Last Saturday L* and I went to WaveAid, a benefit concert for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake (commonly referred to as “the tsunami”). 11 (predominantly) Australian artists donating their time to help raise money, including the return of silverchair and Midnight Oil.

I was mainly there to see the Oils, having not seen them on their final tour before they broke up a few years back. But before they came on later that night, I was amazed to hear the Finn Brothers do acoustic versions of a bunch of Split Enz (finishing with I got you) and Crowded House songs, and have most of the SCG singing along. That’s roughly 47000 people. I didn’t realise Crowded House were so popular, and that so many of their songs had become part of Australian rock history. Anyway…

Now when I say 47000 people, it is actually impossible to hear that many people sing at the same time of course, but not for the reasons you’re probably thinking.

Sound travels at roughly 340 metres per second on such a hot day although it is boosted by body heat. The SCG is at least 200 metres from the main stage to the top of the far stands, meaning it takes about 600 milliseconds (over half a second) for the sound to travel the full distance. Because light travels almost instantaneously at 200 metres, a person at the back won’t hear what they see until over half a second after the fact. Half a second doesn’t sound like much, but our senses think it is, especially when trying to sing along to visual guitar strumming.

To get the main stage sound to the very back, you’re either going to permanently deafen the people down the front, or you’ll have to place extra speakers at the back. Of course the latter is the case, and at the SCG you’ll find about half a dozen speakers around the ground, staggered at various distances from the stage. If you pumped electrical signals into those, you’ll find the sound comes out in almost perfect time with what people are seeing, at all distances, which is what we want to happen. However the problem is the people at the back will now here the immediate sound, plus six other signals slightly delayed by about 100 milliseconds apiece, as each speaker’s audio arrives from different distances, causing an almost deafening echo or reverb. You’ve probably experienced a smaller version of this at a school sports carnival, where they use multiple speakers around an oval.

The solution is to use digital delays to delay the sound coming out of each speaker, by the time it takes sound to get from the main speakers to the target speaker. So if you have a speaker 100 metres back, the PA will be configured to delay the signal being sent to it by about 300 milliseconds. Likewise the back speakers, 200 metres out, will be delayed by 600 milliseconds. This way the sound from every speaker, will arrive at the same location all at the same time that the sound from the actual performance arrives.

Of course sound is omnidirectional, so sound out of the back speakers will also travel forward, meaning the distance between each speaker needs to be carefully calculated.

So if you’re at the back, what you see on stage is still going to be out of sync with the audio, but at least the sound will be clear and have no noisy echo. Unless of course you have a PA which is able to send audio 600 milliseconds forward in time.

What this means is that when the audience sings along, not only will the front and back of the audience actually be out of sync, due to the delayed audio, but they’ll be gradually staggered from front to back, like a mexican wave. Due to this staggering, we find that only small sections of audience are ever in sync, and thus are not actually vocally loud enough to make an audible impact on other sections of the audience. So, 47000 people at once? More like 1000 people at once. Although if the people down the front had super hearing, they’d be able to hear the singing at the back, and wonder why it was delayed by 1.2 seconds.

Getting back to WaveAid, when the Oils finally came on, we were about 10 metres from the stage, right in front. They kicked off with Read about it, not one of their better known songs, but the entire audience (mileage may vary) for as far as we could hear, were singing along. A couple standing next to us who weren’t Oils fans, even had huge grins on their faces, marvelling to the chorus of 47000 voices (slightly staggered) who knew most of the lyrics. Peter’s opening words “I’m probably the only member of parliament currently singing in a band [..] some of us may have moved on, but what we stand for still hasn’t changed” then set the tone for the rest of their set.

