My life

Happy birthday to me and such

On Wednesday, I turned 24, twice as old as I was when I was 12!  It’s like I’ve lived to be 12 years old twice.  So I now enter my 25th year of life, and this website enters it’s 7th year of existence, if I’m doing that math right.

During my 24th year of life, I completed 9 pieces of music, opuses 46 through 54.  That’s not too bad, is it?  Opus 53 and 54 I just wrote in the past week, and they are pretty short pieces.  One is called “Awaken” and is only 1’30”, the other is called “I Will Not Go Home Again” and is only 2’12”.  I’m not sure yet whether or not I’ll put them on the album.

And I’ve already finished opus 55 yesterday, on Thanksgiving.  It’s a 4 minute lullaby I call “The Secret Lullaby.”  Why I call it a “secret” lullaby is a secret, I’m afraid, because it is a secret, and thus, a “secret” lullaby.  It is a very big secret, though, and you can’t handle the truth!  I think I will definitely put it on the album.  I cannot stop listening to it; I have severe “pleased composer syndrome” with it.

We haven’t celebrated my birthday yet, so I can’t tell you what presents I got.  Is 24 too old to be getting presents?  Of course not, you should get presents forever!

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.  We went out to eat, and I didn’t eat much, but I was stuffed.  My appetite is about a third of what it was during high school.  Of course, my backwards sleeping schedule could also be partly to blame; at the time of eating my body wanted to sleep, not digest.

Now it’s early Friday morning (about 2 AM).  I do hope to get some cheap blu-rays or something on sale today, but I’m not going anywhere early to stand in lines.  If they run out of the good stuff, so be it.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Money money money

Not much, but some.  Today I got my first ever payment for writing music, which I put up on TwitPic:

Money! Woohoo!

Ain’t that loverly?  I wasn’t sure what to blur out, so I just blurred most of it out.

My sleeping schedule is currently completely backwards.  I want to stay up all night and sleep during the day.  It’s pretty annoying, since I have work in the mornings every now and then.

I guess that’s it for now.

By S P Hannifin, ago

No NaNo and other stuff instead

I guess NaNoWriMo has officially started!  And … I don’t care.  I’ve once again changed my mind, and will probably not participate this year.  I have a bunch of other stuff I want to do, including finishing my album that I’ve been working on for over a year now.  I’m still about 10 minutes of music away from completing the thing.  I’m currently working on the last section of an unnamed orchestral piece.  I’m orchestrating / composing the climax and end, so it’s almost done.  Then I have four other pieces started that need finishing, though I don’t believe all of them will make it onto the album.  One will probably be called “The Journey Ahead” and I am fairly sure that it will indeed appear on the album as I think it really fits with the spirit of the other pieces.  And one will probably be called “Castle Sky” … that’s my long 15-minute orchestral piece (and still unfinished, but I don’t think it will be much longer).

Oh, I started a new project, one that I know I’ll finish eventually because it requires hardly any work at all from me.  I call it: The Mozart Listening Project.  The objective: to listen to the complete works of Mozart while following along with the scores.  As you can see on the side, I made a page about it.  Because it is just so important.  I just started working through his symphonies.  Got a long way to go.

Android Lastly, I was chatting on a music forum on Friday, and someone mentioned the new Verizon phone coming out called Droid, which will compete with the iPhone (though, of course, that’s some very tough competition).  Looking at the Droid rekindled my interest in creating an app.  It was something I looked into in college, when Google’s Android OS first came out, but somehow lost interest.  (And as far as I can tell, one must have a Mac to use the iPhone SDK, so I don’t think I’ll be trying to develop for the iPhone anytime soon … though, from a business perspective, that’s currently where most of the phone app market is, methinks.)

Anyway, I’m downloading the newest Android SDK and will perhaps try creating something with it.  Having long been interested in game development, two things excite me about the phone app market: 1) It’s rather new, and is still at a stage where a single developer can develop a sellable app by himself.  In most of the video game industry (except perhaps online Flash games), those days are long gone, never to return.  And perhaps one day the phone app industry will be like that too, but it isn’t now.  And 2) it can be very lucrative.  Actually, I’m not sure how lucrative it is.  I’ve heard that some iPhone apps are making millions.  But that’s only a very select few out of tens of thousands, so I suppose it’s like saying that the music industry can be very lucrative.  Well, yes, it can be, but only few a very select few.  Still, I’m guessing the phone app industry is more lucrative than the indie artist industry.  Unfortunately, I’m sure it’s even less lucrative for non-iPhone developers at this time, but who know?  With Google’s more open platform, Android or some similar OS might come to dominate the phone industry, just like Windows now dominate Macs, despite Apple’s oh-so-witty ads.  In fact, I predict that will happen in the next decade or so … Apple may still dominate the iTunes / iPod industry, but the iPhone might meet its demise with a collection of other phones that run the same OS and are thus compatible with the same programs…

