Not in the “I’m outta here!” sense, but in the biological cell mitosis sense.

It was almost two full years ago that I picked up a book called “Refuse to Choose”, by Barbara Sher — the first voice I heard that told me it was not just okay but valuable to be skilled, interested, and qualified in more than one thing!  I can honestly say this book changed my life (and you can read more about that in one of my first posts).

However, I’ve lacked for practical ways to reconcile all that I do and accomplish.  You ought to see the trail of half-used blank books and shoeboxes full of ephemera that I’ve left in my wake.  It will take months, possibly years, to sort through it all.  Raw food recipes, kombucha brewing methods, programming projects, business ideas, publicity stunts — you name it, I’ve thrown it into a box and forgotten all about it, sadly.

With my new Okonomiyaki Recipes blog, however, I’ve had a taste of success in cordoning off an interest, creating a concrete project, and producing something at the end of it — something public, searchable, and thus possibly of use to more than just myself.  Now I am hungry for more.

So begins a long-overdue process of creating environments and sandboxes for myself where I can chronicle my strange and varied array of competencies.  Like buying boxes to put your toys in, and special inserts for your drawers so that your socks and undies go in all neat and tidy, it feels really good to have the proper places to put ideas.

My first title for this post was “Fractionating”.  But the sense of chopping my Self into pieces, pieces with only fractional value from the whole, proved inaccurate.

I may be splitting my “personality” and my time and setting up several different blogs.  But really it’s no different from how I was before, constantly shifting my attention between half a dozen projects in the span of a week. I’ll just be documenting it as well.

In fact, because ideas will have places to go, my brain now has “permission” to generate ideas.  Liberty through organization?  It feels good and my mind is already working at top speed.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve been burning my candle at both ends lately.

Thus I am not splitting into smaller, less valuable pieces.  I am dividing (to conquer!) into smaller cells that are equally viable and will grow over time.

As for this blog, I think I will keep it posted at least once a week. The ION drums articles I’ve been putting here will be moving to their own site on “the nthmost network“, my pet name for the multicellular organism I am.  Three more sites are in the works (kombucha, gluten free, and the metablog), all simultaneously.

All at once! It’s really the only way I know how to do things.

ps. holy crap! Amazon is selling “Refuse to Choose” for $4.03 right now.  Time to pick up another copy — my last one never made it back to me.  Not that I mind!  I think it’s being enjoyed.

Technorati Tags: barbara sher, blogging, mitosis, refuse to choose, scanner

I didn’t say so in my response, but I absolutely agree.  I dislike the way I myself sound, and I try to protect my housemates from it as best I can.  It begs the question of why I play it at all, which turns out to be perfectly apropos to this topic. 

Simply put, it’s a challenge!  Can I get a great score and sound cool?  Some songs work great for me, and some songs are horribly unforgiving, score-wise, when I attempt to inject some style and tone.  I’ve started recording myself when singing a wide variety of songs both in- and out-of-game, and in many cases I’m amazed at the dull flat drowning-cat noises that have won me perfect scores in certain songs.

But WHY is it a challenge to sound good AND score good?  From this point on I have pasted what I posted in the Rock Band forum.

This topic is essentially all about what makes a “good singer”. As intuitive creatures we have a sense of what’s attractive and beautiful (“good singing”) versus what is robotic and off-putting (“monotone singing”).

So, what makes someone a “good singer” as opposed to someone who simply sings the pitches required to get good scores in a karaoke game but somehow manages to sound like a dying cat? 

Here are my thoughts on this, in a somewhat-but-not-completely organized fashion.

I actually don’t think this is a hard problem. Obviously songs consist of logically arranged melodies (and that’s a huge topic, so I won’t get into it). But they also consist of “challenges” to what we expect to happen — twists in the plot, so to speak.

In terms of singing, those challenges come in the form of unexpected tiny delays, choosing thirds instead of fifths for the second time through a melody, using slides to get from one note to the next, and injecting spots of emotion into words that may affect the pitch slightly (even throw it “off”). Some of these things are captured in the Rock Band charting, but if they don’t “come from” the person singing them, they sound just as robotic as any other parts. (Sorry to be so imprecise, but we’re talking Aesthetics here.)

Good singing is pretty much characterized by flaws, because humans are flawed beings, and hearing someone perform “perfectly on-pitch” throughout an entire song feels alien to us. We call that singer robotic and monotone, whereas we call someone like Eddie Vedder an amazing vocalist even though he never sings his songs the same way twice (and arguably he cannot). And why should he? He should challenge our expectations and inject slightly different emotions to stay interesting (which he does) — not recite the melody like a playback machine.

My other main observation is that when you’re singing for the joy of singing and/or to produce something aesthetically pleasing, you are necessarily producing sounds that sound completely different from the vocalizations that occur when you are staring a screen with your thoughts bound up in the effort of getting that little arrow to match with that line. Just an attitudinal thing.
In other words, my opinion is that singing for the purposes of FCing songs in this game produces vocalization that is the antithesis of what our brains want to process as aesthetically pleasing.

Tangentially, I would love to see more original singers of songs in Rock Band playing their songs in the game.

Just to wrap up, clearly it’s possible to sound really good AND appease the game algorithms enough to get 100%. I’m just providing explanations as to why (it seems) these conditions only rarely coincide.

–Naomi

* platinum RB2 vocals
* trained choral singer
* real-life rock band vocalist

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, brain, rock band, singing, theory