Wednesday, October 5, 2011

What I am up to

    If you are my friend, you may wonder what I have been doing for the last year and a half.   I constructed an experiment in me: a way forward with my life.  I built a story.  In this story I can be whatever I wish; I can do anything, and reach to the top of whatever I choose, unassisted.  This story also gathers my body and heart and brings me closer to those I love.

     I have chosen to work in sound design and have been teaching myself everything I need.  Here is an approximate list (Entries in braces, I have not yet begun):

Music:
Mixing
Mastering
Learn new instruments
Instrumentation
Song styles
Counterpoint

Recording:
Field recording
Studio projects

Mathematics:
Advanced Calculus
Differential Equations
Linear Algebra
Signal Systems and Transforms
(Harmonic Analysis)
Algorithms and Numerical Methods

Visual asset design:
Planning and lighting a scene;
Hard surface 3D modeling;
Organic modeling;
Rigging and Animation
Asset creation:
    Texture and material construction;
    Unwraps, Normal maps, <*.maps>
    Optimizing and Exporting game-ready content

Code:
C++
Game Engine:  UDK
    Familiarize myself with all features of the interface
(DirectX)
(XAudio2)

Writing:
The mechanics of language and the elements of storytelling.

Game project:
Construct a game world
     Build all assets from scratch: visual, audio, code.


Selection Criteria:
Some topics may appear unusual.  What do normal maps have to do with sound?  Why hard-surface modeling and animation before XAudio2? There are several reasons:

     Sound is motion:  Sound does not exist without movement.  Game worlds are nonlinear, interactive.  At least two questions arise: What moves? How?  New tools must provide reusable, generalizable answers to these questions.   But to have motion, there must first be a world.

     Logical integration: A game editor like UDK is a complete logical environment.  Everything in the world - a 3D mesh, the sound of a foostep, a light - is an object. In game design, a good tool is a piece of object-based logic: a set of rules by which objects can be made to work together.  Making tools means developing a code base.   And in relation to other game objects, sound is a result:  New audio tools must be integrated into the existing logic which operates and animates in-game objects.

     Spatialization:  Real-time phase manipulation in 3-space is a defining question of the video game.  Representing audio in 3D is an open question. Epic Games (UDK), for example, takes the position that it is hard, so do not try, i.e. record in mono and pan it. This is the least effective way to spatialize.  A sound image is a field: movement changes the phase relationships within the field, and from these phase relations, we distinguish position.  Panning a mono file does not reproduce, or simulate, motion in a field.

Fortunately, graphics programmers and hardware developers have constructed a considerable body of knowledge and experience in the attempt to simulate a similar question of light propagation. Efficient computational methods in harmonic spaces exist, they have physical representations, sample code is available, and specialized hardware for its execution lies in every game console. I believe apprehending and adapting these graphical and geometric methods is the best and fastest way forward; the mathematics and programming skills are fundamental to the question of audio in a game world.

     I love it: If it is on this list, I do no tire of it. I wake in the middle of the night to do it. I dream about it. I draw crowns in my Advanced Calculus book, and stay up until 4AM recording for a friend.


The Job I Seek:
I want to do the everyday work in audio design. I want to record and make sound effects; match audio to keyframe animations; record, edit, mix and master dialogue. Compose and arrange. This is what I do with all of my time, when I am free. I am at my best when I am the least experienced person in the room. I learn quickly, and I love it.

I do not want to be a team lead or a programmer. Making new tools, for me, is an outgrowth of hands-on work with audio. I have begun building what I need to do that job better and faster. I believe many things can be done which are not commonly believed possible, but I do not have a paradigm to peddle: I am always willing to be convinced. That is why I state my position clearly, and defend it. Code is invention and construction: to posit new ideas and test them requires believing they can be done, and trying every way to make them work.

I have a rough map in my mind of the game engine, and every way audio occurs. I also dig further into the methods that exist, to clarify the map. For each place there is sound, I have thought through at least one way to move forward. These structures are primitive, but similar, and often identical, to what the best audio software companies are building. I do not do this by examining their products. I figure it out first, alone, then I check to see who else knows. This is how I find Valve and iZotope. It is better than finding them. I know how to begin building these tools myself, because those elements I understand, I, too, have invented.

I do not expect you to believe me on my word. I expect to convince you. I will post a series of blogs on various audio and game topics, with examples of my own work.

The rest of me:
There is a parallel story which accompanies these mechanical steps: a boy and a wolf, bound together, ducking in and out of the lands of snow. The mechanics of belief are important; they demystify momentum, and demonstrate that anyone may do likewise. Watever we make up, it becomes true when we build it.  The mind is a magic operator. Its scope cannot be given by a rule; the only reasonable approach is to believe that anything is possible; to believe in ourselves and others, beyond what any argument or theory can give. This assertion holds so easily, it can be tested, exactly as I am testing it now.

There is more than me in this test.  I have carried it around my whole life, Anything is possible. I want to know it, then, from you. I want to see you throw lightning into the world.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Magic

Once a year I have a one-hour appointment with my neurologist.

I have roped my jeweled heart into a robin's head.  My tongue is made of feathers.  This new year, the crow says, is going to be beautiful, because we will make it so.  Did I tell you I am afraid I will fail?  Loud-mouthed bluejay, stealing all the pretty birds' songs, calling my thief's tongue a ruby crown.

