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Warren from The Doodle Daily asked me what I’d written today and suggested I put a tune to his blog’s #429th drawing of a clown. I had other ideas I’ve been working on, but after he asked, I couldn’t stop thinking of this oom-pah-pah melody.

Organs in Ab, 3/4 time. Follows this progression: I (4x) | ii | V7 (of ii) | ii | I

Visit this link for his drawing.

And here’s his stationary site Tjomies Vintage Stationary.

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Nice little jam with organs, rhodes, and more. Four bars in F minor, then bars of Bb|Eb|Db|Eb before F minor again.

Last semester, I enjoyed taking a class on non-linear video editing (any editing program on a computer is non-linear). The final project was to assemble something original from the archive footage on the school’s servers. I also edited a disturbing little trailer for the movie The Adjuster, a music video, and a couple scenes from an episode of Law & Order SVU using the original takes. I’d post the Law & Order, but I’d rather not go through the trouble and be asked to take it down. Donaji posted a slide-show of her crafts which included a copyrighted song, and was contacted by a third-party to take it down, so…

A lot of ideas for The Vital Spirit Mechanism spawned from watching a trilogy of philosophy videos that gave an overview on the evolution of thought. “Vital spirit” was a way of explaining life and the soul without resorting to science or anything physical, so including mechanism in the title is a play on it. Ancient Greek physiology stated that,

…air enters the body, is then drawn by the lungs into the heart, where it is transformed into vital spirit, and is then pumped by the arteries throughout the body. Some of this vital spirit reaches the brain, where it is transformed into animal spirit, which is then distributed by the nerves.

The Greeks of old also dissected criminals while they were still breathing as a humanitarian effort to further medicine.

The project is about the melding of music, math, and machine by speaking and audibly understanding binary code. Wonderfully preposterous… until it happens. I wrote out the narration and made a text-to-audio file with my Mac’s Automator. The voice was actually on the Victoria setting, but I manipulated it with effects and it resulted in sounding like a male.

The hours of life required to edit minutes of assorted footage into viewable entertainment is depressing. Similarly, recording and editing music is an egregious process of hours of work for minutes of product. You slave your soul to create a piece of music. You slave hours to record a demo of it for people to hear. You then have a hard time keeping their attention while they wash dishes or maybe dismiss it because it’s not a serious record on a label with distribution.

The class was a nice introduction to Final Cut Pro. I want to save up and purchase the program for future projects like editing home-movies.

I’ve produced more drawings this year than I did the previous decade and then some. There are over a 100 posted so far… I thought this site was about music?

A month ago, I was giving away over 30 drawings and I had over 20 takers in just two days. Yesterday, I mailed off those drawings. I’m not certain it was necessary to give them away, but it felt right to do so because I was worried I had borrowed from copyrighted photographs without sufficient comment or alteration. It’s been on my mind all month and I’m certain that I jumped the gun on it because many of the drawings would have no problem fitting under fair-use. Still, I’m glad that those drawings have new homes across the states, and even as far as England and Australia. I’ve had tens of thousands of people visit my site from across the globe because of the drawings so I best keep at it.

Copyright infringement and fair-use

I didn’t have a strategy or any worries about style to begin with, but I now enjoy *schticking* red-letter captions on images that I come across, and I’m going to continue this, but I would like to use more of my own photos (as well as no photos). I’m grateful for all of the many comments I’ve received from visitors, friends, #draw365-ers on Twitter, etc.

The red-letter captions pair with and parody most of the images (although there is sincere saccharine), but many of these drawings, while some are more altered than others, resemble the copyrighted photo sources quite a bit and this had me worried. I didn’t consider this to be a problem early on because I simply wanted to draw, but in early May, I hit a slump in output as I wondered if my drawings fit under the protection of fair-use as parody and satire, or if they were too similar and should be taken down.

My drawings had not been for sale and I was not asked to remove them, but in the unlikely case that a photo creator found my drawings infringing, I wanted to remove them.

There is clearly parody in the conflict between the words and the pictures in many of the drawings I took down, but there are a few I’ll leave unpublished because the captions are more of a title than a comment, and the image source is too recognizable.

Soon, I’m going to post all drawings under a Creative Commons license to encourage sharing and make collaboration less cumbersome.