Z’ev X Jenerik

02/19/09
Block Haiti
Swashbuckling Students
Aaaaaaarrrrrrgggg!!! *chough* … excuse me … Hi! I am what you would call the
director and producer of Swashbuckling Students, a pirate song written by myself and performed
by a few students (and a teacher) from CAT (City Arts and Thieves) High School. The purpose
of the song will be explained later, and the purpose of this text is to elaborate, to enlighten, and
to elongate an explanation that could be summarized in one sentence. Without further
digression, I give you my “What is Art” paper, Take Two. Action!

Technique:
• In what way does this work represent a skilled use of the software?
Most amateurs (myself included), when working with GarageBand use only a fraction of
it’s true potential. I used to create songs by dragging pre-made loops into tracks and overlapping
them until they became aesthetically pleasing to my ears. Then I found that aside form mearly
recording my voice into garage band, I could also apply distortions and amplifiers to change my
voice. I could, within reason, alter the words I spoke so that no one would be able to tell who
was speaking. I used particular amps to enhance the volume of quiet singers and ‘gruff up’ the
voices of certain, ‘not-piraty-enough’ people. The manipulation of individual track (volume)
levels also made the singers voices easier to equalize, or sound similar in volume level. The end
result of this project could not have been achieved by just any amateur … it takes a special kind
of armature to make something so, well, odd.
• In what way does your choice of materials for this project represent a skillful and informed
artistic choice?
There are only a few music-mixing programs that I know of and the easiest to use (as
well as the one I am most familiar with) is GarageBand. As soon as I knew I wanted to do
something involving the performing arts, I decided to use not only a relatively easy program but
also one I had worked with before. I figured that I had a better chance of creating something
cool if I made a song apposed to if a video in which I could act because I’m unfamiliar with
performing in front of a camera and I don’t like using video editing programs like iMovie
(especially iMovie). In the beginning, I was tempted to do some visual arts project, but to be
honest, I am a performer and I excel at doing physical things with my body as apposed to
painting, which I never really got the hang of.
 • How does this work you've created compare with other works of this kind by other artists?
It was brought to my attention, AFTER I had thought up the idea for the project, wrote
the lyrics, and pitched the idea on my blog, that there is a group of comedic musicians who write
and sing quirky pirate songs. They are called “Captain Dan and the Scurvy Crew” and they did
not inspire me in any way. But, the fact that they are a band selling their music goes to prove
that what they do (and consequentially what I have done) is considered art. If you want to check
them out, go to their MySpace page (as they don’t official have their own website). Their song
was created as music whereas my song was created as a joke, but both of our projects are art.
Now, this is not to say that the idea of a pirate song was not already planted in my mind, as I
watched a play in which they had a funny little pirate song where each person explained
themselves and their roles. But, my lyrics were 100% original, as was the execution of the song.
• Explain in depth the different materials, techniques, and art genres you experimented with
as you were making your final piece.
No project is perfect the first time around and my pirate song is a great example of that
which I speak. I had to make some major adjustments to my work to get it up to par. First and
right off, I had to do something about the sound, as everything was super quiet. I toyed with the
idea of adding amps to each track, but decided to just raise the individual track volume levels 10
notches up each. This unfortunately threw all of the tracks out of volume harmony, making
some loud while others could not be heard. It also made the backup music hardly noticeable. I
then went in and adjusted the sound levels on the individual tracks to balance them out as well as
raising the volume on the instrumental tracks. My last attempt to make the song acceptable was
to look at each track individually, and make sure they were all on beat and on tempo. Where
they were not, I went in minimizing the ‘beat to visual’ ratio and adjusted the singer’s voices
slightly to the side. The song stll sounds funny, just a cleaner funny than before.
• Explain how the techniques you used add to and enhance the meaning or message you were
trying to communicate.
One aspect of my song that truly puts across a message is/are the seemingly pointless
lyrics. When a song has no clear message (and the lyrics are all out of whack), it sends across
the belief that the project is ridiculous and mine is purposefully so. The ridiculous must evoke
some sort of emotion, and therefore one criteria of the project fulfils another aspect of said task.
To cause further hilarity, or at least nostalgia for the cliché, I overlapped the words with a fiddle
(or violin) as everyone knows that if you walked into a pirate bar, you would find someone
playing a fiddle accompanied by someone playing an accordion and possibly an off-key piano.
Point of View:
• In what ways is your point of view evident in the work itself?
Art is the creation of something, anything really, which evokes an emotion within the
general audience, excluding those who disagree as a personal. My pirate song, which I have
called "Swashbuckling Students," is the perfect example of my rule's application as the mere
listening to said song evokes within anyone and everyone a feeling, emotion, or response of
some sort, regardless of magnitude. I believe that even the response of indifference to my art
qualifies as justification for the authenticity of its artistic nature. "Swashbuckling Students" is
meant to make people laugh, chuckle, and/or guffaw, through the use of funny accents and
unorthodox (but entirely cliché) verses. This project is supposed to be fun, goofy, and prove no
point other than the fact that there are still people out there willing to embarrass themselves for
the pleasure and entertainment of others.
• What is your definition of Art and non-Art? How is this definition shown in your artwork?
Art evokes a feeling/emotion, a reaction of some sort so what better to evoke humor,
laughing, and/or disgust than a pirate son sung by pubescent teenagers? My project is to create a
pirate song on GarageBand and get some of my friends to sing with me on it. The purpose of
said venture is primarily to have fun, but also to educationally prove that regardless of the
emotion you get from the song, (whether it is confusion, disgust, giddy chuckles, etc.) my
artwork will have fulfilled its purpose. Whatever message you glean from a pirate song about
a fictitious band of scurvy dogs is entirely up to you, because everyone draws their own meaning
from a piece of art, but know that I make this song, not to make you think, but in the hopes to
entertain (and if I’m lucky, enjoy myself).

