Look where you're going. Look where you're going. Hey, 408. 408. 408. Kick your brake handle. This is gas. This is brake. All right, kick your brake handle. Don't ride your brake handle on your hip. Separate rope today, Jackson. I see your brake position.  Understand, son. Yeah, four-point bunch.  One, two, three, four. Open up your hips. Walk in. Just walk down. That's all you got to do. That's your hips. Keep grip. Ready? Get your feet over here, right up there. Get your feet up there. Step up the edge. You're going to lean. It's going to be a weird drop. Because of where the anchor point is. At that point. One, two, three. Looking over the wrong shoulder. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. Two thousand, three thousand, four thousand.  One thousand, two thousand. I want you to go up the tarmac. One, two, three, four. It's off the tarmac, alright? Your brake can's going to be snow. Alright, put it back in. That is a good hook-up. You are lean one. Get ready. Get your feet right at the edge. And don't give up this time. Just keep slacking it. You're doing good. You're doing good. Hey, man, are you ready? Set up. Alright, regain control of your ropes. Lock in. Forty-seven. I'm in a secret. Need a secret? Good. Grab your shoulder into the ground. He's up. Forty-seven. Get ready. Alright. So, you'll be fine. Just walk back. Eat these back into it. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. Alright, get your feet under you. One, two, three, four. Kick that brake can out. That's your gas. Kick it out. Here's your gas. Two circle group tanks point. Dive hand and palm facing down. Carabiner's up. Three and four is out the door. Brake hand and palm facing down. That is a good hook-up. You are lean one. Get ready. Lean one. Get ready. This hand, your brake can, you're going to start milking it. So, start slacking it. And then leaning into it. You are fine. There you go. There's going to be a slight drop. Get your feet under you. Alright, get that to your... Lock it. Ready?  What the... Hey, one, five, two. Lock it. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. That was a little fast. It's a little slower. It's not right there. It's going to be a weird drop. It's going to hit you one more time. Air assault. Chicken wing. Thank you. Nineteen. Keep that top here closed. And then you can start with the bottom one. Everybody ready? Hey. You got to stand up my leg. Come on. You got to stand up.


All right. I'm here with Superwoman. That's me. You know, it was Superman earlier, but I'm not staying in costume all day. Okay. So we got a special box from a good buddy, JD Frosting Company. He is the headline sponsor. I don't think he announces yet. We have not. Headline sponsor of 8% Nation 2020.  We actually outsource all of our quick books. Yep. We have a, we literally have like a virtual CFO that we talk to every week. Financial statements, payroll, accounting, quick books. It's like a division of our company that has another, I don't even know how many employees they have, but we outsource a lot of it and it's paid off in dividends. Okay. Cause a lot of that can be overwhelming. So they sent us something. They sent us a box of goodies. I want to see what we got. Okay. So stay with us. A little cap. Okay. Whoa. All kinds of stuff. Look at this. Not for me. Oh, I'm going to work out in this. That's so cute. That is what you call some socks. That's what you call a goodie bag.  Well, you know what? We just got to become a client of JD Frosting Company. That's it. Wow. This is sick. This is awesome. Oh my gosh. Sun glasses. They got the, they got the, they, they got to have our swag game. Now these are cool. I like that. No like and trust. You need to like and trust your, uh, We are part of the financial firm, you know, your financial President's Club Coasters. There's two of these. President's Club, JD Frosting Company wine, little wine glasses. That's awesome. That's cool. There's two of those. So freaking awesome. I'm telling you what, all I know is you guys aren't using JD Frosting Company. You are missing out $1,000 in it. It costs a lot more than that to sponsor your impersonation than its entirety, to be the actual full headline sponsor. Thanks for joining the President's Club. We look forward to serving you and your business here with anything else. Please let us know. Boom. Sincerely, JD Frosting Company. The headline sponsor of 8% Nation 2020. Super excited for it. Wow. How about that? Thank you so much. How about that? I look forward to seeing you. Hey, if you need help with anything CPA wise, if you need any help with QuickBooks, accounting, finances, you don't know your margin, you don't know your numbers, you watch it, you're like me and you watch the show The Prophet, and you don't know your numbers really well.    That's also true. So outsource it with the headline sponsor. So literally, it's 8% Nation 2020. Brought to you by? Brought to you by JD Frost and Company.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thank you for watching!


