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Anyone who has ever worked with audio editing deserves my full respect and understanding. I am with you, folks! The reason I find audio editing tasks more strenuous than any other is that I cannot get the help of a companion that I consider essential: music. You give me some chore to do, and I will not complain a bit, as long as I can do listening to some cool music. Always works unless you are editing audio. Got my point?

Audio editing tasks demand a wicked degree of attention. The kind that sucks you into a dark pit, where there is nothing but sounds floating around you. Well, I mean, if you do not live in my apartment, of course. I’ve written here before about my noisy neighbors, but the truth, which I’ve only discovered over the years, is that my apartment is located in a prime location, probably impossible to get on purpose.

Apparently the configuration of my apartment in relation to my building and the buildings around it fulfills the same function of an acoustic shell, which makes me hear from the coffee spoon hitting the rim of the cup of the neighbor next door, to the discussions of the couple who live downstairs about the fate of their cats, not to mention the intense training with B., the dog that belongs to the couple on the top floor, forced to accompany their crazy things, which include walks at seven in the morning on Sunday. And let us not even get into the “wild animals” of the woods in the back street. I just hear everything!

Yes, I admit that sometimes it can be fun to live in the exact spot where all sounds converge. Only sometimes. Most of the time, I feel like I am fighting with half the world to do simple things like listen to a podcast or make a video call. Recording or editing videos in these conditions is extremely tiring and I often say no to some activities I am invited to, simply to save myself the stress of trying to guess (always unsuccessfully) where the noise of the day is coming from.

I plan to move to less strenuous sound conditions as soon as possible, but in the meantime, I try to make the best of my condition by not entirely going against the flow. Let us say that I almost cooperate with it. When the noise is too much, I step away from the computer and complete tasks more accordingly. Using the blender is always a good option to swap one annoying sound for another, more useful one. The washing machine will do the trick as well.

Anything to keep this sound editing going, albeit slowly.

Be seeing you!

G.F.

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The Gavião (Hawk) people is one of the Brazilian indigenous groups. They live in the Northeast of the country, in the central region of the State of Maranhão and they managed to preserve a significant part of their ancient rituals. In a very interesting example of their ability to mix their tradition with elements of contemporary life, tribe youths record on their cell phones the ancestral songs sung by the elders.

Some of them also have profiles on socials portraying the routine of the group. The passage from childhood to the teenage years, for instance, is marked by a period of six months, during which the teenager can only leave the house covered by a wicker mat.

The idea that transition times, such as puberty, demand retreat and self-communion (in other words: time to adapt) is a lesson nature is frequently trying to teach us. Butterflies and their journey from egg to larva, then the amazing pupa period and, finally, adulthood is one of the most beautiful expressons of it. Another way of dealing with changes it through silence.

From the respectful minute of silence in solemn ceremonies to the the vow of silence present in various religions orders, there are many different cultural manifestations of silence as a method or a means to achieve something. After a hard week and a even ahrder weekend, I tried the silence game à la G., which consists of talking only the strictly necessary, no social networks and, most important, no news for 48 hours.

I cannot say my detox days were easy, but the experience was totally worth it. The first impact is that time seems to grow, when we are in silence: suddenly you will have some extra hours in your hand. In my case, those were probably the hours that I would had spend reading the news or checking hashtags and getting angry on Twitter. Anyway, the fact is that instead I had time for long, guiltless, refreshing naps.

The real surprise, though came after my silent days, on my way back to normal, noisy routine: after my “unplugged” period, I did not feel the urge to read all the news, nor to post on my socials. While checking the headlines, I have selected three of four news that really interested me and read them throughfully. After that, I was ready to go back to my things, no trace of F.O.M.O whatsoever.

You might find it funny to have a singer writing an ode to silence, but deaing with sounds is precisaly the reason why I cherish my quiet moments so much. Keeping the communication noise down from time to time helps me a lot to curate my interests in music, just like it happenned with the news. In other words: it helps me to focus on what is really important.

The rest is silence.

Be seeing you!

G.F.

