audio filters and tree rings

slow down and be safe

at my job i've been doing some work on audio files. i really know very little about audio, and nearly all of the different filter options mean nothing to me. i know just enough to clip out the mistakes and make it sound a little better.

as i've been fumbling through the filters, trying them out and seeing what they do, i've found one that's really helpful: the "normalize" filter takes the highest peak in the wave and boosts that to be just about the loudest it can be and then lets everything else fall relative to that. in short, it gives it as good a range from loud to quiet as it possible.

i found another filter that kind of seems to do the opposite: it seems to shrink everything down. actually, it looks like it "mows" the file, so that the waveform is short and not very dynamic. i decided not to use that one, but it did give me something to think about.

on the "normalized" file, there are loud parts but also really quiet parts. lot of range in between. big ups and big downs. on the "mowed" one, there isn't a lot of change between the highest and the lowest. it's all just kind of "meh."

i think we're kind of like that. i've written some here about vulnerability and thought about it much more over the past couple of months; heck, i discovered that my whole art project was about that (and if you're interested, you should really check out this talk.) when we're vulnerable, we can get hurt. embarrassed, crushed, left, forgotten, scared, lonely. deep valleys. but those undesirable feelings originate from the same place as joy, peace, confidence, security, and ultimately, love. the lofty peaks. and when we try to lower (or even completely remove) the valleys, we will equally affect our opportunity to feel the happinesses. we cannot insulate ourselves from one without numbing ourselves to the other.


but i've thought also about president uchtdorf's talk about tree rings. he noted that in times of good weather and growing conditions, the ring of growth for that year will be thick. but when the environment around it is harsh, the tree will conserve its resources, slow down, and grow only a little. and he advised us that we, too, should remember to slow down at times in our lives when things are not optimal.

drink deeply from the cup of life

so, while the only way to really feel joy and peace and love is to expose yourself in such a way that you could also get rejected, ignored, or hurt, perhaps there are times when it is appropriate to lower our amplitude, and pull things in for a bit. to slow down our pace and conserve what we have for what's most important. and then remember to take the chance and "normalize" ourselves to the maximum dynamic range, willing to take the chance that we might get hurt in the knowledge that it's the only way to really be happy.