Today was my first day of school: the Certificate IV in Sound Production, leading (next year) to the Advanced Diploma in same, at NMIT. It’s the next step on a journey that started in January last year, when Google decided I wasn’t their kind of nerd, and it started to become clear what their plans were with regard to Google Plus and names (definitely not their kind of nerd, since I believe people have the right to control their own identity). I decided to quit and do something else. I was recently going through my (locked) Dreamwidth posts from that time, and it’s funny how quickly I made the decision to change careers, even though I didn’t announce it publicly til May.

Anyway, today was my first day on campus for classes. I’m studying at the Fairfield campus, which is the old infectious diseases hospital. The heritage listed Federation buildings, well-groomed grounds, and natural light in the classrooms are fantastic, but the isolation and lack of lunch options less so. I caught the tram/bus down there today, but from tomorrow I’m going to be biking along Merri Creek.

The morning was spent in orientation sessions, which were just as boring as you might expect (I took my knitting), then the afternoon in going over the student handbook and assessment criteria, followed by our first class in Occupational Health and Safety. My cohort is approximately 25 students, of whom five are women (a better ratio, I note, than any tech job I’ve had in the last decade or so). Most are recent school leavers; among the “mature” students, I am apparently the most mature (ha!), being the only one who can remember the introduction of CDs in the early 1980s. Only a handful of students were born before 1990.

The course is vocational, which means it focuses on practical applications and only gives you the theory you need to get the job done. I have about 18 hours of classes a week, spread across four days (Fridays are free), and we’ve been told that we generally won’t get homework or assessment tasks that need to be done outside of our scheduled time. I’ve been explaining TAFE to my US friends as “community college crossed with DeVry” but in fact the curriculum is closer to DeVry; there are no general education credits, and no classes outside of our vocational focus. There’s also very little attention paid (as far as I can tell so far) to the sort of cultural analysis or free-ranging ideas-based discussion that I tend to get from the mostly university-educated nerds I hang out with.

For example, one of the instructors today, when describing an instruction unit called “Implement copyright arrangements”, stated outright that “copyright is the only way people in the music industry can make money”.

(Pause for all my copyright reformist friends to pound their heads on their desks.)

Another thing I heard today, from our OHS instructor, is that rock and roll makes you horny. Well, sure, I’ll buy that. But he said it’s because the sacculus (part of the inner ear) responds in a certain way to vibrations over 90dB (the volume at which rock and roll is typically played), provoking an erotic response.

Is this something that’s widely believed? All I found when googling “sacculus erotic response” was a scam trying to sell “Pherotones” (I won’t link), a sort of ring tone for your phone that makes you (the default heterosexual male customer, of course) irresistable to girls, based on magical frequencies that vibrate the sacculus in a certain way. Classy.

Google Scholar, however, turned up the work of Dr Neil Todd of Manchester University, who published papers such as Vestibular responses to loud dance music: A physiological basis of the “rock and roll threshold” (1999) and Evidence for a behavioral significance of saccular acoustic sensitivity in humans (2001). Their research was reported in New Scientist, which summarised it as:

Because the vestibular system has a connection to the hypothalamus, the part of the brain responsible for drives like hunger, sex and hedonistic responses, Todd believes that people might be getting a pleasurable buzz when they listen to music–which could explain why music has developed into such a cultural force. This buzz may mimic the thrills people get from swings and bungee jumping, where motion stimulates the balance centre.

But there is a proviso: the sacculus only appears to be sensitive to loud volumes–above 90 decibels. Despite this, crooners could also love their own singing because sound levels in the larynx have been estimated to be as high as 130 decibels. “It’s bloody loud in there,” Todd says.

[...]

“The distribution of frequencies that are typical in rock concerts and at dance clubs almost seem designed to stimulate the sacculus. They are absolutely smack bang in this range of sensitivity,” Todd says. Large groups of people singing or chanting together, such as a choir or a crowd at a sporting event, could also trigger the mechanism, he adds.

