Saturday, October 21, 2006

Bill Compton - IDEA: The "hidden" music in the picture.

Click to enlarge

The ORIGINAL PHOTO was grabbed by Dan "Kana" Covington back in the 1970's and caught Bill in what I believe is one of his best images. Keep in mind this is a computer artist's rendition, not an exact image.

The rendition you see here was hugely shrunk from a work by a friend of mine in Canada. It looks like ice crystals or salt crystals or an in Indian sand painting. The version he did originally, was big enough to print a mural or billboard from and it took his Macintosh HOURS of high-speed calcs to construct. I have it saved on CD somewhere. This is the kind of image that CAN be a composite of many thousands of other images, shrunk up so tiny as to resemble grains of sand.

Now, I know I am really fantasizing here.. but WHAT IF each of those data clusters [grains of salt or sand] - when you zoom in on them - were an MP3 recording of a song? What if all those songs were selected from the playlists at KCAC and KDKB and made LISTENABLE and DOWNLOADABLE from a KCAC Lives! Memorial Website? The idea is that such an image would be in essence a MENU of say, random songs - each to be "discovered" by the browser? Wanna play? Dan Page has the larger pic posted on his website in a version that is over a MEG in size. Just click the headline.

Call me crazy (you won't be the first) but this might be the type of online memorial that would spread the experience and make it work!

Now.... please excuse me. I must continue my experiments in the basement. Oh sure, I know we don't HAVE a basement - but it's a great way to hide my perpetual motion machine.

Ronco

1 comment:

freespeak@gmail.com said...

This was sent from Dan "Kana" Covington alias "The Electrician" via email from Hawaii - but belongs as a post here on the blog soooo.....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ron,

This is just too good, So the idea is that you run the cursure over the pic. of Bill and each stop along the way is a song from the KCAC "playlist" [like we really did NOT have a playlist, in the convential Radio Business way]. And you click on it and it plays or downloads. So, if you had it as your desktop, you could play KCAC all day, and you are the DJ. Now we are in the DJ training business, Oh NO Mr. Bill. OH, now I got it, you just want a way to get those LP's of yours back.

Say, what would it take for me to convert my KCAC record collection, I have a turetable, [ not the best quality] and a computer that burns CD's. What do I need to connect up. I think one of my programs, will let me controle the sound. Although, may just a direct reproduction and let someone else, do the enginering. It has been a few years ago that I did production work.

Any Who, Go for it, what will it take?

Daniel, da jungle Man
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ron Sez:

Mariah has been nurturing this idea for some time and we are remembering a buncha stuff Bill loved and played. If we could COLLECT it all somewhere, the pixel-type manu would literally make up a picture of Bill, one could zoom into and click on play or download. So yes, you get the idea,

I can hear Jimmy's anal sphinctre contracting in horror from here. We're talkin seven years of VERY diversified music. Cataloguing it and making it accessible would be a monster project all by itself WITHOUT fancy connections into a picture pixel... so out front, let me say - it ain't practicle without a MAJOR software write! But aesthetically, it would be neat to do.

In any case Andy Olson is well on the way to assembling most of it at Radio Free Phoenix.

RE: how to convert your own tapes and LP's..........

There is a shareware product that I use AND AM STILL LEARNING called "Audacity" which you can G00gle or maybe grab from Download.com still. My son turned me onto it and it is downright amazing. It will do a jillion things AND convert any digitized recording to MP3 or WAV or whatever audio format you choose. It is a COMPILATION PROJECT by SEVERAL audio engineers. It has a high learning curve BUT where there's a will....... Hey, we all got THIS far....

One of the things I like about it is that I can take a 78 and even though I don't have a 78 speed on my turntable, I can play it at 33 or 45, record it, CHANGE THE SPEED on the program itself and it plays back at 78 digitally! Further since the record is so much slower, you hear EVERYTHING on the 78 including the noise in full hi-fi. Just show the program what the surface noise "looks" like and Audacity removes it! Clicks and pops too!

As far as my old LP's Dan... Hey, I still owe you back rent. Just remove the LP's from their sleeves - yes, Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane too... and lay them on you driveway. On a really warm day, they will melt themselves around the gravel and viola! Your driveway is resurfaced and waterproof! No need to thank me - a paving job is kind of overkill for back rent but it's just one way of showing my appreciation for your hospitality that fall.. What was that year - 1973? "Pathway To Glory" with Loggins and Messina was big, I remember.

Thank you!

Ronco