I'm here in Chongqing. Today I met with the mayor of Chongqing, a city or region of 30 million people. And just like in Canada, where the economic heartbeat of the country is moving to the west, China, the same thing is happening. The economic heartbeat of China is moving to the west. Chongqing is the future of China. We're working to build those relationships today. What an incredible place. You see this baby ginkgo tree behind me? Just part of the breathtaking beauty of the region that is growing so fast. The mayor told me today that Chongqing by 2020 will grow by another seven million people. It's hard for Canadians to understand the size and scope of that growth, but that is opportunity for us at home. Opportunity for jobs for people in British Columbia when we build our friendships with our friends here in Chongqing.


I've got some tattoos when I was younger because I didn't have tattoos when I was younger, the hurt and wasn't prepared for the pain I was going to get when they put the tattoo in. I've had cancer, I've had my eyebrow taken off, I've had my face taken off and everything. I've had all that done to me, hurt a lot.     That is a bang average at best championship side.   I live here.     What I care about is everything and that performance on Saturday. No, just not good enough. It's not even not good enough. It's just the worst performance I've ever, ever seen, ever done play and I've seen them all this season.    That's why people laugh at me.    When you're going for a player, you look at personality, the player's skills.  Then you look at what the player's like. Gomez.  None.  Now, 11 players. Pickfatt was too busy winding the tune fans up, which backfired dramatically.    Well, you had four players. Well, you had four men. That's supposed to be football players playing as a team. I've had cancer. I've had this ripped off my face. I've had cancer there. I've had cancer there. I've had my face ripped off. I've had radio therapy. I've lost my hair and everything.     The money we spent in the last three years alone.  Lest I won the Premier League with a team of has-beens and nobodies and journeymen. That's what they're doing. They won that league. They won the Premier League.    And I totally agree with Baz.    Cumin comes in.  He buys them all.   Rich Allsson. Start of the season. He scored 11 goals and he's brilliant. Wonderful. Well done you sir. Rest of the year.  Sigerson. Free kick specialist.  The only player I'd keep with all that entire team is Dynia.   You got flattened in their box?   Where's our centre horse by the way? Can have no wank somewhere, the pricks. And then he gets flattened. The kid gets to pick him up quickly. He kicks off with him, by himself by the way. Not one ever to play a good round to protect him.   They're not mates. They didn't look out for each other's back, none of them. The offside girl, right?      England's number one.   He punches the ball back with a strike as that, running in towards him. I mean, fucking, what is it? Ped said the other day, you just push it away, push it away. What is he doing? Push it towards him. Then you can see him on the camera, whacking and running to the tune fans to go and get the ball, and he's laughing away. That's not, he's not concentrating.  Do you see fucking, oh my God, any fucking, any one day in that?  I'm not from Newcastle. I might sound like a Jordie, but I'm not from here. I was born in London.           Bernard, one ghoul against who?        He's a prick and all, right?    Because one of them is in the atmosphere.  I've just paid good money to come in and stand here, get count, get pissed on, get rained on, get everything.    Money. Money doesn't buy your success. Team spirit buys your success.


You know, it seemed like that first inning kind of struggled to find a split, you know, and a lot of pitches they fouled off a lot of balls. I just think he wasn't very sharp, you know, even even with the slider, I thought eventually kind of found the split a little bit. But just just not the real good command and feel of all those pitches that we've really seen for the better part of the month. So and that's a hot offense over there that if you're really not on top of it, they can make you pay. He has not lost a game since April 17th. Is it surprising to see him not be able to write the ship while he's on the mound? You know, I mean, you're going to have ones like that every now and then.   He's been so sharp with his especially his secondary stuff, that slider and split for for a while now. And and just not not quite as sharp with that.  It seemed like all night and and, you know, eventually made him pay when he did make a mistake on the plate. Was an A.J. Cole's night either what did you see from him and did you consider getting him any earlier?  So trying to squeeze every bit we could out of out of A.J. You know, you know, some of their lefties obviously gave them some problems and and started getting into some deep counts and that pitch count ran up. So just a tough, tough night finishing guys off. Wally Aaron Tanaka's had trouble with the long ball in the past, but he seemed to have, you know, conquered that in the past month and a half or so. What do you what do you think? What do you think the problem was tonight? Yeah, I think just that just not real sharp with his the slider and the split have been so good now for for the better part of a month that, you know, tonight was just, I think, battle in all night to kind of find that feel, find that command of it. And, you know, just a few too many mistakes against a hot hitting team right now. Mark Green's been one of those back end guys, but over the last month, I think his ERA is like six, seven, five. So how much concern do you have there that about this bump and what do you think has been sort of the root cause of it? Yeah, I feel like we keep seeing signs of him kind of right in the ship a little bit. Obviously, a different kind of situation where he comes in behind like that