How's it sound?

This blog has moved to Tumblr.

2011-03-21T22:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Loyal Readers,

It is with great enthusiasm and excitement that I bring to you the news of a move. A digital move. I have long considered the concept of mobile blogging and while being at home and at my desk allows me to quiet my mind and wring out my thinking, there's something to be said for in-the-middle-of-the-action publishing.

So without further adieu I would like to invite you to point your browser to HowDoesItSound.tumblr.com. The mobile tools that Tumblr offers when combined with Blogger's failure to innovate and adapt to different publishing styles have finally convinced me to switch. I feel like I did when I unboxed my first Mac.

Hi, I'm now a Tumblr.

Lean on me

2011-03-07T16:38:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to keep life balanced these days.

I apologize to any regular readers of "How Does It Sound" for the recent drought of inspiration. I've been flush with new observations and ideas but warping around the city between classes, appointments, and deadlines has robbed me of the time to organize them in any digestible form. So I'm going to start taking smaller bites.

Today I will start blogging from my phone. I'd like to be able to strike when the proverbial iron is hot wherever I am. I'd like to share interesting things outside of my apartment in San Francisco and exercise my skills in brevity. Typing on this tiny keyboard keeps things succinct anyway.

I have written about the potentially negative effects of social reductionism brought about by the indifference of digital communication. Short ideas from my phone might appear hypocritical in this light. However I don't mean for shorter posts to be any less considered than my longer ones. Think of these posts as an interesting note slid to you on a napkin at a dinner party (Yes, the punch is spiked).

Here is some fascinating rock art to get things started. Bay Area artist, Bill Dan uses no glue; only gravity and an intimate understanding of a rocks personality to build his sculptures. It's as if he tunes the stones to be in perfect harmony with each other, making quiet and balanced conversations between the pieces of rock. This takes him hours to accomplish and the work moves very slowly and carefully. He spends the majority of his time looking for the right stones to stack, those that fit into some kind of mental model that he's imagined. Sometimes he picks the wrong stone and his whole creation topples over. When he finally finds the right group of shapes, the sculpture stands perfectly still and unique.

I thought it was interesting to consider our interactions with other human beings like this. We stack all of our relationships on one another to create some kind of pillar of social identity. Every different personality we encounter is rock shaped, containing unique planes, crevices and edges both sharp and dull. Some friendships are solid and grounded, providing stability while we get to know the subtleties of the friendships that rest on top of them. Stacking and balancing relationships one on top of the other is a lifelong process.

This should offer solace to anyone who has felt the frustration that comes with friendships or relationships that have fallen apart. As your pile of life stacks higher, it's those with steady hands and a trained eye who can pick out shapes that fit best and balance them with focused consideration. If it falls apart, know that reassembling the friendships around you will bring an enriched understanding of the proper hierarchy and how to stay balanced. Build enough great relationships and you can retire to the shores of San Francisco Bay and build rock sculptures.

How does that sound?

Listen Up

2010-11-30T14:52:00.000-08:00

My heart is racing.

I can feel music when I listen closely. My body reacts to the chords, the timbre of the instruments, to the rhythm of the piece. I know I'm not alone. I've talked with friends about vivid memories that are tied to particular songs or artists. I've worked with children whom have special needs and used music as a way to vault over communications gaps. Music has definite mental clout. You just have to open your ears.

If you think about music as medicine things start to sound different. I start my day by choosing a song that will nudge me towards what mood or mindset I want to be in. Focused? I'll listen to Beethoven. Creative? Give me Miles Davis. Energized? Crank The Police to eleven.

I've recently been designing an experiment to test my ideas about the potency of music. Check out my video, and let me know what you think about my findings.

Take Note

2010-11-23T15:51:00.001-08:00

Listen up.

I'm shooting and editing a unique series that revolves around music. The videos are the final project for one of my classes this semester. I'm eager to find some readers who are willing to undergo some musical experimentation.

Below you can find the introduction to my project. Post in the comments or ping me through various social networks if live in San Francisco and are interested in thirty minutes to an hour of a makeshift sound study.

It's About Time

2010-11-22T13:02:00.000-08:00

Give me a second real fast.

I’m counting down to the end of this semester. I’ve been fortunate enough to continue to take amazing classes and I’m encouraged by how far from conventional advertising we’re being pushed. Because it doesn’t work anymore. I think advertising as a medium is experiencing a monumental shift in thinking as attention gets scarcer and market variety increases with globalization. I’m happy to be in San Francisco during this change because many great new ideas have come from between these hills. I’m hoping to have a hand in designing the future of how companies and their customers interact with one another.

I’m currently taking a class called “Creative Planning,” which is taught by Steve Williams, the man who designed and built the T-Rex in Jurassic Park and the T-1000 in Terminator 2—both before computers and digital logic were so ubiquitous. The first day of class was wrapped around the brainstorming, problem solving, and methodology that went into crafting visual illusions in physical space. It comes as little surprise that Steve is a fan of numbers.

We have studied and examined everything from Euclid’s 47th Proposition to the Golden Ratio, with black holes and astrophysics sprinkled throughout the semester. Our discussions on the concept of time frequently leave me scratching my head as I try to comprehend time as a fluid element. I think best when I’m exercising and have recently come to some findings that I’d like to share. Ladies and gentlemen, start your watches…now.

Classical physics describes time as a constant, independent of the observer’s state of motion. Without getting over my head and risking inaccuracies, I’ll only state that our unique experience of time is the result of a perfect harmony of math and space. Thanks to some research, I’ve learned that “spacetime” is the meshing together of physical space and time into a conceptual grid. The interplay of mass comes into the picture and can warp this grid, actually changing the speed of time. This is one of the reasons that black holes are so fascinating;when something travels past the event horizon, their watch needs some major adjusting.

My most inspired thinking comes to me when I am moving through space by means of exercise. My bike rides, my runs, and my swims shift my thinking, and I’m working out my own theory on how everything is relative. I’d like to offer the following idea for discussion:

I. When I am at rest, I experience time in a particular way. When I am at ease, I know what an hour feels like and my thinking swims within a predictable range of depth. In other words, during my average day-to-day routine the thoughts in my head are no deeper than normal; they usually revolve around my daily responsibilities, social commitments, and general opinions about my surroundings.

II. However, when I suit up and get on my bike, things begin to change. I start climbing the hills of the city, then race down the other side with a pulse that’s around 160-170bpm. The speed at which I’m traveling through space on my bike is relatively faster than it should be for my given heart rate, making my perception of time slow down. In other words, when I get on my bike for one hour and race around faster than I’m used to going, it feels like I’ve only been riding for around 20-30 minutes. Weird.

III. Conversely, the opposite is true when I run. I lace up my shoes in search of any forgiving (read: flat) roads, and the inverse occurs. My heart rate fluctuates between 160-170, but I’m traveling at a speed that’s relatively lower than it should be for my higher heart rate. My perception of time then speeds up and a one-hour run can feel like it took two or three hours. Am I the only one that experiences this?

We talk a lot about film and cameras in class. Steve is an animator by trade and frequently talks about film speeds in conjunction with time. A high-speed camera captures many more frames, or tiny pictures, per second than a regular video camera. When played back, the visuals appear to be moving in slow motion. The reverse is theoretically true; when you record film slower than the standard (known as NTSC) 30 frames per second, the visuals appear to be pumped full of caffeine and move at warp speed.

Compare your brain to an infinitely more complex video camera and think about this: The heart pumps oxygen-rich blood to the brain and allows neural activity to occur. Our brains are constantly making sense of the sensory input that’s continuously wired in, and I wonder if the speed at which we think increases with more oxygen-rich blood. Thus, I wonder if it’s too much of a stretch to think our heart rate could be comparable to the frame rate of a camera. Could this give rise to a thinking-rate that can be related to our traveling speed through space? Is this related to how we experience time?

To test this theory, I would have to have to exercise for specific periods of time at different heart rates (BPM) and at different speeds, after which I’d report how long it felt like I was exercising. I expect that I’d see a strange sine wave where my heart rate, the speed at which I perceive time, and my speed through space all tie together in a subjectively scribbled graph.

So, if you find yourself losing track of time and consequently rushing to keep up, do something that gets that heart beating: some push-ups, a quick jog around the block, even a quick listen to some fast paced music. Otherwise, if you’re stuck sitting down and are watching the clock inch along, try to lower your pulse. Breathe deeply or put on some relaxing music to slow down your heart/ perception of time, and let the minutes speed past.

Give it a try and see how that sounds.

I Dream of Jeanie

2010-11-09T04:45:00.000-08:00

I can’t tell you how lucky I am.

For the past few weeks, my family has been embroiled in medical chaos. My grandmother recently had a large cerebral stroke that left her in a coma and on life support. After a week on pins and needles, our entire extended family bid her goodbye as she left this dimension and transitioned on to the next.

Jeanie Bullock was the mother of seven children and oversaw throngs of grandchildren. I feel incredibly lucky for the time that I spent with her learning her cooking secrets (of which there are too many to count), and listening to her unbelievable stories.

As a memoir for my grandmother, I edited together this podcast for those who miss her and also those who weren’t fortunate enough to meet her.

Grandma Jean, you’ll be missed so much.

Recycled Rhythms

2010-10-06T20:09:00.001-07:00

In San Francisco, there are things that you hear on the street.

One of the things that I love the most about San Francisco is the vibrant street life. Creativity strikes at any time of day or night and trudging up the hills is made much more enjoyable by the various street performers.

For one of my current classes, we were given the assignment to set out and tell any story. Unsurprisingly, my mind jumped first to the men and women I see everyday on the street, making a living from the attention of complete strangers through performance art. The parallel to advertising isn’t lost on me. As I stalked around downtown looking for someone to interview, the commonalities that both ad professionals and street performers share wasn’t lost on me. In some ways I thought, it seems that the main difference is our profit margins.

I caught up with a San Francisco staple, someone who I’ve watched ever since I moved here 4 years ago. Faithful readers, I present…

The Bucket Man.

Passport on a Plate

2010-09-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

My stomach is my guide.

One of the greatest things about living in a culturally eclectic city like San Francisco is the food. Walk around the city and in a few short blocks you can hopscotch all over the world. Delicacies from the Chinese Hunan province on one corner, while spicy Indian curries are tucked into alley ways across the street.

Living in China Town this past year has opened my nose to smells that I hadn't fathomed. Plumes of incense and aged green tea waft between columns of spices and unidentifiable dried plant in Chinese medicine shops. Fish markets reek of putrid fish and as fresh Tuna are unloaded off of trucks onto bare pavement, you resolve to thoroughly wash every piece of meat you buy for the rest of your life.

After my year long education in Eastern culture, I've since moved a short walk away and am now enjoying the familial atmosphere of North Beach. It's known as the "Little Italy" of San Francisco and open-air cafes and gelato abound. I produced a piece about the transition between culinary cultures for those of you that can't join me in Washington Square for a cappuccino and gelato, or a glass of wine and plate of prosciutto and cheese.How does that sound?

The Way We Move

2010-09-11T22:43:00.001-07:00

I've got my eye on things.

I've learned in school that video is the new language. I'm currently in a class that revolves around journalistic short-form production and I'll soon be learning the tricks and subtleties of visual story telling. San Francisco is an incredible place filled with unbelievable characters. I've recently decided to share my remaining time out here with you, the viewer. Though I'll continue to think and write about my findings, you can expect to see more videos of the interesting things that I encounter out here on the left coast.

The most interesting thing I found today was some kind of Asian cultural festival in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco. It was amazing how selflessly these children danced, so unconcerned about capturing the spotlight. I walked away thinking about how endemic this was to Eastern cultures, and how different we Westerners define ideas of self, community, social role, and purpose. Around the world It's easy to see that children love to dance, though I wonder what the differences and similarities are in their thinking as they move with the music.

I watched these kids dance and suddenly recalled the beautiful and perfectly synchronized dance performed at the opening ceremonies for the Olympics in Beijing. Perhaps cooperative dance is as familiar to children in Eastern cultures as a game of "Tag" is to Western kids.

Charged Up

2010-08-10T21:08:00.001-07:00

It's nearing the end of the summer semester, and I'm buzzing with excitement.

For our last Innovation project, we got to work with Kaitlyn Trigger from AKQA here in San Francisco. She talked with us all about how much communication is changing (Advertising in particular). She forewarned that objects such as print ads and standard marketing materials are bleeding their last drops of effectiveness. "We've entered the Experience Economy," she said, as she talked about different Brands that are focusing more on doing rather than saying. Combining Jesse Schell's ideas on the power of games ("The Gamepocalypse") and this heightened importance on experiences rather than messages, we were given our final project. Kaitlyn challenged us to take a crappy experience that we've recently had with a brand, and apply game-thinking or game mechanics to make it more enjoyable.

Though I'm constantly active, I do my best to avoid the gym. For me endless reps and questionable sanitary conditions take the fun out of getting my heart rate up. Thus, I chose to innovate the idea of a gym by creating a new business model that allows for digital interactions, community involvement, and environmental consideration. In our increasingly networked world, it made sense to take an achievement based activity (exercising) and design a way to blend it with digital trends.

Through my research, I discovered that most, if not all gyms are individually focused. Aside from group workout classes and new fitness friendships, I couldn't find too much outward involvement, excluding the YMCA. I then identified cultural gaps in both how people interact with their fitness environment, and also how fitness establishments interact with their respective surroundings.

For this project, I created VOLT: a new idea for a gym.

Rolling forward with Pi

2010-08-02T01:44:00.000-07:00

Marcus Hays looks down the road and sees things a little differently.

And here in the Bay area, people like him tend to lead the way. Perhaps there's something about the hills overlooking the Pacific that nurtures new ideas and forward thinking. Hippies helped redefine gender roles and created an American counter culture in the 1960's through the Summer of Love. Inventors and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley gave us new tools to access information through the Internet. As we begin to innovate our cities to accommodate people rather than vehicles, Marcus and a team of designers at Pi Mobility are hard at work.

The idea of an electric and human powered hybrid vehicle isn't necessarily new. Companies like Giant and Panasonic have been busy cranking out clunky cruisers with large battery packs attached to existing frame designs. Functional, yet not quite beautiful. Pi Mobility, Hays' company based in Sausalito, California is working from the other way around, and acknowledging that the design and aesthetic of a bicycle will have to shift as radically as the technology built into it.

This past weekend, I got to go ride their creation, the Pi Cycle and talked about how they innovated an idea that dates back to the mid-1800s. Since it’s creation, the bicycle has seen little changes in its overall design, besides more modern materials and fabrication techniques. Hays and his team have finally given the bike a breath of fresh air.

The Pi Cycle’s single unifying arc is a direct application of design sensibility and ergonomic functionality. Marcus explained to me that by arching the main tube of the frame, they streamlined their bike and transformed conventional geometry into a single ark that houses the internal battery and electronics, making for a much smoother ride.

The Pi Mobility team’s environmental intentions don’t stop in the design studio. The simplification of the frame makes it affordable to manufacture in the United States, rather than China where most of today’s bikes are built. It’s hard to look at the Pi Cycle with a gaping negative space (where an engine might be mounted), and not consider the future of transportation being free from the dogma of internal combustion.

Ranging from $2,999 to $4,999, the Pi Cycle may still be out of reach for most consumers. However, with new technology consistently bringing down manufacturing costs, I look forward to the coming years when instead of sitting in gridlock traffic during my commute, I can saddle up on a bike that makes me feel like Marty McFly, and silently cruise off into the sunset.

How does that sound?

While I was visiting, I got to test ride the PiCycle. Bike envy quickly ensued.

I speak for the trees

2010-07-27T23:26:00.000-07:00

I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.

For our most recent project in our Innovation class, Max Heilbron and Gareth Kay from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners came to talk. They spent the class talking with us about the power and importance of storytelling within advertising and media. They challenged us (for our next project) to take a well known children's story and retell it in a new way.

Everything that we've been learning about cultural trends tells us that storytelling isn't about simplicity, but rather complexity. The traditionally held structure of stories has been shattered and narratives now hop, jump, and skip around different channels. We were challenged to not only retell the old story, but reframe it in a way that creates an opportunity for people to share or upload something.

