During an eye examination a year or so ago, the doctor mentioned that I am developing cataracts in both eyes. I don’t experience any of the serious typical effects like poor night vision or cloudiness, so it really is not affecting my functioning, but it does mean that I am a legitimate candidate for cataract surgery. This procedure removes the natural lens from the eye and replaces it with a clear artificial lens. It can also correct for near-sightedness, which is why I wore contact lenses in the first place.

So I went onto my doctor’s schedule for cataract surgery, with the target date being April 8. My right eye will be modified on the 8th, and my left eye two weeks later.

The doctor provided several choices in terms of type of implanted lens. (These are generically called Intra Ocular Lens or IOL.) It seemed to me that the most common was to have one eye corrected for a distant version, and the other eye corrected for near vision. The goal there being to get the best possible result for each eye separately by using a monofocal lens in each case. That gives a sharpest correction to vision following surgery.

But he also offered me the option of an IOL specially crafted to provide three ranges of correction — near, medium and distant — all in the same lens. The common trifocal glass lens, which many people wear in their spectacles, is another way to address this. But this IOL, unlike spectacles, doesn’t require moving the head or adjusting eye angles to change its focus. Instead, it uses a ring shaped pattern on the IOL that provides all three ranges or focal lengths to the retina at the same time. The brain deciphers the three incoming images and “sees“ only one distance at a time. My understanding is that the brain learns to ignore the two that are irrelevant and pay attention only to the appropriate distance at any one time. Apparently, the brain and the eye work this way all the time, but it seemed a bit like magic to me and I look forward to exploring it and describing the process.,

Thus, this series of posts about my experience with the Panoptix Pro IOL.

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Several hours later, however, they called me and offered a 10:30 arrival. Took it.

On Thursday I arrived at 10:30 bright and shiny, all rested up, and dressed casually. Because it’s just the eye, they suggest comfortable clothing and short sleves (for ease in placing an I.V.). You’ll recall I had bladder cancer in 2016 and many procedures with I.V., so although I still don’t enjoy them, they’re not a terrible experience. The I.V. is necessary because they administer some light anaesthetic… aparently a benzodiazepine (like valium) and a pain-killer (like fentanyl). I have experience with both of those (from other minor surgical procedures). and I know I stay conscious and I remember a little more than expected. So I looked forward to experiencing the procedure and reporting on it.

Close Encounters — So after the I.V. is placed and they give me some time to just cool my jets waiting, they come to take me away. They’ve now put me flat on my back on the gurney and they wheel me like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride down the hall and around a corner (don’t fall off!) to another hall, then left into the procedure room. They station me under the equipment which seems to be mobile on a sturdy “arm” — they bring the arm right over my face, center it over the eye. The business end of the apparatus appears to me a bit like the flying saucer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind with bright lights in a somewhat circular pattern above my face. Down it comes until almost touching. It occurs to me to become claustrophobic, but the medications nicely prevent that. It seems to me I’m remembering every moment.

First they remove my natural lens. I believe they used ultrasound. Looking upward thru the center of the lights, it seems to me like an ink blot appears in the center of my vision and spreads out a bit. Then they “blot” around the edges of that blackness until the center is pretty much darkened out. Then I hear “You’ll feel some pressure“ and yes, indeed I do feel him pressing on my eye. Then a kind of squishy visual moves in as he inserts the new IOL (lens) via a tiny incision. There are some fuzzy images, but quickly those go away as a small surgical dressing and plastic bubble are taped over the eye. To be removed the next day.

Here’s a video from a doc in Austin, Texas, not mine, showing an actual procedure with the type of lens I have. It’s pretty interesting even if you don’t like surgery movies. No blood.

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Typical IOLs (not this one) bring things into focus at a limited distance or range. The natural eye focuses actively on a distance by squeezing the natural lens, changing its shape, changing the focus point. The plastic IOL cannot do that. So an IOL has a corrective prescription (or refraction) built in.

