liaonotes

click here to listen/download to liao

liao is an album i drafted soon after a previous album of music titled "acceptable" in 2011. over the previous almost-decade, i made and discarded numerous attempts to arrange and produce it, making it a specter of preempted mid-life crisis or something (i.e it was the frequent subject of birthday-night anxiety and introspective shame). every year it stayed in an intimidating state of incompleteness, the juvenile title seemed to ring more and more true: laughably, liao was originally an acronym for "life is already over", where an embarrassing 21 year old me wanted to create an album around the themes of media ecosystems and teleology. every year it seemed more depressing to spend adult life resuscitating the amateur musical voice of a college student, and incredibly unproductive to commit to a time-consuming project where i was sure the final product could only be something i could share in context of a self-effacing joke.

however, as much as i am fantastically relived to finally close this neurotic chapter of my life (or more so, for the new acquisition of psychological space for more chapters of neuroticism), i have been surprisingly extremely enthralled with the results. you are the ultimate judge but i think a more productive route towards my goal of a partial-treatment on ecologies media technologies was to focus on acts of archiving sound documents and technologies of analog understanding and attempted recreation in abstracted digital environments. i think what ultimately lead to this most recent 1.5-2 year attempt resulting in conclusion is a combinational series of chance encounters with treasured tools, techniques, concepts, pedagogy, discussion, technical epiphanies and personal compromises, as well as an unexpected newfound wealth of creative and social support. i felt repeatedly "propelled" by small successes and stabilized during periods of creative confusion because of friends and mentors i.e. "lucky". my method for assessing "doneness" of music is to attempt to listen ad nauseam, with a focus on level of annoyance/boredom. it's my hope that others will only be moderately annoyed listening to this project, the way i am surprised and happy to be.

i'd like to share technical documentation of different aspects of the project on this page for anyone interested. i plan to publish this document 2020-01-13 in incomplete form, as i assume only about three people will actually read this page. however, if there is some particular aspect or technique or source you are wondering about, please just email me (lh00000000 at gmail) and i will take a less lazy approach. until then, please consider this page to be in perpetual state of incompleteness.

toc

release party

karaliao

cover art

the original concept for the album art was a simple grid mosaic of pictures of the sky, the only restriction that one day could only be represented in one photo. i took 194 photographs over the course of 2012 but eventually gave up as progress on producing the album became bleaker and bleaker.

upon deciding to conclude my work on the album last year, i decided that the grid should be arranged according to a similarity metric (i used tsne), however because i wanted a square ratio of height to width, and because i wanted to exhibit the photos as occupying a folder on a macos file system, i decided on a dimensionality of 8x8. in my opinion, the preservation of similarity is not noticeable, especially with the particular images i selected. however, i am still satisfied with the visual inclusion of the file system that was also heavily used to create the musical content of the project. as of 2020-01-13 it is unclear if cdbaby's automated cover art partner-restriction enforcement will allow me to retain any elements of this though. stay tuned lol.

squeeze technique at beginning of wwcd

the synthesized tone at the beginning of wwcd is the first bar of wwcd looped with increasingly earlier loop end times to achieve different pitches. for a very long time, i have tried to figure out a method to use small sections of music as sources for wavetable/granular synthesis in order to glissando into bass frequencies so low that new sections of music would sound "revealed" from the micro-time periods of the piece. i tried and failed many times but it turned out the solution was a simple bit of python and discovering how straightforward the wav format translated to numerical array processing in python.

i previously posted code snippets here.

marketing

i thought to myself, i should really market myself and my work, and what better way to market than using google ads? especially because i never used it before and they sent me a code for $150 in credit.

i set up the campaign to target people in my birthtown, des moines iowa. i tried to only show it to relevant people by targeitng people searching for diners, dj mixers, or productivity software.

i didn't put all of my eggs in one basket though. i also advertised on nextdoor.

i also weaponized twitter memes for my own benefit

snapshots

maybe it is just me, but i think i will helpful to share my snapshotting process in detail one day. basically, while working on the songs, i would render copies and archive them in 2020-01-13-title.wav format in s3 (i'd like to switch from s3 to digital ocean's soon but i haven't gotten around to it yet), then walk around listening to the wav using the cloudbeats app, which is the only non-bullshit music syncing ios app i have found after many many failed attempts. to give myself a simulated sense of deadline-like-motivation, i would post whole-album states on my blog using the #liao tag on my blog page. i don't have any sort of tracking mechanism for my website (UPDATE-2020-01-19: i put a google tag on luminghao.com/liao in order to run a google ad campaign on people from des moines, iowa (my birth state) who have shown interested in either "diners", "dj mixers", or "productivity software". i feel weird about it but i figured it's as good a time as any to actually see what the process for making a google ad is like) (it's static files hosted on github pages and i prefer to bloat my pages with annoying javascript and css libraries instead of analytics pixels) so it was a fake sense of publicness but i guess it worked for me.

influences