You forgot to carry the one!

It was another beautiful day, sunny and clear. The sunset was gorgeous, fluffy clouds tinged with a beautiful delicate pink. Hubby took me into the electronic studio this afternoon to try out the interactive program he�s been working on for the new music concert in two weeks to make sure it�s bugfree before we actually rehearse it with the other musicians. It�s not.

The composition is called �My Secret Fl0wer!�. The exclamation point is very important. I am the keyboardist, meaning that I have a sheaf of poems in front of me, each one of which contains somewhere in the text at least one of those words and/or the exclamation point. I start typing and the computer keyboard is programmed to make funny sounds for every keystroke. When the program �captures� the word �my�, the sounds change, the word is displayed on the screen for all to see (the audience will see what I am typing as well) and this is the cue for the other musicians to start improvising on a 15-note row Hubby has constructed from the individual letters of the title. At �secret� something new happens, and again at �flower�. However, when I finally hit the exclamation mark, the computer starts gathering the sounds the others are making, processing them, and sending them back out in bursts. My job is done when that final punctuation is pressed, although I can complete the poem I�m typing for a sense of closure. The piece ends as the musicians wait for the computer to spew out processed sounds, finally stopping when they realize there is no more.

The problem was that it kept crashing, regardless of how fast or slowly I was typing, what word I was on, whether I had made a mistake or not, and what word had been �captured�. Hubby is ready to tear his hear out. Luckily he has lots of it. He says he has trouble reading stuff off a computer screen, and has probably missed something crucial but miniscule because he hasn�t seen it. I suggested that he take a series of pictures of the different patch screens, bring them home on a zip disk and we�ll print them here, and then he can proofread. Right now he�s marking theory papers and has no desire to go back to the studio. Last night he was there all night, coming home at 5:30 this morning. But we have a rehearsal with the other players next weekend, and the concert is the Friday after that, so this has to be fixed up.

The other pieces on the programme are Cassi0peia by Ge0rge Cacci0pp0 and Terry Ri1ey�s In C. I will be singing and wearing a contact mike for those.

Otherwise, I did laundry and played on the computer. What a life!

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