Instead, my IOL will have three distances (thus “trifocal”) it will focus. (Each is actually a range, not just a single distance.) The corrective prescription for my far-vision is built into one of the concentric rings of the lens. The prescription for mid-vision is in the next concentric ring. And for near-vision, into the next ring. Then this far-mid-near ring pattern repeats across the active area of the IOL.

When I’m standing looking at something on the far horizon, only my far-vision rings produce a sharp image. The mid- and near- images of objects on the horizon are not focused on my retina, and my brain will learn to ignore them in favor of the far- image.

When I’m reading something up close, the near-vision rings are providing the sharp image on my retina. The other rings are providing out-of-focus images, and similarly my brain will learn to ignore them when I want to read.

What are those little wings? Apparently they keep the lens in place in the center of the pupil. Who knew?

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The post Panoptix — Theory appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The surgery took about 10 minutes. I pretty much remember the whole process and it was very interesting. At its conclusion they covered my eye with a dressing, which remained the first 24 hours. My first impression was that my eyelashes were kinda stuck and my eyes wanted to open and close together even though the surgeruzed eye felt scratchy due to the dressing and tape. The doctor later told me he expected my eyelid to stay closed, so if something wasn’t quite working as intended, but there seems to have been no ill effect.

Many people say those first 24 hours are really difficult. I found that being mentally “prepared” helped a lot. I just had to be really, really patient and resist any temptation to scratch or pull on the dressing to make it more comfortable.

When my eyelid was open, I could tell there was plenty of light and I could see areas of dark and light thru the dressing – corresponding to what my natural (left) eye was seeing. So it was pretty exciting to know everything worked but no hint yet about clarity of vision.

Let’s call that Day Zero.

Day 1

Next morning I visited the doctor to have then dressing removed and a quick check-up. Sitting in a eye-exam chair with a chart on the far wall, they removed the bandage. It was absolutely astoundingly clear and sharp. I knew immediately this was going to be a good result — maybe an excellent result. The letters on the eye chart were mostly sharp, and I could confidently read down to the 20/30 line. My understanding was that this is pretty good for the first post-surgery day. I found that reflective objects like chrome on the equipment was “delightfully sharp” and sparkly. It was obvious the lens was going to be excellent!

To rest my eyes prior to surgery I had had a pair of glasses made. (I previously wore contacts, not glasses.) But now with an IOL in my right eye those glasses were not going to work for me. So I went to an optometrist who knocked out one prescription lens and replaced it with regular glass. This barely worked, leaving me with dpuble vision (although it was sharp), but was going to only be temporary anyway.

Week 1

During daytime hours I wore the modified glasses at times, but rapidly discovered it was more restful to just leave them off and let the natural eye be extremely blurry — because my vision with the IOL was so good I could do almost any daily activity confidently. At night I wore a transparent plastic eyepatch taped on, to prevent scratching and injuring the eye.

I decided not to drive until both eyes were completed. Good decision.

The trifocal aspect of the IOL was fascinating, and brain adaptation kicked in by about Day 2 or so. I noticed immediately that the best vision was distance vision. This became spectacularly obvois as night fell. From our windows in San Francisco we see a lot of the city as well as distant San Francisco Bay and the Marin and the East Bay hills.

As the sun set on about the second day, I realized I clearly saw every distant window in Salesforce Tower, and even better I saw the decorative lights of the Bay Bridge. On the East Bay hills, about 15 miles away, I could see individual tall trees on that ridge. I was not seeing those with my natural eye and the glasses. The IOL was at times sharper than my natural eye.

The IOL slightly reduces optical contrast, and that was initially obvious to me, though it was only bothersome when I attempted to read grey type against a white background. I would say it was tolerable. This was also more noticeable at night and with low light levels. It did get better as I approached the end of the week. My guess would be that I was adapting to the light curve of the lens.

But by about the 4th day I could already tell that the IOL did not cause me any problem with glare, halos, or rays, around most bright lights at night. This was super exciting because it is one of the more common outcomes for many people, and I had problems only with the most super-bright lights (like a car headlight coming at me on a city street).