I haven’t read the full papers (ahem, mainstream academic publishing prevents spread of knowledge, blah blah copyright blah blah revolution blah blah first up against the wall), but as far as I can tell, the experiments involved getting a small number of subjects, taping electrodes to their necks, then playing blips of noise at certain volumes and frequencies and watching their neck tension. The neck tension demonstrates that the sounds are affecting the sacculus. What’s the connection between that and pleasure, though? Well, the participants are “required to rate the pleasantness of the stimuli on a nine-point scale”. So there is no connection between the two that’s not mediated via a subjective judgement. Oh… kay.

So I guess if you believe that the sacculus response and the pleasure are connected, that that pleasure is necessarily sexual, and that 10ms single-frequency blips are equivalent to, say, seeing AC/DC play live, then sure, rock and roll makes you horny. I could have told you that, but I probably would have mentioned something about low lights, sexually oriented lyrics, crowds of sweaty people moving against each other, and alcoholic disinhibition. Still, it was a lecture about hearing and hearing loss, not about cultural context, so that’s beside the point.

In passing, while looking for this stuff, I also found (in this article) what is possibly the greatest “no shit, Sherlock!” statement I’ve seen so far in the study of rock and roll: “Studies suggest that there is an increase in alcohol consumption in environments with loud music (van de Goor, 1990).” Apart from muttering “correlation mumble mumble causation” under my breath, it does occur to me that the field research for that one must have been fun.

Tomorrow I have classes in repairing and maintaining audio equipment (yay electronics) and editing dialogue (boo Pro Tools). I suspect once we pick up the pace and really get to work I’ll enjoy it more than I did today’s administrivia. Still, I suspect I’m going to have a challenging time focusing on the vocational skills that actually form the curriculum, and saving my semantic nitpicking, cultural critique, and plans for the downfall of the RIAA for more appropriate forums. Wish me luck.

One of Melbourne's laneways (Centre Place), Jan 2012

I’m overdue posting about my New Year’s resolution, but better late than never I suppose. (Good thing I didn’t resolve to blog regularly, I guess.)

I’ve had good luck in recent years with vague resolutions that attempt to adjust my attitude. I think it was 2007 or 2008 when I said “never turn down an adventure”, and 2011′s was “be an artist”. Each of them requires a lot of words to explain what they really mean to me (tl;dr: it’s complicated) but they worked well for me at the time. Anyway, in that vein, this year’s resolution, inspired by Pam and especially this post (but also, just everything she’s posted in the last year about the shows she’s been to), is:

The obvious point is to go to more live music shows, but it’s also an attempt to get off my arse and go out and do things rather than sitting around at home, as is all too easy.

To help with the live music part of it, I’ve actually set up a mailing list with some local (Melbourne, Australia) friends to plan what shows I/we want to go to. If you like live music, are local, and want to be on the list, then let me know. I may occasionally post upcoming gigs here, too.

Another thing I wanted to post about was this:

I got it last Thursday, more or less on a whim, and it’s all tangled up with last year’s resolution and this year’s.

A week ago this Saturday — within days of Google’s hiring process screwing me over, and the beginning of what later became known as the #nymwars breaking out inside Google (yeah, that was quite a week) — I decided I was going to quit working at the Big G and study sound engineering. I didn’t announce it til May, but I started working in that direction immediately. Within a couple of weeks, I had rocked up to 924 Gilman Street and introduced myself to the head of sound and asked to be taken on as a trainee. I worked my first show there on February 10th, and worked an average of about one show a week, at first under supervision and eventually solo, til I finished up in August before returning to Australia. My last show there was a Black Fag gig. They’d been the first band I ever saw at Gilman, and they were the last too. A fitting conclusion.