tonight. You know, I think just being able to trust that he can go to his secondary stuff to keep them honest, whether it be that change up, whether it be the slider. I thought he I thought he had a through a good change up maybe the first couple of hitters in that inning. And then, you know, that that keeps him honest enough and that allows his fastball to really play. And, you know, when he's when he's working the top of the zone with the fastball, it's really dynamic. But he's got to be able to mix it up and down, but at least be able to keep him honest with the secondary. And I think we've seen flashes of of those secondary pitches over the last month, but still just a little bit inconsistent. Brendan, have you noticed anything off with his fastball? There was no surprise that it was coming last year and he was so good last year. Maybe just not airtight command wise, you know, it's important that he gets it to the top of the zone and getting it to a side of the plate that that he wants. But also, again, you know, especially with some of the righties being able to get a strike down a way to with that fastball. But again, at least having in the back of the hitters mind that, hey, he can flip something in for a strike, something of the secondary variety.  Mandy. Obviously, this is largely dependent on score and situation. Sorry, you're fine. Score and situation, but was there any part of you that debated walking Guzman there in his last about just because of the damage he did to you guys tonight and with First Base open? No, no, not not in that situation. No. Danny. You let Boyd hit against Martin with a couple lefties on the bench. What went into the thought process there? Walk ended up not really being available. Emergency situation tonight with with a kind of a neck and illness. Unless it got close late and there was emergency spot that kind of and and voids throughout his careers kind of hit both. Do you expect him to be available? I hope so. I hope so. We'll see. I got to check on. So that led you to, I mean, I know you pinch at bird for Robins there and so you just knew you only had the one lefty off the bench. Basically tonight. Yeah. Meredith. Sorry, with Walker, you said neck and illness. Yeah, he just came up a little bit with a tweak of the neck and then wasn't feeling good before the game. So he was kind of an emergency situation only. When did you know was it just before the game or did you know earlier than that that that he wasn't going to be able to go? He started. I got to check on him, but he started not feeling well kind of kind of right before the game.


All right, I think we're going to get started. And if I don't get too close to that, I think it's the answer. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our session. We're going to be talking about cultural and technical transformations, benefits from Yale's linked data cross-collection discovery platform. I'm Susan Gibbons. I'm Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communications. It's also important to know that I've had about 25 years as a librarian coming into this project. And I'm joined by my colleague, Rob Sanderson, who is Director of Cultural Heritage Metadata Projects at Yale. We're going to split this talk up. I'm going to talk about, well, the success of this project really has two pieces, technology and culture. I'm going to talk about the culture part, and I'll leave Rob to talk and explain the technology. So a little bit of a grounding at Yale. We have three museums and a library. Our Yale University Art Gallery is the oldest university art gallery in the country and one of the largest. We have the Yale Center for British Art, which is the largest collection of British art outside of the UK, brought to us by Paul Mellon. We have the Yale Peabody Museum, which is a natural history museum as well as anthropology museum. And then Yale University Library, which is the second largest library in the US. And so our challenge is how do you take these very, very large institutions with tens of millions of items and a staff collectively of about 800 people and work on a project together? What's important to know is that at Yale, teaching with collections is our bread and butter. We feel that an education at Yale is qualitatively different because of the opportunities that our students have to engage with the collections from across the museums and the libraries and the galleries. And to give you an example or a scale, by the end of this academic year, COVID willing, we'll have had over 1,000 classroom sessions in a special collections or object classroom throughout the Yale campus. So it happens at a very, very large scale. But what doesn't happen is teaching that way across the collections. That teaching happens in the silos. So we have classes in the art gallery, we have classes in the library, but rarely do those classes connect together. Rarely are the collections that are being taught come from across the collections. And that means lost opportunities. And I wanna give you an example of one of those lost opportunities. So we had a class, a medical school class that came to the art gallery to study these lithographs that have watercolor paintings on them that are by the contemporary artist Jocelyn Gardner. There's a long complicated story to these images and I don't have time to explain them all today, but there's three elements to each picture.  