Technology: July 2006 Archives
And speaking of family, our nephew and niece Josh and Jenny are spending their six-month honeymoon hiking the entire Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, all 2,650 miles (4,240 km) of it. They're blogging their experience as they go, entering their journal entries when they get to towns that have public libraries and other places where they can get Internet access.
It's a remarkable journey that they're undertaking, and their writing and photos of it are compelling and fun to read. And it's great that they can share it with us all as they're underway. Lots of family and friends are commenting and sending their love - social software at its finest!
My niece Rachel, a recent grad of RIT in film production, is here on campus this summer teaching summer camp kids how to make digital videos. We were watching some of the short videos her kids had produced yesterday (it's amazing what a group of creative kids can do in a week of summer camp!) and Rachel remarked that they had written the music themselves too.
Of course, what she really meant was that they had assembled some original combination of the stock Garage Band loops to go along with the film. Somehow, that didn't strike me as "writing music" - nobody had a musical instrument in hand, or a microphone, much less putting down marks on staff paper. It seems to me that we need another verb for this kind of bricolage activity that characterizes so much of current music-making.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's not a valid way to construct music - just that it's helpful to distinguish between different ways of getting to a musical result.
Or am I hopelessly old-fashioned?
