I was born to loving but rather unmusical parents. My father's singing repertoire was limited to "The Old Gray Mare" performed with a toneless and impish gusto which I only heard two or three times that I can recall. My mother tells me she used to be able to pick out tunes on the piano one-handed. As a high school senior I bought my first album: "Al Hirt Plays the Theme from The Green Hornet." I plead humble beginnings.

My freshman year at college I received an all-important Christmas gift: a $13.95 guitar from JC Penneys. This may sound like the apocrypha of a slightly disoriented blues musician, but I have friends who will swear to the truth of it. And like all new and dedicated players, I played it until my fingers were ragged and sore if not actually bleeding.

Under the influence of the devil instrument my musical tastes expanded beyond the themes of television shows. At first, I learned to play the music of Mississippi John Hurt, John Fahey, and then as my skill increased, Leo Kottke and Ton Van Bergeyk. Even from the beginning though I wrote my own tunes-albeit in the styles of others. Over several decades I listened to classical, jazz-fusion, pop-rock, and many other kinds of music which had nothing to do with guitars.

After trying my hand at many different careers including store clerk, chemical technician at a steel mill, raw materials sampler, custodian, musical instruments sales- and repair-person, house husband, art gallery director, artist-in-residence, semi-pro musician and T'ai Chi instructor, I settled on elementary school teacher. Part of my training as a teacher included a class on educational technology. Technology and learning quickly became my area of expertise, and today I am Educational Technologist (a noble-sounding title for a catch-all plate of responsibilities) in the Molalla River School District in Oregon. I also write monthly technology and education columns for several different teacher publications. In the mid-90's, I discovered digital sound design. My music world went sploosh. And maybe squish, too. Brace yourself, brothers and sisters. I gave up fingerpicking.

Watch this video of Beat Knick. You can view or download the entire quicktime movie.

About Octopants

You don't have to know much about music theory to know that most western music divides an octave into twelve notes: A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#. But there can be other ways of dividing octaves: different pitch spacings, fewer divisions per octave or many, many more divisions. Finding instruments to produce and explore this kind of music is difficult. Imagine a piano with 144 divisions per octave instead of twelve. To cover the same range of a traditional piano you would need a keyboard 1,056 keys long rather than the traditional 88. Not very practical. There are ways of controlling sound, however, which might manage 1,056 different pitches. Ways not dreamed of in days of Bach or even Elvis, for that matter.

Pictures.

All of the music on Octopants was written and performed using pictures. Images control the pitch, the duration, the stereo positions, the attack, decay and other characteristics. There are no real time instruments anywhere. Not the electric slide guitar in "GoldSpun." Not the Shakti-like jazz-Indian fiddle-riffs of "Shark Tea." Using MetaSynth, a software program born from the imagination of French software engineer Eric Wenger (for whom it would not be inappropriate to add the adjective genius), I began to explore some of these alternate scales of which there are literally thousands.

The pitches may be somewhat unfamiliar, but there is something distinctly familiar about the rhythms. There's some kinship, for example, between James Brown's "Popcorn" and my "BeatKnick." "eHaw" draws from the rhythms and form expectations which go back to my earliest musical experiences of playing guitar in the styles of John Fahey and Leo Kottke. Some of the pieces may lose themselves in a world where the distinction between what is music and what is sound is faint: is "Trainbuktu " music or a rhythmic sound experience? The rhythms are part pop, part African, part techno, part mathematical.

But there are melodies in my music, crazy melodies maybe, but catchy nevertheless. "Tin Can Command" begins with a distinctly pop rhythm which sets up a snappy melody within a scale of 34 divisions per octave. Not something which comes easily to the lips, I will admit, but a tune which still haunts me at times while driving.

"Back Pond Boys" is built whole cloth from a single note of the mating call of the Bornean tree-hole frog. What a lovely note it is! I wonder what the result would be should the song be played among the females of the species in the wilds of Borneo? A lust-riot to shame both Frank Sinatra and the Beatles. We must turn our heads away from this toward those of an angelic nature. Doesn't "Aerodrone" sound like the voice of angels? Angels perhaps, but with voices divided into twenty-one divisions per octave.

I hope that because of the unusual scales in these recordings, you will find yourself listening to the world in a somewhat different way.