The trifocal aspects of this IOL began to become useful by Day 6. I found I could easily focus on a laptop screen and use the computer for a few hours without strain. Couldn’t use both eyes together, but the single IOL eye, as long as I stayed relaxed and didn’t attempt actively to focus, just kind of naturally was working.

I did not have much near vision, however, in that first week. It appears to me that relaxing and letting the eye and brain do their adaptation without straining, may be the trick.

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The major difference between week 1 and week 2 was really positive — I was progressively adapting to the new lens. During the second week I found that on more occasions I was noticing that I could read small print up close. I would be reading something on my phone screen with both eyes open and relaxed, (and at this close distance the naturaleye would be sharp) but then realize that it was the new eye that was seeing things sharply.

Anyone who’s nearsighted knows that without glasses or contacts you can get right down close and see the pores on your hand. It was becoming obvious I would no longer have that microscopic tight closeup vision once both my IOLd were in place. Like let’s say 6 inches away. Totally blurry at that distance, and maybe magnifying glasses would do the trick — but I don’t know for sure. Just beyond that, however, at 10 or 15 inches I could frequently read things like small print on a medicine bottle. It surprised me when it happened, and it was unpredictable and unreliable, but left me very hopeful.

Now at 13 days post-surgery, I’m scheduled to have the other IOL implanted tomorrow. A little apprehensive, but upbeat and excited to see how the two eyes work together.

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This time I requested they knock me out a little more, which apparently they did because I remember nothing of the lens implantation procedure.

Immediately thereafter we went for coffee and stickybuns at the nearby Saint Frank’s coffee shop on Polk Street. It’s one of those bright sunny San Francisco days. On the way home., Kathryn asked to be routed past more of the addresses I had lived at in the city in the past, so we went by Jackson Street where I lived for a little longer a year when newly arrived in the city. It was about seven or eight blocks away from Pacific Medical Center (on Buchanan St. in 1976), where I had an office and was working on a distance learning project for medical education.

There was an achy pain in the eye socket this time (unlike right eye two weeks ago), controlled pretty well by 500mg Tylenol. Maybe need to sleep mid-afternoon?

It’s probably obvious to you that my first eye (right eye) is really doing great and it’s easy for me to use the computer right now. This is consistent with my experience the first two weeks, and tomorrow when the eyepatch is removed, I really look forward to testing out full binocular vision and more of the near distance abilities of my new lenses.

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The second eye measured 20/20 vision immediately. It was pretty amazing when they removed the gauze dressing and I could immediately read the eye chart on the wall. They said “Read the top line.” I read the top line, and then the second, and then the third, and then the fourth, and then the fifth line going pretty easily to the 20/20 level. It was also clear that this correction was better than the first eye had been. (And that one was still excellent, at about 20/30.)

The day before this second surgery, wearing glasses over one eye and IOL lens in the other, I was seeing double. Couldn’t get stereoscopic or binocular vision to work — two images most of the time. Without glasses on I had some depth perception, but poor quality because of the one uncorrected eye.

It reminded me that a major reason I had trouble with baseball and basketball in grade school was that I had such poor stereo vision with glasses even at the age of 12 or so. Getting contact lenses as an adult was liberating to me, as it restored that critically-necessary stereoscopic component of my vision. And for 6 weeks, in the run-up to the surgery I had returned to that world of glasses. It had left me in a cranky mood.

Now with the bandage removed, my stereo vision immediately worked perfectly. (Had I been worried? Yes.)  I knew I had been suffering some eye strain from the mismatch and it was really bothering me after two weeks of going around that way. My depth perception with glasses was terrible, and I was on occasion just kind of stumbling around. Never tripped or fell, but was pretty shaky at times because of it. Immediately after the bandage came off, I had no problem with depth. When leaving the clinic I could see steps on the stairway and cracks in the sidewalk. And avoid them, of course.

