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The Theologian Dreams of Stars

uploaded: Sun, Dec 21, 2008 @ 6:05 AM

by	gurdonark
Featuring	narva9
length	3:12
Recommends	Recommends (18)

The video which accompanies this song is found at:

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

I find myself lately drawn to the computer programming language Logo, developed by a team working in conjunction with Seymour Papert. Logo particularly caters to newbie programmers, and is the first computer language for many children. I learned it years ago, but have rediscovered as a lost joy reclaimed.

Logo programs permit one to do all kinds of things, but the easiest programs involve using the cursor to draw string-art like images using distance and angle commands. The cursor is termed a turtle in Logo, as the first analog drawing objects in Logo were literally robotic drawing turtles.

Logo is easy to learn, though it takes a lifetime to master. It’s also largely in freeware nowadays. I use aUCB Logo developed by Andreas Michener of Augsburg, which is a variant of Brian Harvey’s UCB Logo from Berkeley.

If you’d like to learn Logo, you can download aUCB Logo for free at:
http://www.physik.uni-augsb...

I am available to provide free e-mail instruction on how to make simple images (and perhaps an elaborate one or two). It’s user-friendly material, with mountains of free literature on the web. The Logo community was a “sharing community” long before Creative Commons existed.

I create a lot of Logo images these days. It’s far more productive than internet blitz chess, and I am rarely checkmated in Logo.

Recently, I created an image for which the title came to me “The Theologian Dreams of Stars”. The image is saved in my flickr account here:

http://www.flickr.com/photo...

This morning, I took a break from a work project and began to write a song. I took my sample in which I recorded a wooden mallet tapping a glass ashtray. I took my sample of bolts from the Home Depot hardware store. I took my sample of the freeware synth chaosynth making a little chaosynth riff. I then wrote an instrumental.

I was going to put the instrumental aside, to use in a netlabel release later. I decided, though, to browse the spoken word a capellas. It is not a secret at all that I deeply prefer remixing to spoken word tracks to writing songs to map to sung melodies. In my ideal world, we’d have more 90 to 120 second spoken word tracks posted here at the mixter, in which the speaker calmly and thoughtfully audiologs ideas.

I ran across Narva9’s piece “Tell Me”. I always like Narva9’s work, because she “gets” what the site is about and her pieces are always fun and thoughtful.

When I heard the piece, I did not hear its title as “Tell Me”.

I heard its title as “The Theologian Dreams of Stars”.

I share it now with you—a four voice synthesizer called Sawcutter, an ash tray, some bolts, a synth line, narva9’s spoken word piece—and dreams of stars.