Being a (rather tortured) environmental enthusiast hiding in an advertisers body, I decided to continue last weeks lesson with Rachel Coady on Environmental Innovation. I chose to re-tell, "The Lorax" by Dr. Seuss for my project. I dreamed up my idea after rereading the book and listening to Jesse Schell talk about games. Jesse is a famous game designer and cultural forecaster, and just gave a presentation through San Francisco's "Long Now" foundation. We all listened to him talk about games and how playing games has the power to change the world. The Lorax had similar ambitions and my project ensued.

Below is my presentation on how to retell Dr. Seuss's classic story in a new way that engages the young, technologically saturated youth, and improve the world in the process.

How does that sound?

Troubadour: The Game!

2010-07-14T17:42:00.001-07:00

So I was working on a project, and I had an idea.

If you love music, you probably already know. The way that media is created, promoted, distributed, and consumed has changed more in the past 10 years than in the past 100 (shoot, even 1000) years. In fact, it's hard to say that we're media consumers any more often, as we're often media creators. Gone is the old marketing idea of "target audiences," replaced by "target participants". Those who first saw this massive shift in online behavior are now probably sitting at the tops of our country's fastest growing companies. Those who didn't simple got left behind and tuned out.

If there's one industry that failed the most at adapting to technological changes, the music industry takes the cake. When Sawn Fanning created Napster in 1999, the music industry was furious when they should have dropped to their knees. "Big Music" shunned their new messiah that had come to lead them into the next generation. Instead Napster was shut down, and like a digital plague this free-media-sharing mentality spread like wild fire. Countless new sharing platforms sprouted in Napster's place and big music corporations sealed their own fate.

For my current Innovation class I just turned in my first project, a personal stab at solving this multi-headed music problem. I designed a mobile experience called "Troubadour" that provides a way for people to explore their surroundings, meet and collaborate with new people, all while discovering new music. "Troubadour" is a game for mobile phones that operates like this:

(Cue Start-Up pitch)

Troubadour is a mobile experience that discovers the new music playing all around you.

Players log into the application as inspired musicians, itching to create the next hit song that will plunge them into fame and success. They move around their city, completing challenges and collecting location-specific objects (ex: a new Fender "Jazz Master" guitar) which allows them to level up, gaining more "chops". As players progress through the game, they enlist the help of other players that are nearby, and combine their talents to "jam".

This interaction unlocks actual songs from Troubador's servers that players keep and can listen to on-demand, anytime on their phone. The music that is unlocked is dependent on the type of challenges that the two players collaborating (rather, "jamming") have already completed. For example, if one player has completed more challenges downtown, they might bring more rap/ city music influences to the collaboration, while another who's completed more challenges in the suburbs might bring punk-rock influences. Two players can never collaborate the same way twice; they are always "creating" (or gaining access to) new and different music.

From the back-ended perspective, Troubador is a way for local bands to gain local listeners. By donating a free song to the Troubador network (that's then analyzed for music related and location-specific metrics), they introduce themselves to potentially new fans that are in their city. There's nothing better than discovering a new band that you like, and then getting excited when they're playing a concert right down the street. The free song that's claimed by users is tagged with all of the artist's relevant info: Twitter tags, homepage, MySpace, iTunes link to help grow their digital fanbase.

Music is something that people love. What people love more is discovering new music before anyone else does (ever heard, "Oh, you like [Insert band name here]? Yeah, I was listening to them before they got big. Now they've gone all mainstream..."). And, what people probably love the most is a tie between playing games and getting free stuff.

I came to this whole idea from spending time in nature, studying how specific birds socialize and integrate with one another (if you've never heard of the Lyrebird, check out this video). It's a shame that Troubadour doesn't exist, though if some programmer reads this and wants to partner with me in finding some venture capitalists to get it off the ground, I'm game.

How does that sound?

The Power in the Leaves and Trees

2010-07-02T14:21:00.000-07:00

Nature is where we began, and nature will show us our end.

In my “Innovation” class this week we got to work with Rachel Coady, a smart, and personable planner bent on returning society to nature. As a class, we trekked out to Lands End and discussed the wonder and incredible innovative practices that are found when you observe your natural surroundings. If San Francisco is one of the epicenters for technology (which tends to pushes us away from nature), working with Rachel helped us to see the beautiful technology right under our nose. Nature is still the world’s greatest inventor.

We talk a lot about being a “solutionist,” someone who, when faced with a solvable problem look for cultural “gaps” that can be fixed. Like social engineers, solutionists try and make something more efficient by identifying the needs (or “gaps”) that we’re living around (without addressing), and then finding solutions for communities. Once identified, we solutionists go into nature and observe how different species solve related problems. After all, the planets ecosystem evolved to sustain itself, without much concern that humans stuck around.

For example, if you’re an urban planner faced with redesigning a city’s transportation network, examine the structure of leaves, and how a plant organizes the transportation of nutrients from its roots all the way up to its leaves. As a species, we humans have evolved to focus on the control of nature, to insure our safety and the propagation of our genes and communities. As the problems we face become more intertwined with our natural surroundings, looking to where we started might be our best solution. We might engender some respect by viewing our environment as the leaseholder to the apartment we call Earth. We can’t survive without nature, but nature would thrive without us.

As we work on our class first project that revolves around looking to nature for innovative wisdom, irony has struck. I prefer to enjoy thinking that I am the master of my surroundings. A few days after dominating the hike to the top of Mt. Tam and experiencing one of the most jaw-dropping views in San Francisco, I woke up with Poison Oak all over my face. If we’re willing decimate countless natural ecosystems in the interest of “progress”, I have to cede defeat as nature covers my face with hives, and makes me looklike I belong back in middle school.

Point to you nature. Way to put me in my place.

Man vs. Wild?

The blog heard around the world

2010-06-22T23:09:00.001-07:00

Just an update.

I just accessed my Google Analytics, where I keep tabs on all the site traffic to and from my blog. Since I've been publishing, it seems that readers have been tuning in from 52 different countries (through search results, I'm sure) across the world, since I started publishing in October, 2008.

Cheers to more multicultural ideas! And, here's hoping that more new ideas, sounds, and videos make their way to the pages of, "How Does It Sound".

Thanks for your loyal readership.

The Sound Around

2010-06-19T13:19:00.001-07:00

Music is everywhere. All you have to do is listen.

Flying back to San Francisco yesterday, I began to hear things. In the clicks of people's footsteps was a complex drum line, syncopating the beat of travelers rushing towards their final destination. The preflight safety demonstration like a well practiced ballet, complete with seat belted pirouettes.

I stared out the window at the clouds over the United States and ascribed a sound or instrument to various clouds as we flew by, creating a mental symphony 3000 miles long. I got back to the city and edited this video together to share the experience.

Almost Done

2010-05-15T20:31:00.000-07:00

An open letter to my Color & Design class. God, I can't wait to be finished:

On Tuesday morning, I will dance on your grave,
reduce you to ashes; no longer a slave

To a world made of Guache; I'll at last be let free:
No more paintings to haunt the dreams in my sleep

At last and for all I'll pledge you good riddance!
Of my time you'll get nothing, not even a pittance.

So be gone with your colors, your theories and lines.
On Tuesday, forever I'm done with design

Laments of Art School

2010-03-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

Color and Design is crushing me to a paste and mixing me back up.

Color is such a central part of cultures and societies and this class is teaching me the raw foundations of color theory. I'll use my new ability in controlling colors to affect future moods, behavior, and perceptions. The course's workload is large and tedious, and for someone without fast craftsmanship, I find myself having to spend hours on our painting assignments.

This class has stolen many nights of sleep this semester, but the end is in sight. Here's the rough draft of our latest assignment: mix the colors and paint a self portrait using a muted complimentary color scheme. Blue is a primary color (which I had a tube of) and orange is the secondary compliment (which I had to laboriously mix using red and yellow) that I then desaturated using white for the highlights and black for the shadows. We were instructed to include an achromatic (black and white) area in our designs that matched the value (lightness or darkness) of it's corresponding color. Lastly, after spending tremendous time and effort on one rough draft, we had to inverse the color scheme (using the cool color for highlights and warm color for shadows) and paint another. And that was just the beginning.

I was up until 3:30 am last night finishing these up. I decided to narrate my experience through a short poem while I waited for my colors to dry.

The Laments of Art School

by Gavin Shelton

I'm up to my eyes in color.
My brush strokes tire like weary soldiers
Dragged across the sands of my canvas,
Haggard and traveling towards the edge of the earth.

My hands are cramped,
And I know that when I'm done
Blood, Sweat, and Tears will mix together.
The contrasts mute, my design emerges.

So I sit and I wait
And my hard work dries slowly.
I wait and I realize that life's a palette of balance
Between onerous mattes and convivial glosses.

Mind Tricks

2010-03-27T21:59:00.000-07:00

Breath deep and sense yourself.

I'm just coming off an amazing week long Spring Break. I've had friends in visiting from Oregon and South Carolina, and we've been having great adventures in Muir Woods and all throughout San Francisco. Perhaps my favorite adventure this week though, has been deep inside myself within my own brain.

Balance is a curious thing, and most people don't think about it too often. Relying on a complex system of neural circuitry, once we're able to walk as toddlers, it's almost as if we forget that it was ever difficult and required some concentration and dedication. Balance is a virtue of mine and I've written in the past about how fond I am of Slacklining, a balance sport that involves stringing a flat piece of rope between two points and walking on it. Getting on the line has become somewhat meditative for me and I've spent the week teaching the basics to my friends and strangers alike.

Get past the tiny size of the rope (one inch wide) and the flexible bounce (hence the "slackness") and most take their first day or two trying to stop their legs from shaking and search for their center of balance. One must breath deep, stop thinking about and start feeling for their center of balance. When I'm walking, my eyes are locked ahead and nothing clutters my mind. My breathing becomes deep and controlled. When I'm on the line, nothing enters my mind except input from my physical senses and I'm able to clear my head of all the mental clutter. By the end of the weekend, I'd set a personal best by walking a fifty foot line (the shorter and/ or tighter the line is, the easier it is to walk on. Thus, the longer and/ or more slack, the more challenging). Below is a video of my final success on the line.

This comes as such a personal victory, as it wasn't too long ago that I sat in the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, recovering from my rock climbing induced TBI. After my head cleared and I had begun intensive In-Patient therapy, simply standing up and balancing on two feet was a huge challenge. My vestibular system (the auditory and neural network in the Brain that contributes to your sense of balance) had taken a huge impact and I would close my eyes and tip over, my head spinning. After relearning how to walk, my balance and leg strength returned very slowly but surely. Now, it's as if I'm walking in Philippe Petit's footsteps and walking fifty feet between two trees on a tiny piece of rope is an easy challenge.

I walked away from this afternoon, marveling at the wonders of the brain and how training your sense of balance through slacklining is almost a form of cognitive exercise: routing and rerouting your neural circuitry to more keenly grasp your physical place in physical space. My legs were once shaky on flat ground as I slowly re-took my first steps, but it seems you can do anything you practice and set your mind to.

How does that sound?

My first steps re-relearning how to walk in 2004.

My first successful steps on a 50 foot slackline.

Edit Out the Bad Parts

2010-03-18T12:08:00.001-07:00

What do you see?

I'm making my way through the semester and learning more about the world around me. In my Relationships class, I'm becoming sensitive to how I interact with people and what my intent is for various human relationships. In my Color and Design class, I'm learning about the color wheel, and the aesthetic and psychological relationships that different colors have to one another. In my Non-linear Video Editing class, I've found that sometimes it's not what you see that's the most significant, but rather what you don't see that makes the difference.

Our editing class revolves around Final Cut Pro, the industry standard program for video editing. We've talked all about different cutting styles and narrative elements, and how to control the viewer's experience through selective editing. To illustrate the power of editing, our midterm assignment was to choose any song and edit together a music video, using a variety of older music videos from other artists. By using fractions of different narratives, I was able to create a whole new cohesive story with brand new meaning and intent. That's interesting to think about when we apply it to ourselves. We're all editors in our own stories, and we all edit together different parts of our life experiences to build new meanings into our memories. An exercise that really shows this is one I did a few years ago:

From the moment you wake up, write down a one word summary of what you're doing at 5 minute intervals through the whole day. Wait a few days, and before re-reading your stilted summary, try and recall everything you'd done. Examine the two lists and look for what's accurately remembered, and what's forgotten.

Chances are, you remember the major or remarkable events (meeting a friend for lunch, or getting in an argument), while editing out the smaller, more routine things (brushing your teeth, or getting dressed). We edit out most of our lives when archiving memories into our long-term cognitive library, and I've begun to wonder about the sum of the things that we edit out and forget. Could we build more empathy for others, if we could hold on to memories of interactions with human suffering? Would we be more deferential when in disagreement with others, if we could remember all the times that we were wrong?

We tend to hold on to artifacts that show our triumphs and successes in life, so what flavors of motivation could be cultivated by surrounding ourselves with reminders of our failures or shortcomings? The power of positive thinking is a very potent and useful tool, and when applied to things that aren't very enjoyable to remember (a broken friendship for example), maybe we can re-edit the experience to turn it into one that's worth learning from.

It blew my mind how long it took to edit together a simple 4-minute music video (about 6 hours) and re-editing all the painful or uncomfortable memories from our lives is likely to be a life-long project. Seeing the silver lining isn't just a simple decision, rather a full-length feature commitment, and I'm inclined to think it's one worth seeing through to the end.

How does that sound?

Here's my re-edited music video for Jump, Little Children's song, "Rains in Asia" created with videos from The Talking Heads, Bjork, Oui Oui, and the Rolling Stones among others.

Voodoo Seduction

2010-03-05T01:50:00.001-08:00

After a late night out a week or so ago, I'd woken in a funk.

The kind when your mind is fixated on sometime from the moment your conscious. The feeling followed me around all day, so I sat down and exorcised it out with a song.

I'm in the process of piecing the finished project together over 3500 miles with my friend Sean back on the East coast. Give it a listen.

New Experiences

2010-03-04T22:31:00.000-08:00

Are you open minded?

What do you believe that you’re proud of? More importantly, are there any beliefs that you’re not so comfortable with? If you consider yourself open to opposing perspectives and ways of life, where do you draw the line? Is there anything that gets swept under the rug? The dangerous caveat with most humans isn’t that we lack information, rather that we lack objective empathy. We cling to our worldview because it’s easy and it serves us.

This is what we’re talking about in my “Relationships” class this semester. We’re focusing on how we treat each other as human beings and also learning about how to coexist in symbiotic ways. Growing up in a family that embraced different cultures and ideas, I’ve always tried to keep absorbing and growing from different people in different walks of life. In class, we talk about embracing this stance of being “In-Learning”, which is defined as:

Being open to influence when holding strong opinions
Inviting other’s views openly
Having curiosity about others, about their life, their views
Tries to “hear” what another is trying to say beneath the surface
Ponders their own reactions and beliefs and learns about themselves
Sees and invites the positive core within others

I'm lucky to be a student and by definition, most of us are already In-Learning to more or less of an extent. After much self-reflection, I’ve decided to try and apply these principals outside of the classroom. I’ve decided to try and delve face-first into one of my own least familiar and most stereotyped social environments. I’ve ridden myself of my past beliefs and ventured into unfamiliar territory. I’ve pledged into a fraternity.

If you can believe that last sentence, perhaps you’ve already started to form an opinion. Based on past experiences with members of the Greek system in your own college days, or maybe from shreds of cultural evidence that you’ve seen over the years, you’re currently shaping an opinion about it. Perhaps you’re muttering, “I’m open-minded, but Frat guys are close-minded idiots. They’re not In-Learning at all”. In a lighten fast chain of neuronal activity, perhaps you’ve already cross-referenced your past experiences and emotions like a book in a cognitive library; in an instant called up volumes of memories to the forefront of consciousness to set the taste in your mouth. But why?

Part of being a successful account planner revolves around connecting, empathizing, and developing common ground with various groups of different people connected to the accounts that we work on. And doing all of this without judgment, or with a “child-like mind,” as we’re taught. As humans, we seek comfort in people that we share commonalities with and slide into “Us vs. Them” thinking with those whom we don't. It would be easy for me to connect with fellow musicians, or cyclists, or any tribe that I already feel a part of.

So, I’m trying to stretch myself into something new that I’m completely unfamiliar with, and so far it’s been great. I’ve begun to meet all kind of interesting kids from other departments and with different artistic talents. Our school bears resemblance to a conservatory setting and the intensity keeps us somewhat segregated from other departments. By meeting kids outside of the Advertising world and from different artistic backgrounds, I’m hoping to cultivate some unique perspectives and grow my own thinking.

