Remixing Chris Breen's beautiful 'Space Theme' podcast music
Liftoff is a new podcast on the Relay FM network that has a delightful theme tune written by Chris Breen. The subject matter of this podcast is 'space, the universe, and everthing'.
If you listen to episode 1 of the podcast, you will only hear about 20 seconds of the beautiful theme music, and only 8 seconds without any spoken interference. This is a great shame because Chris Breen recorded a full minute of music. It is delicate, quiet, and yet expansive and deep. It is therefore perfectly suited for its subject matter. Chris — who has written many podcast themes — provides some insight into how he wrote the theme on his blog and provides a link to where you can download the music (titled Space Theme).
I found myself listening to this piece over and over again. As Chris notes in his post, this is not your typical podcast theme. In my opinion, the most amazing thing about it is the level of restraint that Chris has wielded. It would be so easy to maybe overdub a ringing electric guitar solo, or add all manner of additional tracks to fill out some of the 'space' in the music.
After I had listened to the track for a day or two, I found myself wanting more. So I took it upon myself to make a remixed version of the theme. The main reason was just to give myself more of this lovely music. So using GarageBand, I made some edits to effectively double the length of the track. Because the track has a natural ending point, I had to duplicate material just before the end, and play around to find a natural cutting point.
At this point, I felt the new second half of the song needed something extra to help build the song just a little bit more. This gave me the opportunity to add a few bars of 'Breathy Vox' to partly mask the join I had made. I then added some simple strings and a few other effects. When I saw that GarageBand had a synth sound called 'Sea of Tranquility', I felt that this had to be added.
I tried various other additions, at one point adding a quite sweet clarinet track, but I kept on coming back to the restraint that Chris had shown and felt that I had to honor that as much as possible. The screenshot below shows my final set of additions and edits in GarageBand (click to enlarge):
You can hear my version here. Thank you Chris for making a truly beautiful piece of music. I hope that the Liftoff podcast can do it more justice in future episodes!
Writing a new book
Just a quick note to say that I am currently writing a new book with the help of Michelle Gill and Ian Korf. This will be a follow up our Unix and Perl to the Rescue! book. The name?
Unix and Python to the Rescue!
Snazzy eh? You can find out more details about why we are doing this on the newly revamped Rescued by code! website (it didn't make sense to keep on using the unixandperl.com website anymore).
Launch day statistics for the Take-Home Message
The Take-Home Message
Today I helped launch the Take-Home Message, a new bi-weekly web comic that aims to entertain and inform its readers about various aspects of biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. The comic is drawn by the very talented Abby Yu, and you can read a little more about how and why it was launched on my ACGT blog.
At the time of writing, it's been just over 8 hours since we made the Take-Home Message official. How has the launch gone?
- 748: the number of hits the new site has received (from 33 different countries)
- 287: the number of hits to my ACGT blog post that introduced the Take-Home Message
- 33: the number of new followers to the associated twitter account (@TakeHomeMessage)
- 24: the score for my link to the site on the Bioinformatics subreddit (enough to keep it at #1 on the Hot list throughout most of the day)
- 7: number of new Tumblr users who have followed the blog
- 5: the number of subscribers who signed up to receive new comics via email
Overall, I'm extremely pleased by this. It will be interesting to see how well comic #2 does when it goes live in a couple of weeks. Thanks to everyone for their kind words about the comic and the website.
A flag for Davis, California
Yesterday was flag day in the United States. So it seems a fitting time to launch my idea for a flag for the city of Davis, California. Davis currently has a logo, which incorporates a Penny Farthing bicycle, but this is not a good choice for a flag as it breaks many rules of good flag design.
Here is my proposed design (you can also download a larger version without the border):
The video below explains what this design symbolizes. I shall contact the Davis City Council with my idea, but I would love it if they organized a proper flag designing competition, open to all residents of Davis.
Flags can be rallying symbols that a city can unite behind. Flags can also give people a sense of pride about where they live. So let's have a flag for Davis, California!
I was interviewed by Front Line Genomics magazine
I was recently interviewed by Front Line Genomics to talk about my life in bioinformatics. The interview initially appeared in their magazine (PDF available) but is now on their regular website too:
A big thanks to Carl Smith for his many kind words, and for asking me to be interviewed.
Video: iterating towards the final design of my 'These go to five' banner logo
I recently launched a new blog, These go to five, which is attempting to (very slowly) chronicle all of the five-star songs that make up my iTunes music library. These songs represent only about 1% of my ~13,000 song music collection, so I thought I would use the blog to explain why they are so special to me.
Once I had settled on the name — a bit of an oblique reference to these go to eleven — I then started work on my design for a banner logo. The following video shows how I iterated over several designs before arriving at the final version. The backing music is an instrumental song that I wrote as part of the RPM music challenge.