Within a couple of hours I again noticed a kind of “screen door effect” or moiré pattern in the new eye, on the outer edge of my visual field. I had noticed this after the first IOL implant (on the right eye) and it had become less and less visible over the week. The pattern was more visible in the second eye. At the edge of my vision there is a kind of a flickering screen door effect as I cast my eyes left or right. This is certainly due to the concentric rings of the lens. It kind of causes a bit of what I would call a flicker or stutter as I move my eyes left or right. It is more visible in low light, and I’d guess this is because my pupil opens to a larger size in low light, meaning more of the IOL surface area is involved, and consequently more of the concentric rings. This is just an observation and definitely not a malfunction at all. I think it speaks to the design of the lens and how the brain adapts to it.

Upon returning home from the clinic, I used the prescription eye drops for the very first time in the second eye. Then after taking a shower I noticed that my vision was clouded up like steam on a hot shower door, glass shower door. It was a bit unnerving — maybe some tapwater washed through the eye? Or maybe it was a lot of light scatter that the brain couldn’t yet filter out. But it persisted for a few hours and eventually cleared.

Reading text, and iPhone screen up close, are now absolutely focused and sharp. This had not been easy for me even with contact lenses, and especially in a dark room at night. Now everything is exceptionally clear and easy to focus on, even down to maybe 8 inches in front of my nose.

This is going to be great! Maybe I’ll give this writing thing a rest for a while now and check in after a few days or weeks.

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View a sampling of V.I. work online.

At the beginning of a meeting there might be a long horizontal paper unrolled across the wall. Eileen would, from start of meeting, begin sketchhng out words, clouds, little people, relationships, all the way thru the end of the meeting. These murals served as conceptual records of the meetings — embedding not only ideas, but interrelationships. Particularly relevant to NextNow was her Engelbart mural, viewable on VisualInsight.net

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This is what I’d call a state of inquiry, in which one discards any pretense of sophistication and critism, and simply observes — takes in all aspects of what is happening, and reserves judgment and critique.

It’s actually akin to the state of mind that works best when you’re first viewing a film. You observe a lot, but initially there’s limited information, so an approach in which you let it all flow in and hold your judgments ’til later can be the best strategy.

I think Bill’s approach is often similar. At least at the beginning, before sparking a conversation, he often puts people together with no detailed plan for outcomes, and basically makes or “holds the space” for something to happen. He makes the introduction — and lets it go from there. You can be sure he doesn’t do it randomly — there’s always some hint — but it leaves plenty of space for exploration.

Wish I could give you concrete examples. In my case there some fuzzy cases. My professional life has been in Computer Science. But it has been often at the fuzzy edge of what used to be called “man-machine” interfaces or communication. It meant working in 3D visualization, data visualisation, “art” to some degree, and ultimately with Digital Audio Workstations and the composition of music. Along the way various NextNow events included people with interesting ideas and projects that influenced my work — and for sure influenced it visually.

PS: For the 2015 events, I just now found the third page link, so March,  April and May are now all accounted for.

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Tonight I sit and share with you my thoughts about our friend who we sometimes call “Mr Human Glue” who has played a creative and interesting role in our lives. At least in mine.

How I Came to It

Way back in the 1970s I created a technology project at Northwestern University where we sought to introduce and experiment with online communication and education. As a young professor I was into the tech and because we were so far “ahead of the curve” part of my role was to discover and meet other experimenters in related work. At some point a fellow called me up (or wrote on paper!) to say that he had a grant to “call people up and introduce them.” I believe it was an NSF grant. My friend who team-taught a seminar with me — Bob Johansen — and I had some number of such calls, introduced and moderated by this facilitator, and relationships were sparked that went on for decades.

I say that by way of introducing here the concept of “professional introducer.”

Not an entirely new concept, of course, because we know that centuries ago artists had studios where they worked together and often novel ideas arose, musicians and intellectuals had salons, and the univeersity concept certainly served to cross-polinate (ccompared to guilds and trades).