How does that sound?

Live! with Justin Ancheta

2010-02-23T14:51:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about San Francisco is the street life.

Musicians perch on these hilly streets and almost any kind of music can be heard if one walks long enough. My favorite musician whose street side concerts I've listened to numerous times is Justin Ancheta. A local troubadour, I've heard Justin both solo and with his band, Mostro, complete with drums, and a huge didgeridoo-like horn. Enough to stop anyone dead in their tracks and induce spontaneous hip gyration.

I got in contact with Justin and he was so kind to record a live session for you loyal readers.

Listen to the sound of the city.

I ran into Justin Ancheta on the streets of San Francisco last year as he was playing with his band, "Mostro". In their three-man setup is guitar, drums, and a six-foot long indigenous/ organic horn of some kind that produced a low drone a la a didgeridoo. I had no choice but to stick around.

I've since followed Justin's music (both solo and bands) and am stoked to get behind his musical outlook.

Carpe Digital?

2010-02-21T19:48:00.001-08:00

I am dependent on technology.

And I'll be the first to admit that I'm a long time user. My addiction started in the 6th grade when we got our first computer and I taught myself how to build basic webpages with HTML. From then on, I remained glued to my screen, stretching the fabric of the internet, sharpening my understanding of all things digital.

Suffice to say, moving to San Francisco has only stoked the flames. Like a cocaine addict traveling to Colombia, the close proximity of the Apple, Twitter, and Pandora headquarters binds Bay Area tech nerds together. In San Francisco, binary code is the drug du jour.

I've heard the critics before, scoffed at their diagnosis of having a tech problem. Communication theorist Marshall McLuhan diagnosed dilemmas like mine through his work in what he calls, "Technological Determinism":

"For the past 3500 years of the Western World, the effects of media- whether it's speech, writing, printing, photography, radio, or television- have been systematically overlooked by social observers. Even in today's revolutionary electronic age, scholars evidence few signs of modifying this traditional stance of ostrich-like disregard"

McLuhan wasn't the first to begin to look critically at the rising digital tide, and he certainly hasn't been the last. Earlier this week, I trekked down to City Lights Books here in San Francisco, and heard renowned technologist Jaron Lanier talk about his recently published book, "You Are Not A Gadget".

It was really fascinating to hear him talk and my digital worldview is getting a serious ruffling as I'm reading through it. I managed to video his whole talk for you loyal readers, which you can read below. Perhaps this book will be the kick I need to massively overhaul my digital diet.

How does that sound?

Part 1: Jaron introduces himself and his ideas by playing an ancient flute-like instrument.

Part 2: Giving some thoughts and ideas regarding our online behavior and why it's different from our real-life behavior.

Part 3: Technology is the problem and solution to making life better.

Part 4: Misperceptions about the Internet

Part 5: Part of the solution may be in micropayments

Hear them out

2010-02-18T14:19:00.000-08:00

I've heard the music.

Today, I commuted into downtown Oakland after making contact with the Community Manager at Pandora, who was nice enough to set me up with a personal tour of the office. To any music lover who's ever fantasized about working at one of the Web's biggest music presences, let me confirm what you probably already assume. The people at Pandora rock. They work hard and listen closely. Everyone whom I met was open eared and more than willing to share their two cents of musical insight. Everyone loved some aspect of what they do. This got me thinking.

One of the reasons why I'd guess that Pandora is so rampantly successful, is that it's an organization that are filled with passionate people. An easy gig, some might say, to get to listen to music all day. But it was interesting to ask whether or not some of the employees enjoy silence as much as the rest of us love music. After listening and analyzing music all day however, a lot of the music analysts and program engineers leave their office in Oakland and go to separate band practices. For the people that work at Pandora, it seemed that the music never stops.

It's my hope that someday I'll get to reconnect with them and somehow combine my interest in cultural/ business strategy with my passion for music. If technology has ripped the fabric of the music industry apart, organizations like Pandora are likely to sew together a new model of how music, artists, and listeners can all connect and improve the lives of each other.

How does that sound?

A panoramic view of their headquarters in Oakland, CA.

This screen shows the network engineers the health and operations of their servers all across the country.

This is part of the process that their Music Analysts go through, when combing through music and writing the musical DNA for every song.

Stacks of CD's, waiting to be ripped into their library.

"Jack the Ripper" audio ripping station, compliment to the "Jill the Ripper" workstation.

In the lobby of their headquarters, they make space for live music to be played by any and all interested musicians/ employees.

To break up the (seriously) strenuous work of getting music into the hands of the right listeners, people at Pandora take breaks with epic games of table tennis.

Feathered Histeria

2010-02-14T22:41:00.001-08:00

San Francisco knows how to share the love.

And there's no better love sharing that beating the crap out of strangers with soft, fluffy objects. To mark Valentines Day 2010, I marched down to the Embarcadero in true citizen journalist style, camcorder in one hand, my feathered mace in the other. Flanked by my friend Khaia, we charged forth into America's largest public pillow fight. The clock strikes six and feathers start to fly. Emerging from the mob battered but victorious, San Francisco won't soon forget the power of the pillows. Lucky for the history books, I recorded the pillocaust for those who were there in spirit.

There's always next year.

Stranger Media

2010-02-13T14:10:00.001-08:00

Can anyone hear you?

Living in San Francisco amongst web startups and venture capitalists, communication technology moves this city. With Facebook, we could find and reconnect with old friends. With Twitter, we could become citizen journalists and amateur PR publishers, managing our personality's brand. We're ever so willing to share ourselves with people we know online. But what about complete strangers?

Internet predators have gained massive press attention and stories of retirees getting swindled out of their retirement savings though web scams keeps our guard up. In the digital ocean of the Internet, we often think that any online stranger has a sinister ulterior motive. Or, that talking to web strangers is "creepy". But how is it different from striking up conversation with a stranger at the grocery store? Context perhaps.

Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year old student from Moscow has capitalized on the human desire to be social with strangers through his site, Chatroulette.com. The New York Times describes the site as "generating one-on-one Webcam connections between you and another randomly chosen user around the world. The results are occasionally serendipitous, putting you face to face with an interesting person from another corner of the planet." Though memories of early AOL chat rooms flooded my keyboard, I decided to log on and try it out and investigate what the buzz was about. The results were pretty serendipitous.

When you log onto the site, it connects you to another person sitting in front of their computer, and you can start talking to them or instantly "Next" them, connecting to a new user. After cycling through a few screens of adolescent kids gathered around their computers, I connected with a student from the midwest. We started to talk and quickly discovered that we shared eerie similarities (Both having visited San Francisco in High School on choral trips and now both studying Advertising in college). Through our screens, we quickly began to share and speak the same language. We talked for a bit and then I excused myself and we parted ways. That got me thinking.

The Internet has opened up accessibility to any imaginable information and social media has fissured our groups of friends from the tens to the millions. Any trend has an inverse cultural swing and I think that technology movements which help us re-centralize our lives locally (physically) will show mass adoption in the future. When I was at the Pandora town hall meeting earlier this week, I pitched the idea of using Pandora (and their ability to help you find new music) to help find new local music that users would enjoy, based on their described tastes.

Is something like Chatroulette paving the way to establish human connections with complete strangers? As the digital and physical line blurs, will this become more socially practiced and acceptable? If you knew that you could have a face-to-face conversation with a complete stranger who happened to eerily share a lot of the same interests, would you? Wasn't that what Facebook used to be all about? Have we become comfortable making friends with people we've never met?

How does that sound?

Afternote: After spending a little more time on the site, I was confronted with the perverse, grungy aspect of public web space. Because there's no limits or monitoring on the website, one can inadvertently see some pretty graphic stuff. It's not all appropriate and there's a disproportionate number of male users, so be warned.

Don't touch that keyboard. Pandora is bringing music back.

2010-02-11T12:07:00.001-08:00

It was Nerdy Nirvana.

Last night, I trucked deep down into the Mission District to hear a visionary. Tim Westergren is the mastermind and founder behind Pandora, the incredible internet music radio service. As music as an industry undergoes a violent reshuffle and displacement through technology, it seems fitting that some true pioneers are headquartered along the San Andreas fault line, here in the Bay Area of San Francisco.

After giving a keynote about Pandora's history, where it is now, and where they'd like to go, Tim invited questions and cross examination from the nights listeners. In true ace reporter form, I documented the talk from my seat. Watch below to hear the captain of one of American Internet's biggest players talk about what they're up against, where they want to go, and how they help you discover your next favorite song.

Take a look and listen closely. If you've never been to Pandora.com, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Tim tells us where Pandora has been, where they're headed, and where they'd like to take music as an industry.

Tim talks about how Pandora listens and how Music DNA works.

Digital rights is a conundrum in the age of digital sharing, ripping, pirating, and republishing. Tim talks about how they fit into the legal shuffle.

Live! with ALO

2010-02-06T20:59:00.001-08:00

One thing I love is breaking by own perceptions.

I love getting it wrong, and learning from my misjudgments. Like the idea that all big rock stars are jerks, I was blown away this past Thursday when I met the guys from ALO (or, Animal Liberation Orchestra). Hailing from Santa Barbara and the Bay Area, ALO has toured all over the US with Jack Johnson and Matt Costa. Their music particularly resonates with earth-love surfer types and anyone with an ear for mellow grooves. I walked down to KFOG's studios, where I'd been invited for a private concert to promo their upcoming show. I arrived a little early and after handshakes and warm introductions, I helped them unload their gear and trucked it upstairs.

You'll like their music if:

You like mellow grooves with keyboards and slide guitars
You listen to artists on Jack Johnson's "Brushfire Records" label
You can feel music in your body

You probably will pass on their music if:

You hate being coerced into dancing/ rhythmic gyration
You prefer walking through fields of sandspurs
You find yourself in a bad mood when listening to music that makes you think of the ocean, good friendship, and enjoying life

Awesome guys, and it was even better getting to hang out with them for a few hours. I managed to snag some audio on my phone before talking with the guys after the show. They were excited to hear about the blog and wanted to share a little message with my readers.

How does that sound?

You can hear more of their stuff by checking out their MySpace page or perhaps visiting their homepage.

The Pied Piper of San Francisco

2010-01-30T19:01:00.000-08:00

Transfixed.

I'm back in San Francisco and during a walk though Golden Gate Park with a friend, we stumbled upon this guy. It's amazing how transfixing something as simple as bubbles can be when they're huge and slowly lumbering through the air. Perhaps like campfires (which I've heard called, "Nature's Televisions" for their transfixitive ability), maybe there's something in the brain that gets befuddled and shifted into neutral when faced with something so amorphous.

Think that's far fetched? Check out the video and see if you're not at least a little bit captivated.

Live! with Sara Houser

2010-01-19T10:58:00.001-08:00

New sounds are pouring down in droves.

I'm marooned on the cold, wet south eastern seaboard but making good use of my time back home in Charleston. The weather's slowly warming and I've made a routine of waking up and riding my beach cruiser down to library to learn more about art history. And, catching up on good, local music.

Sara Houser (a former school mate of mine and esteemed guest of the first "How Does It Sound" podcast) kindly caters to my auditory addiction and just recorded a new live song for the blog and your subsequent viewing pleasure. Can't wait until things start to warm up.

How does that sound?

Live! with Corey Webb

2010-01-04T17:37:00.001-08:00

Things are sounding just right for right now.

I'm back in Charleston for a month-long break and getting a chance to reconnect with some old friends and musicians. I went to middle school with Corey Webb, an emerging folk troubadour back before he'd honed his own musical style and had taken Charleston by storm. Today I hung out at his house which overlooks the lowcountry marsh. We talked a lot about music, people, nature, and where we're all headed. Then, we recorded some songs.

Give them a listen. Feel free to support another great Charleston independent musician who dedicates himself to changing the world around him for the greater good.

How does that sound?

His solo work can be heard/ purchased here. He also sings with some like-minded and extremely talented musicians in his other band, "Bodies Full of Magic". Listen to them here.

The tracks above can be appreciated by downloading below.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://howdoesitsound.bandcamp.com/track/the-dust-in-between"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;The Dust In Between by How Does It Sound&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://howdoesitsound.bandcamp.com/track/perfect-mouth"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Perfect Mouth by How Does It Sound&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Taking the Plunge

2010-01-01T15:29:00.001-08:00

We rang in 2010 by freezing our blood and temping cardiac arrest.

And to celebrate this new decade, I joined a bloodthirsty mob, a few hundred strong to charge headlong into the icy Atlantic. We screamed and yelled as we all galloped forth, and were slapped hard by the icy waters.

An amazing time was had by all. Cheers to all in costume without shame, and those in bathing suits without rational judgment. We ran. We splashed. We froze.

Happy 2010.

Where have you been this whole time?

2009-12-30T09:38:00.000-08:00

What are you made of?

After flying back home to the Deep South for a month long break from Ad school, I’ve gotten a chance to do some good eating. I’ve found comfort in my standby grits and sweet tea and eaten my weight in Christmas cookies. If the adage goes, “you are what you eat,” I expect that my demeanor is now sweeter and somewhat covered in frosting and gravy. Which, has gotten me thinking.

Next time you’re sitting down in front of a meal, stop and look at what’s on your plate. Try and imagine how many days it grew from the ground or hung on a tree before beginning the long trip towards your stomach. Einstein proved that matter isn’t created or destroyed, but instead is carefully rearranged in different forms through chemical reactions. If our bones and muscles are constructed from the nutritional building blocks from the food we eat, those nutrients are acquired from the environment our food is grown in. So what are we really made of? Do we grow our of our surroundings?

I don’t mean for this to be overly philosophical and if you’re left-brain dominated perhaps you’re already scowling to “Get real, Gavin”. So think about it like this:

You’re given a box of Lego’s and told to make a building. After everything’s constructed and finished, you decide that you’re more interested in trains, so you take apart your building and make it into a shiny new locomotive. You then take it apart and make it into something else, and so on. As you use the same building blocks for every new creation, every individual piece has its own history; an account of where it’s been and what its been made into.

Such has been the debate of philosophers and thinkers for centuries.

It’s interesting to acknowledge that we’re all essentially living history books. And not just where we've been, what we've seen, or what we've done in life. We’re physically built of a jumbled mess of sub-atomic pieces that have been handed down since the beginning of this universe 13.73 billion years ago. Though it might sound like the crazy ramblings of stoned hippies, the laws of physics suggest that what we’re all made of (physical matter) has always been around, and thus we all must have some kind of sub-atomic ancestry. Thus, the idea of reincarnation makes sense in the right context of scientific thinking: what makes up your cells and bones once was organized into something else and will be rearranged into something else in the future.

As an Ad man, I can draw the analogy of humans to products: Our bodies as the physical good itself, and whatever element that makes each person unique (consciousness, soul, etc.) as the good's brand (defined as the thoughts, feelings, and emotions associated with physical product) of the individual. Thus, to think about your body as the packaging of what makes you an individual, how it will be recycled to package something else in the future?

Just sit and wonder about that before you go to sleep. The skin on your face, the sheets that your under; where have they been and where will they go? After everything gets old and breaks down, the building blocks that you're made of will disassemble and lay in wait to be reassembled into something else. Everything around us: buildings, friends, cars, clothes: we’re all made of the same stuff, more or less.

How does that sound?

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T21:38:00.001-08:00

Hope your stomach is full of good food and you're in the giving spirit.

Here's a little tribute to the most famous miser of all.

How Does It Sound? Podcast ep. 1

2009-12-20T12:09:00.000-08:00

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It's been an exciting and enriching semester. I had a ton of fun in my Radio/Podcasting class and got to produced, edit, and engineer my first (hopefully of many) podcast. Our final project for the class was a 3-segment episode and I decided to tie it into my blog and share some thoughts about where I think music is headed.

Give it a listen.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://howdoesitsound.bandcamp.com/track/how-does-it-sound-podcast-ep-1"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;How Does It Sound? Podcast ep. 1 by How Does It Sound&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Want to check out Sara's music? Check out:

Her BandCamp website
Her Myspace page

Branding Salvation

2009-12-08T17:03:00.000-08:00

I learn from those that have come before me.

As an advertising student, I learn from the successes and mistakes of media campaigns in the past. I find inspiration in work that creates new cultures and perspectives while disparaging the copycats. As creative business strategists, we work to understand the primal desires of large groups of people. We study consumers' behaviors and attitudes in order to better understand their needs and desires. After our work is done, we're able to engage with them in the most effective and persuasive way.

