Carolina Ghost Towns

Back in 1985 my brother Houston introduced me to Todd Rundgren’s innovative album, A Cappella [sic]. Rundgren used digital sampling to create an album made up only of the human voice. He added distortion and manipulated the sounds to emulate drums and other instruments. Back then this was really impressive, and I was amazed that ... Read More "Multitrack Madness" »

Normally our clan gathers at Christmas, but this year many were going to be gone. So, we decided to get the gang together for Thanksgiving. And what a crowd it was – 2 parents, 7 children, 9 in-laws, 12 grandchildren, 8 great-grandchildren, 1 aunt, 1 uncle, and 1 boyfriend, plus several dogs. 38 in the ... Read More "Taylor Family Thanksgiving 2009" »

Part 2 of 2 In Part 1 I covered the easy stuff. Working with audio is trivial compared with working with video. Not only do you have many more file types and codecs, but now you’ve got to worry about aspect ratio for HD and compression quality. Given two video files with the exact same …

This is part 1 of a 2-part series… I’m a BIG fan of embedding. The ability to take media files from one location and use them in another context creates learning environments that are rich and appealing to students. I like it even better when the process is simple. Embedding is now a standard feature ... Read More "Easy Audio Embedding" »

UPDATE: Sadly, Aviary has discontinued this wonderful series of products. The links below are no longer available. Today I got word that Aviary.com has released a new online audio editing tool called Myna. This joins Aviary’s growing collection of online tools with bird names, including Phoenix, the image editing program, and Raven, a vector graphics ... Read More "Exploring an Aviary" »

This morning I loaded up the photo and recording gear and headed up to Furman for the 2009 Greenville Scottish Games. It was a great day to be outside – finally no rain, and not too terribly hot. I decided to check out the games, and see if I could get a bit more information ... Read More "2009 Scottish Games at Furman" »

Strange sensations coming over me Something I can’t explain Suddenly there’s an endless void where I used to keep my brain I gotta see a doctor, but I’m too wasted to phone one Wanna customize my van and I don’t even own one Ah, ah, ah, Oh! I’m turning into a heavy metal head Ah, ... Read More "Metal Head" »

Saturday morning I skipped out on a bunch of gardening chores that Laura had lined up for me and went to a shape note singing at Furman. When I arrived, there were about thirty singers already in their open square configuration, singing away. Unlike the William Walker Memorial Singing at Wofford a couple of months ... Read More "Shape Note Singing at Furman" »

Local Greenville blogger Eric Rogers stumbled across one of my posts about tilt-shift photography and thought he’d give it a try. Eric is a filmmaker, so he took things a step further and tried to tilt-shift a video clip. The results are quite good. Here’s a link to his finished product in Quicktime .MOV format… ... Read More "Tilt-Shift Video" »

As a child, I had a notion of what a perfect Christmas would be like. It didn’t involve gifts, but more importantly what happened and who was present. Keep in mind that I was about seven, and this was back in the 1960’s. My perfect Christmas would begin by having Christmas Eve on a Friday ... Read More "The Perfect Christmas" »