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“The sun on the newsstands
fills me with joy and laziness
Who reads so much news?”
– Alegria, Alegria (Joy, Joy)
Caetano Veloso, 1967

What´s New? is one of the many incredible interpretations of Billie Holiday. The 1939 song by Johnny Burke and Bob Haggart was included in the album Velvet Mood: Songs by Billie Holiday, released on Clef Records in 1956. I wonder about the first verses: “What’s new? How is the world treating you?” and how they relate to the last verse of Notícia de Jornal (Luis Reis and Haroldo Barbosa), sang by Chico Buarque : “Our pain doesn’t come out in the newspaper“

I don’t know where you live, but I can bet that the vast majority of the incredible amount of news flashing across your screen daily rarely treats you well, let alone mirrors your pain. And yet we waste precious scrolling down an infinite screen of events that might fill our hours, but are fairly unable to appease the feeling of not being informed enough.

At the end of the day, which always seems shorter than the previous one (what do you mean it’s already that late?), how much information do we retain afterall? Very little. The bitter truth is that nobody needs so much news, and this is not an easy thing for me to admit for I am a confessed news junkie. Fear of Missing Out hadn’t even been invented yet and I already suffered from it.

Frankly, before digital media everything seemed to be under control, because the volume of news that a newspaper or printed magazine could contain was limited, not only in terms of the physical space occupied, but also in terms of time. Even in publications with two runs a day, once the edition was over, there was not much to do, even in the event of the biggest scoop ever.

The patience factor was even more important when it came to weekly or monthly magazines. Now think about the number of times the same content can be updated, rewritten and re-edited in the interval of, say, half a day. Pretty insane, isn’t it?

I remember an interview with the late Portuguese writer José Saramago, in which he said that if he subscribed to forty-three printed newspapers and magazines daily, his neighbors would certainly call him crazy when they saw the volume of information dumped at his door every morning. On the other hand, no one would question a cable TV subscription which included the same number of channels.

As we say in Brazil, Saramago shot at what he saw and hit (also) what he didn’t see. Not only we got used to a connstant hyper-supply of news, we have also expanded the concept of what can be considered relevant enough to gain the status of news. The faits divers, for instance, have been fully upgraded and are now sometimes considered more important than, well, basically anything else.

We discussed previously the importance of sorting out relevant songs in order to build up a consistent set list. Maybe exercizing fine curation also in other departments of life is not a bad idea at all. Sometimes it is good to take a break and take it slow.

Be seeing you!

G.F.

p.s.: in case you want to take five minutes relaxing from the news, I would like to suggest this lyric video of a song from 1893, which got new lyrics due to the 150th birth anniversary of the composer, Ernesto Nazareth.

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Deadlines. How to deal with them? If you ever looked anxiously to the calendar every hour, counting the remaining days until that very important deadline, you know what I mean.

I understand deadlines are part of life in society and I am ready to deal with them. Quick and painless is my usual style, although sometimes I also play the long and suffering mode. Either way, I am not afraid of them. Why? Because I know that the real deal starts right after you have pressed that “send” button.

Waiting for the result of a project is not easy. You did your part, putting all your heart and soul in it (not to talk about a huge amount of time), you double checked all the boxes, uploaded all requested files and now what? You exercise your mental balance and self-control: you wait.

Plenty of songs, from different genres deal with the variety of feelings we experience while waiting for someone or for something. Probably a playlist, with your top ten themes has already started in your head, but what is the thing about waiting?

First of all, it is a word with a lot of meanings. From longing to someone to arrive, to hoping for something to happen, waiting has to do with accepting that there is a limit to our actions. Sometimes, the move is not ours and there is nothing we can do about it. Or is there?

My trick to deal with the torments of waiting is fulfilling it with a meaningful action, instead of simply killing time. It can be a simple thing, such as: taking a shower, doing the laundry, cooking or actively listening to music, whatever makes sense to you.

Once immersed in a new, engaging activity, your perception of time changes completely and the feeling of emptiness brought by the waiting is suddenly gone.

Be seeing you!

G. F.