Recently, I've found inspiration by looking through history at the most successful campaign of all time: Western Christianity. Though their methodologies today are very different from one another, both modern advertisers and the Catholic Church devote enormous efforts and resources to creating enticing experiences that either unconsciously or well knowingly engender emotional participation and the creation of new cultures. Madison Avenue owes its dues to the Church.

Today, we’re all connected through technology and we learn and grow as one larger community. But before YouTube or Twitter, how did we share original ideas? Way back before the Internet, the telephone, or personal publishing, there was no framework to hang our experiences on and general knowledge was very scarce by today’s standards.

That framework came in part through religious unification in the Western world. In ancient Rome, we can thank Constantine for founding for what would become humanity’s largest and most powerful tool of governance throughout history. After issuing the Nicene Creed in 325 A.D., Constantine and a think tank of religious officials began to lay the groundwork for the Catholic Church by identifying what half of all advertising today spends countless hours and millions of dollars crafting.

We talk in our Account Planning classes about user emotions and buying states. More simply, my fellow Ad students and I comb through culture and media to understand how people feel towards certain ideas and products, and what frame of mind they’re in when making purchasing decisions. As a result, at the root of any Ad campaign is a way to alleviate one of two innate human desires. Modern advertising assumes that either:

A. People will always want more love
Or
B. People will always want more money.

Think back to any commercial you’ve seen, print ad you’ve read, or billboard you’ve driven by. Think about the messaging they’re telling you and try and guess which of the two wants they’re trying to massage.

Viewed from a business perspective, the Catholic Church sits on even footing with today’s corporations. Neither can survive in a social vacuum and both rely exclusively on the patronage and involvement of participants (either customers or believers). Anyone in business understands that humans and cultures are always in a state of flux and thus, the Catholic Church is subject to the same pressure at attracting an ever evolving consumer base and adjusts it's beliefs and practices as dynamically as companies do.

After establishment, the Catholic Church made the strategic decision tackle both: offering a way for their followers to better their lives by finding more love while increasing the Church revenue through monetary donations. By subscribing to their movement, believers were promised eternal love in exchange for exclusive church loyalty. By providing an answer to the human obsession with the afterlife and filling humanity’s oldest market niche, the Catholic Church made a decisive move that has since secured their status as a market leader in the minds of the faithful. In a similar way that millions of technology enthusiasts look to Apple to pave the future of technology, billions of spiritual believers look to the Christian Church to help guide their hearts and minds. After establishment, their user-friendly belief system spread feverishly through concerted and grandiose artistic campaigns, and the Catholic Church began to become recognized as the authority on the afterlife and salvation.

Artistic commissions greased this machine and as more and more impressive works were created, the Church began to earn a commanding status in society. Not far from the Church’s seat of power in Rome, Italian artist Masaccio stunned viewers with his work, the “Holy Trinity” in the Santa Maria Novella church in Florence in 1426-27. Masaccio was a pioneer in his time and by collaborating with architect Brunelleschi, he applied some of the first ideas of perspective into his artistic works.

The use of lines and math to convey three dimensions on a two dimensional surface makes the fresco come to life, and the imagery of Christ’s crucifixion seems almost lifelike in its time. Today, we’re so visually disillusioned that it takes complex computer graphics to impress us. So to imagine that the churchgoers screamed and had to touch its surface to realize the illusion seems laughable.

Nonetheless, Masaccio was the first artist to fully appreciate what advertisers now understand as media environments: the relationship of a physical space to a visual message and how both affect each other. Using mathematical calculations, he integrated the church’s natural light sources into his painting and was recorded to have sat in the church all day before starting, as to observe how natural light moved through the windows over time. Setting the course for modern art directors, Masaccio discovered that it’s not only what we see that convinces us, but also how and where we see it.

An account planner in his day was patron Bishop Bernward from Germany . Bernward fundamentally understood the inclusion of past cultural practices for a strategic goal. By borrowing Roman architectural styles, his commissioned the church of St. Michaels in Hildesheim, Germany built from 1010-1033, which piggybacks onto the Roman reputation of superiority and dominance and exalts church members associated with it. In addition to the clear Roman influences in the arches of the church, St. Michaels attempts to widen its base of appeal by including Islamic zebra striped elements of interior design. By commissioning this church, Bernward combined unlike elements for a completely new and remarkable user experience.

When I sit back and look at art history books alongside Communication Arts magazines, it’s clear that both advertising and organized religion are two diverging tips of the same iceberg. Both groups create persuasive messaging to help establish opinions and grow their group of followers. Either through branded consumer goods or religious iconography, both organizations create social badges (like logos or spiritual symbols) with which people can display their tribal allegiance or group membership. Take a modern day Evangelical and a fanatical Apple user, ask them about their dogma, and you’ll get somewhat similar programmed rhetoric about their beliefs.

Some might read this comparison and reply that the Church isn’t anything like an advertising agency. You might make the case that:

“Churches are straightforward about offering love. Churches aren’t anything like agencies because they’re honest about what they do. Advertisers aren’t.”

Just as there are scandalous or fundamentalist Christian churches that preach hate and discrimination (going against the general reputation of good will and brotherhood), there are countless advertising agencies that dedicate their talents towards preserving the environment, creating material for small non-profits, or advocating social responsibility (against the reputation that ad men are money-driven scoundrels).

“There’s no Buyer’s Remorse with Religion”

The inclusion into smaller intimate social circles is a primal human desire and one that Religion greatly benefits from. However, just like becoming a member of a church can identify you as a part of something greater, in today’s cultural economy, people use consumer goods to a similar effect. In the industry, we call it Tribal Consumerism and we look at how anthropological and psychographic trends can be followed along different brand lines. Simply put, people tend to hang out with other people that buy similar stuff.

Lastly, people often make both sides of the argument that the other is inherently evil and will ultimately cause the demise of humanity. I’m less inclined to believe the sky is falling because while I acknowledge that both groups have been used for dastardly intent in the past, both organizations yield incredible control over a significant percentage of the global population. While organized religion has been used to justify sectarian violence in some groups, it’s also brokered peace and emotional solidarity to others. Likewise, advertising has sold lots of useless junk in the past, but as business continues to drive our society, advertisers and marketers hold the unique power to influence and steer our culture towards environmental stewardship and conscious consumption.

Thus, it seems that both organizations stand at a crossroads. Conventional advertising is failing as old mediums such as print and television are loosing effectiveness. Meanwhile today's Church is reinventing itself for the modern believer, who is exposed to many more competing religions than in years past, and whom also has begun to use commercial goods as a way to establish cultural identity. Advertising and marketing is moving towards an economy of mass customization and religion might stand to take a tip from its former follower.

Perhaps the future of the today's churches revolve around a similar idea, as they find ways to use their expert knowledge to better the lives of individuals instead of entire congregations. Some contest that people don’t need the Church as a go-between with the divine, so perhaps new fortune lies in positioning themselves like spiritual personal trainers: providing a custom tailored way to get emotionally unstuck and help you to discover ideas that you wouldn’t find on your own. After all, the Catholic Church is subject to the same pressure of attracting an ever evolving consumer base as modern companies are, and adjusts it's beliefs and practices as dynamically as modern day brands.

How does that sound?

Sandra Hong Revisited... Live!

2009-12-05T21:48:00.001-08:00

More music is coming from the Jackson Street, mega-hit studio.

To ease the heating pressure of final presentations, projects, and papers, Sandra stopped by today for some more music. We're writing/ forming the shape of a song that I wrote this summer, and it's coming together really well. Can't wait to share.

As for now, enjoy the videos below and comment with your thoughts.

Forgive and Forget in the Age of Google

2009-12-02T15:32:00.000-08:00

I’ve put things behind me before.

And, after misunderstandings or social blunders with my friends, part of being a higher-level communicator is working through things and starting fresh. We turn over new leaves every day and within our various groups of friends, and are given grace. But it’s harder to forgive and forget when your misunderstandings stare you in the face, and are digitally archived and always accessible.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about communication accessibility in the context of friendship building in our digital age. I’ve been thinking about how we connect to each other and how the different mediums of communication (both digital and interpersonal) build friendships in their unique ways. Our human relations are built on interactions and the way that we interact has changed more in the past 5 years than it has in the past 50 years. We text message each other instead of actually talking and hearing each others voice. Emails have replaced letters and postcards and sometimes, I video chat with my friends in the same city, as it’s faster and more convenient then trekking across town for a quick conversation. But having actual face-to-face time is completely different than face-to-screen time (even if the spoken conversation is the same), and thus builds the relationship in a different way.

Think of your friends like onions. Communication theorists Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor are responsible for conceiving the “Social Penetration Theory”. They liken our personalities to onions in depicting our multi-layered personalities and explain that through discourse with each other, we peel away layer after layer of personal information, moving from surface-social facts (like biographical info and cultural preferences) to deeper, more revealing information (ideas of self identity, religious views, deeply held fears). We socialize from the outside inwards.

Think about the day you met your best friend. Chances are you started on the outside first (“Hey, what’s your name”) before delving deeper (“What’s your biggest fear?”). For our own social safety, we let our guards down gradually to stave off humiliation while at the same time figuring out how to interact with someone new on-the-fly. All relationships have life cycles and we tend to ebb and flow between closeness and distance with the people around us. Friendships naturally fizzle out and people tend to move on to make way for new social growth. But what happens when you start to bottle up the sea of communication and save it for later? Does digital discourse make it harder to let go of things and move through the natural life cycle of communication? When we interact through our screens, how does it affect the friendship knowing that both parties could save the discussions for later review? How different is social forgiveness when everything is archived and never forgotten?

One idea that I’m currently working through is how digital communication throws a monkey wrench in this natural life cycle. Like modern embalming, most digital communication is perfectly preserved in our inboxes, so that we can revisit any conversation at the click of a button. As human beings, this makes sense as we tend to hold on to relics from our past to establish cultural identity, show the stripes of our experiences, or simply just to “remember the good ole’ days”. But as we go through the messy misunderstandings that come with friendship building and tuning into each other, Google (and with most other digital communication brokers) sits back and keeps score. In the years to come, are we to be burdened by ghosts of all of our past friendships staring at us from Facebook walls, Inboxes, Chat transcripts, and Twitter conversations?

I wonder about how things have changed, since the times of having a small group of close, in-the-flesh confidants (usually about 2-3) to now having a digital network of 1000+ online friends. Depths of your relationships aside, when everything is saved and squeezed into the same inbox (mixing a long email from your close friend with a mass message about an upcoming party), how do we sort things out? When our communications get muddled, is it harder to prioritize our relationships? Advertising superstar agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky touched this nerve with their “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign last year: Remove 10 friends from Facebook and get a free Whopper from Burger King. When we quantify our friendships digitally, is that what the exchange rate works out to? Gross fast food?

I’m still figuring things out and trying to find the right balance between a digital social life and a physical one. It’s impossible to renounce digital interactions these days, so I think a worthy goal is being conscious of both A) who we're talking to B) how we're talking to them and importantly C) where we're talking to them. I don't want to forget all of my secret handshakes.

How does that sound?

Thanksgiving Caloric Intake ≤ Calories Spent Hiking in the Cascades

2009-11-30T21:46:00.001-08:00

I needed a breath of fresh air.

And flying to Eugene, OR for almost a week for Thanksgiving, was exactly that. Lots of good food, beer, friends, and laughs around Zack's house near the University of Oregon campus, where he's currently camped out, working on a PhD in Chemistry. Lots of breath-snatching, stupefying, strenuous hikes through the Cascades made for a complete and successful urban detox; a necessity when living in the bowels of a big city like SF.

Here are some photos from the trip. If you've not yet made you way out in the Pacific Northwest, pack your bags and bring some good hiking shoes.

Less is More

2009-11-24T14:13:00.001-08:00

I am savvy.

I surf cultural waves; an insight gather. I am above the tricks and gimmicks of marketing and am the master of my own economic destiny. Rather, I'd like to believe that I am.

In the US, it seems that we're changing evolutionarily. "I think, therefore I Am," has been refunded for "I buy therefore I Am". We use goods and services, brands and commodities to define our role in American culture, sort us into likeminded groups, and express of views. In the age of over-choice, you vote every day with your wallet. At a workshop that I attended last year at Neutron, Marty Neumeier's brand consultancy here in SF, we learned about Tribes, and how people tend to buy goods in groups (for ex: Nike, Apple, and VW and how the same kind of consumer tends to worship all three). But I don't define myself though what I buy. Rather, I'd like to believe that I don't.

I've been saving a pile of foil Yoplait yogurt caps on my counter after breakfast every morning. I don't have any particular loyalty to yogurt brands so I size everything up equally when I shop for breakfast food. Yogurt is full of me-too products (different bands that are all more or less the same) and Yoplait differentiated itself with the age-old philanthropic supplement: giving $0.10 to Breast Cancer Research for every pink foil cap mailed in. From a gimmicky perspective, the strategy is genius. Like any rebate, the promise of money refunded is just persuasive enough to bias consumers, yet the commitment is small enough that it doesn't require any real action to feel satisfied that we got the best deal. As I filled my fridge with pink topped yogurt, I wondered about the data for actual caps refunded versus how many additional units sold due to the marketing strategy. I'd like to believe that I'm being a responsible consumer, earning money for causes that I support through purchases that would ordinarily benefit nobody. But the fact is, after leaving the checkout isle, we rarely follow through.

I'm determined to get Yoplait to make good on their promise of reward for my loyalty. $3.70 total might be minuscule, but it's more a defiant message to marketers to get creative with adding real value to the lives of people. Ironically enough, I've started shaping my view on Advertising by reading some websites detailing the Buddhist idea of non-attachment and a reduction of the importance of material goods. I'm currently trying to brainstorm ideas for how to reduce what we use, keep what we have longer, and be more content with life, while at the same time, creating a way for businesses to engage with people and use their specialized expertise to add value to the greater good. Can companies advocate not buying new things and get rewarded their efforts? I think that as brands become more interactive, personal, and compassionate, I hope to see less manufacturing of wants and desires and more creative ways to enjoy and appreciate what we already have.

Think it's a crazy, counter-intuitive idea? Nobody used to believe that a penny would make any real economic affect until someone discovered the wonders of $0.99.

How's that sound?

Creative Planning

2009-11-21T16:11:00.000-08:00

Being in Art School studying advertising, we're not measured in right and wrong so much, as we're taught to focus more on possibility and feasibility.

For those who aren't familiar, in an advertising agency, the account planner acts as the liaison between the creative department and the client, and is responsible (among other things) for the cultural research and strategic planning that directs any given media campaign. Schools like the University of Texas and the Brand Center at Virginia Commonwealth University are pumping out business grounded planners to fill these positions in a more conventional way. But the American business landscape is in serious flux right now and I question the relevance of any marketing education that's taught out of a text book these days, or is framed in a completely left-brained way.

As things change over night in the age of digital commerce, how can one succeed by continuing to subscribe to the religion of Adam Smith? Cameron Maddux (the Associate Director of Account Planning in our Advertising department) is currently experimenting with us to build what he calls "art school planners". By schooling us in things like Art History and Color and Design theory, an Art School planner is used to thinking in colors and culture rather than data and demand curves. We're inspired by stories of societal revolution brought about through artistic expression and are taught to find what makes us passionate and work from there. We find strategic directions in a similar way that painters find the perfect color to convey their message.

We're encouraged to absorb things outside of advertising and business, to go out and experience new cultures and practices. We're pushed by our teachers to go and explore the unknown, to take time away from our work and do interesting things. I think it's important to understand that it's the experiences you have as an individual that builds your personality. Intake life, filter through the Brain's unique wiring, output your worldview. By being in San Francisco, a nexus for interesting personalities and practices, my outlook on life is constantly absorbing, adjusting, reframing, rediscovering. My ideas are frequently a work in progress and often reflect the insane diversity of this city.

A really cool pursuit of design thinking comes from New York City-based art director Justin Gignac. To illustrate the power of package design in framing our judgments about products and goods, he collected street trash to arrange in a well-designed container. People actually buy garbage and feel good about it because of the way it's composed. His second series that I'm impressed by is the "Wants for Sale" series he's done: Screen prints depicting various objects of material lust as well as physical needs, sold for the actual price of the corresponding object. Pretty cool idea, great execution.

