Kablammo!

See, the problem is that I know an awful lot more than my professor—about one pretty minor subset of the subject matter. He’s obviously an expert in Protools; that much is obvious from about 5 minutes’ worth of class. And since he’s evidently made his living as a music producer and engineer for quite some time, I’m going to go ahead and assume his knowledge of the empirical, æsthetic, and business aspects of music production dwarfs mine. That’s basically all I could have asked for in an instructor, and I intend to learn a lot from him in the areas of his expertise.

The problem comes with everything pertaining to the physical manifestation of sound, and anything even vaguely resembling mathematics. The professor’s only talked about this stuff very briefly, and he seemed rather uncomfortable about it, and he qualified what he said with the disclaimer that he doesn’t like talking about physics because he doesn’t know squat about physics, or something along those lines. Which is all well and good, and I’m quite happy he admits it up-front when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I don’t want to come off to the class or the professor as some show-off brainiac, but a gay DJ once taught me an awful lot about acoustics, so I had to bite my tongue when my current professor said, for example, that a handclap in a room was an example of a standing wave.

I feel like it would be awful presumptuous to privately ask him if he’d want me to give the class a brief primer on things like v = fλ, but it would be even more presumptuous for me to blurt that shit out in the middle of class one day. So my current plan is to continue holding my tongue and hope that the topic never comes up again.

UPDATE: As it happens, I didn’t hold my tongue after all. Some of the professor’s comments and explanations to other people’s questions were quite helpful and informative, but then he claimed that the speed of sound was not a medium-dependent property. So I had no option but to strenuously object. And later I drew a picture on the board.

We’re on the verge of really diving into Protools, though, so I can’t wait for more of the class.

Song of the Moment: «Run» — Ratatat ft. Ghostface Killah and Jadakiss

1 Comment

• Tiiu says:

  February 1, 2006 at 18:17

  I laughed out loud when I read this. I don’t read your stuff too often, but I got a kick out of this. I can totally see you sitting in class and saying “i strenuously object…” and the fact that you later went up to the board & drew a picture about it is just fabulous. I always knew you were a smarty pants!

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