The highlight of the night was when drummer Rob Hirst started a simple snare beat, which the audience immediately recognised as Dead heart, and started humming Doo do, doo do, doo do do for about a minute before any other instruments kicked in. The couple next to us kept looking around, unable to stop grinning. To then hear 47000 people singing about giving Australia back to the Aborigines, was probably the most significant and positive political statement I’ve heard made in this country for many years. And the music was great as well. 🙂

A bunch of lefties? I doubt it. Aussies enveloped in the emotional rhetoric of Australia’s greatest ever live band? Perhaps. 47000 people who care about human life, tolerance and a world population living together in peace? Most likely. John Howard take note. You have three years.

Update: I’m pretty sure the songs were Read About It, Say Your Prayers, Best of Both Worlds, King of the Mountain, Forgotten Years, Power and the Passion, and Dead Heart. I can’t remember the exact order.

I stupidly braved the sales today, looking for the elusive pink, red, blue and green socks. Since the Sock Shop franchise closed down (well, was bought out and shut down), wearing mismatched single coloured socks, almost a trademark of mine, has been difficult to say the least, but I figured if anything, stores would most likely be tossing out their old fluoro socks into the bargain bins. No such luck.

It was at that moment, finding myself in the middle of the menswear section of a well known up market retailer, that I noticed I was awash in pastels, particularly baby pink. Under the fluorescent lights, you’d be forgiven for being blinded by aisle upon aisle of almost identikit shirts, if it weren’t for the mostly incomprehensible writing which seems to adorn all modern hip fashion, in an infinite array of fonts, styles and colours.

Yes folks, pink, with gibberish annotations, is the new brown. Born from the world of Euro courture several years ago, and finally making it’s way into the design houses of modern middle class pseudo-fashion, we say goodbye once and for all to the browns and earthy tones which subdued us for many a year.

Walking around the mall today was like being embedded in virtual reality advertising, and I felt strangely compelled to try reading every fragment of script worn by the endless pairs of testosteroned half surf culture half club culture male hipsters, with hair sprayed natural coloured limp mohawks. Sorry guys, but mohawks need to have colour and need to be spiked up, otherwise they just look like a half arsed lopsided business cut. I guess that’s Chatswood for you.

So anyway, I’m rambling now. The point is that the whole day reminded me why I don’t usually hit the Christmas sales. Many a year ago I was teased for wearing pink socks, strange considering my hair colour, but now that fashion and the mighty dollar dictate that pink is OK, calling all macho guys, this year it is swell to wear pink. Hmm, maybe I should switch to yellow…

Treadmills and Weight Loss

I promise this is the last personally oriented post for a while, after which I shall return to previously lofty heights. I give you Artarmon’s biggest chocolate croissant, and if you’ll excuse my white pasty hand which was used for scaling effect, I’m sure you’ll agree seems to go easy on the chocolate, and somewhat generously on the croissant. Also, I give you what is left of my previously discussed family of beetroots, after our recent heatwave, going out in a blaze of glory.

I spoke about this a few weeks back, but whenever I’m late for work, or I plan for a great day, something usually conspires against me. All psychological I’m sure, but somehow I doubt that my admittedly strange and deranged mind would have caused this morning’s disaster. If it had fallen the opposite direction, we would have woken up with a tree in bed beside us. Actually, I don’t know what is more surprising, the fact that a tree destroyed two cars, our nature strip and blocked the road for most of the day, or the fact that my Sony Ericcson K700i camera phone actually takes some pretty good pictures when the lighting is right. (And no the man in blue isn’t me, I have no idea who he is)

Losing memories

A walker is a person who continuously and randomly walks about a theatre stage, particularly the various locations which will contain an actor throughout the show, while the lighting people adjust and program all the lighting. Yesterday it took Amanda and me about an hour of walking and pausing on the Enmore stage, to get the lighting right for the Cranston Cup Grand Final.

You know, Baker’s Delight, our local franchised gourmet baker, are single handedly responsible for bringing the bread making profession into the modern era. Well, them and other businesses like them.