I'm wrapping up the semester and continue to learn so much in all of my classes. Two things from this semester that I'm looking forward to exploring on this blog is A) how we live in both the physical world and the digital world through technology, and how our real and digital behaviors are affected and interwoven in the two environments. Another thing that I'm currently outlining (for my final paper in Art History), is how elements of my education in advertising, branding, and strategic planning can be traced back to the world's first modern day ad agency, the Catholic church.

Lots of exciting things being learned out here on the West coast. Can't wait to share.

Here's some of Justin Gignac's work.

SF Green Fest 2009

2009-11-15T21:38:00.001-08:00

San Francisco is a nexus for creative thinking and new ideas.

As the importance of thoughtful consumption increases, we begin to broaden the definition of civic duty, and rewrite the American Dream, minds from San Francisco will be leading the way in new solutions. This attitude lives around ever corner. A willingness to try new
things; ditch the old for the new is what pulled me here and what keeps me thinking.

Today, I headed down to the SF Green Festival; a 3 day expo for social conscious businesses to set up stands to showcase their products/ movements while various lectures and musical performances play out. I went last year and met and talked to TED Talker and decorated brain
scientist, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. This year, I went and collected promotional info from various companies and ate my weight in free organic, free-trade, and gourmet chocolate samples.

Definitely worth checking out if you're ever in town. Check out my photos below.

Chords and things

2009-11-10T12:42:00.001-08:00

Just playing around with some song ideas.

Anyone want to help me finish it?

Coit Tower

2009-11-08T17:19:00.001-08:00

Coit Tower sits right outside my window.

And at night, it's hard not to stare at it and get lost in your own thoughts. I was playing around with some words and wrote this a while back. Sean and I had some cool atmospheric instrumentals to accompany it so maybe we'll record it one of these days.

Look there, Up, Down.
Stands tall, no sound.
Guards through the night.
Telegraphing all around.

Sun disappears
Cold's gone, fall's here.
Blow horns, Coit spies:
Foggy glow, eerie night

My love, the sea.
Summer's gone with the tide
Mark Twain was true.
By the bay, I'll think of you.

This is Ad School (pt. 5)

2009-11-07T17:04:00.001-08:00

I remember slaving away in the library of the College of Charleston.

Buried in books, pouring over chapters and chapters of "general education" knowledge that I was generally sure I would never use in the real world. Today, I woke up and met my friend Brandon, who had arrived with his team of Advertising, Motion Picture/ Television, and Acting students. I leased out my roof for today so they could shoot a spot for the Flip Mino that they're working on.

They arrived around 9am, it's currently 5pm, and they'll continue to shoot as much as they can before dark. All of this is student funded. Their Blood, Sweat, and Tears are more or less equal to Deadlines, Campaigns, Glory.

This is Ad School.

My name is what you think it is

2009-11-07T01:56:00.001-08:00

I'm terrible with names. You too? No? Let's take another look.

I've always been thankful for my name. Switching schools in different countries as a younger kid, I'd always sit quietly at the back, waiting for them to get towards the end of the attendance sheet with climactic effect. Standing in the hallways, I'd often introduce myself to similar acclaim: "I LOVE your name" or "Gavin?! Like Gavin DeGraw??". He sings: "I don't want to be anything other than what I've been tryin' to be lately". But, how about... "I don't want to be ever compared to that winy singer-songwriter, ever againnnn". I want to start with a clean slate.

So these past few weeks, I've been thinking about names and their meaning when injected into culture. First though, I think it's important to get something strait: human language has absolutely no intrinsic worth on it's own. It can't feed you, it can't house you, it can't heal you physically. It's both A) how you use the words with other people and B) your past experiences with words that make it useful. Language can't stand on its own and requires at least two speakers to pump it up. Words are a mutual agreement that when you say something, the idea of whatever is in your head will be reconstructed in my head. The trouble is that none of us talk in the exact same currency and our exchange rates are rarely 1 to 1.

I'm so fascinated with names because they're so arbitrary yet so critical. For a string of guttural sounds from the throat, your name start building your reputation as soon as it leaves your lips. Introduce yourself and our brains use cross-referencing systems to dig through our memory. We quickly look for any information attached to the name or word (emotions, opinions, information, attitudes towards all the people with that name that you've interacted with before) and begin to determine our initial attitude. This sets a taste in your mouth before conversations even begin (though most of the time, it's minimal) and our brains reduce uncertainty through calculated predictions.

For example, imagine you meet a tall, dark haired man named Adam. Unless you've got previous history with another similar guy named Adam, the slate would remain relatively clean. But, imagine he introduces himself as something culturally loaded (in the United States) like, Muhammad or Saddam. Without even giving him a chance, is it possible that your first impression is laden with preconceived notions and stereotypes?

It makes me wonder what my name says about me, to you. I hope that the army of other Gavin's are out in the world putting their best foot forward, so that if I am to meet one of their friends in the future, they won't say, "Gavin huh? Yeah, I knew a Gavin once. He was a real jerk". A cool anthropological study would be to examine a sample size of people from a medium-sized city, all with the same name across an age spread of 5 years and look for social patterns. I wonder if any similar behaviors would emerge due to the public subtly expecting the same thing from different people of the same name. Think it's outlandish?

Think about first person you fell in love with. If someone new introduced themselves with the same name of your former flame, do you have enough mental control to keep any previous emotional memories from flooding back, (perhaps only very subtly/ passively) tainting the new friendship with ghosts from your past? We think that we're so good at perception and that we've got our Brain reigned in, but most of the time our Neurons and Axons are a jumbled mess, hanging on for the ride and trying to make sense out of things on the fly.

As a student studying Advertising and Strategic Planning, I've got to be careful about the words I choose and to take some deliberation before I write my next tagline.

How does that sound?

This is Ad School (pt. 4)

2009-11-06T11:12:00.001-08:00

With every ad school comes internships.

And said work experiences give us real-world exposure to the inner workings of agencies, PR firms, and media magistrates. But exhaustive coverage scans or 24-hour creative concepting sessions have it's perks...

My boss explains it best.

This is Ad School (pt. 3)

2009-11-05T23:02:00.000-08:00

Ad School isn't something for the shy or weak of heart.

And when you get up on stage to present and ground your findings, always expect questions, criticisms, and doubts. Ad School makes one polished in the art of thinking on one's feel, feigning confidence, and putting ordinary, boring life under a microscope to look for behavioral insights.

This is Ad School (pt. 2)

2009-11-05T19:33:00.000-08:00

We're deep in discussions.

And in Digital Strategies, we talk all about digital behavior, online personas, mobile devices, emerging technology, and how humans are weaving web channels between the threads of their daily lives.

This is Ad School (pt. 1)

2009-11-05T17:42:00.001-08:00

This isn't a game.

For those who sit in Graduate classes or trapped in cubicles and quip that you cant wait for those suckers who went to art school to hit the hard realities of the Real World, it's time to dispel some myths. Welcome to the multi-part, epic serial ongoing drama: "This Is Ad School".

Below you'll see an example of the struggles of working late nights, painfully racking your brain for the most brilliant concept that will make all your fellow ad cohorts jealous of your uncanny wit and razor sharp intellect.

This video is real footage, not altered in any way, and shows the sobering reality of what life in ad school can do to a person.

Blood, sweat, tears :: comps, briefs, deadlines

You Are What You Eat, You Think What You See

2009-10-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

Though I may be lean and mean, I love eating and I realize that what comes into my digestive system ultimately guides my life.

During this past summer, I took the time to read up on food and learn more about what keeps us all going. I read all about gourmet cooking and the frivolousness of salad in "The Man Who Ate Everything". Jeffrey Steingarten became the food critic for Vogue and has since been lauding the wonders of white truffles while tearing apart dieting myths, one after the other. This criticism and opposition to the widely held (American) ideas that everything good is bad for you is brought into crystal clear context when you look at American culture and our ideas about portions combined with the pitfalls of human perception.

Alex Bogusky is a master in understanding this and when not crafting campaigns for VW and Burger King, he wrote the book, "The 9 Inch Diet". In 136 pages, I read about, "the dieting conspiracy in America" and how our gastronomic woes are a product of crafty marketing and exploiting the human (perhaps, American) obsession with maximum value by eating big. Why get a small-sized anything when you can double the size for 30% more? Do I think that by paying less per ounce, I'm doing the best by my body? If your attitude is "Why not?" then "Why So?". America is obsessed about dieting and efficiency (as seen in those god-aweful "time saving" devices on infomercials) yet we're the least healthy nation on the planet, wasting the most amount of resources. Wouldn't it be prudent to think about the big picture and consider everything that enters our body and dictates our attitudes and behaviors?

I'm trying to start viewing the Media I take in on a daily basis by the same critical standards that I eat by. I wonder how much of my perception of the world around me (reality) is framed by the pictures, billboards, YouTube videos, podcasts, movies, and internet pages that I stare at for hours each day. I limit sugars and fatty foods and try to maximize fruits and vegetables to nourish my body but until now, hadn't considered using the same prudence with my electronic eating. I wonder how I could feel by following this idea of a digital diet:

Books as Vegetables: >3 chapters per week
Blogs as Protein: ≥1 blog per day
Social Media as carbs: >2 hours per day
Texting/ Twitter as snacks: in moderation

If you think about sensory consumption in a holistic way, you can start to get an idea about the nutrition you get out of the various things you soak up. I feel like we could begin to take greater control over our world views, opinions, and perspectives by doing less "Info snacking" of tasty yet trashy Tweets and more savoring of scholarly sustenance. In an increasingly decadent media feast with a plate that's impossible to clear, I want to make sure my thoughts and opinions stay in good, dynamic, athletic shape. A toast to start reconsidering what it means to get my fill of information, where it comes from, and how it grows/ affects my thinking.

How does that sound?

This subject is something that I've been thinking about for a long time, and I recently read a really interesting "Knowledge Is Social" article along the same lines that describes the idea of "Infobesity" that's worth reading.

Snow Patrol revisited

2009-10-24T13:47:00.000-07:00

Ever since I heard them and met the guys from Snow Patrol last week, I've had their music on repeat.

So this morning I decided to record my own cover of one my favorites of theirs. Here's "If There's A Rocket Tie Me To It" by Snow Patrol from their album, A Hundred Million Suns.

Feel like carrying this around to listen to on your own time? Right click and "Save Link As" Download here.

Live! with Sandra Hong

2009-10-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get these walls to sound right.

My good friend and classmate, the lovely Sandra Hong stopped by last night for some musical exploration. So we sat down for a few hours, trying (in vain) to record a duet (it was too high for our voices), shared some favorite bands, and recorded some of her original and cover songs.

Below are her performances, recorded exclusively for your viewing pleasure and found only on How Does It Sound. Here's to more acoustic sets to come.

"Thrift Shop" by Sandra Hong

"Don't Know Why" by Norah Jones

Live music with some fellow Irishmen

2009-10-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

I'd never heard their music.

And when I walked into the KFOG studios a few hours ago, I didn't know that I'd be retracing my steps back to Ireland for the next 45 minutes.

The Radio and Podcasting class I'm currently taking is taught by two DJ's at two of the biggest radio stations here in the Bay Area. We've toured the studios the past two weeks and I'm quickly starting to nurture an interest in steering my studies in a direction that could land me in a similar environment someday. Having such an open ear and being exposed to music from around the world, I went on to talk to the Music Director about how she blends her skills in listening, marketing, and business to scout content for the station. Blending business strategy, advertising, and music together sounds right up my alley.

So after some talking and a few emails exchanged, I talked my way into an in-studio concert with Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody and Nathan Connolly. Super awesome guys who were playing a promo set for their upcoming show at The Fox Theater in Oakland, CA tonight. I chatted briefly with the guys about my recent trip to Ireland after their set. They're from Belfast and after hearing that I'd stayed at the Europa Hotel noted, "Mate, you stayed in the most bombed hotel in Europe". Crazy.

What a cool experience. Check out the photos and recordings below.

"Take Back the City" played Live! from their A Hundred Million Suns album.

Grey Matters

2009-10-12T21:39:00.001-07:00

I came across this story and had to think twice.

Rather, my two brain hemispheres had an inner dialog about the newly received input and each unique side added it's own flavor (deductive vs. inductive, quantitative vs. qualitative, numbers vs. colors) to the evaluation. I can't understand this process as I'm not directly privy to the conversation. Everyone takes their brain for granted to an extent and everyone is used to think working mostly right. Well, almost everyone.

Michelle Mack's life is particularly one-sided. After watching this CNN report, you've got to think about how you reason your way around the world and everything in your everyday life you're even able to appreciate. It's interesting to think about how we've all got our own talents and quirks and what we can learn from empathizing with each other. As I'm learning in Art History, personal expression has truly accentuated and helped steer public awareness for thousands of years. I think the worldviews of individuals whom see things drastically differently from ourselves can paradoxically get us out of our own head and elevate the way you look at something.

We're all multifaceted, and stories like this cause me to audit where my talents, interests, and abilities live on the neurological topography behind my eyes. Interesting food for thought.

Now, back to the books for me.

This one time, at BandCamp...

2009-10-12T15:32:00.001-07:00

I just had a conversation with a real pioneer.

Well, a real contemporary pioneer; the silicon valley, next big idea kind. Ethan Diamond is the creator and founder of BandCamp, a free website that's fleshing out and dreaming up new ways to fill the void that the crumbling Music Industry is leaving. We talked about what BandCamp is doing, how the state of music got to where it is today, and what things could possibly be like in the coming years.

Apple has broken CD sales into an a la carté buffet of "hit singles" and MP3 culture has allowed anyone to be die-hard fans of hundreds of bands at the same time. Is the age of the Super Star long passed? Would the Beatles or Elton John or the Rolling Stones have taken demanded such listener loyalty if they were trying to establish themselves today? I'm skeptical.

Ethan and I talked about the new age of music and how artists are having to start thinking more holistically to gain listeners. An artist has a CD? Great, I can download it from my friend for free. What else do they have? What can musicians and bands begin to create that cannot be replicated digitally? Experiences are a good place to start (and a reason why concert tickets are still a money maker for music acts) but it's time to start brainstorming about what else can be offered alongside concerts, CD's, and standard merchandise. In today's age, anyone should assume that anything that can be copied on a computer and given away freely, will.

Tools like Pandora, CDBaby, LastFM, and MySpace has undercut the Radio industry and given people the power to find their own music. BandCamp seems to now be working to give people a means to express their open-ended support for their favorite independent bands (think Radiohead's launch of "In Rainbows"). As a lover of all things musical, I can't wait to see the best creative ideas bubble up from the depths and take a stab at redefining how musicians not only reach listeners, but touch listeners too.

Interested in what they're doing over at BandCamp? Give their video a look-see.

Power of Sound

2009-10-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

The medical power of music, now backed with some interesting studies.

Check out the video below to see how listening to music could possibly be one of the most worthwhile things you do during your day.

Back Me Up

2009-10-10T21:12:00.001-07:00

Listen to yourself, see how it sounds.

I've been playing around for the past hour or two, recording an a capella cover of a Radiohead song that's been stuck in my head all day. After listenting to the song a few times, I took every individual element and recorded it in GarageBand to try and piece things together.

Here's a little clip of what it's sounding like, having used my phone to record the vocals. I wonder what the creative process was like before the age of technology...

Give it a listen.

A New Radio Personality?

2009-10-07T22:47:00.001-07:00

I'll try and keep this under 30 seconds. Go.

For Intro to Radio and Podcasting a few weeks ago, we had to record and edit an intro to "Brock Talk", a local sports show on KFOG where our teachers are DJ's. I sampled out some of my favorite music and ripped the audio off of a Muhammad Ali YouTube video from his heyday. My concept, editing skills, and 25 seconds of fame blared through thousands of strangers' speakers last week.

Give it a listen.

Sing at your screen and listen for a thousand voices singing back to you

2009-10-04T23:09:00.001-07:00

I must have heard it from twenty websites away.

YouTube is incredible. If you're a longtime reader of this blog, you'll remember that last year I got together with a few friends and wrote a song from our three separate cities. I called it an "Open-Sound" project and thought I was doing something new, but I'm sure people have long since been using the web as a means of musical collaboration. I just stumbled upon the coolest application of using the web for long-distance music creation so far.

