We also had a Rutas Invisibles workshop the morning before Voz de Voluntarios.  I took photos during Rutas along with recording the audio of some of the stories that came out of that workshop.  However, the recorder was out of battery about halfway through the workshop, so I did not capture as much as Ana wanted.  After the workshop, Ana talked about the development she has seen through the course of these workshops with the participants.  They came to her quite shy and fearful, but asking to hear their stories time and again has built their trust with her and the workshops.

This week we had Monday and Tuesday off.  It was nice to have the time off, but consequently, I did not have time to prepare the equipment for the Rutas Invisibles workshop on Wednesday.  The cameras were well charged, so that was not a problem.  However, the audio recorder was dead again, so that was frustrating.  Especially because I thought I was successful in charging last week, so I was expecting that even though I was not in on Monday or Tuesday, it would be working.  I learned this week that the workshops we are doing with Rutas is the plan for the show a week and a half from now.  Anna wants me to produce some music to go along with that show, but I am also supposed to incorporate the songs that the participants gave to me for the playlist we used on Wednesday.  Thus, I think it will be more like a remix than an original production which I am ok with because I have about a week and a half to produce it.  I wish I had brought my studio headphones from home to Barcelona.  I think my Bose earphones will work well enough for what we are doing though.

This was a week of trying a lot of things that did not work, of starting over.  As I began my work to develop the audio piece for Rutas Invisibles, most of the audio files were in formats incompatible with Ableton.  Consequently, I spent much of the beginning of the week figuring out how to convert the files into Windows-friendly formats.  On top of that, considering this as a remix project, I do not even know where to begin.  Each of the songs I am working with is a different tempo, different key, et cetera, so I was attempting to warp and repitch them to get them into the same sonic space.  This did not create the desired result.  It sounded overly distorted.  I deleted the Ableton project and started over multiple times to try to start fresh and find a new solution, but it did not work.

After spinning my wheels Monday and Tuesday trying to bend the Rutas playlist to my will, I decided to try a new approach.  For now, I am leaving the Rutas playlist alone and building a composition to link the recordings from the workshops together.  Thinking of the project as a compositional task instead of a remix task makes it seem more reasonable and achievable.  This approach unblocked my development of the project, but it is still at the early stages.  On Thursday, I was working with a train sample to try to extract the rhythm from it, but that is really difficult because there is a lot of irregularity in the sample.  I again tried warping the audio to get it to feel more regular, but in this, I was only mildly successful and not so much as to be satisfactory.  Instead, today I discovered a different cut from the sample that has a very defined beginning and end sonically, so looping this sample produce a clear and easy to follow rhythm while preserving some of the syncopation and noise characteristic to a train sample.  Now, with the rhythmic baseline for which I was hoping, I have been able to start developing a melodic motif that will be the chorus of the audio piece.

Dura.  La mejor palabra para resumir como fue esta semana.  However, it was also rewarding.  By the end of the day on Monday, I had a working outline of the audio piece and discovered how to incorporate the playlist as well.  I was able to send this with the completed introduction to Ana.  The breakthrough discovery I made was the train whistle.  I matched this pitch with an operator instrument that also included some enharmonic tones that matched the timbre of the train whistle, so after fading the train whistle into the operator instrument, I could essentially bend the pitch of the train whistle into the key of the upcoming song.  With this discovery and the planned framework for the audio piece, I was able to make a lot of progress on the piece on Tuesday.

In fact, I finished the piece (or so I thought) Wednesday morning before the Rutas workshop.  I finished it at the last possible minute though, so naturally, I had problems bouncing it to my phone in time to actually use it during the Rutas rehearsal and performance that day.  Edgar had a chance to listen to the beginning of the piece during our lunch together, and he gave me some really positive feedback.  I really appreciated that because I was the only one that had really listened to the piece at that point, so I was quite uncertain whether it was any good or at all what the organization was looking for.  To be fair, Ana did give me good feedback on the intro on Tuesday, so I knew that I was working in the right direction.  However, I had changed the intro some and had not yet developed the first drop in the sample that I sent to her, so I did not know if the progression of the piece fit what the team was looking for.

With Edgar's vote of confidence, I continued to revise the piece on Thursday along with uploading the media from the event.  After listening to the piece all the way through, I found some issues with the tempo changes and audio wrapping that I had missed during the composition phase.  I also worked on balancing the conversational pieces within the mix using some compression and also bringing down the volume of the music pieces within to keep a more steady volume.

