I was meandering around my hard drive yesterday and i happened upon an old folder of ProTools files. i found this ready-made clip in said folder and listened to it, just amazed.
Funky. But tasty.
At first i wondered, where the heck did this come from? man, it sounds great! did i do that? who’s playing what?
the first thing that gave it away was the drums. They sound terrific. They also sound looped, except for the kick-butt break in the middle of the clip. I remembered that i had downloaded several genres of high quality miked-up drum loops sometime in the early 2000′s. This must have been from a funk set. Then i started to recall the tune… oh yeah… at the end of my stint with the Newtons, i was writing a funk song for the group. I still know the chord progression and riffs, and the part in the above clip was not originally in the song. I must have thought it was cool enough to export just this piece, because there are no files of the whole recording.
I found the ProTools project file and all of the raw tracks, but i cannot open them. Why, do you ask? well. I’ll tell you.
(at this part, it may get boring. If you’re not bored yet, click to read on for the geek talk!)
ProTools is a fancy software sound recorder. So fancy, in fact, that in order to actually get the software, you have to buy thousands of dollars worth of recording hardware that was designed for it. When Apple moved up to Mac OS X and abandoned OS 9, the company that makes ProTools decided to give the “Light Edition” of the software for OS 9 away for free. It wouldn’t work under OSX, so they weren’t losing any serious money-spending customers. I snatched it right up, and went to town. All of the recordings i have made up until the Christmas album were recorded in ProTools LE on my 400Mhz G3 iMac running os 9. In fact, even after i got OSX, i kept the copy of OS 9 on there so i could reboot the computer into the older operating system and make music with PTLE. All of the Newtons recordings from 2005 were made this way. my copy of ProTools was rock solid and worked like a champ… that’s the cool thing about running old software on a not-as-old computer.
Then i got a new iMac that couldn’t run OS 9. I had to ditch ProTools on the new computer, but i would never delete my original project files. Well, here i am, and the closest computer that can open these files (provided that my dad didn’t delete the now-impossible-to-find PTLE software or OS 9) is in Lafayette, sitting on a computer desk ripping vinyls to CD’s.
That’s cool, one weekend i’ll bring home my protools files to try and salvage what i can from my quirky beginnings.
Not quite done with the story… take another swig of that beer and listen close. Sometime in 2004 i was running out of hard drive space on that ol’ iMac. I had recently acquired a free PC Laptop from Mercer University, and decided to dump my precious old recording archives onto the laptop’s hard drive as a backup. Fast forward to 2007, and the laptop itself is irreparably broken. Last month I bought a hard drive enclosure so that i could take out the laptop hard drive and retrieve those old PTLE projects from my high-school days. Well, i hooked it up and looked for the files. I couldn’t find them. where could they have gone? they couldn’t delete themselves. I gave up, but created a compressed disk-image backup of the entire laptop hard drive (windows XP and all) so that i could search again later, and wiped the disk clean.
Last night, when i was rabidly searching my hard drives and my brain for clues as to what might have happened to all that old stuff, i seemed to recall burning DVD backups of my ProTools files… this could have been with my laptop, and i might have stored those disks somewhere that i don’t quite remember. maybe i have them, maybe Dad has them, maybe they’re in a box or a case. Who knows. But it just kills me thinking that they could be gone.
I took so many precautions, and for the first time, i’ve gotten to the point that the things that are important to me are stored in some obsolete format on a forgotten disk in an unknown closet.
Ok, now that we’re past the boring technical part, here’s some more meaty personal discourse.
I may only be 22, but I still have managed to feel my past slipping away. This is the feeling you get when you graduate, or change jobs, or move somewhere, or break up with your S.O., or fight with your family, or lose someone. Even when it’s still very recent, you try to jog your memory to gather up as much as you can and hold on. You sometimes feel like you want to be back there again, just to watch.
The most obvious effects of this universal human condition are the development of still and motion cameras. Old photos and videos are treasures to their creators or participants. This is no mystery. It’s a little quaint, and a little tragic, and a little endearing. We all would like, at some point, to take a thick brush and blacken the lines where they have faded, and saturate the worn colors with fresh ones. Whether this is for enjoyment or not, there is a strong pull on our cognitive abilities to interface with our memories.