Eric Whitacre's Virtual Chorus is a project by one of my all-time favorite choral music composers. It seems he's taken virtual jamming to the next level and assembled a whole choir from people sitting in front of their computer all over the world. 116 voices have now been mixed together to perform globally on the world-wide-web. It's exactly what you'd expect a full choir to sound like, and save the lack of acoustics from a concert hall, they sing with an incredible tone for the myriad of DIY recording devices they used.

Having studied classical and popular vocal music in school for almost 10 years, I remember the nerves and excitement as you stood in a hallway of 30 other singers waiting to audition. It truly blows my mind to think how my musical upbringing and education would have been different should we have cast out videos of ourselves singing and tagged them with our personal info and musical credits. I'm not out of college and I look at the experiences of kids in elementary though high school and figure how technology will change their learning experience.

What an undertaking and I'm super impressed at how well it came out. Give it a listen for yourself.

HSBF 2009

2009-10-04T20:31:00.000-07:00

It was a perfect way to end an action packed weekend.

Every Fall, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival is set up in Golden Gate Park, attracting tens of thousands of concert goers. Subsidized by San Francisco venture capitalist Warren Hellman, the HSBF breaths life into the tall trees of the park that once heard the original songs of hippie legends like Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix. The oldest trees and plants in the park seem to have rooted the tradition of free, large scale public concerts and I couldn't be a bigger fan.

The lineup this year was incredible as always (Neko Case, Richie Havens, Lyle Lovett, Dr. Dog, Amadou & Mariam, The Chieftains, Doc Watson & David Holt, Emmylou Harris, and MC Hammer to name a few) but unfortunately, I could only make it down for the last day of the festival. We enjoyed some awesome songs by Dr. Dog before meandering over to listen to the Chieftains play. Though it's been decades since the summer of love, drop yourself in the middle of this festival and maybe things haven't changed as much as you thought. Lots of dreads, shoes seemed optional, and the occasional waft of pot isn't uncommon.

Anyone who's considering a visit to SF in the future year might consider waiting until this week next year so you can soak up LovEvolution and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in 3 days.

Incredible.

Neighbornomics

2009-10-04T02:01:00.001-07:00

Sometimes it seems like we're on the Titanic economically, and I just found ice on the deck.

Everyone is feeling the pinch and Washington doesn't sleep. New ideas are being pitched and governmental fingers are trying to plug the holes of a boat that seems to be made out of wire mesh. So we have to get creative.

A few semesters ago, a girl in one of my classes wrote a creative brief for Craigslist, and her single most compelling idea was that Craigslist is a medium for community building. I was skeptical at first but after some time spent on the spartan website, I've got a different outlook. Craig Newman developed Craigslist in 1995 to list events in San Francisco and has grown into the global public exchange that it is today. You can find anything on there: jobs, real estate, a cute stranger who you noticed in the coffee shop down the street but didn't talk to (see the Missed Connections section to ruffle your opinion on virtual voyeurism).

Over the past few months, I've been plugging into what I call the Gigonomy of Craigslist. I'll define the Gigonomy as "the resources and exchanges of a given community by local populations". There seems to be a national trend of focusing more of our economic activity locally to either hedge shipping and handling costs or to help stimulate the neighborhood businesses they feel loyal to. Lucky for me (and anyone with a computer), Craigslist has a whole section of "Gigs" and it's through that opening into my community that I've both made and saved some money. My couch and desk in my apartment? Free; all I had to do was pick it up and take it off the owners' hands. Help a girl move into her apartment? $60 for two hours of work; and she called me back a few weeks later to assemble her bicycle for some more quick cash.

There are a few CL finds that I'm most proud of so far. The first is a job that I recently found for my mother with an organization in Charleston as a Spanish tutor. After a few meetings with the company, she starts soon. I'm pretty pleased that I can pay back a small bit of the parental sacrifices that I've received by helping to broker the relationship. The second is connecting with a filmmaker who was looking for a romantic San Franciscan location to shoot a scene for a piece that he's working on. I emailed him a photo of Coit tower, which is right outside my window. He came to scope out the location and filmed for 4 hours today in exchange for a piece of expensive electronic equipment that he had lying around and that I've been lusting after/ needing for a few years. And it was that easy, really.

It seems that when we connect with the people around us, despite background, age, color, or nationality, you both come out ahead. For the citizens of Ithaca, New York, the idea of helping your neighbor to grease the community machinery isn't new. In addition to American Dollars, the city has adopted a complimentary currency of Ithaca "Hours". This microeconomic idea isn't backed by the U.S. government and is a market reaction to having little say in how community (here, the country's) resources get apportioned. The basic premise is that time and effort you spend in service to Ithaca rewards you with varying fractions of Hours. One Hour is roughly equivalent to $10 (according to their website) and can be exchanged for any goods or services at stores within the city. It's a local's only currency however, and encourages real centralization. I first read about it in an article in COLORS magazine, which you can read here.

Could local currencies possibly be a way to help alleviate the massive budget deficit we're in? Balancing almost $12,000,000,000,000.00 is a dubious challenge given that the US Dollar is now a fiat standard and our greenbacks stopped being backed by gold bars in 1933 by President Roosevelt. How is our money worth anything, you might ask? The answer: Oil; and how Saudi Arabia accepts our money as their standard means for exchange of the world's most sought resource. Maybe it's high time for us all to do some homework in better understanding global economics and foreign policy.

We can't afford to be ignorant much longer.

On a lighter note, below are some photos I took from the film shoot in my apartment and on my roof. If you can't see them, then visit the blog. The film maker's scene concept fell apart mid-shoot, so he just got footage of the actress Monica (dark hair) and the make-up artist Thu (blond hair) posing together for a trailer he's working on.

LovEvolution 2009

2009-10-03T16:10:00.001-07:00

San Francisco is a crazy place to live.

This city crawls and shakes with culture. Today was LovEvolution (formerly Love Fest); a big parade of DJ floats blaring club music and shaking your stomach organs with all the bass.

Check out below or visit the blog to see some photos of a staple San Franciscan experience.

New Sounds: A House A Home

2009-10-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

Crazy to think how people grow up.

A House A Home is the outfit put together by a quiet girl I knew in middle school, who grew up and into herself through well crafted lyrics and catchy melodies. After high shool, Sara Houser quickly became a southern ex-pat to study music at Berklee in Boston. Now in Austin, TX she's started to churn out "lush and epic sounds" with her band and they've been stuck in my head for the past few days.

Job well done. Check out the tracks below or visit her website.

<a href="http://ahouseahome.bandcamp.com/track/buried-my-heart">Buried My Heart by a House a Home</a>

<a href="http://ahouseahome.bandcamp.com/track/now-i-know">Now I Know by a House a Home</a>

Lily Bunka Awards

2009-09-27T18:10:00.001-07:00

Lots of learning and cultural sharing again this year.

Stern Grove hosted the award festivities and it's the kind of place that squashes you in perspective. Enormous trees. Vaulted sheets of earth. This is the kind of place that would set anyone with a vivid imagination and a love for the outdoors completely on fire. The juxtaposition of nature and urban is one of my favorite parts of San Francisco; you can step into nature by traveling a few blocks away from the middle of downtown.

We didn't place in the finals but walked away the with "Best Team Spirit" superlative pat on the back. My team leader last year (whom we placed 2nd under) is vaulting over some big family health hurdles and I wish his family the best of luck (if you're reading this, let me know what I can do to help). Next year when he's back, I've got my eyes on the prize.

Here are the photos from the awards ceremony. Again, if you can't see them, then visit the blog on the web.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Lily Bunka Project 2009

2009-09-26T23:58:00.001-07:00

"[W]e are reviewing our experience to enable us to respond to the cultural challenge: to help countries, communities and individuals interpret universal principles, translate them into culturally sensitive terms and design programs based on them, programs that people can really feel are their own."
—Thoraya A. Obaid, UNFPA Executive Director

If there's two elements that will help steer the global community towards real acceptance and cohabitation, I think that cultural understanding and creative design will be in the running.

I just finished a long day of brain storming, sketching, discussing ideas, and coming to censuses with a really cool group of kids whom I don't understand at all. The Lily Bunka Project is a longstanding tradition at my school, where students from the Lily Bunka School of Art and Design in Mito, Japan come to San Francisco for tours and collaborative creation. On the first evening of the competition, we're subdivided into teams and so begins the cultural kluge. We laugh and speak in stunted elementary sentences. Large sweeping bodily gestures convey our ideas, often meeting puzzled looks before devolving into more laughter.

I competed in the competition last year for the first time, where we "Designed for the Future" and had an incredible experience building robots to symbolize our cultural similarities and how we can use technology to bridge the cultural gap. The theme was "Simple Pleasures" this year and design constraints called for the finished product to be in the form of a wearable hat. Together we thought, talked, translated, and sketched, and soon began to construct a geometrical hat with 7 panels depicting different simple pleasures that both Japanese and American culture enjoy; prospectively together: Music, Travel, Love, Community, Nature, Learning, and Peace. These are things that all human beings from any culture can enjoy and use to tune their life into the perfect key. We are Team 8, and thus it takes a human wearing the hat to bring these 7 simple pleasures together into context.

I love getting involved with this program every year and discover human truths though my self-realizations. I've discovered that in cross-cultural groups of strangers, I'm quicker than most to try and break the ice and establish shared means of communicating. We present our final projects tomorrow morning in Stern Grove in hopes of winning the grand prize of Mino Flip video cameras for every team member.

Wish us luck.

If you cant see my photos below, then visit the blog in your browser to check them out.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Live! with Brent Jordan

2009-09-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

My first "How Does It Sound?" podcast.

Give it a listen. Leave some feedback? Check out Brent's music.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Broadcasting thoughts, observations, and ideas

2009-09-17T14:48:00.001-07:00

Is the record button on? Click. Go.

Fall classes are in full swing and the one I was most clueless about upon entering, Introduction to Radio and Podcasting, is turning out to be really fun and creative. For a while, I've had aspirations of vaulting this blog from the screen to your ears and now it's starting to come together.

I lucked out in that one of my neighbors in my new apartment is an audio engineer and has been coming downstairs to give me tech tips in addition to letting me play around with his pro set-up and record with his super expensive mics.

To anyone who reads this blog, what kind of stories would you like to listen to? Our first assignment in class was to record and edit an intro capsule- the clip of audio that plays before every episode. Here's what I created:

The View

2009-08-18T16:13:00.000-07:00

I'm back for more.

I've just moved back to the City and into a cool apartment that's towards the edge of China Town and overlooks Telegraph Hill and North Beach.

Though I'm currently sleeping on the floor, just stopped the gas leak from my stove, and am living out of boxes currently, it's a fantastic space and has some pretty stupendous views. It's close to a children's day school in China Town so with the windows open, I wake up to hoards of little chinese kids giggling and snickering a few buildings away. Definitely easier to listen to than the omnipresent drone of the cable car.

Go out my bedroom to the tiny wooden staircase in the back of the building, up a few flights to the roof deck and you're rewarded with this view. Here's hoping for a good semester.

Click for a better look.

Lend me a hand

2009-07-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

Guitar tracking,

Is made easier when you've got some help. Here's what I'm working on today.

Piano Madness

2009-07-18T15:59:00.001-07:00

I can almost hear the finale.

I've got less than a week left in Miami and I'm trying to squeeze every last drop out of my time away from reality, I'm fervently trying to wrap up recording sessions so that we can move into mixing and mastering. I can't wait to share.

Here's a little video from today. Sean and I wrote a song on this old, dilapidated piano in the house I'm subletting in. Creaky and missing keys, we went on to find that when we recorded his part on his keyboard, he had to transpose his part a few keys higher to compensate for the archaicness of the old piano.

Here's a little clip of what's to come.

Make the Best of What's Around

2009-07-17T12:03:00.000-07:00

We've gotten ingenuitive.

While writing more songs, we decided that the echo of my kitchen didn't fit the vocals for a song that's getting finished up. Hence, we built a home vocal booth using a closet, hangers, shirts, and towels to dampen the sound. Things are starting to come together really well.

Can't wait to share.

Here's a tiny clip of the demo for the song that went on to get recorded using the setup.

You Know What I'm Saying?

2009-07-10T22:13:00.000-07:00

Music creation is in full force.

And I'm hoping to end this summer with a little EP of 4-5 songs. If I were to post digital copies on this blog, what could we trade for the listening experience?

What kind of video could you shoot/ edit to accompany the songs? Could you write lyrics to one of the instrumental songs, or perhaps a second set of lyrics from a different perspective? Might you choreograph a dance that illustrates a feeling that the music strikes in you and post the video on YouTube?

Once the music's completed, how could you take what we've done, and take it to the next level? Send me an email or post in the comments section with your ideas. Pitch to me your case for getting some good, free music.

How does that sound?

Here's a rough (and incomplete) demo of a song Sean and I are currently finishing.

The Sound of Summer

2009-06-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

I'm more equatorial lately.

Having taken a week and a few hundred miles to visit family and friends along the way, I've landed in Miami for six weeks and will try and learn from experiences down here to fine tune my cultural radar.

Besides walking around under real palm trees (watching my head for falling coconuts of which there are many) and spending time with Gracelyn (who's making awesome progress regaining strength and flexibility in her arm post-crash), I've started settling into my normal summer routine of music writing/ recording.

Here's hoping to have a breadth of new stuff be the time I head north.

"All those signs, I knew what they meant. Some things you can invent. Some get made, and some get sent, Ooh?".

2009-05-17T22:59:00.001-07:00

Back to the South,

And after 12 total hours of traveling, I was desperate for a way to pass the time. Complimentary drink services, peanuts, and being forced to watch "Bride Wars" can only ease so much restlessness in a tiny seat and it's when you're options are limited, that you come up with the best solutions. People talk about "out of the box thinking" all the time, and it's becoming clear that the idea is defunct. Creative thinking for creativity's sake lacks relevance and people and ideas that turn limitations into advantages, constraints into possibilities; those are the things that are getting ahead. Like building the best possible castle in the smallest sand box, life becomes more enjoyable when looking at your challenges through the lenses of possibility.

So on my flight home, I came to the conclusion that today with the technological infrastructure we have in place, if you have access to a computer you can be creative any time, any place. The things that we carry around in our pockets and backpacks have the potential to be tools for sparking new ideas and putting unlike things together. The potability and accessibility comes in handy when you're strapped into a seat in Coach class, and you'll go to great lengths to pass the time until the captain turns on the fasten seat belt sign. On a cross-country flight, I napped, read my book, and recorded a music video to cast off into the Internet, with hopes that it might spark someone else's imagination.

How do you flip your struggles into positive experiences?

Chris Martin had some good ideas about flying fast while thinking about perception and seeing things from a unique perspective:

How long before I get in?

Before it starts, before I begin?

How long before you decide?

Before I know what it feels like?

Where To, where do I go?

If you never try, then you'll never know.

How long do I have to climb,

Up on the side of this mountain of mine?

Look up, I look up at night,

Planets are moving at the speed of light.

Climb up, up in the trees,

every chance that you get,

is a chance you seize.

How long am I gonna stand,

with my head stuck under the sand?

I'll start before I can stop,

before I see things the right way up.

All that noise, and all that sound,

All those places I got found.

And birds go flying at the speed of sound,

to show you how it all began.

Birds came flying from the underground,

if you could see it then you'd understand?

Sum it up for me

2009-05-03T12:47:00.001-07:00

I can't write for long.

I perceive that my life is becoming more demanding, more involved, more strenuous. I look for ways to categorize, manage, save time. I hearken back to my economics class, seeking ways to achieve the most results with the least investment of time (currency). More information will afford me better decision making which invariably saves me time. I can't afford to think for too long about one specific thing.

Objectively speaking, this reasoning seeps through the pores of our judgment and behavior. Our frontal lobes collect data through sensory organs, making decisions, reasoning our way though the world. Just as televisions can be viewed as external extensions of the eyes, a telephone as an artificial ear, the computer now is our Brain's apprentice. Getting proverbial coffee, filing information, sending memo's, the Internet helps the Fortune 500's Brand of You maximize results. Minimize error by quickly finding any answer to any quantitative question. Speed evolution by always seeking new information. Position yourself socially by maintaining constant communication with your network, your networks network, and the Internet at large (estimated at 1,596,270,108 users in March of 2009). Here's where I start to fall silent.

