John Bullitt / Earth Sound

Vernal pool at dusk

John Bullitt — Mon, 03 May 2010 23:30:02 +0000

It’s about 7pm at the end of a mild spring day in Maine. At a muddy vernal pool, the spring peepers are just beginning to warm up for a night of song and courtship. In the nearby woods, the reclusive hermit thrush settles in for the night. An unseen woodpecker signals from across an open field. A quarter mile away, standing somewhere in the tall reeds on the shore of nearby Tunk Stream, an American bittern issues its unique call which, from this distance, resembles the ker-plunk of a smooth pebble dropped into a pond.

It seems somehow fitting that these, some of nature’s most gifted songmakers, are also its most reclusive. A full-blown peeper chorus can be deafening, yet each individual frog hides so artfully, pressed tight against an inconspicuous low-hanging branch or to the damp underside of a curled leaf. The bittern stands motionless in the marsh, its camouflaged head pointed skyward, looking like just another drab stalk of reed. And the thrush, whose ethereal trill leads one naturally to lift one’s eyes upward, lives out most of its life poking quietly about the leaf-litter at the forest floor.

Great beauty dwells in the unseen.

Autonomous Composition Engine

John Bullitt — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:00:10 +0000

A nod to the color theories of Josef Albers, the flexibility of CSS, and the remarkable capacity of the mind to find pattern and harmony within random structure.

frame

Full page view.

Fata Morgana

John Bullitt — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:40:55 +0000

I came to Maine armed with the basic knowledge that every summer vacationer quickly learns: that black flies inevitably bring an abrupt end to late-spring picnics in the woods; that blueberry season, though short, is very, very sweet; and that the ocean tides are even more impressive than you can imagine.

What I didn’t appreciate until this, my first winter in Maine, is that this is a landscape of magic. One bright, cold morning in late November I awoke to find the bay outside my window begauzed with three-foot tall curling wraiths of fog, looking for all the world like a sea on fire. This was my first encounter with “sea smoke”, the result of sea water shedding its rising moisture into an overlying layer of much colder, drier air.

Then last week, during one particularly cold day, I looked up during a walk on the beach to see that the entire island of Petit Manan, some seven miles offshore, had been lifted into the sky. This phenomenon, I learned, is well known in deserts and in polar regions, when a steep temperature gradient near the surface causes light to refract in peculiar ways. The result is often a mirage: the shimmering pools of “water” miles ahead on a summer blacktop highway; the “castles in the air” of folk legend.

Petit Manan island, airborne in January

An ocean on fire. Entire islands that rise into the air. Billions of tons of seawater that pour in and out of every cove, bay, and sound all up and down the entire coast — not once a year, not once a month, but twice each day.

All this leaves me wondering: who could have dreamed a world as astonishing as this?

Falling Glass

John Bullitt — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:24:44 +0000

Sennheiser, vintage 2009

Here’s a little journey into the rich acoustic world of the humble wine glass. In this clip (an abbreviated version of a longer composition) I’ve taken the sound of my moistened finger running along the rim of a wine glass, and transformed the scales of time and frequency to highlight some of the delicious details of singing glass.

Here I’ve layered a series of smoothly varying time-stretched recordings atop one another, in fixed harmonic proportions. The tones of the singing wine glass descend in an apparently endless waterfall (an effect known as the Shepard-Risset glissando1). This motion magnifies the subtle shimmering of the glass, as the shifting harmonics play off each other in unusual ways. Sometimes the glass seems to breathe audibly; sometimes it rings. Yet its sound always remains distinctively “glassy”.

This slow bottomless cascade of sound reminds me of the circular shape of the wine glass itself, as well as the tiny circular paths traced by the molecules of silica as each passing wave of sound continues on its long circumnavigating voyage along the rim. Circles within circles within circles: each one a continuous unbounded contour in space and time, possessing neither beginning nor end, driven by the laws of physics, and bursting with the possibilities of motion.