There is a collar around her neck, which you can see is quite torturous. And then there's a plant that is at the bottom. And that's a medicinal plant. And so it is the combination of those three things that Jocelyn Gardner brought together in her images. So the class came to the art gallery in 2018. They looked at these seven pictures, they asked questions of it, and they left. And that was the end of the story. But there was a whole bunch of lost opportunities here. And because Jocelyn Gardner's collection actually has 13 images, there's 13 lithographs. The other six were literally across the street at the Yale Center for British Art. But the art galleries catalog and the Yale Center for British Arts catalog do not reference the collections that are across the street. So only a few of us happen to know that both collections have these images. If you have the opportunity to read Jocelyn Gardner's artist statement, you learn that she was inspired to create these images by reading the diary of Thomas Thistlewood. Thomas Thistlewood was a plantation owner and a slave owner in Jamaica. And these diaries, there's about 62 in number, cover the year 1750 to his death in 1786. Where are the diaries? The diaries are two blocks away in the library. You would find out that they're in the library if you tried and searched the library's catalog. You'd find the images, which you see one on the screen here, if you went into the library's digital library and saw the images. So now we're up to four different catalogs. Now the students came in part to understand the plants that are in the picture because they are having medicinal value. Well, of course, with a Peabody Natural History Museum as you would expect, we have the plant specimens and they're in another museum and they're in another catalog. So to find all of this would meant a search of five different catalogs at least and we have about 22 total across the university campus. So our challenge was if we're really serious about teaching with collections, if you want to take that to the next level, there's a number of things we need to do. We need different kinds of classrooms. We need transportation. We need registrars. We need to do all that, but we need to make our collections discoverable in a single place so that the relationships can be understood and connected or so that the user can find new connections that we didn't even know it's there. And that was the goal of this project. Now this isn't the first time we've tried this. Back in 2009, there was a presentation here at CNI by a former colleague, Meg Bellinger and she was in charge of the Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure. What was created ended up being a view find based catalog that had about 1.5 million records in it and it sort of languished. And one of the reasons if we look back, why did it languish is because the project and the initiative was technology driven. At no point did we really take a step back and say, well, what's our culture? What's our governance? How are we going to make decisions? Who makes those decisions? There was also a sense that it was neither top down nor bottom up, but it felt sort of imposed from the sides onto the collections. And so there was sort of this bristling of wait a minute, these are my collections. I want to be a part of this project, but instead it felt like those outside of the collections were making the decisions, doing the programming and all of that. And so it was successful in that it created something but that creation was never embedded into our organizations and was never really used. So now we're trying this again. And the question is what's changed and what will be the success this time around we hope. The first is that my position as a deputy and now vice provost for collections was created in 2016. So that means within the provost office, there is someone whose job is to focus on the opportunities for the museums and libraries to work together, to collaborate and to find ways to foster those opportunities. It is also the first time that you have someone in the provost office who knows collections go back to my 20 plus years in libraries. So to have that appreciation and the advocacy in the provost office for someone who really understands what's under the hood as opposed to just a general appreciation for the objects themselves. So that's one thing that happened. Then in 2017, Yale was fortunate to recruit John Barden as our CIO. When John came and he really looked at the landscape at Yale, what he saw was there's a lot of going on within the collections. There's a lot of technology there. We spent an enormous amount of money there. Shouldn't there be something within the IT infrastructure and budget and organization that reflects the importance of it? And he created the cultural heritage pillar in IT. That means we have dedicated colleagues in IT who are focused on collections. It also gives us a pathway to central funding. Every year there's this large project budget that is put forward and we have a pathway to petition and sort of pitch ideas for collaborative projects within cultural heritage. And being able to sort of grab for that money, that was an impetus for us to get together and say what could we do together? Because we'll have a better chance at getting some of that money if we did that. Another thing that happened, which was important, was between 2018 and 2020, three of the four leaders of those four organizations changed over. And that meant when we recruited a new library director or a new gallery or museum director, we could say to them, here at Yale, we have this ambition. This ambition is for collaboration across the collections, not just this project, collaboration at all sorts of levels. And if you come here, we're expecting you to be a leader in that process. So there's an expectation of what their mindset would be coming into the institution. And what that meant is as those leaders came in, they were bought in already, and then they helped to change the culture of their organizations underneath. So as we got together and said, how do we wanna work together? What do we wanna focus on? It was easy for us to jointly commit to IIIF, because if you look at the early founders of IIIF, Yale's one of them. And the other thing that we quickly centered on is we wanted to do this cross-collection discovery project. So we had sort of IIIF built in there, and then let's figure out cross-collection discovery. The commitment is so large and significant that if you look across those different units, as well as University