Context and Connections:

• Specifically describe the artworks you looked at when developing your definition of Art in
blogs 1-3.
Um … funny thing … I looked at visual art to construct my definition of art, even
through my project is musical in nature. But enough stalling, I looked first at a man scrawling
graffiti on a wall. I personally despise tagging as I feel it is a brash disrespect to all others who
then have to stare at the surface. BUT, I figure that if someone takes the time to go down under
a bridge and tag a well tagged location, he or she must have a good reason for doing so. And
then there was the paperclip. Ah, how subtle a simple picture can be and yet fraught with
ambiguous interpretations it can sustain. To be honest, I ‘googled’ “paperclip” and grabbed the
cleanest picture I could find. The result was a red paperclip on a white background which I
defended proudly and so full of shit you could smell it across the classroom.
• Based on your exploration of Art, what specific characteristics does Art need to have?
I tend to be a man of physics, mathematics, logic, and reason (with the occasional sprout
of emotional jibber jabber … I am human after all). Thusly, I tend to not defend a statement
orthodoxy. I found that art evoked within me an emotion; from the tagger disgust and from the
paperclip, well, Red. I have found that every piece of artwork is created for a reason, or at the
least in the attempt to make/do/etc. something. I have also found that art must evoke an emotion
(young Newton here with his laws of motion, except I’m not as smart and … Nevermind).
When I looked at the paperclip, I reasoned that the person who invented it made it to hold paper
together, and while making it, was probably perplexed, angered, or nonchalant about the whole
business. The paperclip evokes within me a feeling of usefulness, and possibility when
considering the stringing of many of them together. I have found after creating my project that
Art is a living entity that becomes whatever you want it to be. Anything can be called art, but to
truly believe something is art is a capability we all have, yet seldom use. I know nt the intent of
the tagger, nor the motivation, nor what he feels, yet I can say that his work is art because he
makes it with intent and it makes me feel disgust. End of argument.

Reflection:
• Discuss the specific stages you went through as you started reading, researching, thinking
about, designing, building, and revising your project.
First off in the grand scheme of this project, I decide I wanted to do something comedic,
because I Like Funny! Actually deciding what “funny” thing I wanted to do was a completely
different matter. I knew that my particular area of artistic expertise lies in the realm of the
performing arts. I figured that doing a movie or something akin to a visual project was
improbable because I am camera shy and the ideas I had of things I could videotape were pretty
limited. I was “brainstorming” in class (which means I was sitting around in self pity for not
coming up with an idea) when my friend Devon called me over and showed me a rather funny
video entitled “how to talk like a pirate.” I figured that pirates were funny if you made them
exaggerated, but I didn’t really start calling anything my project until I was rhyming at home and
stumbled upon some funny lines that would later be sung by my friends and myself. I started
writing the pirate son and found that it was so much un that I could use it ass my art project as
long as I could prove that what did was art (easy). I started making my song by finding a violin
or two in GarageBand and laying down the tracks with a drum beat. I simultaneously mad the
beat and wrote the song so that by the time I got to school, all I had to do was record. After
recording all the voices haphazardly (I say haphazardly because I got all the singers to sing on
different days at different times), I pieced together the song and made sure everyone could be
heard. My last realization as I ‘turned in the project’ (put it on my blog) was that I had recorded
the song and edited it with the volume on my computer all the way up, which means that at
normal volume, the song is so soft the lyrics are indistinguishable and the song is … quiet.
• Describe the specific art and technical techniques you used in "art-specific" language.
I mashed together a beat for my pirate song by selecting sound clips from the eye button
and combining them until they were aesthetically pleasing to my ears (like making the 16-count
drum beat out of four different drum rifts shorted to 4-beat intervals and strung together before
being copied and pasted appropriately throughout the song instead of just using one 16-beat riff
and looping the track). In the recording possess, I used a microphone to record each individual
voice, tweaking them with amp effects and the like when needed so that each person sounded as
pirate-y as I could make them. I used text edit to write the song and transferred the words to a
Microsoft Word document so I could mess with formatting at free will. When doing accents, I
informed my friends that they had to make their voices gruff and stereotypical pirate-like,
although I think each person interprets 'pirate' differently and displays it differently. I had each
vocal piece (except for Largos and Kelp, who were recorded at the same time) recorded on a
separate track so I could tweak the vocals and mess with the individual volume levels as each
singer had a different volume of singing and changing the master volume (command + B)
wouldn't distinguish between tracks. As a final decision, I chose a vector for each sound track to
come out of, so as to create the illusion that the pirates are standing in a semicircle around you
instead of a couple of students sitting next to a microphone with ear pieces in, a script, and an
over excited computer operator.
• Interview a classmate you trust. Ask them to grade your art project against the rubric and
to give you warm and cool feedback.
I can tell you right now that I did not have my project analyzed by anyone, yet I saw
other project categorized and know with little doubt that my project would score very poorly on
the scale of “Technical Complexity.” You see, I fear many would view my work as a simple
entity that sounds unfinished and raw, untethered by perfection, and they would be right. But
they would also in judging my project based soaly on what they hear discrediting completely all
the other work I’ve done for this project like writing the lyrics, getting multiple voices to sing,
and adjusting the volume levels so it sounds like it is at least a balanced (volume-wise) crew of
scurvy dogs. If all of the singers are not singing at the same time, that is a human error.
Granted, I should have had people who sung out of tune or out of tempo repeat themselves, and I
did. But human errors happen, and I want everyone to keep in mind that although this is an
excuse, it is based in reality.
• Compare your finished work next to an established, professional work of art.
Have you ever heard of Dead Kennedys? Well, “m listening to “Kill the Poor” right now
and their singing is almost as incoherent as my pirates. What I notice my song lacks in
comparison to these respected ‘Artists’ (Meaning no disrespect, Because The dead Kennedys
rock!) is verity. They have guitar solos, different drum rifts, and at least three instruments (not to
mention the fact that all of their instruments are originally played and not dragged out of a pre-
made loop). I have two pre-made fiddle loops and an improvised 4-diff, pieced-together, drum
rift made of GarageBand loops (not of course counting the original singing). They use the
slurred voices to their advantage by having an easy-to-follow beat. I have a sometimes-
incomprehensible beat, as the singing tends to drown out most of everything else. Slurred
singing hurts my song. I believe I know why they sound so much better than Blue’s band of
Scurvy Dogs, and it is simply this; they are professional musicians with a professional sound
editor whilst I am a high school actor who connects with computers about as much as escargot
goes with potato chips and red coolaid. Simply put, I should stay out of he field of sound
producing.

