So here we are back at it again. For a final project in my Computer Science class at The New England Institute of Art I must compose a Wikipedia entry or edit, add, update an existing entry. Wikipedia has been a fantastic online encyclopedia resource that I have referenced quite often in the past. I never actually gave much thought to the meaning of the word wiki. Every time I hear or think about the word wiki it conjures up childhood memories of one of my all time favorite old school hip-hop track “Jam On It” by Newcleus. Wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki… The actual meaning of the word wiki is “crowd sourcing.” That is exactly what Wikipedia does, and it’s brilliant. It is going to be a challenge to find a relevant topic of interest to create a new topic so I may find myself editing and adding more pertinent info to an existing Wikipedia topic for this assignment. Bidding you a lovely rainy New England day from audio land…
This week in my Computer Science class I learned about the Exaflood, which subsequently I had never heard of. You can watch an interesting video on the subject here:
This is a scary possibility that we may even see in our lifetime. Basically as far as I understand it an exabyte of data is an extremely large amount of data. We are using and generating so much content on the net in these times that according to the video on the exaflood that i gave you the link to above, 20 U.S. households use as much internet capacity as the whole world used back in the mid nineties. The greater percentage of this usage is generated through HD video content and streaming video which takes up a vast amount of bandwidth. With users these days watching movies and television shows on their laptops or even connecting their computers to their HD televisions to do so you can see how much this usage is going up. It is said that the overload of the bandwidth by this extreme usage could in fact overload the networks and drastically slow down the internet.
It’s pretty crazy how many people are connected to the net and how much growth there is. I can remember having a dial up internet connection when I was younger and how long it took just to connect to the net. Imagine that we overload the net with all of our new technology and our need for faster connections and instant gratification wind up leading us back to that ever so slow place. Now I doubt that will happen if the advertising service providers continue to upgrade their fiber optics that are the backbone of the internet as discussed in the video. The service providers really need to see what the future holds and I think they have a good grasp on it. Technology is always going to get faster and less expensive so one day we may end us using the internet as our one and only resource. If this were to happen we would need an extremely vast network that could handle all this exadata. It’s something that most people really don’t think about and I found it interesting.
If you get a chance be sure to check out the youtube link.
I learned quite a bit more in the past week in my other classes and daily life as well. I think that I’ve learned something new every day since I was born and that is one of the beauties in life. Having attended the Boston Area Definitive Audio Student Summit at NEAI this past Saturday I had the opportunity to meet a few industry heavyweights. The 9 time Grammy winning producer/engineer Jim Anderson blow my mind when he took an analog tape two mix recording converted through the best possible A/D converters and rendered the file to a high quality mp3 then brought that mp3 back into the original mix. He then was able to use some phasing techniques to line up the mp3 track with the original tape master to allow the listener the ability to only hear the distortion that is added to each and ever mp3 we hear. This is just one other reason why convenient mp3 audio is inferior to that of cd quality 16 bit 44.1khz sample rate music formats or even better vinyl.
I also had the privilege of attending a discussion on music copyrighting, licensing, publishing, and synchronization with Jordan Tishler . If you read my last posting you’s know that this stuff really is where the rubber meets the pavement as far as achieving a somewhat sustainable income with your recorded works and songs. I received some great advice from Jordan concerning my current endeavors with Long Distance Analog and Absolutely and I’m educating myself further and looking at other opportunities for us that I had not thought of previously. I look forward to meeting up with Jordan in the near future to check out his studio and get his feedback on our music.
We’ll that’s all I’ve got for now. Sweet dreams from audio land…
So this has been yet another action packed week for me. I’ve been working hard over the years to discover the 25th hour in the day so we could all achieve a little bit more with our lives. Haven’t found it yet but I’ll be sure to let you know when I do as it would surely help me out with my hectic schedule.