IT, you see money flowing in from their own budgets. You see new FTEs, new positions. Staff positions have been created, and in creating that, it was a trade-off to potential staff positions within your unit. So there's a commitment there. But the largest contribution by far is well over 100 staff have provided in-kind contributions to make this possible. And with 100 people out of 800 total within our cultural heritage units, you have a real commitment overall and an investment in it because so many people have touched this project. So many people have contributed to it and they wanna see its success. It's hard to bring everyone together. It's harder to sort of move fast, but you do it and it's sustainable. Another key part of this is that we were awarded a grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2020 to 2022, extending into 2023. And that grant allowed us particularly to focus on our metadata because if you imagine bringing together those very disparate collections, what does the metadata look like? And it brought us Rob Sanderson, who has just been a fantastic part of this project. Not only does he bring the expertise, but his generosity of teaching others causes people to wanna come and hang out with Rob, right? And so it's like, let's go hang out with Rob. He's working on this great project. And people are just anxious and eager to do so. And we have other stars throughout our project who are just so generous in teaching others. So it's a teaching opportunity for everyone. So what's been built up over time? A couple principles in our culture. One is that all units retain ownership of their data. The day you say, we have to decide how we're gonna have that particular name entry, is it gonna be Trumbull comma John or John Trumbull, that's where it all falls apart because then someone has to trade something up. We're able to retain all of our original systems of record. And even the Lex project, and this is called the Lex project, which is light, does not create a new system of record. So you're not battling who's got it right. We've all agreed that good enough is better than perfect that we will experiment and we'll move forward incrementally. We've recognized that the expertise exists throughout our organization in those 100 people and there's ways for those people and more to contribute to the project. So we're tapping not only IT specialists, metadata specialists, we have curators, we have librarians, we have user interface designers, we have graphic designers, we have university council and copyright lawyers working with us on the project. So you have lots and lots of people and their expertise coming forward. And so essentially what we're finding is that this collaboration is taking us farther, perhaps not as fast because we could have done it if just a small group worked on it but we wouldn't have had the buy-in on the project. And collaboration is rewarded by our university. The dollars are flowing to us because it's a collaborative project and they believe by funding this in the collaborative sense then the individual units will not come asking for a similar type of project that just they would benefit from. Our process is to build consensus through engagement and experimentation as I sort of referenced. We have an exciting vision. We have leadership at all levels. We have really good project management happening throughout. We've established our shared priorities and our values and some of those values include it's an open project. We are sharing absolutely everything we can that is not proprietary. Another value is that as we work with the metadata we're really focused on bias and racism that may be embedded into our metadata from centuries of this kind of work and that we should collectively try to address that. We have an agreed upon governance model and cost sharing. So when a bill comes forward we're not suddenly all arguing who pays it. We've already established how things are going to get paid for and by whom. And if you can imagine this project has many, many teams many groups and committees have formed and each of those starts with the establishment of norms for the collaboration within that committee and it sort of rolls up and through the hierarchy of all the different committees. So all of this to say we pay a lot of attention to how we do things, not just what we're doing. So the results have been really a cultural transformation for us. This collaboration is contagious. We are working on shared collection storage. We'll have the first shared painting storage where the paintings that are in storage from across our museums will come together. We'll have a shared three-dimensional object storage. We have shared positions. First Native American curator for both the art gallery and the Peabody Museum. We have shared conservation labs. We have a shared digital preservation infrastructure. We're sharing provenance expertise across the organizations. We have shared diversity, equity, and inclusion plans. So over and over again, as we sort of tackle something we are defaulting now to why don't we do this together? That has led to lots of peer connections forming across the organization. For reasons that are still baffling me the curators on one side of the street and one museum were not talking to the curators and the other side of the street at the other museum. Literally it was just a street. But organizationally, culturally they were told we are different and we're different enough that we should not be collaborating. We have shown actually there's so much similarity. Why would you not talk to colleagues who could help you think through a particular problem? And over time it's built trust and that trust has led itself to generosity. We now have meetings where amongst the museum directors and library directors and I we've got a problem and someone says well let me put some money down. Let me see if I can kickstart this and the rest of you can come back in. Or let's try to pilot a classroom