Working at Gilman was without a doubt one of the best experiences of my life. From the first time I saw the rules inside the front door, to the experience of working huge shows and meeting some of the nicest people I’ve known in ages, to — most importantly, I think — the opportunity it gave me to leave the office on a Friday afternoon, get on a trans-bay bus, and do something awesome and in-the-moment and most of all loud. No matter how tired or cranky or outright depressed I was, by the end of a show there my shoulders had come down from up around my ears, and I could always stagger home afterwards and sleep soundly, knowing that I’d done my job as well as I could, and that once the show was over and the equipment powered down, I was free of responsibility til next time.

I miss Gilman a heap. I miss the people (especially my sound booth buddies), and I miss the bands and the kids who worked the front door and the graffiti in the toilets and the moshpits and I even miss that frigging stand for the kick drum mic that always fell apart no matter how much you duct taped it.

So yeah, the ink’s to remember my time there, and to commemorate the year I stopped being an open source geek and started being a professional music wonk, and to remind me (if I’m ever feeling like I don’t want to leave the house) how good it felt to go to shows every week and be a part of that.

Seems like everyone around me is either doing NaNoWriMo or is in the throes of fannish holiday exchanges. I refuse to make any writing commitments at present, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sympathetic to those that have them. And so…

This afternoon, my housemate Emily and I made Written? Kitten! It’s more or less along the lines of Write Or Die, only without the AUGH AUGH OH NO AAUUUUGHHHH DIEEE!!!!, and with more cuteness and fluff.

It was a quick hack in an afternoon, and we only have the browsers we have at home, so if you find problems with it please let us know.

ETA: source code, if anyone cares.

I’m not sure how to post this in a way that’s not awkward, so here it is: as of last week, I have legally changed my name to “Alex Bayley”.

The recent Google+ names debacle was the catalyst, but not the underlying reason, for this change. When Google insisted that I use my previous wallet name, “Kirrily Robert”, on its services, it made me realise how much I didn’t want to. I’m not strongly attached to “Kirrily” as a name. Among other problems, it’s hard to spell, hard to pronounce, and an all-round nuisance when working internationally and in the public sphere as I do. And more importantly, I don’t feel like it’s me — whatever that means.

Throughout my life I’ve chosen and used a variety of other names, of which Skud is the best known and longest lasting. In relation to Google+, a lot of people asked me, “Why don’t you just change your legal name to Skud?” The problem is, Skud isn’t an easy name to use offline. Like Kirrily, it needs to be repeated and spelled and explained each time I use it, and there are many offline circumstances where I simply wouldn’t be comfortable using it. Even online, I’ve come to realise that being legally mononymous can be rather fraught (just ask Sai or Stilgherrian). So, “Skud” is not the solution.

As I worked through this problem, I realised that my return to Australia, going back to school, and picking up a new career would mean introducing myself to hundreds of new people. I didn’t want to introduce myself as “Kirrily”, nor as “Skud”. The whole situation started to get me down, until I realised that I could choose something else to appear on my legal paperwork, school enrolment, and so forth, while keeping “Skud” as my name online and in the tech community.

To cut a long story short, for a range of reasons I chose the name “Alex” as my new given name. As there are already a range of Alex or Alec Robert or Roberts in the music and technology industries, I switched my surname to Bayley, a name belonging to an uncle, aunt, and cousins to whom I’m quite close. And, just for good measure, “Skud” is now my legal middle name. I figured it might come in handy.

I expect that most of my friends will continue to call me “Skud”, so it should be business as usual for many/most of you. Almost all my online contact details remain the same, however if for some reason you have my old gmail address you should know that I’m retiring it; please use skud@infotrope.net instead (should work fine for sharing docs, chat, etc). When meeting me face to face, please feel free to call me either Skud or Alex, not Kirrily.

Addendum for those who are interested: to change your name legally in the state of Victoria, Australia, where I was born and now reside, you simply submit a form and payment to the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. You are issued with an amended birth certificate showing your name change within 20 working days, or 5 working days if you pay the priority processing fee (which I did).