coming soon…

“Music is the one art we all have inside. We may not be able to play an instrument, but we can sing along or clap or tap our feet. […] The music we hear early on tends to stay with us all our lives.”

— Fred Rogers

Music is immensely profound and incredibly beautiful. And it’s a part of us — as much a part of us as our ears or our noses or our toes. When we foster its development within ourselves it is tremendously rewarding, with benefits that reverberate throughout our lives in numerous positive and sometimes surprising (or even unrecognized) ways.

Children can grasp incredibly rich, complex musical concepts early on, simply by expressing themselves naturally in a musically conducive environment.

“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”

— Fred Rogers

My goal as an educator is to provide early beginners with an environment that encourages their natural musical endowment. Exercising their imaginations, and playing with guided, informed mentorship within a structured, musical context, students will strengthen their own personal relationships to sound.

A symbolic music programming language for composing and for really just thinking about music in different ways.

It’s written in Common Lisp, which is a language that’s well suited for building new languages on top of it, and Csound which is a language for programming music.

View the Bogu source code on GitHub ↗

This video is demonstrating its live coding capability: just three simple loops dealing with a couple pools of notes in different ways.

For a visualizer, I ran the audio into a Processing program that is scrambling around a 5 second video loop of boiling water in a pan.

A live instrument built with Csound, Cabbage, and Python for real-time, reactive, anxious sound design.

Source Code on Github

This is an unfinished rotoscope animation meant to accompany a short ballad I wrote on one of the mysteries of love often overlooked in modern song: body odor.
What was fun was that the music and lyrics all came to me at the same time.

The idea was to experiment with rotoscoping which is an animation style where you trace over a video recording of a real subject. The process is notoriously tedious; after months of near-daily work I ended up with about 20 seconds of footage.

Below is an initial recording of the song, and accompanying lyrics

THAT NIGHT YOU STANK (BUT I LIKED THE STENCH)

that night you stank
but i liked the stench

we laughed, we drank
we sat on that bench

you reached to put your arms around me
shoulders bare, that musk resounding

my heart began to soar up like a dove

and some primeval chemistry
reacted deep inside of me

i smelled you and i knew i was in love