Graduating from high school is an odd and disorienting experience. You never think you'll merely stumble upon that day when you spend your last night in your house as your home. As the "college process" begins, everything gets blurry. You get caught up in what SAT score you got what your GPA is how many clubs you were a part of how many references you have how good your college essay is how many supplemental essays you have to write. Then you start looking closer at colleges, at how they're ranked in magazines how many hundreds of thousands of volumes their library has what the professor to student ratio is how many top-notch computer labs they have how good the dorms are what the guy to girl ratio is how much beer is consumed on a typical weekend. Then its who got into princeton yale harvard stanford and what they're going to do with their life. Before you know it, its the night before graduation, and everyone is really nice and pleasant to one another, and everyone seems to forget the time that the star lacrosse player got drunk stole a car and crashed into a station wagon sending the family inside to the hospital, or the time when the star football player videotaped him and his girlfriend fucking in his room and showed the whole team and the girl had to move to florida. Or the time when your friend wanted to tell the school that he was gay but was afraid of what the kids in our class what do to him if they found out. Then, all of a sudden, you're in a brilliant white tuxedo walking down an aisle lined with very important looking people approaching a stern man with a piece of paper that you've worked 12 years to get and its funny because you've never seen him smile or talk before and he wouldn't know your name if he didn't have that piece of paper but he still smiles at you and holds your hand a little too tight and leans forward and whispers "Congradulations" with a voice that reeks of green mint listerine and aftershave. Then you go to the various after parties and you take the very first picture of you and your mom and your dad in the same picture since you were little and everyones very happy and proud and you realize that won't see most of those white tuxedos ever again. Then one morning you drag a trunk out of your house and your family is crying because you're the first one to leave and it takes three hours of driving through central pennsylvania before you realize that its here.

The Most Incredible Skateboarding You'll Ever See

I'm not even going to tell you what it is, I don't want to ruin it.
Just click it
Trust me

We were asked to record and edit a piece of sound art that described our day. After a bit of contemplation, I realized that the most profound transitions during anyones day are between sleep and consciousness. So with the help of my trusty ipod recorder and my good friends in Animal Collective I came up with the following masterpiece: SOUND
Enjoy...and please don't sue me Animal Collective

The Blind Can See

The other day, I was asked to put on a record on the radio for a blind student on campus. He has his own radio show, however can't operate the equipment in the studio. He makes his own CD's, and every week someone plays them for him. Being the good and responsible music director that I am, I agreed, expecting the typical Union mix; 20 or so tracks of Dave Mathews and Fallout Boy. I put the cd on to find that it was one track that was about 61 minutes long. I didn't think much of it, and was on my way out of the studio when I heard, to my surprise, a delightful and fresh hip hop beat fill the room. Soon, a voice on the cd rose over the beat, stating something about 89.7 WRUC. Clearly, this was not pulled from a previously recorded hip hop album. I stuck around for 15 minutes, to find original music that sounded 100% professional, complete with voice-overs, scratching and smooth transitions. For a full 61 minutes. I was astonished.
In our exploration of sound, those with sight cannot begin to approach the level of understanding that the blind possess. Refocusing all the neurological energy that we use on sight into sound must produce a zen-like understanding of the medium. We see blindness as a handicap...however, is it more a specialization than a handicap? Am I the handicapped one when it comes to sound?