Bob and I had done a collaboration at Northwestern — teaming up to create a Seminar on College Teaching (so-named by our Dean Claude Mathis) in which we intentionally brought together graduate students and faculty from many departments, using this mix to spark new ways of viewing and supporting and conducting education (and expanding our use of “distance learning” technologies). (I’ve writen some about this Computers And Teaching project.)

NextNow

So it must have been 2003 — Bill Daul came along (but no recollection of how we met) with his idea to formally bring people together, which he named NextNow, and it was familiar and very natural. I “signed up” immediately. I don’t recall whether NextNow had coalesced around Doug Engelbart already, or not, but early NextNow meetings such as the one at Fort Mason (using World Cafe as its structure – this may have been only the second NextNow meeting) included a wonderfully broad participation from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. I can’t overestimate how many people I met thru those events – they were miraculous. (Also see Engelbart on Wikipedia)

NextNow meetings were held at many venues, though Doug’s house may hold the record, and events held at or with the collaboration of MediaX at Stanford I think were some of the most fruitful.

For a long period – perhaps most of the life of NextNow – operations, events and meetings at The NextNow Collaboratory in Berkley played an underlying structural role and provided more of an ongoing physical presence than the more “itinerant” meetings.

When I decided on a career redirect in 2015 I celebrated by putting together a paroxism of several NextNow meetings in downtown San Francisco (in March then April and May) we used a model we’d been improving over the years – presentations; small groups; re-convene and synthesize. One of many models the group had tried.

In conclusion (of this one note) I want to recognize publicly that Bill’s work as founder and listener-in-chief allowed me, and certainly a number of others, to meet new people and new-yet-connectable ideas, over a period of maybe a couple of decades, that otherwise just might not have happened. And there was often a special synergy when people “collided” from disparate disciplines.

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Visual arts have always been a personal interest, and even as a musician I have always associated images with music. When Lennie Moore brought to his SFCM class a member of the Scary Cow film collaborative in 2016, it gave me an opportunity to connect my musical composition skills to filmmakers. This resulted in my developing opportunities to score and record music for a half dozen films. (Some are viewable online.)

In 2022 I began filming my own story — what I call “Coming Home to Music” — after 50 years in Computer Science. As a teen, I was a pretty good pianist, and when I went to college I had made a choice between studying engineering (and then computer science) or enrolling in the American Conservatory of Music to study piano performance. I chose computers. Then in 2015 I came back to music full time at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In 2022 I decided to commit this story to film, and as luck would have it, found three other SFCM alumni who had stories of a similar trajectory — and were really perceptive and willing to tell their stories. The four stories are now woven into one single feature film Play It Again — Coming Home to Music and How It Changed My Life. (online) It’s great how the stories dovetail and how each of my co-stars is able to tell their story in ways that are clear and deeply insightful.

Both film and music businesses are so completely disrupted that it’s a constantly changing landscape. Streamed music pays almost nothing at all (roughly a sixth of a cent per play) and only the megastars make an income on streaming. And mostly the money is in performance, not recording. In film, blockbusters are the big news and tiny independent films pretty much never get seen. So the trick here is to break the mold and find other ways of paying for a film, not just ticket sales. Workin’ on that.

If you’d like a peek behind the scenes at a music recording session, take a look at this 2023 short I produced. Making the Music of Happy Goat (online). We filmed this in 2022 and much of it is included in Play It Again.

Now for a preview of 2024, we will be spending much of our time at Ensō Village in Healdsburg, where a community based on Zen and Quaker values is being formed. Over 200 living units and many interesting people with fascinating stories. Next year’s report will certainly cover a lot of that ground. (Current online sources of information are limited, and I recommend you wait for my future report.) The people are the attraction.

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From frost on rooftops out our windows (San Francisco – frost?) to the vivid red maple blooming in front of our home, we continue to appreciate life and beauty!

