Author: Franklyn Monk

Poet. Geek. Science fiction aficionado. General freak. Get social with me: Facebook| Twitter | Other

2950 Hz

Have I ever played for you 2950 Hz?

I found it laying around. It’s a 2950 Hz tone, picked out of the background of one of my voice memos, from two Novembers ago. That fall and winter you could hear this tone for blocks. I think it was from a faulty light fixture, or a faulty deterrent device. The colder it got, the louder it became—November 11, 2015 must’ve been a particularly cold night.

I cleaned it up the best I could, probably, it’s been a minute. I filtered out noise, and some inane poem about something I’m sure meant something, I’m sure. If you crank it you can still hear hints of it. Not worth the trouble , and besides the point.

The point here is, this is the tone that settled over my hood for a spell. It’s approximately 2950 Hz.

Bactrian Chorus of Drones

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Originally this was a part of The Tenth Day, but it wasn’t featured as prominently as I thought it should be. I’ve tweaked it a little, I’m uncertain if you’ll be able to recognize it—more so if I hadn’t mentioned it.

I had a blast with the video too, until the files got so large that Gimp choked on em, brought down my whole machine. Took four hours to get running again. Yikes.

The background came from a featured image I just made for No Help For That (from 2012!). I’m making featured images for posts I find missing them—there’s gonna be a lot of them, and they’re mostly gonna be old.

Edit: I’m having a doozy of a time posting this one. I keep getting server 500 errors, and I can’t tell where they’re coming from. It’s almost as if the database or cache is choking on one of the images I’m trying to attach to the post. 14,400 squared, wouldn’t think that would be an issue. 16,500 x 60 shouldn’t be a problem either. Who knows. Maybe something my theme can’t handle, or triggers some bad math somewhere.

Error logs shows: mysqli_query(): (HY000/2013): Lost connection to MySQL server during query in wp-db.php on line 1877 as well as Illegal string offset 'width' in template-tags.php on line 115 and Illegal string offset 'height' in template-tags.php on line 116. I suppose it could be trying to retrieve width and height information before WordPress completes saving and crunching the files, and freaking out. Or I could have corrupted my database somewhere along the line. I don’t know. I’m keeping an eye open, and working around it the best I can. I hope it straightens itself out, maybe on the next cache refresh—but I’m afraid to do it manually, let the crone job do it’s thing and see what happens. I guess in the trolley car problem I’d not act, my actions could just make shit worse. I don’t know. I can’t predict the future, I’ve tried, I’m a miserable failure.
Continue reading Bactrian Chorus of Drones

Thomas Run


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TITLE: Thomas Run
DESCR: Ride into the the night with me with this field-recording of a bike ride.
ALBUM: Dronescapes
TRACK: 39
GENRE: Dronescape
YEAR: 2017
PUB: Quasigentsia
TAGS: ambient, audio, bicycle, bike, cycling, drone, dronecast, electronic, experimental, ffmpeg, field recording, franklyn monk, homebrew, indie, no-39, monk, music, podcast, reaper, ride, routing, sound design, soundscape, video
URL: Persistent
MIRRORS: Archive Audio | Archive Video | SoundCloud | YouTube
IMAGES: Frame Grabs
LICENSE: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Stress Response

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Yeah, ok, if I keep putting out these small, non-drone-y, items, I may have to create a new feed for them. But, I don’t produce a lot of content, and it may be fun to have random small things appear, little rocks in the stream.

And…I did it before, these little stepping stones between realities, I called them microcasts…but I had some weird rule that they had to be under, I don’t know, some absurdly small number of seconds, a handful. And one of them, an enhanced podcast, went nuts.

Oh, that was the other thing, microcasts were all going to be enhanced, but there’s a couple weird edge cases where a very short enhanced podcast with a bunch of hires graphics and chapters goes nuts with some podcast directories and aggregators.

Then Apple effectively doomed the format by removing the functionality from GarageBand. Probably for the better, if you’re going to do an enhanced podcast you might as well do a video. Which is what I’ve started doing…I’m getting better.

Anyway, here’s me losing my shit at this guy that started following me, across a vacant lot, middle of the night.
Continue reading Stress Response