Process:
• Describe how your definition of art grew and developed over the course of the project.
I found though working on this project that art is more than I said it was, or at least, what
I call art is more than just what is capable within the confines of logic. You see, I could have
stopped working and editing at any point stating that the lack of ‘quality’ in my art is a
purposeful move to prove an equally bullshited point, but I didn’t. I continued to work on the
song because I want it to sound “good,” whatever that means. This realization gave rise to an
epiphany and new meaning to the phrase “Art is what you want it to be.” I want my art to sound
‘good’ to me, so I want my art to be ‘better’ than a half-assed attempt at art. I am using many
loaded words, because they have new meaning to me. Art evokes a different emotion in me than
in you, because the art is my creation and you are an observer. I want my art to be good for me,
not for anyone else. If you want something to be art, it will be. Want drives our opinion while
instinct, taste, etc. steer it, choosing what is what. Art is what you want it to be.
• What strategies did you use to overcome setbacks you encountered in the process?
Setbacks are ugly and mean things, partly because they are merciless but mostly because
they throw you off which disrupts your flow and makes you pick up lost momentum. Setbacks
are (in opinion) the biggest reason why artist quit working on a project. In my case, I have had
quite a few setbacks, some of which have been dealt with while others have been ignored or
swept under the rug, figuratively (of course). To begin with, I asked around for volunteers to
sing like a pirate on my song … and … I have some lame classmates. I ended up acquiring
singers through accident, pleading, pity-plays, and flattery (all of which are lies, as the people
who sung on the song all offered their assistance). I even had to have my teacher sing a track on
the song, which wasn’t a bad thing, but the purpose of the song is that the “pirates of the ship
called CAT” would all be students (where I assume most of the anger and grit is). Another
biggy, I had soft (quiet) tracks (which I know I’ve already thoroughly whined about). Luckily, I
was able to get other people to fix that problem, for the most part. I had one or two other small
problems which I dealt with through experimentation and guess and check. If I couldn’t figure
out how to do something, I asked either Devon (friend) or Ted (teacher) for help and they came
to the rescue.
• What feedback did you get from your peers and from Ted about how to improve your
piece?
Ted showed me how to increase the volume on certain tracks and suggested that if a track
was too quiet or too off, I would probably be better off just rerecording it. If I did this, I’m afraid
I would rerecord all the tracks over, to make sure everyone pronounced the lyrics correctly and
to assure that all the recordings were laid down at the proper sound levels. My friend Devon
(Pirate Paul and Largos) is a tech smart guy and he suggested that I add amps to quiet tracks to
make them louder. He showed me how to make modifications to tracks (like amps and
distortions). Ted also suggested that if a track is slightly off, I should edit the tract, dragging it
from side to side (possibly even cutting the track [command + T] and moving individual chunks)
so as to make the singing in-time with the beats.