LISTEN TO ME

I wiggle my mouse, letting a laser sensor detect movement and send small electrical impulses down a copper cable via the universal serial bus into the front of my Apple PowerMac G5 where two IBM built PowerPC 970MP processors detect that movement and jolt to life together in unison, propelling my desktop computer to 2.0GHz per processor as it cycles through billions of calculations a second to frantically run the UNIX foundation that supports Mac OS X as a platform that flexes it’s muscles and hosts Core Audio that can detect my M-Audio audio interface over the universal serial bus and supply the electricity needed to not only power that input/output interface, but supply the extra 45 volts down it’s cable to my Nova where it powers the electronics and diaphragm of the microphone so it can receive and interpret sound pressure levels emitted by my Marshall Valvestate S80 amplifier who listens for the signals made by my Gibson SG guitar.

Where my hand and pic grazes the strings of it that vibrate at different frequencies depending on where I restrain those strings on various points along the guitar’s fretboard. the dual, plated humbucker pickups below the strings sense those strings vibrations with electromagnets wrapped in copper coil that generate small electrical signals that are routed inside the guitar, being coloured by the density of the wood and the coil of the strings as they pass through volume and tone filters that I could control with my hands with knobs on the face of the instrument and zaps on out through a 1/4 inch cable into my solid-state amplifier where those signals are sent through semiconductor circuits that use a combination of valve and solid-state technologies that create a unique overdriven sound and route it out to a pair of 12 inch speakers in a cabinet that continue to shape the sound before it expels outward as waves of particles and energy through the air and collides with my Nova microphone where it is then converted once more into electrical energy and is blasted down, through my I/O’s analog to digital converters that change electrical signals to digital information so my Macintosh’s Core Audio engine can read those packets of information and allow Logic Studio to route and record that information to my hard drives that are spinning at 7200 revolutions per minute.

All of this happens behind a graphical interface that allows me to modify, warp, change those recordings into a coherent “mix” where the guitars are spread out over a wide stereo spectrum and it’s harmonic content controlled with multi-band equalization so that the drum kit, who is a interface and algorithm with over 20,000 different samples of a given drum kit that interprets how I play my midi controller into different drum recordings, in real-time, to arrange different percussion patterns can eventually get mixed and summed with the recordings of my guitars in a mathematical algorithm where it is then converted, compressed and saved as an individual MPEG-Layer-3 coded file that I then upload over the TC/IP network that spans the entire fucking globe to a website that I own and run for a small-as-shit fee, so that anyone on the infinitely accessible internet can decide if they have the time to listen to what I had just spent the time creating or read what I had just self-published. for free.

EVERYONE.

everyone takes everything for granted, all the time.

and as much as I find the possibilities of what can be done with our technology inspiring and truly amazing.. I find it sad and very disheartening that nobody knows that it’s there. or what it actually does. or the effort it took to get it to where it is. or that they can do these kinds of things if they took the time to look into it.