Songs without Words

It’s so much fun browsing DA for people who’ve redrawn old art to highlight changes and developments in style and technique over time. It’s a controlled experiment, so to speak. Here’s my addition, begun quite some time ago (September 2011) but not completed until now, as part of my “Finish things” initiative.

And larger version of the new version:

Angel atop a cloud

I picked the original subject largely because it was a significant development back in 2006 – my first serious attempt at CG’ing an actual pose rather than a standard profile or head-on view.  The line art was quite polished for the time, and the experimental wing style worked out quite well.  Of course, many problems are immediately apparent: the lopsided nose placement, the corpse-like skin tone, the bizarre foot angles, and the pimple-like blush on the shoulder, for starters.  Besides technical issues like that, I also tried to update aesthetic preferences, including softening/rounding off the facial features, selecting gentler colors for the hair, eyes, and pants, adding more detail to the lace on the top, completely replacing the nondescript shoes with color-matched flats, and giving the jeans more character.

I left this portrait unfinished in 2010. The areas which I’ve since completed or repainted are probably stylistically obvious: Faxu’s hair and boots, and a rework of Nisu’s facial features and hair. I’ve otherwise kept the quirks of the original, including the monochrome shadow, extremely long limbs, and dark lines.

As a first product of my great effort to “finish things,” I would like to present this short story to you all, which had been placed on hiatus since February 4, 2009 with a little over half of the text written.  I haven’t fully proofread it, so I hope there are not too many errors.

Andromeda, a short story in thirteen scenes

As with most of my recent stories with the exception of “The Swordsmith’s Daughter,” this is really a character study, but it’s a binary character study involving the narrator and her interactions with the titular protagonist.  While mature topics pervade through the story as a necessity for this kind of subject matter, there are no actual “mature scenes.”  The total length is about 50 pages, so it should be a quick read.

I had originally given up on the project because I had second thoughts about not telling the story from the first-person point of view of the protagonist.  It felt strangely constricting to leave out the direct thoughts and feelings of the protagonist in favor of perceptions of those thoughts and feelings.  But in the end, I’ve concluded that it’s okay, because such first-person accounts exist already, and the tale of someone close to and relevant to the protagonist is probably a more widely relatable narrative.

I realize that even amongst tolerant crowds, the issue of how to deal with gender identity in the child and adolescent is extremely controversial, and I don’t pretend to have the answers.  But starting the conversation and increasing awareness has to be the first part of finding a solution, and that’s a part of why I felt this should be written.  More importantly, it’s still a story, and despite the extenuating circumstances placed upon the main characters, I hope that it still conveys the larger journey of coming-of-age that every child in the world goes through.

My biggest enemy is my inability to finish projects that I start.  My professor just pointed this out to me recently, but I’ve known this my entire life.

Why does this happen?

The common theme is that I lose interest, but there are so many underlying reasons for this loss of attention, including:

1. The impetus for beginning the project is no longer relevant.  For instance, the emotions behind the main theme of a song or a story no longer matches how I am feeling.

2. My skills improve over the course of working on the project, and the initial work is no longer satisfying and would need to be redone to a higher standard.  This especially applies to visual arts, because my skill continues to change significantly day to day in contrast to my compositional style or writing style.

3. The project was too ambitious, and it turns out to be beyond my skill level to complete the project as originally envisioned.  Sometimes, time can correct this issue.

4. Something new is more interesting and distracts attention.

5. The project involves a lot of repetitive actions which get boring.  This is particularly true of art projects, where tasks like drawing forests or large bodies of water can simply become tedious.

6. Completion anxiety.  I don’t know how to really describe this, but this is a fear of finishing a chapter of my life, of closing off a story thread and letting it slowly drift into the past.

Why is it so hard to go back and finish things?

The task of resuming an abandoned / on-hiatus project becomes more and more difficult with time.  In general, it’s easiest to resume a writing-only project, provided that a few pages have been written: first, the software doesn’t change rapidly, and text / document files are generally openable in a number of redundant programs; second, while writing style varies from story to story, the language and vocabulary are essentially the same; and third, I tend to leave enough character sketches and descriptions, and plot pointers, to suggest what needs to be done.

Resuming a musical project is much more difficult.  In this case, there are frequently software compatibility issues.  I have used Rhapsody, Finale 2003, Finale 2008, and Finale 2012 to compose, and in addition to not being back-compatible, forward-compatibility is also limited.  Rhapsody files can be read in 2k3 and 2k8, but with incomplete information – tempo changes, dynamic changes, playback channels, and some transpositions (for transposing instruments) are lost – and into a Finale format with missing expression palettes.  Combined with the need to reassign all channels and convert to VST playback, this can be almost as much work as starting input from scratch.  Rhapsody files can’t be read into Finale 2012 at all.  There are also stylistic issues: my musical preferences change rapidly, and I do not necessarily retain the skills for writing in a particular style after moving on.  This makes for a high chance of a disjointed transition from old to new material, for instance in how the development of a theme unfolds.

Resuming an artistic project suffers primarily from rapid growth in skill.  Use of the wrong brush settings in an old artwork can be very frustrating to overcome, because touching up line-art is as difficult if not more difficult than creating new line-art.  Old poses and expressions can also be off on second glance, and rotating a face by 5 degrees in three dimensions is nearly impossible without complete re-painting.  While overall skill level improves, there may be missing information about past settings (e.g. the method used to create meshes in 3D, or a particular custom brush used to create an artistic effect or pattern) which prevents continuation of an incomplete portion of a larger region in the work.