Not twenty years ago, a baker was, along with the candlestick makers, a middle ages profession and a pretty bad career move for the modern upwardly mobile job seeker. Or at least that’s the impression I had as a youngster. Men in funny white hats, big wooden spatulas in hand, pushing balls of freshly kneeded dough into a hot clay oven, as knights on horseback ride past, jousting lances in hand.

Then the supermarkets got into the act, with their plastic wrapped chemically treated and almost clinically sliced bread, with all the taste of plasterboard. For all intents, you’d assume there was no longer such a thing as a baker.

Anyway, gourmet bakers have done wonders for a new generation of McDonalds workers looking for a better career experience. You can’t get more traditional than a baker.

I visited our local a few days ago, and carefully analysed the various loaves they had under the fluorescent “make it look fresher” trick lighting, when I was served by one of the actual bakers:

Baker: What can I get you?

R: Well, I’d love a twisted delight, but they’re all a bit burnt today.

Baker: Burnt?! That’s not burnt, that’s caramelised!

R: Fine, well I’ll have a not burnt twisted delight thanks, and make it caramelised will you.

I can tell you, there’s a pretty fine line between caramelised and, well… burnt. But then we’re pretty pedantic in software as well.

User: The program crashed.

Support: OK, can you be a little more specific? Did it hang, loop, break, abort, quit, reboot, not launch, exit, fail, slow down, or just not give you the results you were expecting?

User: Umm… I don’t know, it just doesn’t work.

I’m probably the most pedantic person I know when it comes to the use of language, perhaps tied with a few notable exceptions, and I’m telling you, that twisted delight was burnt.

I’ve been wondering how much I should be writing up new learning experiences. I’m one of those always busy people, who has a lot of different hobbies and interests. Thus I’m always learning, and at various stages of knowledge in various domains.

But in 1, 10, 50 or 100 years, do I really want people to read about the day that I learnt what a theatre “walker” was? Will it affect my job prospects later in life? What if I became a big time theatre producer (not my intent, by the way), clients found my blog in archive.org, and realised I only just learned this stuff in 2004? Or will I be embarassed by it? Conforming to social standards we’ve been conditioned to since birth, and selfishly feeling inadequate because I only just learned something.

Perhaps in years to come, blogs will be the key to reversing these ingrained evils? Blogs are what will keep us honest as the years go by. The Internet is our personal archive, an ever changing permanent record of us and our interactions, recorded for all eternity. A million years from now, the universe will still have a digital (physical) record of the life of Richard BF, his opinions and much of his presence, with scholars pouring over our lives, like modern day archeologists dissecting an Egyptian mummy. Scary.

So here I was considering whether to write about my recent experiences in theatre, when I came across this quote, by Martha Graham:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. It is your business to keep the channel open.

While I’ve taken it out of context, I think it’s a great metaphor for life, and for some, blogging in general.

So in a few days, I’ll probably write a little about “walkers”, and the experience of being involved with a production bigger than just a few hundred punters.

Mental note to self, stop being so anxious about things.

I tend to live my life at one of either ends of an emotional balance beam which has anxious and frustrated at one end, and jocular and flippant at the other.

This morning I decided to get an early start, as I’ll be interstate later in the week. So I got up earlier than usual, only to find an urgent email I needed to reply to. Then I found that the cat had left a present in the lounge room, which needed to be cleaned up. Once actually out of the house, driving to work, there was road work at one of the big intersections really close to work, and they were only letting every third set of green lights go through. By the time I got through, I didn’t have enough petrol to guarantee getting to work, so I had to stop for fuel, the only servo on the way of course being a long detour. Then when I got to the street where I work, I just happenned to get stuck behind the slowest Mini Cooper driver in all of Sydney.

Subsequently, I was actually later than usual to work.

So instead of being anxious, I’m sitting down, taking my medication (a mug of Coke), trying to make my environment as conducive to productivity as possible, and am continuing my design for a system for the dynamic construction of Microsoft WordProcessingML documents from our enterprise CMS, Sytadel.

You can never guarantee the perfect day, so quit worrying about it.