During this week, I was primarily consumed with composing this audio piece, but I also want to mention how rewarding the performance at Mescladís was.  To see these workshops come together into the kitchen of Mescladís was an awesome experience.  On top of that, to have lunch with the participants and see first hand the community building of which these workshops were a part revealed to me the impact of our work and showed me the motivation for this organization in a way that I had never understood.  I really enjoyed the whole experience Wednesday from top to bottom because I could see the positive impact we had.

This week has been dedicated to file management.  The physical drive stopped working, so I could not offload the large video files from the Rutas workshop on Monday.  Instead, I worked on converting them to a smaller, lower resolution set of videos.  I am also behind in editing the photos from the Rutas workshops, so I worked on catching up on those this week.  However, the main event of this week was my meeting with Ana and Nieves on Wednesday.  We talked about Ana´s vision for my next project with the new group for Rutas.  She gave me mostly positive feedback on my first piece, but wants me to make the next piece more complex and have a clear ethnographic purpose.  I will need to write an article explaining and criticizing my next project which, as she argues, will be easier and more complete if I have a clear plan to which I can refer to build my analysis.  The main obstacle that I will have to overcome to achieve this vision is understanding what is going on at the workshops.  Improving my castellano has not come easily, but my listening has improved enough that I think I have a shot at getting this right.  Even better would be an ability to ask probing questions of the participants to understand their pasts.  Perhaps I will be capable of this in the coming weeks of this project.

My other main project this week was streaming training videos to the Tudanzas YouTube channel.  Designed as a streaming practice exercise, I had to set up and stream the videos that are currently in the drive to the YouTube channel.  I also added a title slide to the videos which I learned how to automatically transition to at the end of the playing of the video.  I had to download an additional plugin for OBS to achieve this.  It is a really powerful tool for automated scene switching.  This was a fun and straightforward project, a good introduction to using OBS for streaming.

Analyzing audio is hard.  It requires dedicated concentration to the task, and much more time than pictures that can be evaluated at a glance.  On top of that, I am analyzing audio in my (intermediate) second language.  Pero, bueno.  It is a similar challenge to photography in that there are set pieces and candids, so the candid moments are harder to capture than the set pieces.  The practice of playing music during our sessions also makes it difficult to pull clear audio samples from the workshops.  Working on the photography for the workshops has distracted me from the audio space of the workshops.  Next week I want to focus more on being in and managing the audio space because it is my last week to capture samples for the next piece.

I was able to catch up on editing the photos I have taken for Rutas, but I spent the majority of my time working on parsing the audio from this week's workshop.  I worked with various audio annotation tools to find a useful process to tag and categorize the material.  However, in my meeting with Marghe today, she informed me that I also need to be choosing music samples to use in the next project as well.  I can also write pieces for the project, but the bottom line is, there should be melodic themes throughout the piece.  I am considering using the "noise" from these recording to compose at least some of the melodic elements in the piece too.

Before the workshop on Monday, I had a chance to ask Edgar if we could have the participants say from which country they are for the audio recording.  To my surprise, this was already included in the plan, but this marked the first time for me that I had an objective going into the Rutas workshop.  Trying to create without any parameters or boundaries makes my work after the workshops complex, ill-defined and inefficient.  However, I think that is a necessary state when beginning a project like this one.  It is a state of imagination.  Doing nothing to discover something.  But it is important to recognize when passive observation must turn to active solicitation, to a point of creation instead of gathering.  I am almost certainly late on this point:  struggling to find meaning in the sea of 4.5 hours of audio with another 1.5 hours arriving each week.  Instead, I must turn to the sound of the workshops.  The structure I am proposing is more a study in the structure of the workshop than of the participants themselves, yet the affect and subject of workshop is thus captured within the study.

To return, or more so to introduce, the theme of memory this week is to touch on the logistic and intellectual challenges I faced.  Most directly, I learned that my computer cannot handle 4.5 hours of audio all in the same Ableton project.  This makes mixing audio from the laboratorios more complicated because I have to save individual clips from each laboratorio separately.  Moreover, this makes referencing or editing the placement of the clip within the original audio more difficult, but it simply requires a change in approach to the project.  Memory also refers to my intellectual struggle to build a working model of the workshops in my mind and think on how to organize them into an audio artifact.  There are many aspects in each workshop that are similar and many that are distinct, so it is a mental exercise to retain such information and transform it. 