Kathryn: I am still leading the Feldenkrais program for adults with severe neuro-motor challenges at Bay Area Ability Now and also co-leading a weekly meditation practice group for Tergar International on Sunday mornings, with my colleague Cristian Lotito—something I’ve done weekly since April 2020, and monthly in person before that. The photo shows me with Cristian and Mingyur Rinpoche, Tergar’s Founding Teacher.

I was drawn to the work of Roshi Joan Halifax (photo left) several years ago, and I am delighted to be able to study with her “in person” on zoom. (You can see my small face on the zoom insert above her head.)

Jim/Sky: It’s been mostly-sunny days this week on the ski slopes near Lake Tahoe, and we’re happy that we’re both skiing — at least on the fair-weather days. (Temp 36°F day and 18°F night)

Despite a ski injury last January, Kathryn has continued skiing and loves it — as she has for many years. These photos of us were taken yesterday!

 

Jim/Sky: Kathryn also got to visit with her sister Susan Amber Gordon on the East Coast, despite our lessened eagerness to travel since the start of the pandemic.

 

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Play It Again

Jim/Sky: In 2022 I started producing my feature-length film Play It Again about “Coming home to music.” I’m personally an extreme example of this. For me the coming back started in 2014, then accelerated to full tilt in 2015-2016 at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where I completed a full-time post-graduate year in Technology and Applied Composition. At that time, I had already been thinking about making a film about the experience, but there just wasn’t time to complete the coursework and do a film at the same time. So in February, 2022 I finally started filming. An intermediate full-length cut of the film is completed now (December, 2022) and with the filming of one more scene in January, we will have it all “in the can.”

When I went back to music in 2015 I said that “software had caught up with us” and was finally enabling a new breed of composer and compositional process — with sampled instruments it had become possible to compose and play back in real time at good quality — a new cyclical compositional process much like software development. Well by 2022 it was obvious that iPhone hardware and software were advanced enough that “filming” could be similarly streamlined and available to far more would-be producers. So I became one of those. The film is almost entirely shot on iPhone with wireless sound recording right into the camera as well. Sign up for more film info!

Play It Again — Coming home to music and how it changed my life; filmed in 2022, and scheduled for release in February, 2023. New audio albums are in the works for Q1:2023 augmenting the existing albums. Amateur Music Network; I’m on the board of directors of this org that promotes “the love of music” including upcoming workshops and a library of video of many past workshops. Joined the board of the Ross McKee Foundation, which promotes piano performance. We had a private showing and panel discussion of The Third Harmony, a film I scored in 2020. CDs of my albums are available now via special order. Just ask me.

My film will be available in February, 2023, and if you visit the Play It Again web site, you can sign up there for email notification.

(The space above is where the intro video should appear. It may be empty if you have opted out of ‘statistics’ cookies. You may play the introductory video on Vimeo)

 

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SFWEM.NET is the San Francisco Wireless Emergency Net, which is a mesh network that’s being built out by amateur radio operators with the intention of being a communications backup in time of emergency — when phone and data networks may be locally overwhelmed or not functional. Beside that, however, it’s an interesting experiment for amateur radio operators seeking to understand the benefits and limitations of “wi-fi” as a long-distance tool.The wi-fi that most people know is range-limited and often flakey.  SFWEM works with directional antennas that have far greater range, and with higher radio power (permitted to amateur radio operators) on a band of radio frequencies not available for public use. So rather than being stuck with a 50-foot maximum range, we can get good connections over distances of 20+ miles. The connections are still line-of-sight, meaning that one antenna must be able to literally “see” the antenna on the other end that it’s connecting to. Any buildings, trees or hills in between the two will reduce or eliminate the signals.

So the idea is to create a mesh or network of interconnected stations to cover the space — in this case the northern end of San Francisco Bay, and soon the southern end of Marin County — with stations that automatically relay communications from one node of the mesh to the next. And as long as even one mesh node has a connection to the Internet, all of the other interconnected mesh nodes can reach the Internet (and each other).

