents a start of the digitisation of personality.

Of course, our personalities are sold as commodities by social media to construct an advertising profile, this is the business model of these giants, so they consider this information valuable. I remain unsure whether it is. I'm sceptical about targeted advertising, it seems to me something of a scam. Social media companies make money by charging others to advertise, not by selling anything of value. Those advertisers have little choice but accept the if the 'personalised advertising' theory whether it actually works or not. Before social media, ads were not personalised, yet advertising was a thriving business, and the concentrated attention of people on social media would, I posit, still drive a lot of commerce without any targeting.

MOPO Sheet Music

Completed and filed the sheet music for Music Of Poetic Objects. Each album refines the standards and look of the music, so even when this mammoth, planned multi-year plan is complete, there will be a huge amount of work to publishing it somehow - yet I've now completed 37 albums of complete sheet music, with 14 albums remaining.

Since it's re-recording, I'd not listed The End And The Beginning on Bandcamp, the old version was there, so I've prepared that today. A full day of seemingly little progress. So it goes. Onwards we march.