YouTube

I just posted this over on thereminworld ... It was in response to a summary of the recent Levnet thread about the various ways to increase YouTube views by the judicious use of titles & tags (amongst other things). It led me to think about YouTube in general, and my own recent adoption of it...

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My own opinion of YouTube has changed somewhat recently. Up until now I've always been in reactive mode... if someone pointed me at a video, I'd watch it (standard stuff... stupid kid blowing himself up and the like), but since my theremin journey began, I've started to see it as an extremely useful tool. Providing a platform for the exposure of minority interests is where YouTube excels. Without it I would not have had such an exposure to the theremin's community, output, or capabilities. By definition, when talking of music, words can only go so far.

Taking YouTube as a whole, it's interesting to look at why people post. To a great extent "because they can" is a solid argument if we embrace the idea of the media belonging to the masses (rather than corporate entities) being the new model. This is a concept that I whole-heartedly support... and maybe there's room for a discussion about Marshall McLuhan's view in another place.

Looking more closely at theremin offerings (and excluding the likes of the theremin cat etc.) they can be broken down into a few simplistic categories:

Natural performers... people who would be the first up at an open mike night at a local venue. The world needs entertainers... God bless 'em.

Educators... having once been an educator I understand the need to share. Some of these videos are put out there simply because someone knows how to do something and wants to help others. It should be noted that a good instructional video is not as easy to make as it looks... teachers of the world, I salute you.

Community communicators... you know your audience and want to share amongst a relatively small group. Posts are made welcoming critique and suggestions. Once upon a time these people would have been the "bedsit" musicians with no outlet. Now they can share... and we are all better off for it because there are some real gems out there.

Promotion... give a taste of what you have to offer. Throw it out there on the YouTube platform with the hope that people may find their way to your other outlets. This may be for for traffic, sales, politics or whatever.

Vanity... never underestimate the power of ego. Unless clinically debilitating (at either extreme) ego is a good thing. It defines us. It's who we are.

In truth (well, in my opinion) most of the theremin videos posted on YouTube do not fall into any single category, but have a healthy mix of many of the elements listed above. My own attempts were posted with some trepidation (and a little anonymity).

I look forward to watching the developments.

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Two posts in one day? I must be getting into this blogging thing :)

Frustration...

This is frustrating. I'm having a lot of fun tackling the theremin learning curve... while it's easy to get some interesting dog-fart noises out-of-the-box, to impose your will on the output takes some diligence and practice. I'm getting to the point where I can imagine what I want and my first attempt will not be a million miles away (by that I mean it's still half a million miles off!). Add to this all the video stuff I'm trying to get to grips with and it's pretty much killing all my spare time... and I'm having a blast!

Unfortunately, I have to leave my adopted home (New York) and go back to London for a couple of weeks... no computer, no theremin, no internet... I've developed a nervous tick already! I don't watch that much television (hardly any in fact), and like a lot of people I use the internet for most of my entertainment.

I'll take the old laptop and maybe I'll find an unsecured wi-fi :) Fingers crossed.

Industry part 1

I just added "Industry part 1". Just a short piece that uses footage from "Master Hands", a 1936 documentary made for Chrysler. Again, it's multi-tracked theremin, recorded and post-processed on the Mac (GarageBand this time). The video was sliced'n'diced in Final Cut. The repeated percussion comes from an Apple Loops collects.

I'm still feeling my way with both the Moog Etherwave and generating the visuals. In fact, I'm feeling my way with all aspects of publishing on the internet! Maybe I'm a little late to the party, but I'm getting totally confused with the available vehicles for publishing my "work".

OK, so here we have a blog where I can rattle on and give some insight into the though process and maybe some technical details of the audio/visual production. YouTube seems to be the obligatory platform for publication of the work, and this blog thing seems to be reasonably well integrated for attaching individual videos to posts and having a selection on the sidebar. But what about MySpace? I've got an account, but I'm buggered if I know how to set it up properly. It all seems fairly redundant... except for maybe the MySpace community aspect. Apart from that, MySpace seems to have the most screwed-up business model and user-hostile interface that I've come across (maybe it's just me). So, for the moment, I'll stick to the blog for my keyboard diarrhoea (I can never spell that word... it's amazing what a Google search on "the shits" will produce) and YouTube for audio/visual content.

I'm getting completely bogged down with the public domain archives (www.archive.org)... there's so much great footage to use as source material that I can completely lose myself for an evening. Strange as it may seem, I still manage to find and use stuff that quite a few people have already used. I guess there's not as much "good stuff" as I thought. After I posted "Daughter of Horror" I did a YouTube search and found that the original movie is far more popular than I imagined. Maybe I need to look a little more carefully at what I select... dig deeper and find some stuff that a little less "immediate".

I guess it's the nature of the beast... we're given a cornucopia of source material that we all plunder for the "best" bits. It's early days... hopefully I'll develop my own style and technique that will leave me less derivative. I don't feel too bad about it though as it's all part of the learning process... but there's sometimes a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism :)

Daughter of Horror

For those that are interested, here are the technical details:

Audio: Moog Etherwave Theremin directly connected to the line-in of a Mac Pro. Multi-tracking and digital processing (on-board effects) with Logic Pro. Mixed-down and exported as an aiff file.

Video: Public Domain from www.archive.org - The piece was originally issued in 1955 as "Dementure", and then in 1958 as "Daughter of Horror". Original mpeg file converted to dv with VisualHub. Very little post production done, just a few edits from the opening ten minutes. I wanted to avoid a processed mash-up for this one.

The Theremin allows for expression unbounded by the limitations inherent with traditional instrumentation. Frets, keys and any standard intonation put the player in a box he has to break out of. While capable of creditable emulation of some more traditional instruments (violin/viola/vox humana), the Theremin stands out (to me) as an instrument of exploration.

Inspiration... www.thereminworld.com is undoubtedly one of the best resources on the net for the Theremin-curious. I must single out one of its members, Gordon Charlton, as someone whose work I keep returning to ... working as "Beat Frequency", his new album "The Chordless Chord" is now available on iTunes.

Gordon, I'll try to make my next piece less derivative :)