Mummies Don't have Electricity (Post School Stress)

In an underground room I cut the head off of a mummified corpse with a steak knife. The corpse had been a prominent man and had a black scar on his left cheek. I was going to use his head a MIDI controller.

Of course it didn't work. Mummies don't have any electricity. No damn brainwaves to control sound waves. I felt very guilty and left the head in the theatre.

Summary of Last Semester

Mainly what I did this semester was take 8 classes and create 3 theses. I also learned how to swim.

For my music thesis I recorded samples and made instruments out of them. Bottles clanking created high percussion and water-filled woks made for sweeping wobble-lines. I got tons of gamelan sounds and focused on lining up the pulsing patterns to create a polyrhythmic structure.

I thought it would be super cool to create an interface that used body-motion to control music, and realized it would be possible with a Kinect sensor, Ableton Live, Synapse, and MaxMSP. At my senior show: "The X Sound Festival" I performed the piece: "Dream Leftovers" using a minimalist dance to control elements of the song. It appeared that I was floating because I was lit by backlight, wearing a UV costume I had made, and standing on one leg to use one foot to pan a track, In the end I rolled off the stage into the audience.

My teacher was powerful mad at me for putting a dead coyote in her dishwasher. Actually she was mad for not having a DVD for the X Sound Festival (the DVD drive in the lab was broken). I didn't realize it was an issue because everything worked fine using my friend's laptop, including preemptive messages I had made such as: "Shake into a New Dimension is an application downloaded from the ether, are you sure you want to open it?" and "The X Sound Festival has unexpectedly quit, reopen? Once I had been scolded for being unprofessional for an hour or so I felt ashamed and have hopefully learned my lesson.

 

Here's the part where I get to brag however: after being thoroughly chided my teacher commented on how impressive it was that I had written two songs and made a music video in three weeks, along with creating a multi-media performance art piece. She commented that I had accomplished more with the Kinect sensor technology in a few weeks than the combined efforts of the technical director of Mills and a graduate student had over the course of four months. 

Once I was thoroughly burnt out on working hard I just continued to work hard. I directed my first large video crew and finished my psychology thesis. I had an average of 3 hours a day commuting by bus throughout the semester and would use it to do research for this thesis. I ended up writing about music as a metaphor for brain function, discussing how cross-cerebral neural oscillation synchrony may be a crucial component for cognitive function. There are many brain disturbances that are correlated with brainwave synchrony abnormalities and I proposed new research within three of these areas (schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders and Parkinson’s disease) involving a relatively new individualized neurofeedback treatment that transforms EEG data into music. 

Now I’m done with my undergraduate degree. I’ve had capstone educational experiences, but it’s still odd not to be thinking about what classes I’ll take next semester. Now I’m busy trying to find a job and an apartment but also making myself deadlines for individual projects like writing an album, making a few DJ sets, making a line of paintings, creating a fashion line, studying for the GRE, Researching all the neuroscience literature on dreaming and learning basic Photoshop, calculus and physics.