Josh McNeill

Month: October 19, 2011

The race card, you know, like the joker.

October 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

This morning, as I was waiting for class to start, this white guy in my class starts talking to me about a disruptive fellow that sits near him that happens to be black. Now, I haven’t really noticed a problem up to this point but I do sit on the other side of the room. What really struck me is when he said something to the extent of: “Like, what’s this guy’s deal, right? I almost wanna play the race card. I mean, I don’t want to but I dunno.”

What the hell does that even mean and why does this guy I’ve never talked to feel so comfortable using this racist speech with me? Are black people naturally more disruptive than white people or something? I was a bit shocked, flabbergasted even. A moment later he was mentioning how he’s an honor student.

I can only imagine that he had no idea how racist he sounded or realized it immediately after and didn’t even want to bring it up again even just to correct himself. In any case, it’s stored for posterity on my recorder now, probably as one of those moments when someone simply does not listen to themselves.

So it goes.

October 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

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Here lies the last two hard drives I’ll need to finish recording a year of my life.

My roommate mentioned to me the other day how it didn’t seem like I had been doing this for almost a year. It hasn’t seemed like that long to me either; it’s behind just part of my routine. Wake up, change the batteries, download yesterday to my computer while I shower, transfer data from the computer to hard drives while I eat breakfast, format, record.

I think I’m gonna feel a bit naked when this recorder is no longer in my pocket; it’ll be like walking around without a cell phone. But all things must end I suppose and make way for new beginnings. In this case, the new beginning is facing what I’ve gotten myself into by trying to organize and convert 12 terabytes of sounds from the last year into music.

Manga + laughter = …music?

October 9, 2011 / / 0 Comments

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It’s hard to tell which is more strangely humorous: this anime/manga image of a character laughing or the guy I recorded repeatedly laughing out loud on the bus while reading a manga. In any case, I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself regardless of the fact that I had no idea what the joke was.

This got me thinking, what the hell makes laughter alone so funny? Maybe it’s just the situation that the laughter occurs in. This nerd was laughing in a public place, by himself, over something many people wouldn’t even admit to reading. That’s humorous to me. Then again, I know certain people who make anything that’s already funny ten times funnier with their laughter.

There must be some scientific literature on laughter that could shed some light on this, right? Bill Nye or some other “scientist” who’s supposed to be funny has probably done a whole series of experiments to decipher the effects of laughter. Nope. The science guy seems to have failed me. I did end up reading a bit about how you can seemingly understand someone’s emotional state by their voice even if you don’t know their language, though. (If you’re interested, see: Cross-Cultural Recognition of Basic Emotions Through Nonverbal Vocalizations, Sauter et al.; Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language, Pell et al.; Vocal Emotion Recognition Across Disparate Cultures, Bryant, Barrett.)

In any case, I’m hoping that I can use laughter as a compositional device. If the rhythm is the culprit, I can use that maybe to create false expectations and then resolutions. Even if not, it will at least be highly useful for creating rhythms in general. Just think of how many crazy laughs I’ve recorded that can be turned into a frightening army of stupid.

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