My appointment is at 8 in the morning.  The sky is only beginning to tumble pink into the treetops when I arrive.  It is January 4th of the year we are new; the year we  begin to say, I am beautiful.

Near the end of my appointment, my doctor asks me a long question, which runs like this:
I don't want to offend you, but [....] The way you describe how your mind works is unusual.  It can get you into trouble; most people don't think the way you do. [...]I believe that your decisions may be right for you.  There are some places I couldn't follow you because I don't know what presumptions you made to get from one place to another.  If this were a conversation at a bar, I'd ask you about those presumtions, and if I were your best friend I would already know what they are.  Like I said, most people don't think like you, and the way you are talking today is different from how you've ever spoken to me before [....] Now let me finish where I was going with that thought [....] I'm not questioning the changes [...] I mention it because amphetamines can change the way your mind works [....] It doesn't sound to me like the amphetamines have anything to do with it, but I have to consider the possibility.  [....] I hope I didn't insult you.

Insulted?  I am elated.  I made the changes.

A year ago, I began to change.  My heart and mind were not what I believed in.  I had said, I cannot give you what you ask of me in friendship.  I don't know how to do it.  But that was not true.  Cannot is a strange way of lying with words.  To think clearly, I have to change it to will not, because I am alive.  But when I took responsibility for these words, they became this:
I will not give you what you ask of me in friendship.  I will not learn how to do it.

That was not good enough.  So I changed my answer; I erased two nots.
I will give my love in friendship.  I will learn how to do it.

And that was the beginning.  One thing I would not say or believe and so I changed it.  Because we can learn and change, and have wills.  New questions appeared, shouted at me.  What is the difference between the person who believes she can do anything, and the person who does not believe?  What if it is the belief itself?  What if this is the only thing?

I pretended it would work.  It would be true, because I would make it true.  Some days this seems small, and others it is everything.  The days I am new are better: the days I cry on a bus, reading Edna St. Vincent Millay explain that her heart is a daft bird, charging the storm and making her nest in the shadow of the hawk.

And in the dark I have worried every choice thin.  And still, I am new.  Still, I unbutton in the dawn, tumble out of my nest into its quick, chill arms and sing.  Still a sunrise breaks open my chest.  I am unappeasable, daft; I will charge storms.  When I am blind to obstacles, they no longer exist.   I am new because I have said so, and I will not stop.  You are beautiful and I will learn to say how I am stitched up the wrists with the velvet ache of you.

You.  Friend.  Father, mother, uncle, aunt.  Love.  New stranger on the sidewalk.  I am in a daze.  I am alive.  I am thrown to the ground on a pair of eyes, confusing the skin with apricots, my tongue with the feathers tied into your hair.  When the wales open across your legs, my wrists hurt.  It is okay; I will tell you that you are beautiful.

It is true about us.  We are who and what we believe, if we choose to be so.  Or, if you wish:
The empricial change was sufficient to raise the question of its origin, and my doctor was ethically obligated to ask.  I am not offended.  It was the highest compliment, and I did not go looking for it.  You surprised me with this question, Dr. Stolz.

I bluffed, and now it's true!  I like this.  I think I will see where I take myself with it.

Have I repeated and fluttered about?  Words will fall away in time: I will learn how to edit and make neat, organized paragraphs.  Words are not so easy with me yet, and that is alright.  It is okay to go on.  It is okay to dump words of love out windows, keep each other up at night with them, spill a few too many about.  Here, I will try for a middle ground.

One more thing, then.  This:

SandmanMoon.  You are my friend, and you have my love, without qualification.  This has always been the only honest answer.  You said that other people, too, need to know it can be done.  It is possible to grasp everything we love, reach upward, and surface, carrying the whole treasure of our hearts.  Possession can be broken, it is possible to love one another, all of us, and there is no measure: love is not stolen or cheated, one from the other.    You are right.  This is not a message to be tucked away in secret.  It is hard to trust myself, and I must learn to do it.  I am no longer angry that people did not understand.  They were worried.  And they, too, need to know that we succeeded.  That we found the in the same parts of ourselves that got them to worrying about us, answers.  Being alive is dangerous, we tangle up in people.  And this is right for me.  It is more important for me to love, for no good reason, to give myself in every action and word; the moment this choice is made, everything changes.  It is not just true about wedding rings, about husbands, wives and children.  I wrote to you, I said,
I will love.  The open, jeweled heart is scarce. We have kept ours.

And that is no small thing.  We made it up ourselves; neither is that so small or common.

All of that you already know, SandmanMoon.  I have said it, safe near you; or you have said to me.  It is time I put those words where other people can see them, as we had hoped to find them in the mouths of others and did not.  Say what I believe openly, as you have done.  The poetry book cradled in the corner of a bookshelf lining the eaves and fingertips with such discoveries, plucking at the frightened heart, was only abstract until I launched myself into the sky and made it true.  Other people will see, and that, too, is more than it seems.
 
Thank you, SandmanMoon.  Thank you for every word you have placed beside me, for every moment of your life that you have shared with me.  You have helped me become a different person, one that I love.  I do not think there is more that one could ask for, from anyone.