Finally, resuming a scientific project is plagued with incomplete information – missing documentation of previous experiments with important data; experiments performed by people no longer in the lab; lack of reagents from the same batch or even complete inavailability of the reagent altogether.  It is often difficult to restart pipelines to plug in holes that become apparent in hindsight. Use of proprietary software formats can make data impossible to retrieve and re-analyze if done improperly the first time around, and programming code can be hard to decipher if poorly commented or written by someone else.

What I want to do about it

Leaving masses of unfinished work takes a psychological toll – each “open file” requires a working memory of present status, and an internal to-do list provides automatic reminders.  This becomes unbearable when the magnitude gets too large and a significant portion of ‘brain cycles’ are consumed for reminders and maintaining a fresh memory of works in progress.  Flitting from one idea to the next means that nothing will ever get done, as attention and time become divided into unsustainably small quanta that aren’t large enough to make any progress.

The solution is to release such unfinished tasks, either by definitively abandoning them or completing them.  My priorities for finishing are the following:

Writing:

I have countless unfinished stories.  But ones with only a page or two and generally unsalvageable – there’s not enough plot and characterization to go off of.  The two most important stories that I’d like to finish are the episodic “La Petite Princesse,” a series of tales in the same style as “The Little Prince,” but exploring modern allegories; and second, “Andromeda,” a story near and dear to my heart about a boy who wants to change, as told from the point of view of his twin sister.

Art:

Nisuna and Faxuda portrait in front of a tree (very nearly completed)

Andromeda and Irene’s portrait (3/4 completed)

Angel’s portrait (draw it again – 2/3 completed)

Music:

Trio for Flute, Violin, and Piano (3/4 movements completed)

Violin Concerto No. 60, 2nd movement (tutti and main solo theme written)

Games:

Tales of Graces f (now completed)

Final Fantasy XIII (final chapter)

Disgaea 4 (final stage, I believe)

Atelier Totori (final arc – building the ship to find Totori’s mother)

Scientific Projects:

Communicating nanoparticle project

Lung tissue engineering project

Anticoagulant nanoparticle project

The mounds on the ground are supposed to be snow.

Sat in Hayden today and drew this.  Had the idea of a snowy group portrait yesterday, something I’ve never done for this cast.  I actually sketched all the outfits first (plain and un-posed) – I’m bummed that the nice scarab-themed jewel encasing that I designed for Faxu isn’t even visible at all because of her positioning, but that’s how it goes, I guess.  Sorry for the strangely proportioned legs and Nisu’s abnormally small head – I’ll fix them if I ever make a lineart of this.

When classical music enthusiasts bring up the popularity of the Pachelbel’s Canon chord progression in pop music, they usually would point to songs like Vitamin C’s “Graduation (Friends Forever)” or Green Day’s “Basket Case.”  But there are also more subtle derivatives which involve slight substitutions, and I wanted to illustrate such an example here using PSY’s 어땠을까 (What Should Have Been), a song from the same album as the more well-known Gangnam Style.

Listen to the demos

We begin with the classic Pachelbel (simplified slightly), in the original key of D:

Next, we simply transpose to Eb major (now played by an electric piano):

Changing the Bb to B natural in measure 2 and D to Db in measure 4 create secondary dominants (with appropriate bassline adjustments to accommodate).  As the Eb bass already appears in m. 4 now, we switch m. 6 to first inversion.  Finally, we change the predominant chord from IV to the related ii.

Now, application of melodic ornamentation and delay of the predominant to dominant chord change in the last measure yields the harmonic component of the beat to “What Should Have Been.”  The hook, as sung by Lena Park in the recording (or Park Bom if you find the live performance on Youtube), is simply a melodic variation of the top line.

Part 1.

As my first post in a long while, I want to highlight a couple words from the family derived from the root “leuk-” meaning “light” or “white”

Luna/lunar: goddess of the moon, and pertaining to the moon.  An obvious object which is both white and bright

> Lunatic: a crazy person, originally blamed on the full moon.

> Lundi: the French word for the first weekday, the English counterpart of which (Monday) also refers to the moon.

Luster/lustrous: a sparkle or sheen to a surface or object

> Illustrate: originally meaning “to bring light to” or “to illuminate,” I find it interesting how it is still relevant for modern “illustrators,” who by depicting concepts in visual form, are seeking to clarify and illuminate a subject for the audience.

Lumen: a unit of light, but also the inner surface of a biological vessel or duct, referring maybe to the light coming in from the aperture of a tunnel-like object?

Lucid: clear, transparent; and lucent: shining

> Pellucid: similar, as in the zona pellucida around an egg (oocyte)

Lucifer: the bringer of light/morning star, and another name for Satan

> Luciferase, any enzyme including that found in fireflies, which cleaves a substrate to release light

Leukocyte: a white blood cell, part of the immune system.

> Leukemia: a cancer of the white blood cells in the bloodstream (lymphoma is the solid tumor equivalent)

To my knowledge, the word “luxury” does not actually derive from the same root, nor do “lust” or “luster” in the sexual sense.

Part 2.

Splitting roots.  Just a short note about how two-consonant combinations in roots can end up split in both pronunciation and eventually the conception of a word.

Helicopter = “helico” (spiral, like in “helix” or “Helicobacter,” a bacterial genus including a common species causing stomach ulcers) + “pter” (winged), but we split this has “heli” and “copter,” the latter of which is the accepted short form for the word.

Diagnostic = “dia” (through, by) + “gnostic” (pertaining to knowledge), but the pronunciation splits this as “diag” and “nostic,” which is reflected then in neologisms such as “theranostic,” a therapy which is also useful as a diagnostic; this term is rarely spelled more properly as “theragnostic.”