Adriana Knouf's blog

I've had a relatively cheap Korg synthesizer sitting in my room for about a year now. Regularly I've thought about using it and its MIDI capabilities to explore various musical ideas by recording what I do to a MIDI file for later perusal or transcription. All I wanted to do was something simple: save the MIDI data that enter my iBook through my MIDI-USB cable to a MIDI file. No routing, no use of software synths, nothing like that: just save the data that I'm playing.

Via "purse lip square jaw":http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/2006/07/mediacommons.php : The "Institute for the Future of the Book":http://www.futureofthebook.org just launched a new project entitled "Media Commons":http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/07/introducing_mediacommons_or_ti.html, an attempt to bring scholarly discourse into a "scholarly network" through development of new means for creating and reading scholarly works. While I agree in principle with the desire to revamp the means of academic production, I have a number of worries, highlighted below. bq.

_(I posted the following to the "microsound":http://microsound.org/ mailing list. I wish I could point you to the relevant thread, but the "archives":http://www.propheticdesire.us/microsound/msound-archive.html seem to stop around April of this year.)_ ... is how a public service announcement at my radio station begins. (What follows is a rant/polemic; feel free to move on if not interested in those sorts of things. This is entirely separate from the recent myspace talk.

I've recently moved to a new location near Davis Square in Somerville, quite close to a number of my favourite haunts ("Diesel Cafe":http://www.diesel-cafe.com/main.html (flash warning), "Someday Cafe":http://boston.citysearch.com/profile/4751852/, and "McIntyre and Moore":http://www.mcintyreandmoore.com/ (another flash warning, and for the main navigation as well!)). My new place apartment didn't have network access, and for the first day or so it was okay, as there was an open wireless spot nearby.

It seems to be a commonplace these days that we self-consciously watch what we say, what we read, what we _do_ when in public. A phrase that is innocuous in the company of our like-minded friends becomes potential jail fodder at an airport. Such was my perhaps-unwarranted concern when, during my extended travails in airports and airplanes across America last weekend, I was reading a book entitled "Revolt, She Said":http://www.semiotexte.com/authors/kristeva.html , a collection of interviews with the critical theorist slash psychoanalyst "Julia Kristeva":http://kristeva.blogs.com.