As I listen to this nearly endless descent, my thoughts turn skyward, too, to the nested elliptical motions of moons around planets, planets around stars, and stars around their home galaxies. Each celestial body falls freely through space, pulled by gravity to its neighbors, and carried forward by its own momentum into a long, looping orbital path. Each body falls ever downward, downward, towards a bottom that never quite seems to arrive. Of course, the laws of Nature do guarantee that, sooner or later, friction and entropy will eventually win: the orbits will decay, the bodies will collide; they will, like the rim of the ringing wine glass, fall silent. But, for now, the Universe sings.

All this — from simply listening to a finger touching glass.

Notes

1. For more about the Shepard-Risset glissando, see these Wikipedia articles: Shepard Tone and Jean-Claude Risset

PHP & MySQL Quickies

John Bullitt — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:45:06 +0000

More stuff I tend to forget...

Launch the MySQL daemon

% sudo /usr/local/bin/mysqld_safe [type ^Z] % bg

Stop the MySQL daemon

% mysqladmin shutdown -p [type in the password when prompted] % mysqld --skip-grant-tables

Change MySQL's root password

% mysqladmin -u root -p password NEW_PASSWORD [type in the old password when prompted]

Backup a MySQL database

% mysqldump --opt -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD -h HOSTNAME DBNAME > db.txt % zip db.zip db.txt

If you can't remember USERNAME, PASSWORD, HOSTNAME, or DBNAME, you can find them in (for example) your WordPress wp-config.php file.

During installation phpMyAdmin says "#2002 — The server is not responding (or the local MySQL server's socket is not correctly configured)":

I don't claim to understand this one at all. But some combination of these seem to do the trick:

Log on as root and create the file /etc/my.cnf. Insert these lines into the file:
[client] socket=/var/mysql/mysql.sock [mysqld] socket=/var/mysql/mysql.sock
Look at /etc/php.ini and find the line concerning "Default socket name for local MySQL connects". There should be nothing after the equals sign:
mysql.default_socket =
Execute phpinfo() and examine all the references to mysql. Look for any weirdnesses and inconsistencies there. Make sure the mysql socket names and directory paths all make sense with your php installation.

Check your PHP configuration

Create a text file containing the following single line of code:

Name the file something useful like phpinfo.php and load it into your browser.

Handy references

Working with PHP 5 in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

“Night of a Thousand Songs” (CD)

John Bullitt — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 21:06:21 +0000

Distilled from several nights and early mornings of field recordings, this CD brings you right to the water’s edge of a small waterhole in Madikwe Game Reserve, South Africa. In the span of about forty minutes you can experience a representative eight-hour night of sound, from the spectacular late-night chorus of frogs and toads, to the first threads of birdsong from the dawn chorus.

This recording may be enjoyed in many ways: as a calming background soundtrack for relaxation or exercise; as a meditation on the passage of Time; as documentation of a disappearing African wetland habitat; as a tool for the naturalist to hone his or her skills at identifying wildlife by ear; or simply as an experience of pure ambience—the living sound of life on Earth.

The CD includes an 8-page explanatory booklet.

You can order a copy online in just a few clicks.

Apache web server not finding my “icons” directory

John Bullitt — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:57:21 +0000

I like to keep icons for a website in a top-level directory named icons. Trouble is, when the server tries to fetch anything from that dir, it either spews a "not found" error or, in the case of images, simply doesn't display the image.

Problem: The Apache web server isn't finding a website's top-level directory named /icons.

Cause: By default, Mac OS X 10.5.5's Apache server has /icons aliased to /usr/share/httpd/icons/. The server will thus always look there, instead of in your /icons directory.

Fix: Disable this alias. Launch Terminal, edit the file /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-autoindex.conf, and change this line

Alias /icons/ "/usr/share/httpd/icons/"

to this:

# Alias /icons/ "/usr/share/httpd/icons/"

(The '#' is Apache's "comment" character. Apache treats the rest of the line as a comment, and ignores it.) Now restart Apache (apachectl graceful). Your browser should now find your icons just fine.

The best tutorial for installing GD into PHP on Leopard

John Bullitt — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:23:09 +0000

No, I didn't write it. It's "Adding GD library for Mac OS X Leopard" from the Mac OS help and tips website.