where we bring collections together. The Peabody Museum said, I'm building five new classrooms. I'll dedicate one of them for that pilot project. Let's experiment and see what happens. So we have this generosity that is coming through that I think is going to lend us to more and more types of projects. So let me turn it over to the more complicated stuff. Thank you, Susan. So, yes, with such a buildup, I hope to at least continue the good work. So, yeah, in terms of some of the technical principles, one of the core ones is usability. Came up in the last session in this section about accessibility and usability. So the data in Lux is linked open data. It's a graph, a knowledge graph, but at the same time it's usable. It's not loud, it's loud. So linked open usable data. And the standards as part of that linked data are critical because with three different domains, with many different units and departments, each with their own cataloging traditions and then changing cataloging traditions over time, we need to ensure that the descriptions are semantically interoperable. We need to know that when we're talking about Trumbull comma John, we're also talking about John Trumbull, we're also talking about John Trumbull dates and so on and so forth. We use an ontology called linked art, which comes from the museum world. It's an international standards and ICOM, the International Council of Museums. We also, of course, use AAAF. But when I say usable data, who do I mean? Who is it usable for? Because usability is determined by use, it's determined by the audience. So instead of being usability of the researcher at the end, instead what we're talking about for the data is usable by the developers, by Jeff's team, Jeff was sitting in the front row. He's the manager for Wave Jeff. The manager for the team in ICS who does all the hard work in setting up the Amazon instances and installing all the software, building the front end, and so on and so forth. So it is Jeff's team that the data needs to be usable for and where are they from? ICS, they're not domain specialists, right? Most of them had never seen before they came to Jeff's team, I imagine, a mark record or any ADSGML file or the headaches that are TMS for the museums. So that model is very simple at its base. It is activity-centric rather than object-centric, that's the principle distinction that we try to draw. So in the middle there is the activity, that could be the production of an object, that could be provenance, it could be an exhibition, it could be the destruction of an object. It's carried out by some actor, it takes place at some location, it involves objects, be they physical objects, paintings on the walls in the museum, or information objects, the works that are carried by the books in the library. It happens in time, in a time span, and it happens in a certain way, a technique, if you will. And then we just take that, that star, and stamp it over and over again across the board with different and subtly different relationships in between the resources to ensure that we've captured the semantic nature of the work. Cliff mentioned fair already, saying, well, hey, it sure would be nice if it was practical. So we have tried to define what we mean by fair in terms of lux, which is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. So in particular, we make every attempt to have our identifiers persistent and de-referenceable. If there is a URI in the system, you can go to it, it will tell you what it identifies. With all of the great cultural changes, a cultural transformation, this leads to also a sustainable system in which those identifiers are more likely to be persistent. As Kuntzi says, persistence is a service. It is not a policy. You can have all the policies in the world, but if you don't have a service, you don't have an identifier. Already mentioned, we use open licenses as much as possible, standards, and keep the data available as possible. I was fortunate enough to give the plenary session, the keynote, for the April 2020 CNI, which was online at the last minute, as you could recall, at which I introduced this equally un-Google-able acronym, Shared. So sustainable, we talked about it, harvestable. So by harvestable, we mean you can go and get all of the changed data since the last time you came to the system. So we want to make sure that it's not just LUX that we're building, not one application. We're enabling other applications to be built at the same time. Available, reconciled. So reconciled ensures that when John Trumbull comes from one system and from a second system, they are merged together. But the more critical point is we also align them, not internally, but also externally, with the library code name authority file, with the Getty Union list of artist names, with VF from OCLC. And from those external data sources, we can enrich our understanding of those entities and make the user experience significantly better. Diverse, we make absolutely every effort at inclusion and diversity. I co-chair along with my colleague, Elizabeth, the bias and racism committee. Governance, Susan is the sponsor. I'm the product owner. Jeff is the person who doesn't actually have a name. I'm afraid. Sit where the strategy thing is. Sarah Prown is our project manager. So we've tried to make every effort to ensure that we have all of the roles in place, to ensure the sustainability and availability of the system. Technical design and process. So it's very similar to our cultural processes. We use incremental prototypes. We make sure that we can always fall back to the previous prototype in case something goes wrong. We try to ensure that our concerns are separated, not just arbitrarily, but through standards to ensure that there is something that both sides of the equation can point to. So linked open data and to play fundamental. We looked for, for a long time, a solution architecture that would help us to build this. And that was also very collaborative. We had about