I was able to go to one day of the Oly Old Time Festival, a yearly event celebrating American folk musics, and take a couple field recordings. There are three recordings of square dances, two of the family dance and one of the night dance. I enjoyed myself immensely, learned new perspectives from the workshops and came away very happy.

I modeled the electronics after a square dance that was taught where there are two lines of dancers with one dancer at the head of both (they used a stuffed animal and I didn’t catch the name of the dance). The head of the line takes a partner and takes them down to the end, and the dancer who didn’t get chosen becomes the new chooser. I haven’t seen this form of shuffling before, so I tried to put into a musical format: each of the seven dancers is a different tone/part of a field recording (one is violins & 275hz, another is shouts & 100hz, another is stomps & 440, etc.). The end of the lines are the softest, and are split into the right and left channels, getting louder as they approach the chooser, while the chooser is in both channels and oscillates in volume a bit. Hardish to hear, but it holds up to analysis, which really is all that matters in music anyway right? Here is an image of the pure data patch. VERY messy, but I didn’t really have a fully realized plan as to what needed to happen, so I had to make up a lot as I went.

Thank you to Emily, Erik, and Ruby.

(View the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzfGNMOt3a0. [It’s way cooler to see the pictures of what is happening in real time.])

Me and Brianna are getting married!

The first eleven minutes of the podcast are the actual surprise proposal itself. If you want to get a feel for the whole date, the rest of the podcast is a time capsule of everything that happened that night. You can check out what she said on the way to meet me in the car, what we talked about before and after dinner, and what we talked about after the proposal happened. Also included is us going out to pick up the ring a couple days later.

I wanted to create a whole new soundscape for the proposal, but I also wanted Bri to recognize and understand what was happening as quickly as possible just with the sound alone, so some of the sounds were taken from the episode I did for her birthday. (https://www.cooperschlegel.com/lullab... )

Thank you to Dale and Sue for not giving up anything!
Thank you to Morgan and Isaac for the beautiful photographs (https://www.mosaaic.com/)!
Thank you to Ryan and Tarissa for bringing bluetooth speakers and for being there!
Thank you to Mom, Dad, and Isabelle for bringing the canopy, setting things up, and relaying my instructions to everyone.

We love you all!

This is the last part of the San Diego series. Two recordings from San Diego Zoo, one from behind the flamingo pen where me and Brianna fed the flamingos dog soaked in water (the watery tchick-tchick-tchick sound is the flamingos feeding). We caught sunset in Owen’s Aviary, which was amazing. The species in the aviary are: Bali Mynah, Black-naped Fruit-dove, Black-naped Oriole, Chinese Hwamei, Collared Finchbill, Collared Imperial Pigeon, Collared Imperial-pigeon, Collared Lory, Cotton Pygmy Goose, Dollarbird, Eclectus Parrot, Edward’s Pheasant, Emerald Dove, Fairy Bluebird, Fawn-breasted Bowerbird, Greater Necklaced Laughingthrush, Iris Lorikeet, Lesser Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, Malay Great Argus Pheasant, Mariana Fruit-dove, Metallic Pigeon,Metallic Starling, Nicobar Pigeon, Papuan Mountain-pigeon, Red-billed Malkoha, Red-tailed Laughing Thrush, Spotted Laughing Thrush, Sulawesi Green Imperial-pigeon, Victoria Crowned Pigeon, White-bellied Imperial-pigeon, White-breasted Kingfisher, White-breasted Wood Swallow, White-eared Bulbul, White-eared Catbird, White-rumped Shama, and White-throated Ground-dove. Also in this episode is tecolote (owl in Spanish) canyon, which was around where we stayed. My parents and I went for a hike around sunrise, so birds were super active then too.

This is part two of three of our trip to southern California. About halfway in the middle of our trip we drove out to LA to see my aunt Deanna and uncle John. They met us in Griffith Park, and took us to Chinatown for dinner and to see the Thiên Hậu Taoist Temple. You can hear all the fans they had running to circulate air, as well as a huge standing bell that was being struck during our visit.

I went with my family (Mom, Dad, Isabelle, and Brianna) to San Diego for the holidays, and got some good field recordings. I’m going to put them in the shows in the order I recorded them in, which presents some challenges, especially with the overall narrative. The two field recordings in this episode are from silver strand beach and from San Diego bay, where we spent a couple hours out on the water. You’ll hear waves, winches, and the voices of all those present (which makes it a little less sleep inducing this week, sorry, we’ll get back to no voices this week).

When I was taking the field recording on silver strand, the sun was setting, we got there just in time to see it approach and go under the horizon line, which meant a whole lot of deep oranges and blacks and maybe some grey-green around the edges, and as the sky got darker the street lights came on and the stars started poking through. We saw Venus!

I found my halloween recordings! My recording device attaches a date to each recording, which is always in the year of 2007. It’s almost like digital preemptive time travel. I was searching for files to delete to free up space on my computer and found my old recordings! Hurrah!

There are two big field recordings in this episode, one was my initial walk from around the capitol blvd bridge over I-5 through south olympia, down past the fountain by the capitol, and into a restaurant on 4th ave. The second doesn’t really follow a route, but stays in south olympia the whole time.

Listening back, there weren’t many “trick or treat”s but that’s what I remembered. There were a lot of “thank you”s though, and a hearty rendition of jingle bells, as well as a “stop being so rude.”

I started playing in Hospice this last week and have my second attempt tomorrow. Wish me luck!

I went through some old home videos (the source of the fuzz you’ll here in this) and picked out 54 different soundclips, which I plugged into my computer so it could choose between them at random. As always when I give my computer the ability to make all the choices it surprises me with what it gets attracted to. About half (~25) of the soundclips made it into this episode I think, and I’m only basing that on things I didn’t hear. There were a number of clips that only played once and a number that were played very many times despite all being equally likely to appear. I also played electric bass for this episode exclusively!

Although this is for my Dad’s birthday, I’d also like to dedicate this episode to my sister and mother as well.

Unfortunately all of my halloween field recordings were lost in the sands of time, so I had to take more field recordings this week. I decided to go the mall for some field recordings in the food court and outside the movie theater. I also took a walk on Kenyon st. going away from the mall and onto Harrison, you can hear someone ordering fast food in the episode.

Malls are strange places; the mall here in Olympia is hardly any different than the malls I've been to in Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, and New York. Much like airports, they all have sounds in common. They exist on the same plane of reality and then you walk outside and it's something completely different, only unlike an airport you don't emerge into a different place, it's just your local neighborhood again. Wild!