At a constant rate of continual evolution, the Internet never sleeps. Stories of Google's rise to fame, fortune, and global relevance fuel the hopes of every Internet startup, perhaps erroneously[1]. In the cutthroat climate of Silicon Valley, I can imagine developers eat, sleep, and live in a perpetual state of creative development. But do we develop just for development's sake? We cut corners and call it optimizing. We edit and filter and call it targeting. But what happens to the spare bits: metaphorically, the shards of communication that get edited or literally, the physical data that's rendered obsolete?

I'm thinking about this while watching the company video for yet another supplemental social networking company. Following the trend of spelling regular words in irregular ways to try and gain differentiation, Quub brings things like Twitter and Facebook Status Updates to another level. "The process of contacting each person [in your network] require too much time and effort," they cite, advocating for "Ambient" instead of Active/ Reactive communication models. Allowing people to tune into or tune out of different social profiles is a decent idea, as there are always people whom you'd like to stay in touch with, but aren't invested into enough to desire constant social monitoring.

However, the geometrical sounding social networking service takes it a step further by learning from your input into the service, and then guesses what you might be doing, providing quick status update options, devoid of critical thought. "Keeping your status up to date, requires time, effort, attention, and creativity and that's hard" the video narrates cooingly. The service "learns" your routine and makes practical status suggestions that reflect your lifestyle". To me, the idea of averaging out your life experience on behalf of "more integrated electronic socialization" sounds like caffeinating crack cocaine. Whatever happened to the tip of the social iceberg? Is the depth of communication an affordable cost of staying afloat with your entire social sphere? Let's start a dialog. Leave your thoughts in the comments section. If you live in San Francisco, let's go sit down, grab coffee, and talk this out. I want to hear how you think.

Because I think this is gross.

Here's a cool graphic from Mike Arauz that examines the different levels of online friendship, and how we express our emotional/ social investment over the web. Click to enlarge.

[1] In Dan Gilbert's talk (see previous blog post) he talks about the human inability to accurately predict odds and outcomes. I'd like to see the statistics for an Internet startup's success/failure odds ratio and see if launching a successful Web 2.0 business, is a bit like winning the lottery.

What's It Worth To You?

2009-04-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

Where do you save?

How much is it worth to you, to save a little extra time working now to be able to play later? Or more importantly, how many times do you put off doing something now, figuring that the value of immediate time indulged will outweigh the subsequent time you'll spend fulfilling your responsibilities later? My projects don't finish themselves. Your house isn't self-cleaning. One of the most valuable piece of advice that I got from my parents was, "Discipline isn't so much about obeying rules as it's doing what you don't want to do, because it has to get done". I'm still tweaking this one out.

Dan Gilbert talks about the human mind's inability to tally up value or calculate for the future. We'd like to imagine that thinking ahead is a safe bet, and that we do it accurately. But we (as humans) fail all the time. He talks about purchase behavior as an example. He cites that we compare options to past experiences rather than logic, when evaluating value. We turn down enlightening experiences or opt for more self-defeating behavior by following the advice of the skeletons in our closet. He goes on to point out that by comparing things to the possible instead of the past, we're able to make better use of our decision making. If you have 30 minutes, check out his TED Talk (at the top of the page), and start reevaluating how you budget your life, and if you're truly "seizing the day" as much as you could.

An interesting counterpoint I'm currently thinking about, is how the actual value of value is always in flux. The kids of the 50's and 60's, rushing outside after school every day with baseball gloves in hand might have a hard time "having fun" with today's kids who rush inside after school every day to sit down again, plug into a screen, and escape reality in a screen. Both groups have "fun" so do both pastimes have equal value? Depends on who's keeping score. In our classes, we're talking about how TIME= THE NEW CURRENCY, and how our constant rushing between appointments and deadlines is redefining value and culture in America.

I take comfort in how trends move in cycles, and perhaps people will soon remember how to stop and smell the proverbial flowers.

Here's some good life advice on living in the present, written by Jamie Cullum and sung by yours truly.

I Just Did It

2009-04-26T16:44:00.001-07:00

Definition (n): the degree of distinctness in the outline of an object, image, sound, or person in a given society.

I just finished watching the new documentary "Art & Copy" at the San Francisco Film Festival. Profiling the ad industry as a key media and culture purveyor in the United States, the movie profiled a few of the "greats" in the industry that I'm fueling up to launch into. By delving into the lives and motivations of Lee Clout, Dan Weiden, and Rich Silverstein among others, it gave some insight into how great ideas are created and where creativity comes from. To see how the famous Creatives see themselves, I could define myself as an original thinker and see my commonalities with my fellow ad students/ creative cronies, who are all fairly intent on both making a living and making the world a better place. Sometimes, those life goals seem fairly exclusive to each other.

I feel like those of us studying the business are constantly on our toes, defending our career choices to friends and family. More often, I tell them stories about inspiration and society; like the effect on culture that Nike had with the first "Just Do It" campaign. Not only motivating people to get out and buy athletic shoes, Dan Weiden from Weiden+Kennedy told the audience about the torrents of mail he's received over the years from people across the country about "Just Do It". Stories about how the campaign was the activation energy needed to finally leave an abusive spouse, to go back to school to get a more fulfilling career, or generally start living again. Inspiring peoples lives like this makes the pill easier to swallow. In Advertising, my overarching goal is to learn how to give people ideas to better express themselves and distinguish their unique place in life. How to make their individual life experience better.

Some could say object, "But look at how Nike conducts its business in other countries, making shoes from sweat shop labor. What about the lives of the workers who make the shoes?" and that's a huge thing to think about. The film (and some of our classes) went on to make the point that in the coming years, Creative thinkers will be the ones who set the course for successful businesses; perhaps set the course for the development of new cultures and ways of valuing life. Businesses are listening to creative shops more than ever and they have a unique opportunity to change business practices for the better. Advertisers now have to be thinkers, product designers, foreign relations specialists, anthropological humanitarians, gurus in traditions. Now, Advertising is less about spin and more about augmentation. In our economy of over-choice in time-deficits, those who take an alternative course to life/ business might be the ones who get noticed more often.

I now feel a little more at ease when thinking about this in relation to how long it's taking me to get through college. Four years in a standard education system probably would've constrained me more than given me the keys to the future and I'm excited to be strapped in for the long haul. Living in a unique city, learning in unique classes, and breeding unique thoughts and ideas is invariably going to make my life experience better. Meanwhile, I'm out getting other experiences far removed from creating culture or selling ideas. I'll always be exploring.

Yesterday, I fulfilled a childhood dream by trekking over to the Oakland ice rink and meeting some members of the NorCal Speed Skating Association. Apolo Ohno made it look so easy and while there's lots of crossover to cycling in the muscle groups used, I'm not used to crossing my feet over one another at 15mph on slick ice. After warming up and getting some technical advice from some skin-suit clad ice racers, I found myself barreling down the straightaways of the rink.

Problems arose when I'd come to the end and have to turn left for when turning and maintaining speed as I don't have much blade control and my skate would loose traction. Things came to a sliding stop when I lost my balance on an inside turn, went down, and smashed my chin on the ice, transforming the Oakland Ice Rink into what looked like a murder scene (The average human has about 5 quarts of blood, so I didn't have a huge problem with parting with a few drops). Apparently, ice is as hard as concrete and it's times like this that I'm thankful for being such a helmet zealot. I'm now hobbling around on a sprained ankle and smirking when explaining my 5 new stitches to curious friends.

In America, the culture code for scars is WAR STORIES and for the sake of storytelling, I may embellish a bit when showing this one off for a good while.

My new stripes

Hornets on thin blades streaking over cold, hard ice.

Map Out Someone's Reality

2009-04-16T03:59:00.000-07:00

I'm working on researching ways to enrich the lives of people living with disabilities for my Advertising Research class.

As I was struck with a combination of some late-night ideas/ enthusiasm, and only a few short hours before turning it in, I've traded some sleep for some good, quiet thinking time- a rarity at my apartment (being 2 blocks from Union Square is a great location, however I came to the conclusion that the morning sounds that wake me up wouldn't be too different from living beside a highway).

Whew.

Click to enlarge.

YouTube :: OurWorld

2009-04-15T15:15:00.001-07:00

As a student who studies trends, it feels awesome to research and make forecasts, and then see those predictions come true.

For the trend of people using the Internet to make music together and called "Open Sound", YouTube is now calling it "The Internet Symphony". People reaching through their screens while squeezing sound into their computers is a powerful thing and has the transformative power to bring together the networked world. Working with Chinese composer Tan Dun, YouTube hosted the first ever global orchestral audition for musicians around the world to tryout for the first Online Collaborative Orchestra. Google (who owns YouTube) had this to say:

"Together, these professional and amateur musicians play 26 different instruments and come from 30+ countries and territories on six continents. The selected musicians will travel from around the world to New York City to participate in a collaborative summit for classical music on April 12-15, 2009, concluding with a concert at Carnegie Hall under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony Music Director, New World Symphony Founder and Artistic Director, and London Symphony Orchestra Principal Guest Conductor."

As the Internet and open collaborative sites like YouTube begin to take hold in people's lives, I think that communication, collaboration, and originality will take on completely new meanings. Perhaps human negotiation will be transformed as messages, motivations, and meanings can be distorted when we can't see who we're interacting with. Do you think you're more predisposed to getting into an argument on the phone or face-to-face?

I wonder if YouTube could become a more powerful negotiation tool, hosting participatory UN Summits to talk out differences between nations or perhaps instigate inclusive town-hall meetings for municipal legislature? Imagine being able to grow your worldview by listening (and seeing) what other people of differing opinions have to say? Is the Internet and it's core value of participation a unique construction of a new-age democracy?

How's that sound?

Imagine bridging cultural gaps and settling dispute Check out the YouTube Symphony Orchestra's video below or click here to check out their homepage.

Let's Talk It Out

2009-04-13T15:21:00.000-07:00

If we're all swimming in the ocean of technology, I've just surfaced for a much needed breath.

We all make conscious decisions in our lives and hopefully grow from the experiences we endure. Today marks the day that I'm voluntarily closing my gonzo-like social experimentation and investigation with Twitter. I've since proved some preconceptions about the instantaneous social medium, and had some disproved. Below are my findings in "Twitter: A Retrospective".

First off, upon entering the Twitter galaxy, a friend reached out a 150-character long hand and directed me to some websites to learn about the social rules and etiquette of using the service. Every means of exchange has it's scripts and practices and Twitter is no different.

Note: While writing this, I found it interesting how the phrase "What's up?" is normally bankrupted when exchanged in the beginning of a conversation. As "What's Up" is now equal to "Hello" in our culture, unless accompanied by a concerned tone of voice, it's rarely a real question of what's going on in your life.

Whereas you can use your Twitter page as a mini-media station, broadcasting declarations, links, and photos, it becomes social when you post replies to other "Tweets" or users of the Twitter universe. By posting an @ in front of their name, thus "Tweeting" at them, people know that your thoughts are aimed their way. This idea of being able to listen into others conversations (not unlike reading people's Walls on Facebook) could possibly deepen the conundrum of digital eavesdropping.

I observed that when I "followed" (subscribed to the updates of) some news networks like Newsweek and CNN, they then in turn, "followed" me. After some careful thinking, I guessed that Major Media uses services like Twitter either as market research tools to hear about the lifes/news of their clientele or possibly as a way to keep a more global finger on the world news pulse. For example, in San Francisco if there were to be an earthquake today, anyone and everyone could become citizen journalists and give lots of short, stilted updates to the Twitter universe about what was going on. Though Major Media has journalists and reporters all over the world, Twitter turns everyone into a contributer whom potentially pitch story ideas every time they post. Andy Worhol couldn't have guessed that everyone's 15-minutes of fame would turn into months of personal publishing.

Another thing that I delved into touched on the blossoming practice of personal branding. If I've written about how the clothes you wear and way you physically present yourself has a lasting impression on those you meet, the digital realm is starting to creep into relevance when making judgements and opinions about others. Think of how often you've "Googled" someone or checked out their profile on Facebook or MySpace. Celebrities are starting to use Twitter as an anti-tabloid, hyper-PR channel, to maintain some personal control over their public image. However, most likely when you meet a new friend, it's not someone whom you're read about in the news or seen on TV and Twitter gives users the chance to create their own "buzz" around themselves.

If you're reading this and are in college, chances are you've met a new friend on campus and rushed back to pull up their Facebook profile and gleamed as many insights as possible. We are a society of information addicts, constantly craving to know as much as possible. While this social media and instant access to internet is a huge and powerful tool, when does it become a hinderance? When does a bulldozer operator spend so much time pushing dirt around with buttons and controls that he forgets how to pick up a shovel and start digging for himself? I wonder if most of the younger generation has any amiable social skills and could handle themselves at a dinner party or one-to-one interview.

And lastly, it just boils down to where I choose to invest my social hedge fund. Of my 800+ friends on Facebook, it may be more enriching (in depth) to have a smaller handful whom I could have regular, real, deep conversations with. Of the thousands of Twitter updates I've sifted through over the past few weeks, I'd trade all of them for a few good dinner-time conversations. It's time to quit and I couldn't be more relived. I'll say @HowDoesItSoundReaders: If you wanna grab coffee and talk about what's on your mind, I'd love to listen.

How does that sound?

Multisensory concert

2009-04-03T10:59:00.001-07:00

Ratatat took hold of a thousand or so people last night and took control of their inhibitions.

Ratatat is a duo from New York, making as much music as is humanly possible from a sythesizer and a guitar. It's an incredible show (last night being my 3rd time seeing them) not only because of the music but because of the presentation. In addition to standard fog machines, lasers, and crazy LED light displays, Evan Mast and Mike Stroud have a giant screen behind them that sometimes plays cleverly edited video clips, and sometimes amorphous colored designs.

Check them out on iTunes or MySpace and see how your ear drums and brain work together when confronted with shrill beeps, and face numbing guitar riffs.

How's It Sound? Art

2009-03-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

Very cool project I just stumbled upon. Click the photo to see the set on Flickr.

Walk It Off

2009-03-22T22:13:00.001-07:00

I'm poised to make some big strides.

March is the Brain Injury Association of America's "Brain Injury Awareness Month" which serendipitously falls in line with my big ad research project on students with challenges that stem from Brain Injury. After going through tons of research and expert advice over the past few years, my brain feels saturated like a dripping sponge and I'd like to wring it out for the benefit of others.

This coming Saturday, I'll be participating in the California BIA's annual "Walk for Thought" fundraiser to support people in California whose worldview has been instantly and violently adjusted. The Brain Injury Association cites that of the 1.4 million head injuries in the US per year, California is the battlefield for 33,000 new cognitive casualties. Thousands of people who will wake up everyday and find themselves unable to potentially move, think, speak about, or understand what's going on around them. Every day, millions of people quietly join the ranks of what experts and policy makers are calling America's biggest silent epidemic.

Feel free to donate a few dollars (and share your thoughts about how to integrate Brain Injury survivors back into society) on the behalf of those who face the daily challenge of living in the thick fog of Brain Injury and who grope in the dark for some kind of guidance. I've met kids and adults, construction workers and Harvard-educated scientists whose lives have been shattered and who've demonstrated steadfast resolve in tediously picking up and piecing their lives back together. By raising awareness, you can feel better that if you, yourself someday have a head injury, there will be a better climate of understanding and support. Thanks to everyone who can afford to get involved and show some support.

My donation page can be found here.

Re-Imagining Life

2009-03-19T13:36:00.000-07:00

I'm finding gems.

I'm casting stones into the waters of the Internet, looking for patterns in the ripples. I'm exploring students with exceptional challenges for Cameron's Ad Research class, in hopes of discovering insights and designing a way to enrich their lives in some way. By starting to peer into hopes, dreams, struggles, and frustrations of complete strangers, I'm starting to see a unique common denominator. Advertising tells us that things which make your life easier, in turn make your life better. I'm starting to take issue with this idea.

Mike Rowe from the show "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel recently gave a great TED Talk about celebrating hard work and how by performing a goat castration, he realized how wrong he had been in his suppositions about life in general. If you've not seen what he had to say, it's a hilarious talk and worth checking out to re-imagine how you think about work.

In my research, I just found a great analogy for re-framing the unique life experiences of people with daily challenges. By changing the lenses, you can look at almost any situation through rose colored glasses. Emily Perl Kingsley writes about this in her piece below:

WELCOME TO HOLLAND
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Here's hoping I find some valuable patterns in these ripples.

Here's what Mike had to say:

With my Strengths in Mind

2009-03-12T18:11:00.001-07:00

What do you do better than most people?