Let me explain. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) ships with PHP 5.2 installed, but without the useful GD graphics library. Most of the GD installation tutorials I found on the web involve an intimidating series of steps that require downloading a bunch of supporting libraries, compiling them, then re-compiling PHP. Although Kénior's tutorial "Adding GD Library for Mac OS X Leopard" seems to have worked for many people, it never quite worked for me; after many careful tries, I kept getting Apache errors (as seen in /var/error/apache2/error_log) that prevented GD from successfully loading:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/gd.so' - (null) in Unknown on line 0

So, after much hair-pulling, I finally found the wonderfully simple tutorial on Mac OS help and tips: Adding GD library for Mac OS X Leopard. It calls for simply (1) downloading a fresh PHP installation that has GD already compiled-in, and (2) using it to replace the existing PHP folder in /usr/local. I had PHP up and running with GD in about one minute.

What could be simpler?

JTB’s e-news of 081005

John Bullitt — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:12:55 +0000

Greetings, friends.

Welcome to the October 2008 edition of John B’s Consistently Irregular e-Newsletter.

“NIGHT OF A THOUSAND SONGS” CD
“EARTH SOUND” GETS AROUND
MY WEBSITE IS A BLOG
“OPEN STUDIOS NOVEMBER 22-23, 2008

1. “NIGHT OF A THOUSAND SONGS” CD

In 2006 I made some extended field recordings of the magnificent night sounds at a remote waterhole in Madikwe Game Reserve, South Africa. I have edited these recordings into a single continuous track: a forty-minute journey through a representative night at this magical place. The CD is now at the printer, and should be available by November 1 (or sooner!). In the meantime, you can listen to an excerpt from the CD at my online store. If you like what you hear, you can pre-order a copy of the CD at a reduced price. I’ll send out your order as soon as the CDs arrive from the printer.

Buy the CD!

2. “EARTH SOUND” GETS AROUND

The sounds of the deep Earth that appeared on my 2007 “Earth Sound” CD are finding their way into unexpected corners of the world. Matthew Ferraro, a US-based composer and orchestrator for film (“Minority Report”, “Spiderman”) and television (“Futurama”, “Anne Frank: The Whole Story”), is incorporating some of these sounds in his “Tension of Opposites,” a major work for symphony orchestra, mixed chorus, children’s chorus, and soundtrack. This composition, which addresses “humanity, diversity, and the major life issues we all face as human beings,” will premiere at London’s Barbican Centre on March 1, 2009.

More info: http://www.thetensionofopposites.com

An excerpt from the “Earth Sound” CD now plays continuously near the entrance to an exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum. The exhibit, “Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters,” will remain at the Field Museum until January 2009, at which point it begins a three-year tour to a half-dozen science museums across the country. (Alas, not to Boston.)

More info: http://www.fieldmuseum.org

3. MY WEBSITE IS A BLOG

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been gradually restructuring my website into a blog format, which allows visitors to post comments in response to my sound clips or small art pieces. Come join the discussion! I always welcome your thoughtful comments.

More info: http://www.jtbullitt.com

4. OPEN STUDIOS NOVEMBER 22-23, 2008

It’s that time of year again! On the weekend of November 22-23, 2008, artists from my own Joy Street Artists building will once again join our neighbors at the Brickbottom Artists Association in throwing open our studio doors to the public for a fun- and art-filled weekend.

Open Studios is a great opportunity to sample the work of more than 100 artists in practically every medium. I do hope you’ll stop by the Joy Street Studios and drop in for a visit. You’ll find me in studio #37, where I’ll be sitting next to a bowl of Hershey kisses. I’ll save one for you.

When:: Saturday & Sunday
May 3-4, 2008
Noon-6pm
Where:: Joy Street Artist Studios
86 Joy Street
Somerville, MA 02143
USA
Directions & more info:: Joy Street Artist Studios

I send you all my best wishes for a peaceful autumn.

— John

Buddhadharma Magazine

John Bullitt — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:22:00 +0000

Buddhadharma Magazine (Summer 2008)