My “interconnection” consists of the packet radio station, which is linked to the amateur packet radio network in the area (in my case to KE6JJJ in Bernal Heights, and to NøARY in the South Bay). And two nodes on the SFWEM mesh. The link between the two is software. A JNOS software system running on a Raspberry Pi4 computer. JNOS can send and receive messages on the packet side, and can send, forward and receive messages using regular Internet-based email.

The whole setup is currently solar powered. Summer in San Francisco is cold, and sometimes foggy, but there are enough sunny days that the batteries can make it. (Winter, with different sun angles, is a bit more challenging.) Currently (May 2021) I’m testing to determine how long the solar powered system can supply both the packet and the SFWEM systems, as well as solving some issues with how many different voltages are required for all of this equipment, and how efficient the whole power supply thing can be.

Lots more to say; enough for now.

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My first two films were Indulgence (Leo Maselli) and The Third Harmony (Michael Nagler).

For those of you not familiar with how a composer creates music for a film, I thought I’d go thru how Kip and I collaborated to put music to this story.

Scoring the Film — How we Started

Kip and I had a chat about music for her film months before anything was shot. Late in 2020, the shots were all “in the can“ (with COVID protocols on the set) and Kip gave me an early rough cut of the then 24-minute film. The editor, Charles Anderson, had done an excellent job cutting and assembling the scenes, and honestly there was very little that changed in terms of scene lengths between then and the final version. At this early stage the final colors weren’t set — the film looked somewhat grayish — and the dialog was basically unedited, requiring selection from among multiple microphones, and sometimes a bit of sonic cleaning up. But the sequence of shots was close to final in this case, and the story line was clear. (Not every filmmaker works this way.)

At any given time I have dozens of songs or musical ideas just waiting to be used in films. So I pointed Kip at my online music bin and said “Listen to everything — at least the first 20 seconds of each — and then let me know what pieces of music you feel might work in the film. Based on her suggestions, I then refined (and added) what I thought might work, but mostly we worked from her selections.

Interestingly, a large percentage of what she liked had already been used in films. This is actually no problem, because it helps me understand what she was reacting to.

I then took a set of about eight of these and positioned them within the rough-cut film, so we could review the film with dialog and with my suggested music.

Making the Music Fit the Film

My digital audio workstation [DAW] is the Logic Pro X app (from Apple), which allows me to view the film second by second, and directly position the music against each cue in the film.

In the screen shot above, the film runs left to right on the timeline, and below it are the various pieces of music looking like a colorful waterfall. Each is positioned where it’s going to go time wise in the film. The goldenrod colored bars are the sound effects and the dialog of the film, which run its entire length.

Wherever music needed to be stretched, I just wrote more music — basically I had all of the instruments available to me there in real time and I just write and tailored the music to each scene. A couple of pieces of music I adapted to be shorter. As composer, of course, I have complete flexibility to do anything I want to the music, and I do not have to worry about whether Beethoven or Mozart would complain. I just make whatever changes I wish to make.

The 25-minute film ended up having 10 music cues by the time we finished. Very little silence, and honestly almost wall-to-wall music. In some films I add “designed sound” to scenes, but in this one we remained melodic and instrumental instead.

The “Alexa” Segments

Most of the music in the film is “movie music” — the kind you’re used to from many films. But, also for this film we needed three very short (10-second) pieces of diegetic music. Diegetic means it’s part of the action in the scene. In this case our heroine asks Alexa to play some music. We needed 80’s pop, classical, and jazz. Rather than license from someone, I wrote the jazz, asked another SFCM composer (David Tippie) to write an 80’s pop soundalike, and paraphrased Erik Satie for the classical (out of copyright) segments.

So What’s New?

This is the first time any of this music has appeared in any film or album.

Only one piece of music was written specifically for this film. Everything else was waiting for the right time and the right film. All of them were written in the last 3 years.