Back to the task at hand. In the past week I have learned several useful things that I will indefinitely carry with me on my quest fin this life. We watched an informative film on the inception and creation of the Internet, Networks, and the World Wide Web in my CSI101 class that was interesting. I thought it was really cool how in the begining of greating the ARPA Net the computer scientists had to create a device called IMP to interface with various machines so that they could share information with other machines. Being a vintage analog synth buff I found this IMP machine with it’s blinking lights and switches reminiscent of an old synth or something you’d find in a Star Trek episode. I liked how when presenting the newly devised network technology to the commication giants at AT&T the network compleatly crashed and the executive at AT&T laughed at this technology. Just take a look around these days. You know these guys anr’t laughing anymore, well maybe they are now with the invention of the iphone.
I also learned a great deal copyright law, publishing, and licencing as it pertains to music in my BUS101 (Music Business) class. It couldn’t have come a better time as my production partners and I are currently copyrighting our materiel to sell the sound recording license to a newer independent dance music record label out of the UK. I have much better understanding of this subject matter and have been able to guide us in making educated decisions concerning our art. Can’t beet that right.
That’s the update for now, off to my AMT101 (Audio Tech 1) class to plot some complex wave forms. Until next time, good night and good luck from audio land.
I’m taking a very interesting computer science class at The New England Institute of Art on Thursday evenings. I attended my first class last week and let me tell you, I really enjoyed it even though I’m a Mac and we’re working in a PC lab. Having worked for a few notable dot com companies as an account manager in the past I’ve always found the internet and the world wide web to be a unique place of business. Being a creative individual who as a child took things apart only to reverse engineer and reassemble them to teach myself how things work learned about a simple little thing called packet switching. I had previously been informed of packet switching but now I have a better understanding of how they work with the web and with internet based applications. For those of us that may not know what packet switching is I’ll give you a brief explanation. Packet switching is what happens to an email or information form your computer being sent to a server through various protocol when you click send. It is a type of network communication where the data is split up into smaller packets that include the date, sender, receiver, and the packet number. Those packets are then sent through different routes and reassembled once received on the other end.
Now I’m not so certain if packet switching is whats really going on behind the scenes with a cell phone based application such as text messaging, maybe you can tell me if this application follows a different protocol from packet switching? Regardless, I’ll give you and example of my recent experiences. I’m currently on the old Nextel iDen network through Boost Mobile which is run by Sprint for cell service as it’s an inexpensive alternative for unlimited text and talk time, seeing as my Verizon Wireless service was costing an arm and a leg. With Boost Mobile text messaging, and obviously this is not the most reliable network, I will receive text message that exceed the character limit and are broken up into what I equate as packets then sent to the Nextel iDen server to be downloaded by my phone. Now when someone sends a message that exceeds the character limit, more often then not, I will receive the packets that the lengthy text has been broken up into in a completely different order from which the original message was written. This is annoying but not as annoying if it happened with all our emails.
I’m looking forward to learning as much as I can about what goes on behind the scenes on the net especially when we start to learn about web design and the basic html coding that I have some self taught experience in. This will be a good basis for teaching myself about css, php, and flash. Although I remember a web programmer telling me that since a flash url stays constant on all pages of your site that it makes for limited result when you get into search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Now for all of us creative people out there this where it the business comes into play. We can explore those marketing tactics and put them to work for us a little later on down the road.
It certainly has been quite the long week for me being a full time college student, working a full time job, and somehow finding time to write new music and live a little of my life. With that i bid you sweet dreams from audioland, I’m off to reboot my mind.
I’d like to welcome you to the Beat Connection Recordings Blog. My Name is Jesse Allen, I am a Dj, Producer, Remixer, Saxophone Player, Keyboardist, Synth Player who has been working in the music business in one form or another for sometime now. I have released a few records over the years and continue to make a release various styles of underground dance music. You can find a link to my bio and some hip music I’ve done on the right side of the homepage of this blog if you’d like to know more. Currently I am studying Audio Production at The New England Institute of Art to better diversify myself within the audio industry and further hone my craft . In this blog I will be posting the topics of interest mainly associated with my CSI110 Internet Technologies coursework. Other topics that inspire me through my experience in higher education will be posted here as well including audio, music, dj mixes, video, images, artwork, etc. Thanks for visiting and keep posted.