And… I guess that’s all I have to say.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Deadline

As you may have noticed, I am no longer concerning myself with the Hours project.  Took too long, obviously.

cds I really want to finish my album before the end of the year; before Christmas if possible.  So I’m going to try giving myself a deadline of October 31st to finish all the music for the album.  October 31st 2011 that is!  No, no, the end of this October.  Part of me hates to give myself a deadline because I would much rather work at my own leisure, composing when I feel like it.  On the other hand, I really want to finish the album.  And I want to get working on other albums.  I’ve got so much music flowing through my head lately that I really want to get out.

Fortunately I only have about 15 more minutes of music to write for the album to be at least 60 minutes long.  So if I can write at least 5 minutes of music a week, I should be set to go.  So for now I’m giving myself until Sunday, October 4th, to write 5 more minutes of music.  I’ll let you know if I succeed or fail.

Then when (or if) I finish the music at the end of October, November will involve getting everything else ready to go, ordering the CD replication, and getting it out there (mostly to CD Baby and Amazon).  I am hoping it will also be the first album of The Worlds Inside series I’m starting.

For a little while, I became a bit interested in trying to replicate some mini CDs.  I thought they might be cheaper since they’re smaller.  After researching around and asking for some quotes (since it seems not that many companies want to publish prices for mini CD replication), it seems it’s actually more expensive, I suppose because it’s just less popular.  It would save on postage though, but not quite enough to make it worthwhile, at least not for a first album.

When you ask for price quotes from a bunch of different companies, some will just email you back a price, others will email your three times before they give you a price letting you know that you will soon be receiving a price, some fill their quotes with guarantees and promises and statistics of how many customers they’ve pleased, and some treat you as if you’ve already signed a deal with them.

Anyway, I haven’t really been up to much [that is not super top secret] lately.  So I won’t write anything else in this post.

By S P Hannifin, ago

A long blathery post

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS

twotowerslive Last Friday my mom and I went to Wolftrap to see a Lord of the Rings concert.  They have an orchestra play all the film music (choirs and soloists included), while projecting the film The Two Towers in HD on a huge screen.  We went to the same concert last year for first Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring, and I blogged about the experience here.

I don’t have much else besides praise for the concert; watching a film like that is just fantastic.  I will say a few things though:

The brass was quite loud.  In the soundtrack recordings, I’m sure they can mix the orchestra sound a bit so the strings have more of a voice, and perhaps the acoustics of Wolftrap’s Filene center have an effect, but when it came to the brassy action parts, the brass was quite loud, drowning out a lot of the orchestra, and sometimes the character’s voices.  The percussion could be quite loud at times too, especially instruments like the bass drum.  But this is not complaint; I love the sound of a booming bass drum.

The speakers popped every now and then a little before and after intermission, which was really annoying.

The choirs were amazing.  I really loved the elvish choir music.  The strings and choirs sounded especially dynamic and full and rich when hearing them live.

There were many moments in the film in which the story was so engaging that I forgot that the music was live.  This is both a testament to how well the music was played and just what a good story it is.

As I mentioned last year, it was a lot of fun to watch the film with a huge audience that also loved the film.  Hearing them laugh and cheer at moments was kind of exciting (though I myself kept silent the whole time).

Actually, watching the crowds made me kind of want to be a film composer; there’s just such a huge audience out there.  It’s easy to forget how big the world is.

Lastly, I kind of wish the Filene Center allowed popcorn and soda inside.  It would of course make a mess that they’d have to clean, but I do quite enjoy munching on popcorn while watching a film.

Next year I hope to see The Return of the King in a similar manner!

LAPTOP FAILURE

firelaptop A few days ago, all the applications on my laptop, from Firefox to Microsoft Office programs, kept crashing.  Then I’d often get the bluescreen of death saying something about a physical memory dump and then restarting the computer.  I was sure it was a RAM issue, and thought one of my sticks of RAM was bad and needed to be replaced.  So I took out one of the laptop’s RAM modules and, voila, it worked!  Though I was out 2 GB of RAM.  I wanted to go buy some more RAM just for the quick fix of it, but my father insisted that I call Dell support.  So I did (well, actually, he did, and then handed me the phone) and, by switching the working RAM into the other slot as support told me to, I discovered the problem wasn’t with the RAM, but with the motherboard; it couldn’t communicate with that RAM port for some reason.

