Things are trucking right along. Thanks to Stu Steele and Keni Yip from Polytechnic’s Computer Science Department, we’ve now got an excellent PC lab for our Second Life workshops. Josephine and I had a wonderful meeting with Pauline Oliveros, Will Swofford and Vonn New from the Deep Listening Institute and we all got very excited about having a Deep Listening workshop for our students next month. They’re all very keen to explore Second Life and its (mostly untapped) potential for aural environments. Yesterday Jos and I met with two teachers from Scotland, Sean and Katie Farrell, and it looks like they’ll be joining us in New York next month to teach SL skills to our students in person and (I hope) help us build the Kids Connect island.

Talking with Pauline, Will and Vonn about deep listening, aural environments and perceptual shifts, the shape of the Kids Connect island continued to coalesce and I thought of more exercises we could do there. Example: we ask the kids to make an audio recording of their home and/or neighborhood and take pictures of it. Using Photoshop or Gimp, they stitch the photos into a panorama; using Audacity, they edit and enhance their audio recording. In Second Life, they turn the audio and panorama into an audio/video installation, a slice of their lives for their counterparts in Amsterdam or New York to experience. This is not a new idea, of course. See:

• a panoramic photo with sound of the Sydney Opera House, as seen from a ferry (requires Quicktime)
• the one-minute vacations: field recordings from around the world

On a related note, if you want to understand why some people stray from the mainstream and end up in the so-called “avant garde” read the profile of Morton Feldman in the latest New Yorker.

Extreme length allowed Feldman to approach his ultimate goal of making music into an experience of life-changing force, a transcendent art form that wipes everything else away. To sit through performances of the two biggest works‚ÄîI heard Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble play the five-hour-long “For Philip Guston” in 1995, with phenomenal purity of tone, and the Flux Quartet play the six-hour-long “String Quartet (II)” in 1999, with tireless focus‚Äîis to enter into a new way of listening, even a new consciousness. There are passages in each where Feldman seems to be testing the listener’s patience, seeing how long we can endure a repeated note or a dissonant minor second. Then, out of nowhere, some very pure, almost childlike idea materializes. Most of the closing section of “For Philip Guston” is in modal A minor, and it is music of surpassing gentleness and tenderness. But it inhabits a far-off, secret place that few travellers will stumble upon.