Once the entire arc of the music for the film was completed, and after a small number of revision rounds, we were set to go. For this film, I provided the sound mixer with three “stems.” These are audio files that run the entire length of the film; in parallel; and the volume of each can be adjusted based on what’s needed at any instant. In this case, I provided a finished “mix” with all of the instruments at the volumes I felt were best at every second in the film; but I also provided a full-length file consisting of the music without any drums; and finally a full-length file with only the drums. It’s the job of the film’s sound mixer to use these along with dialog and sound effects to make the finished audio for the film. I get to listen to it and comment, but I don’t play a direct role in its construction once I’ve turned over the stems.

The Trailer

The one original “song” was the most emotive and wrought-up of the group, and it fit the mood of the trailer perfectly. (Charles Anderson, the film’s editor, did a terrific job piecing together that trailer) The music was actually significantly longer than the trailer, so much as I did for the film, I placed the trailer visual in my DAW and then stripped and recomposed to get the effect I wanted for the trailer. I could literally work down to the precise frame in the video. The drummer in the trailer actually is a different drummer than was used in the film…for emphasis…I love those huge taiko drums and so that’s what I wanted at the end of the trailer. In the film itself there’s some quasi-taiko drumming, but not quite that much.

The Album

After the film was fully locked and music was mixed, I took the music itself, which spanned the 25 minutes of the film, and created a new project in my DAW just for the audio. The film had scenes with no music, so I expanded the music to be end-to-end 25 minutes, by adding and extending some of the selections. I also created a broader sonic spectrum and changed some of the instruments. Music sounds different when standing on its own (that is, when “supporting” action and dialog). This somewhat richer version of the soundtrack then becomes the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack album. This goes into the queue at CDBaby for distribution to all of the streaming services. Once it’s distributed, it can be played or downloaded online. SkyHi Digital has a page with links to the album on the various streams.

The interaction with the film’s producer, and the film and sound editors, was very good. Feedback usually makes huge improvements. It’s good to have many ears listening to the music when it’s being refined. Collaboration works wonders.

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We (the team here) have been struggling with the color on Logitech C920 and C922 webcams recently. We’re preparing for a big international conference in November when the cameras will be in around-the-clock use. Initially each camera had a nice color balance, but after a couple of weeks each of them acquired an “underwater” blueish cast, and things that should have appeared white in the picture turned a spooky underwater blue!

Some of the blueness is due to where we have located our webcams — they’re in rooms with good outdoor light, but no direct sunlight, so the ambient lighting is saturated with blue skylight. But, beyond that, the cameras over-emphasized the blue. They were trying to auto-correct, but slewed way too far blue. Instead of compensating for our blue light, they were over-emphasizing it. Today we solved the problem!

The Camera Settings App

Logitech provides a Camera Settings app (for Mac OS in our case) that you can install to modify the way the camera sees things. (Download from > logitech.com/support/C930c ) Download it and install it on the computer, then connect your camera and fix its settings.

The app exposes five settings under its Advanced tab (see screenshot). The adjustment we needed was to Auto white balance. Turning it off (the little toggle switch), and then adjusting the color temperature (the xxxxK value) fixed our cameras so they produce a pleasing color output under various light conditions. That’s pretty much it.

In our case, I had to turn it all the way to 6500K to get a pleasing effect in daytime lighting conditions. At night, with incandescent (or LED adjusted to incandescent color temperatures) we have to modify it, but honestly it’s so easy to use the Camera Settings app that we can set it once for each online session and let it run.

The other adjustments do what you’d expect, and we have not needed to fiddle with them, as our problem was just the blueish cast — which is now gone!

C920 users

This worked for both our Logitech C920 and our C930 cameras, even though the C920 support page doesn’t give you a path to download this software, and even though Logitech does not list the C920 as a supported camera for this app. So if you’re using a C920, be sure to go to the support page for the C930 to download this software. It won’t let you pan or zoom (features of the C930), but you can fix the color.)

Logitech Brio

Postscript (Dec 7, 2020): We eventually ended up with a Logitech Brio webcam that has maintained its (proper) color balance for weeks. It can also be configured by the Camera Settings app, but it’s a far better camera in the first place.

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