So sometime this week or next week or whenever, a Dell guy should come to my house and replace the motherboard, which will hopefully go smoothly.  In the meantime, I’ll only have 2 GB of RAM, but everything should at least run smoothly without crashing.  My music composing might be impaired a bit, since I often do use up a lot of RAM loading up virtual instruments, but 2 GB should still be manageable.

The laptop (an Alienware M17x) gets really hot when playing games.  Like, burning hot.  Like, you could fry an egg on it.  Okay, maybe not that hot, but, still, it gets really hot.  Which is fine with me because it plays games really really well; highest resolution (1920 x 1200) on highest settings and the frame rates stay high.  It’s just awesome.  But I’m wondering if it’s all the heat it produces that damaged the motherboard?  Eh… who knows…

READING

thelongtail Last week, I finished reading Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.  It was written in 2006, and in the computer world, that makes it outdated already.  (Though there is now an updated and revised edition that I haven’t read, but I’m linking to it anyway.)  YouTube wasn’t as big when the book was written, and it mentions Google Froogle every now and then.  But, overall, the ideas in the book are very good.

That said, I’m not sure reading an entire book on the subject was worth it.  It’s a short book, only around 230 pages, but it certainly seemed repetitive.  The idea of the “Long Tail” isn’t too hard to understand: there’s a definite market for niche products, so if you can offer a lot of choices to buyers (without, obviously, spending too much money yourself), you can definitely make a profit.  Great subject for a magazine article (which is what I believe it started as), but for a book it seems just a bit stretched.  Makes for easy reading at least.

PROJECTS

oreally3 I also recently started some projects with a friend.  The first idea was to create cartoony shorts, similar to PowerPoint presentations we used to give in high school.  You can see our first animation here on YouTube.

Some problems with this project are: the animation is very rough and the recent-event subject is time-sensitive.  I think such shorts could find an audience if we could keep them up, but with just two people creating them, neither of which are quick or experienced animators, it would probably be infeasible, unless we had a lot more time to dedicate to it each week.

What I’d like to do eventually is use this similar method of animation (creating animation frames in PowerPoint, since I know how to draw best in it) to create something longer, and non-political.  Two years or so ago, my sister and I planned out a kid-friendly comedy-fantasy story with the hope of one day turning into a series of cartoons.  At the time, I had just bought Flash and had high hopes of gaining awesome animation skills with it.  Using PowerPoint didn’t cross my mind, because I am stupid.  But now that I am reminded, maybe it will be something to try in the future.  I especially like the idea of writing music to it, and being able to take a long time polishing an animation.

Anyway, the other project we started was the writing of a novel.  But I can not yet say anything about it due to a non-disclosure agreement.

SCHOOL WORK

I don’t go to school anymore, so I don’t have any.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Hour by hour

I read this post which talks about how you have to do a lot of work to get good at something. It seems pretty obvious, though for someone just starting something, whether drawing or composing music or writing, it can be frustrating at first. You have to create a lot of terrible stuff before you start getting good. Before I became the most amazing brilliant composer the world has ever known (what? don’t you agree?), I wrote pieces such as The Toy and The Workshop. Not exactly the most thrilling pieces of music ever written. (And, of course, I’ve still got plenty more to learn about composing.)

Also, I don’t think that just doing something over and over will alone help you get much better. You must also have in your mind something you’re trying to achieve, some skill you’re purposefully working for and know you don’t have yet. You could doodle scribbles all day, but that won’t help you draw like Rembrandt; you must consciously pursue drawing what you know can not yet draw.

I can easily imagine meeting a person who says “oh man, I’ve been drawing for 10 years!” or “writing for several decades!” or “composing almost my entire life!” and their work still seems terrible to me. Of course, when it comes to art, it’s also a matter of taste, but merely putting in the time with no effort to get better is worthless. (And I can also easily imagine people just plain lying about how long they’ve spent doing something.)

Anyway, the post mentions working 10,000 hours to get good at something. That’s a lot of hours. I’m not sure how many hours I’ve spent composing. Maybe an average of 12 hours per piece (some more, some less) for 51 pieces. 51 * 12 = 612 hours. That’s about 6 percent of 10,000 hours. I got a long way to go.

But that’s just a very rough estimate. I haven’t been keeping track of how many hours it takes me to do anything. So I started a new project called The Hours Project. You’ll see a new link to it on the side of this blog. Basically the goal of the project is to keep track of how long I spend doing stuff. I’m sure I won’t be able to keep it up forever, though, but I think it would be really interesting if I could keep it up for at least a year. I’m guessing sleep and work will take up the most of my time. I’m also not keeping track of how long I spend chatting online, surfing the web, or blogging… or other random stuff.