This week was full of workshops.  On Monday, we had Rutas invisibles as usual, and in addition, Wednesday through Friday we had workshops organized by Nieves for Rojo Tabú.  As a result, I spent much of my time this week either in a workshop or editing/uploading the media from the workshops.  In my first Rojo Tabú workshop, I took really blurry photos, so the next day I tried to use manual focus so as not to have to wait for the AF system to focus on the subject.  This worked to a certain extent, but I also came up with pictures that were out of focus.  It takes a lot of attention to manually refocus as the scene changes while also trying to capture moments that are rapidly changing.  I think that one of my main challenges in the first day was also keeping the subjects in frame without moving the camera during the shot.  I took a number of photos that even the stationary background is blurry, so this is a dead give-away that I did not have a steady hand during the shot.

Overall, I really enjoyed being a part of the Rojo Tabú workshops.  Nieves did a really good job in creating a thought-provoking experience for the group.  We did warmups such as taking 5 minutes to close our hands; activities such as contact dancing (you always have to be physically touching at least one of the other people in the group as you all dance to the song); and had conversations that touched on sexuality, menstruation, womanhood, religion, and health.  The music selection for each activity also improved the experience by matching the mood and feeling of the activity sonically or providing a sonic basis for movement and imagination.  Lastly, the space in which we had the workshops was really great as well.  It had an industrial yet artistically antique ambiance.

As the Google Drive neared 100GB, this week we had to tackle where to save the new media we were creating.  In the end, I am not sure exactly how we found the new space, but Ana cleared out half of the tudanzas.comunicacion Drive, so I can continue business as usual.  In addition to business as usual, however, I had to move the edited photos on Canva to the Google Drive, as well as move the photos of the 2022 projects into their proper folder.  This task blocked me more than it probably should have this week because I did not understand where the final destination of the photos was supposed to be (i.e. in which Google Drive folder the team wanted them).  As such, this week was a lesson in advocating for myself in addition to finding ways to move forward on a project without understanding what its final form should be.  Not having that final stage concrete in my mind made it more difficult for me to move forward on the project, but I managed to make progress by working backwards from the possible solutions to a common state that I could work toward to stage the media for the final step(s).

I also continued working on extracting audio samples from the Rutas workshops.  I found some interesting samples from the moments I miced the individual groups during the painting session the week prior.  Just casual conversations and banter that I think will really liven the piece.  I have also taken to looking at the recordings visually (from the waveform analysis from Ableton) to drop into high energy spots of the audio.  This allows me to skip the lulls in the audio from the workshops.  I think I will try to create calm and low energy parts of the piece from MIDI compositions or cuts from meditation sessions at the beginning of the workshop.

En la reunión pasade que tenía con Ana, me dijo que debo de buscar algunos ejemplos de música que son parecidos a mis obras de Rutas Invisibles y Rojo Tabú.  Era una tarea que me sorprende cómo tan dificil que iba.  La verdad era que no sabía cómo se llama este tipo de arte.  Empecé mis investigaciones buscando los "soundscapes" y la ingenieria de los sonidos y etnomusicología, pero la idea, la tema con que trabajo en mis proyectos no salió en esas temas.  Eventualmente he encontrado páginas que se refería a "arte de sonido" y con esta frase clave, podía encontrar obras de música que son similar con mis ideas para Rutas Invisibles y Rojo Tabú.

Much of my week was dedicated to working with the Rutas Invisibles and Rojo Tabú sound art projects.  I learned that getting into the flow state of the projects is much easier when I do not feel the press of other tasks to complete for the day.  Because of this I was very grateful to have fewer auxiliary tasks this week because I could make good progress with the projects.  Going through the recording from this week was really entertaining because now that I have a start in the project, I could hear moments in the audio that I knew I wanted to include and moments with which I knew I could do away.  It was a marked changed in my methodology to work through a Rutas workshop recording where I really know for what I am looking and what will work in the piece.  I have started to focus more on the noise sections of the recordings as well as the laughter and short phrases that have been captured.  I think that mixing these short moments amid a rhythm of noise will produce a groovy obra de música y más personal de este proyecto.