Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-04-13 - 6:08 p.m.

I bought an expander today - �49 in Andertons in a sale. (They also had compressors and reverb units for the same price.) I have put on the send to record line in my mixer. I already had an expander in my Behringer unit - but the chorus here is so good that I decided I needed a unit to use with it.

I have been thinking about building up WAVs - so many different tools to use. I am still most comfortable with the Creative Labs WAV studio on my 1996 PC. It is fast and accurate for snatching bits of CDs and then building up a shirt sound stream. I have to transfer the WAV to the new PC on a floppy so that makes for a shortish upper time limit. Maybe the best tool for developing the WAV on the new PC is Cubase because it forces you to think in bars and beats - and in the plug-in effects there is a fair amount of processing power. I only have a demo opy of Wavelab and allthough it has even better plug-ins it is save disabled.

Today I have been thinking more about another Steinberg product - Traktor - which is a DJ mixing desk. I can load up the WAV from Cubase and begin to crossmix with a number of other beats, fragments etc. The really brilliant thing about Traktor is the ease with which you can take a mix out as a WAV and then reload it onto one of the decks for further cross mixing. I need to get this WAV development process fixed in my thinking - one is intimidated by the power of the tools.

In today's paper there is a review of a new biography of Aldous Huxley. In the first half of the 1970s I devoted a lot of attention to this author. I studied Brave New World and the preceding four novels concentrating on the portrayal of science and scientists. I got a lot out of this but for some reason I never quite managed to finish the final draft.

There's a sketch of a Brave New World type society in the first novel - Crome Yellow - which is based on Huxley's experiences at Garsington (just south of Oxford) during the war. If you can remember Eleanor Bron and the fig in the film of Women in Love then that's Garsington. In 1923 the scientist JBS Haldane, a biologist and friend of Huxley, published a book called Daedelus or Science and the Future, which developed the idea of a society of people who had been "designed" through genetics. This was a great success and grew into a series called "Today and Tomorrow". I have about thirty of them including "Icarus or the Future of Science" by Bertrand Russell - they are little hardbacks about 3 inches by four. A rival publisher brought out the Psyche Series which included "Science and Poetry" by I A Richards - the new Professor of English at Cambridge - which has an amazing theory of how good literature impacts on the brain.

These themes are picked up by Huxley in his second novel - Antic Hay - which is a kind of romp round bohemian London. The leading character is thought to be a portrait of JBS Haldane - and the integrating power of art, under challenge by the "Waste Land" city, is represented by Wren's dome for St Pauls.

Those Barren Leaves and Point Counterpoint - the next two novels go deeper and deeper into the question of how values can be grounded. Russell's stoical materialism - which he set out in A Free Man's Worship isn't good enough. In part this is because the new physics has dissolved matter and opened the possibilty of a new mysticism. Huxley got friendly with a writer who popularised this point of view - and who also was deeply interested in Beethoven - I do wish I could remember his name. In Point Counterpoint one of the references is the Grosse Fuge from the late Beethoven String Quartet. Maybe more of this tomorrow

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