My Gadget Life

Last night I went with a group of friends to see a play written by Pat Gabridge (my friend and coworker’s husband) called Blinders. It’s a political satire about the “scientific” discovery of 2 supposedly identical human beings and the lone reporter who sees that they aren’t really identical. It’s sort of an Emporer’s New Clothes theme, and very timely, even though it was written a while back (1997 or 98?). I thought of the corporate media and how so many lies are portrayed as truth with everyone jumping on the bandwagon of what’s popular. When chatting with Pat after the play he mentioned that he thought at the time he wrote it that it would be less relevant in the future, but instead it’s become more relevant. (sadly) It touches upon everything from presidential debates, to the pope, to believing in your own vision in a time of mass brainwashing. I highly recommend it! It’s at the Boston Playwright’s Theatre…. Out of the Blue Theatre Company.

My sister has a blog called Living Better Cinematically, where she writes reviews and descriptions of “ephemeral films.” (She collects them). Here’s the subtitle of her site: Reviews of film ephemera, including such things as educational films, industrial films, military and propaganda films, tv commercials, movie trailers, shorts, experimental films, and movies made for non-mainstream audiences.

It’s pretty cool. Check it out. Many of those films are freely available to download from sites such as the Internet Archive.

Have you ever heard your own voice as the opposite gender? It’s SO funny! On Christmas we were playing around with sound software for the Mac, called Amadeus II. We used my Powerbook to record ourselves having a conversation for about 1-2 minutes. Then we played with changing the pitch and speed when we played it back. We decided that the funniest thing was to keep the normal speed, but turn down the pitch just enough so the women and kids among us sounded like adult men. I was with my 2 friends, Sandy and Melissa, and their kids, Rosa, 14, Isaiah, 11, and Xavier, 20. Xavier has a very low voice anyway, so his sounded totally ghoulish. Then of course we speeded it up to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks, which is always good for a laugh.

We realized that hearing ourselves as men brought forward the fact that as women we tend to use certain inflections and ways of speaking that were still there even though the pitch was lower. We totally sounded like an episode from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy! We loved it! All of us were in hysterical fits of laughter for quite some time.

By the way, that program, Amadeus, is a great piece of shareware. I used it to digitize my old piano recitals from my undergrad years that were on cassette tape. I could use the white noise filter to edit out the tape hiss from the old cassettes and it was also very convenient for editing out the empty space at the beginning, fading out the applause at the end, and splitting it up into separate tracks. I saved it as mp3, burned a couple of CDs to give as gifts, and put the files on my iPod. I highly recommend Amadeus!

There are 2 recent articles I found helpful about how to digitize your cassettes and vinyl, see MacWorld, Jan. 2005: “From Tape to CD: Bring your old recordings into the digital future,” or Playlist, Winter 2005: “Digitize Me: Convert your tapes and records, before it’s too late.” Both are by the same author, but the second article also covers Windows software.

My friend, David, just happened to notice this and snapped the photo.