In both of Cameron's classes that I've taken, one of the reappearing themes that comes up in our discussions is the idea of building on your strengths; Find what you're good at, and excel in that. We talk about how modern education systems have developed a premium on highlighting our shortcomings with big, menacing, red X marks and the occasional frown face. By being forced to go nose-to-nose with what we don't do well, and being strongly encouraged (forced) to give those areas extra time and attention, we often neglect the things that come naturally to us. The things that we find "easy" or "natural" sometimes fall by the wayside because maybe we think that if you're not working hard, it can't be worth much. Luckily, this is starting to change.

Writers, thinkers, presenters, and people with ideas and imaginations are currently trying to highlight the ways that the education system, rather than the students, are failing. Look at Ken Robbin's TED Talk about how crucial the emphasis on creativity is, and by "educating people out of their creativity," we're doing the world community an injustice. Closer to home, Charlie Kouns, our former Account Planning director here at the Academy, has traveled around the world with his Imagine Learning project, in attempts to rewrite the American high school curriculum for the 21st century. All very exciting things, and all reasons why I'm so glad that I was given the opportunity to focus on my strengths and transfer to art school and focus on ideas.

So, in Advertising Research we all just took the Clifton Strength Finder 2.0 test, to give us an idea of ways that would be best to investigate the cultures of our individual research projects. I'm studying students with academic challenges that stem from Traumatic Brain Injuries, partially in an attempt to reflectively study myself and how I measure up to other students that have unique brains. Though I've not yet read Gladwell's "Outliers," I want to examine the circumstances that led me to such success from such struggle. I'm thinking that if I can isolate a few of my preconditions for complete success after a TBI, I can start thinking of creative ways to teach other TBI survivors how to unlock their potential for a fulfilling life.

After the test, the Strength Finder test had this to say about my innate proclivities:

Maximizer: People who are especially talented in the Maximizer theme focus on strengths as a way to stimulate personal and group excellence. They seek to transform something strong into something superb. By focusing on what I do well, I've developed strategies and compensations for things that are a challenge.

Strategic: People who are especially talented in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues. Starting in Stacy Attafi's French class, I began to pitch ideas for alternative assignments and means of evaluation that show what I do better than most.

Individualization: People who are especially talented in the Individualization theme are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person. They have a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively. A large part of why I'm an Account Planner is that I love to experiencing different people and the unique way that everyone operates the brain.

Ideation: People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. " You say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one."

Input: People who are especially talented in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information. This I get genetically from my mother, who is an expert at drawing out the stories, hopes, dreams, and testimonials from complete strangers. If you've ever met her, you know what I'm talking about.

Looking at the results, it further confirmed my notion that somehow, someday I will be educating people in creative ways, to advocate for those who have trouble advocating for themselves. By helping to form bridges between groups of people whom else would have no means to connect with, I can help bring people together to empathize and understand one another, finding their commonalities and shared musical keys.

Here's hoping I can continue to learn to be a conductor of sorts.

Click below to check out the book:

My San Francisco Bike Rides

2009-03-10T22:17:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the regular rides that I'm doing these days, though swimming and running have taken center stage and pushed my bike to the back burner lately. Here's hoping that Spring Break reminds me what lactic acid buildup feels like.

View Larger Map

The Age of Shared Creative Thinking

2009-03-09T00:56:00.001-07:00

I feel so lucky to be in such a core of new ideas and new thinking.

And, to train for a career in an ever-changing industry of trends, ideas, and communication, I can think of few places that would be more suiting than San Francisco. The more I look around, the more I see evidence of people using the Internet as a tool to come together and share, building off of each others strengths and ignoring the weaknesses, to come up with ideas that are greater than the sum of the parts. This is part of what our Lily Bunka team talked about this past fall, and Cameron helped guide our ideas about crossing distance, language barriers, and cultural incongruity. This is what I think the future could be built around.

Often seeing the world through sound, and experiencing things best through music, I found another example of creating new music from existing parts. The Israeli producer Kutiman has made an electronic name for himself by creating an album of songs entirely from sampled YouTube clips of other people playing music. His renditions are unlike anything I've ever heard and having the accompanying videos are something to be experienced. Check out this website for an incredible demonstration of researching, editing, combining, and building on creative pieces to make something completely new.

While I've been thinking and writing about this for some time, I'm certainly not alone. Last semester, I sat down with my friend Josie Ng, a classmate, Art Director, and designer, and interviewed her about what's going on with originality, sharing, contributing, and inspiring. Listen below to the first ever, How Does It Sound Podcast interview (you may have to visit my blog's actual page to listen, as I'm not sure if it's loading properly in Google Reader).

Open-Sounded Global Evidence!

2009-03-07T14:34:00.000-08:00

It's incredible when you lose yourself in an idea and discover that there are people all over the world that are possibly thinking the exactly same thing.

My Mom just passed along this video from the upcoming documentary, "Playing for Change" which is touches exactly on the trend that I've been talking about with Open-Sound. Here is a video made by a team that connected people from different cultures, communities, and creeds together for the simple goal of collaborating and sharing music with one another. Check out their project at http://www.playingforchange.com/.

I wonder if people from around the world were to write and collaborate on a single work of music, how our differences would get tuned out and we'd begin to start feeling a similar rhythm. Check out the video below.

One Love - Song Around The World from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

“Blogger with Sound Opinions Fights Back in 140 Characters or Less” (75 Remaining)

2009-03-03T21:10:00.001-08:00

"If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose." -Sun Tzu

I've decided to change strategies. While studying trends, minds, communication, opinions, and emotions, it's important to be open to things that are often different and new. After recently publishing my thoughts about Twitter, I've started many (real) conversations with actual people (That's you, Martin) on the pro's and con's of abbreviated and instantaneous social broadcasting.

I now want to discover and truly understand how we evolved towards frantic brevity. I'm taking a leaf out of Hunter S. Tompson's "Gonzo" style reporting and throwing myself head(line)long into the mix. One thing that started the Music Industry's downfall was ignoring cultural shifts and trying to preserve the same business model that sold Beatles records and 8-tracks by Pink Floyd. I figure that to have even a sliver of hope of planting my own trend seed, to try and get people to really connect, I've got to find the right soil and acknowledge the rising tide.

So I've joined Twitter. Rather, this Blog has joined up in an attempt to get inside the belly of the beast and see what makes it's users tick, talk, and "tweet". Rather than post the mundane details of my day-to-day life, I'm electing to try and use it as a conversation starter. One of my favorite things about the internet is how it can cross thousands of miles to collectively share thoughts and ideas between anyone with something to contribute and perhaps this could bolster participation in the Blog.

As these articles can tend to be rather long, the "How Does It Sound" Tweet outlet will try to stay away from Twitter's neurotic (maybe caffeine induced), "What are you doing?????" question and pose more professorial, "What do you think?" queries that makes you stop, stroke you chin, think about, and arrive at insights from. Here's hoping my Twitter Trojan Horse isn't instantly uncovered for it's true motives and quickly snubbed by what Lance Armstrong calls, "The Twitterati".

Being Twittered to death sounds like a funny, but brutal way to go.

Links:
Twitter Page: (http://twitter.com/HowDoesItSound)
RSS Feed: (http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/22713411.rss)

Personal Branding thoughts from Seth Godin

2009-03-02T11:26:00.001-08:00

The theory of Personal Branding is on the minds of a lot of people these days.

Seth Godin, an award-winning author and marketing guru talked about this on his blog a few days ago:

"Personal branding in the age of Google"

A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.

Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person's name.

The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, "binge drinking."

The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, "I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I'm annoyed by it. I'll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings."

And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.

Three for three.

Google never forgets.

Of course, you don't have to be a drunk, a thief or a bitter failure for this to backfire. Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you're on Candid Camera, because you are.

Cultural Backlash

2009-02-27T18:41:00.001-08:00

Every once in a while, moving forwards means moving backwards.

As the world gets more and more crowded and resources get more far and few, trends towards simplicity are going to start reemerging. Though perhaps being forcefully pushed along because of the recession that the US sits in right now, it's a good thing that people are finally starting to put things into more accurate perspective.

Louis CK had great thoughts about this when he appeared on Conan. Check it out:

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. What's your mission on Planet Earth?

2009-02-23T11:31:00.000-08:00

Here's the most recent video produced from a firm in Berkley, CA that I'm eager to work with someday. Free Range Studios produces video and media for sustainable and forward thinking projects and organizations and recently won a bunch of awards for their Story of Stuff video with Annie Leonard about consumption of material goods. Check that one out if you want to rethink about what you buy.

In this video though, the story is somewhat proverbial and cynics might claim that it's out of the context of modern day society. Nevertheless, it raises interesting questions.

All in all, I tip my hat to the perspective of the fisherman.

To be fair and balanced for the Information Addicts

2009-02-21T21:30:00.001-08:00

I'll be the first to tell you, I don't really have a head for math.

In my Algebra classes throughout high school, spending time teaching myself the programming language of my calculator seemed a better investment of my time than watching someone tabulate proofs on an overhead. I talked to a math major once at the College of Charleston and it was really incredible to hear her talk about her linear passions. To math aficionados, numbers are the language of reality's creator and divide down deep enough and you'll finally find the pattern. I watched the movie "Pi" once and there's a really interesting scene where the characters talk about a mathematical pattern hiding everywhere in every day life.

So I got to thinking. While running today and thinking about Twitter and electronic communication, I came up with a way to look for the mathematical significance of my own online correspondence. I tallied up all of today's emails both sent and received (17 total) and started charting. For emails sent within San Francisco, I tabulated the distance between our two computers using rough neighborhood addresses in relation to the driving distance to my apartment. For everyone else across the country, a simple search through Google Maps gave me figures (driving distances between the two city limits) to base my data off of. Here's where things started blowing my mind.

All things being equal, if every individually sent email (from today alone) would have hopped off of my screen, sprouted feet and marched to their respective inboxes across the country, a flock of my sent emails would have accumulated 8,824.2 miles of travel. Just from today. While this number's impressive, the respective received emails, (again, from today alone) would have tracked double the distance at 16,773.8 miles (as I received more than I sent... today).

For those keeping score, that means that a cumulative distance of 25,598 miles would have been covered today alone by emails either coming or going from my computer, should they had to have been delivered by hand. To put things into perspective, the total distance around the equator of planet earth is 24,901.55 miles. Today alone, should one piece of mail had to cover the total representative distance of it's electronic counterparts, it would have traveled completely around Planet Earth with 697 miles to spare. All of this happens from the comfort of our homes and with simple few mouse clicks, and we don't even blink.

So I guess, in an attempt to be fair and balanced to the folks at Twitter, it must be acknowledged that everything comes at a cost. Think of how much gas gets saved, or CO2 emissions scrubbed out, or trees saved when we reserve correspondence to clicking buttons on a keyboard.

This is one of the reasons why people love getting handwritten letters, because we know that this physical object has traveled many long, actual miles to drop into our actual mailbox. Could you imagine life if we had instantaneous and authentic (physical) personal messages?

Sounds like a lucrative new business idea.

Information Junkies looking for a buzz

2009-02-20T23:53:00.001-08:00

So I just had another series of realizations today.

I'm currently researching Twitter for a creative brief I'm working on and am starting to come to some scary realizations. For those that read this blog and aren't completely tuned into Internet culture, please pat yourself on the back. A big congratulations to you for staying safe, staying back in the age of the printed word and authentic personal communication. Twitter is the antithesis of personal messaging. Not only is it one way, but it's short and incomplete. Revolving around the the self-proclaimed philosophy of being "a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" Twitter has single handily undercut the value of human interaction.

Twitter stands atop the peak of a communication landfill. Most people (myself included) open our computers each morning so data can vomit all over our desks, prompting urgent attention to check various inboxes, reply to friends, colleagues, and family members. We've all got an insatiable appetite for grasping reality and being unsure has now somehow equated to being uneducated. Most of us would fail a data breathalyzer, having an information level that's far from healthy.

In today's media environment, most of us swim in a sea of headlines. We "info snack" and gleam tidbits of information from bold text and italicized sub heads instead of reading whole articles, getting whole stories. My friend Gary Smith and I talked about this last year, and he wondered, "how many others -- especially all the young people who are weaned on it -- will begin to question the massive time swallower that [media] has become . . . and the equivalent evaporation of time required to grow and think in a deeper way." By being linked into each other's online space, what are we giving up?

The scary truth is that most of us are physiologically changing the way that our brains are wired and this is changing the way that society is developing. Renowned Communication Theorist, Marshall McLuhan talks about this in his "Technological Determinism" theory. He postulates that every new form of media innovation becomes an extension of some human faculty and changing means of communication changes the course of history. As a book is potentially an extension of the eye, electronic circuits extensions of a humans nervous system, what human trait does Twitter or text messages exude? Is the cost of actual depth and context worth the price of being instantaneous? Which direction is this leading us?

Are we a society that's so ruled by technology that we've designed a technological extension of an increasingly ADD wrought mind? Neil Postman thinks we are. As an apprentice to McLuhan, Postman writes that, "we have unwittingly made a transition from a tool-using culture to a totalitarian-like culture, totally used by tools." Think you're free from the Matrix of communication? Try leaving your cell phone at home for a day and see how anxious you get for a fix of information, a little taste of temporary understanding, or an inexplicable feeling that someone, somewhere is trying in vain to get in touch with you. Here's to turning over a new leaf and unplugging more often. I just took my first ride in San Francisco without a cell phone. Riding through Golden Gate Park has never felt so peaceful. Here's hoping that I can learn where the Power button is again.

How's that sound?

This is a talk by Linda Stone about how consistent media consumption is changing the way we live. Scary stuff to think about.

Understanding scary finances in a visual way

2009-02-19T08:45:00.001-08:00

Anyone and everyone who lives in America, especially students, should be paying attention to what's happening to the nation's finances. I'm no business major and thus, seeing the finance crisis conveyed in creative ways helps me to grasp what's really going on.

Check out this awesome video to understand where we are financially and how we got there.

To change people's minds, you have to speak their language

2009-02-18T11:42:00.000-08:00

I thought this was pretty clever advertising. I can think of a few churches back home that I might distribute this in.

The copy reads, "Global Warming is bringing us close to a catastrophe of biblical proportions. Let's make sure history doesn't repeat itself."

The Brand formerly known as Me.

2009-02-16T23:49:00.001-08:00

I came up with an interesting theoretical proof in class just now that touches on my thoughts about social branding.

If clothing can be considered human packaging.
And product packaging commands the consumer experience.
The clothing you wear and the manner in which you present yourself must dictate how people decide how and in what manner to interact with you.

This all happens within less than a second. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this phenomenon in his book, "Blink". Without realizing it, consumers “transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of a product to the product itself.” Gladwell described a test between two brandy companies. One had superior results in taste tests and brand associations, but was losing market share to a brand with better packaging. Their problem was not their product, nor their brand- it was their packaging. Think about all the things that you've bought solely because of the way it looked on the shelf or on TV.

To all my friends about to graduate and go look for jobs, be sure to dress sharp. Maybe it's time to start thinking like personal brand managers.

I could probably stand a new shirt myself.

Pillowcaust

2009-02-15T13:44:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I witnessed human warfare, an outbreak of civil violence.

March down to San Francisco's Embarcadero on any February 14 and you could see it too. Yesterday, I took part in the annual Valentine's Day city-wide pillow fight and couldn't have had a better time. Picture a few thousand people, all wielding their feather filled maces while running into battle. "Freedom!" I screamed, as I ran into the crowd, my small travel pillow swingin'. Young and old were there in full force and despite UN Pillow Peacekeeping efforts, we were out to shed feathers.

And that's how things progressed. If you found yourself near the epicenter of the gigantic battle, you were knee (if not at least shin) deep in feathers that had exploded away from their pillows. Group think and mob mentalities are so funny and interesting to study in such circumstances. All I had to do (which I did on many occasions), is scream something like, "Get the redheads!!!" to evolutionarily select ginger haired combatants for extra attention. They'd in turn wage as much war by themselves as possible before seeing some other population minority in the crowd to divert the glancing blows of goose down. Not to say that everyone didn't fight each other well enough anyways.

People showed courage, led others into battle, sacrificed themselves for friends. This is where legends are made and where the history books will remember the fallen.

At least, until next year.

Click here to see some photos I managed to take. Or, watch the carnage I witnessed below.

Untitled from Gavin Shelton on Vimeo.