This is also partially inspired by the game The Sims 3… but you’ll have to play it to realize why, because I don’t feel like explaining…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Working

I’ve been working a bit more on my melody mixer creator thing; I’m working on expanding its abilities so that it will be compatible with any size melody in any time signature. I think I’ve finished planning out the necessary algorithms, now just programming awaits. And there will be quite a lot that will need to be reprogrammed, as there were quite a few shortcuts I was able to take when programming it to work with just one size melody. I’ve also been writing a book on my melody mixing algorithmic methods. It’s obviously not very long right now, but as I continue to program and explore this area of computer generated music it will hopefully chronicle all my explorations and algorithmic design decisions. It will probably be finished in 10 or 20 years. Or never.

Haven’t been up to much else lately… getting a bunch of hours at my part-time job, which is good for the money, but when I come home I tend to sit in front of the TV, surf the net, or play The Sims 3, which are all fun, but not very productive.  I can’t say I really want a full-time job…

By S P Hannifin, ago

I will never compose again

Just kidding. Sorry. It’s such a cruel joke, I know.

E3 stuff

E3, the video gaming expo, was last week, and a couple things interested me.  Firstly, “Project Trico” got a real name: The Last Guardian.  It also got a more polished trailer.  Ahh… that looks like such an awesome game.  (By the way, I saw the film Miller’s Crossing, the film the trailer music is from.  It was a pretty good movie, I enjoyed it.)

The bad news is I don’t think I’ll be able to afford a PS3 or that game anytime soon… this gaming laptop was also announced at E3.  It’s about as powerful as my desktop.  Actually, it’s a bit better, and it’s got a blu-ray player and an HD screen.  So I bought it.  Woohoo!!  The estimated delivery date isn’t until mid-July though, I suppose because it’s a brand-new model and maybe they don’t have the assembly line going quite yet.  Waiting for it just plain torture.

Lately I haven’t been spending as much time on my computer as I usually do, so I haven’t been composing, or… doing anything constructive at all really.  Well, I’ve been reading, I guess that’s constructive.  Hopefully I’ll get back to digital constructiveness when the laptop comes.  Might be more quiet than usual until then.  (I’d be more apathetic if I weren’t so lethargic.)

Lightning

For some reason, it seems to be storm season here.  We’ve been getting a bunch of storms.  (Sadly, a local middle school student was also recently killed by a lightning strike.  Makes it seem scarier to be outside during the storms.)  Lots of lightning… last week I took some pictures and put them on a public photo album on Facebook.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Summer and time

It will soon be (or is today) a year since I’ve been out of school, completely free from formal education. It’s strange because time passes much more quickly when you’re not really waiting for summer to come. When I was in school, I was always thinking about future due dates, and I always had the next break or three-day weekend lingering in my mind, looking forward to it so I could sleep in. My mental schedule was always full; I was always anticipating something. Without all that schedule aniticipation, the days have really flown by. I once read somewhere than one reason time may seem to fly by as you get older is because you don’t experience new things as often, where as when you’re young, the days are often filled with new experiences. I think not anticipating anything, not consciously waiting for anything also makes time fly. I can vividly remember sitting there in a classroom listening to a boring teacher blather on and on and looking at the clock, realizing school wouldn’t be over for another three or six hours, and just suffering. Watching the clock makes it tick very slowly. Better to spend time doodling in the notebook if you can get away with it.

That said, I don’t mind at all how fast time is flying by! It sure beats going to school.

What I admit I don’t like is hearing about around this season is other people’s vacations; it makes me want to retire. My last real vacation was 8 or 9 years ago to Disney World. But these days it seems like a pain to go on vacation. You have to secure time off work, do all this packing, take a long trip, and sleep on a dirty hotel bed (they don’t wash the mattresses), and the fellow vacationers might be annoying to share a hotel room with. And you have to spend a bunch of money. And then there’s the trouble of a vacation coming to an end. I think it’d be better to retire first, and then go on vacation . . . and never come back. Or have a job that requires travel so you don’t have to pay for it.

Anyway, I’m still spending my free time composing music for my album (or watching Hulu). I have around 6 pieces started, not sure which one I’ll finish first, but whichever one it is will be Opus 50.  Bwahahaha! (I’m really already over 50 pieces if you count all my work, but I’m only counting the ones I have listed on my MP3s page, and the three I’ve already finished for my album). So far the plan of having the album complete in two or three months is looking good! Hope you don’t mind my constant blathering about it, I’m really not up to much else. I’d probably get a bit more done if I didn’t sleep in at every opportunity though. My body still naturally wants to stay up all night and sleep until 1 PM.

By S P Hannifin, ago