I’ve been using computers for almost as long as i’ve been alive, and have been practicing personal data management in a computer since i almost deleted the family computer hard drive sometime in 1992. It’s all about how much storage you have, how many files you create, and what it takes to organize those files. As long as you backed up your data, you can create exact copies of your past in a matter of minutes. It’s a brilliant idea, and one that modern computers have thrived on.
Dad and I have both been keenly aware of this, and his never-ending quest to put as many photographs, home movies, and records into digital format is an amazing testament to the human impulse to preserve. In digital format, it’s incredibly easy to organize. Almost no actual work required, and the physical space occupied is comparably microscopic. The payoff, of course, is the brain-blossom of old emotions, stories, and details that viewing or listening to these archives can instigate. I find it worthwhile to sift through my old stuff when i have a moment. Even these very blog archives, on the left of the home page. Perusing my old 2003-2004 pages can take up an afternoon. just look at those sideways blue hills of months, nearly 46 of them… does it look like i’m mildly obsessed? This posting of an old creative endeavor that i may or may not have lost was really a telling indication that Time really is moving quickly.
i am simultaneously excited and terrified.
Sigh. what else is new.
It’s true that I have many dozens of backup discs in the closet. I tried to organize them into Photos (that’s one stack), music, software, data, stuff like that. Hope you recover yours.
Dave, besides the boring stuff, your post got me to thinking about my blog. I’ve never really thought of it as self-preservation, more of an of-the-moment gratification tool. But now that you’ve introduced this idea, I think I shall try harder to update more often and not stop mid-post production because I’ve got “more important” things to do. After all, some of these posts I may see as pretty important when I can no longer remember the details of the events too clearly.
May I just say:
Although technology is amazing because it spawned from the human mind alone, there were other ways of remebering those emotions and sights and sounds you speak of.
Let’s go back to ancient Greece. Why did I have to study those Greek plays time after time in highschool and college? Because it prooves that you can capture what happened a long time ago because of story-telling and the written word. Reading their stories can be as vivid in your mind as the digital camera’s images. The plays portray the sights and sounds and smells and feelings of their heroes.
So, I guess my liberal arts education really did pay off, if only to post a comment that no one reads on David’s blog!!! ha, I knew $80,000 might come in handy somewhere!
So, if you really want to remember the ‘details of events clearly,’ yes, your blog is a form of the written word that will bring you back and help you remember.
I think we spend so much time having to remember passwords, usernames, and pin numbers today that without the ditigal cameras, we would only hold enough memory in our brain for ‘security purposes’ so that no one can steal our thoughts (thoughts which consist of our identity: social security, pin numbers, etc)
Does the modern world seem a bit more absurd to you now?
that was my whole point.
By the way, the other use of my liberal arts education would be applied to the fact that I argue just about everything. (something my friends and family can vouch for) I guess I wrote so many essays with points of view and arguments that it’s pure habit now. hmmmmmm
Dave,
this is a really good entry, especially the bit towards the end there about memory, technology, etc. I really like these personal entries, but I know how hard they can be to write – sometimes I feel silly because I’m almost too reflective on this page….
@ Michelle:
as a fellow liberal artist, I can sympathize with your need (impulse?) to critique everything that comes your way. I do the same thing, but I think that is the hallmark of a good arts education – learning to think independently, not allowing any argument to go by unscrutinized. After all, no idea, theory, or hypothesis is perfect, so I find that everyone can benefit from a thoughtful critique, provided it is constructive.
I would argue, as I think you are, that writing itself is a kind of ‘technology’ that allows us to store information or build arguments that we’d otherwise be unable to remember. The kind of writing (or information storage) that Dave talks about in this posting is more, I think, about impression, rather than opinion:
Hence, your point about Greek drama is well made – impressions/memories are often best “interfaced” through art, even if that art was made by someone else!
Also, I think that all the digital files on my computer are a kind of art as well, created organically by my relationships, interests, etc.
In fact, my computer is an extension of my memory – it helps me, like written words, to save things I could never hold in my head. I don’t think its a matter of “remember less” to “store more” on a machine, rather I remember more through my machines – they are an extension of myself.
A great book on these themes of technology, self, and memory is called Natural Born Cyborgs by Andy Clark. If this stuff interests you, I really recommend it.
Thanks, Jon!
As usual, you have great recommendations of materials for whetting my intellect.
Now if I could only squeeze in time for them between 2 jobs!
my advice: stay in school forever!
You would probably be one of the best “professional students” out there anyway