Relaunch!

November 17th, 2011

Hooray! It's been three weeks in the making, but ditoniccomma.net is finally redesigned and up and running. I've added pages for video and photo galleries, as well as a link to a blog on transportation planning issues that I'm developing. Content for these is on its way; getting the site design right took longer than anticipated.

There are still some loose ends and site bugs floating around: Opera users in particular will encounter problems playing media (read the FAQ for details and fixes). If you're feeling editorial, send me an email if you encounter something that just doesn't look or work right.

All music tracks linked in the page body now play in the nifty audio player in the header. To celebrate the relaunch, I'm posting a set of improvisations from the past year; we'll call this one four on the floor since several of the tracks sound house-inspired to me.

Site Down

November 15th, 2011

The site is down. Long live the site. Some pages are functioning, or you wouldn't be reading this, but in general, nothing is working. Please be patient. I'm doing my best to deliver a new and improved Ditonic Comma.

Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere

January 17th, 2011

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I'm resurrecting a sound collage I spliced together shortly after September 11th; it mixes then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's statements defending widespread detentions of Arab Americans with clips of King reading his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. If "America" is a vision of liberty and equality, current backlash against Latinos in Arizona should remind us how tenuous that vision is, and just how far light-skinned people like me still have to go to uproot the perennial seeds of racism that flourish in our society and individual psyches.

A Day Playing Class

January 17th, 2011

Friday, October 22nd was a remarkably good day for making noise. I've posted improvisations from three modern classes over in the music section

Cue the Lonesome Harmonica and Tumbleweeds

October 10th, 2010

Yeah...not much in the way of anything going on here in the past year and a half. The reason? I've gone all 2nd-career-preparatory in my thirties. With a just over a year of an Environmental Studies Master's in public transportation planning under my belt, I still make music for dance, but there's precious little time to post it. Fortunately, thanks to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, the site can sit here unmolested until I decide to do more with it. And I think (hope) that the time will come fairly soon.

Fresh Look Hereabouts

June 1st, 2009

Since I put this site up six months ago, I've learned more about design and coding, and that initial try at a working website started to look terrible. With a new design that incorporates a hand-drawn version of the logo, a stronger color scheme and a few CSS tricks, today's Ditonic Comma is ready to take its rightful place as one of the best barely-professional websites developed in someone's spare time around!

New Score

March 18th, 2009

I'm pleased to post a new musical offering: Fire Bells/Dance with a Phantom Limb. It premiered on the Winter Faculty Concert March 6th as the score for Professor Travis Gatling's piece Cracks in the Wall, an exploration of the recent financial sector meltdown. Lots of booming, clattering percussion, some field recorded, some sampled from class improvs...I'm continuing to enjoy the process of coaxing harmonic content out of indefinite pitch sounds through sample transposition and combination.