four months of seven or eight people from around the division, both in ITS and from the collections investigating seven or eight different possible platforms. We eventually made a decision that allows for full text search, graph search, and full text plus graph search. This was our core requirement that we had. And I will tempt the demo gods and try, so everyone stop using internet please. We might be interested in radio packet networks. What? Who would be interested in radio packet networks? Celia, who would be interested in radio packet networks? Here's the book in the library. This is our work. Oh, it's LeFiddler. Who? I think everyone knows this guy, right? With his trademark blue shirt. So we went from a work record to a person record. The person records in places have the left-hand side is designed to bring you back into the collection. The right-hand side is designed to tell you about the person. So I've launched a coalition of network information, a member of the coalition of network information. So we do not have the CNI logo in any of our systems. We do not, in fact, have that cliff as a member of CNI. However, this is where the enrichment comes in. So we started from a work of cliffs, we went to cliff, and now we can start to follow our nose and interact with the information that we have built up across the collection of lots of different records. So we can then see places. Here we are in the District of Columbia with a map and so on. And now we can start to see here on the left-hand side more interactions across the different collections. So we have a photograph probably in the art gallery. There are works created at, so from the library, works about Washington, D.C., an image in this case, all works published at D.C. So if we scroll down, we could also explore up and down the hierarchy, see related locations, related agents and so forth. But if we want to go back into the collection, we can then turn that view into a search to then continue to refine and explore. So yes, now we're a long way from packet networks. So we have facets, as you might expect. But remember, all of this is based on linked open data, rather than a traditional solar index. So all of these names are being pulled in from their records, rather than being embedded in this record. Let me point out this one, ecological zones. Because this is an interesting side effect of having multiple domains being reconciled automatically. What it actually is, is landscapes. So in the natural history world, you would say that a landscape is an ecological zone. A landscape, of course, for the painting perspective, is definitely not an ecological zone. But if you go there to the ecological zone record, it will tell you what it is, including landscapes, wilderness area and so forth. And again, it brings you back into the collection to see further records. In fact, we have 1,319 ecological zones, or indeed paintings, sorry, landscapes, from the various different collections. So, let's just look briefly at one more person. So we can also have, related agents, sometimes they're only, let me just go back. Very briefly, search for trumbles, things he was mentioned. So trumble, his objects, works by or about him, the various trumbles, people. Trumble as a place in Connecticut, concepts that involve trumble and exhibitions. You can go through to look at trumble. And for the more extensive artists and so on, we can have timelines of their work. The locations will be plotted on a map, but it's still being worked on. Related agents, trumble is very famous for his paintings of the American Revolution. So here is agents related to trumble and the works of trumble. And we shall leave it there. So, thank you Demo Gods for working. So, some observations about Lux generally. Lux is a knowledge graph, as you've seen. You can very easily go from radio packet networks to John Trumble and paintings and landscapes. Everything gets connected. This is part of the reconciliation and enrichment process. The particular expected search features are available with full tech search, with facets, with connections. But there's also this graph that underlies the data. And we can leverage that graph using the underlying database. So it starts to shift the paradigm from known item search, you go to your catalogue, you search for the thing that you know. And instead it tries to drive the user towards browsing and discovery. So it tries to ensure that the user can leverage their curiosity and explore things that they may not have even known existed. How do you get from the lithographs on one side of the road to the lithographs on the other side? How do you get to the actual specimens in the Peabody? How do you get to the diaries in the library, in the special collections? It's because of curiosity. That's what we really want to drive towards. And through doing that, we think we are bringing it from search into research. Now you are looting things. You are able to investigate the things that you're interested in. For this reconciliation is absolutely critical, and we are so thankful to the Mellon Foundation for their grant. Because if we had five different entities, all of which were John Trumbull, then you wouldn't have those connections. There would be one record from the library, one record from the gallery, one record from the centre, and so on and so forth. Interestingly, we've found that the reconciled records show up more often in relevance-ranked searches because they've been enriched. There's more connections to them, so they rank higher. There's more keywords, there's more descriptions, so they rank higher. So by using the graph, we enable the user to find more graph. It's a virtuous circle. Cross-domain is hard. That's my third observation. I'm sure it is of no surprise to anybody that the paradigms of describing a work versus describing a archival collection versus describing an object on the wall have taken quite a lot of effort to marry together. Also, labels. So in a pre-linked open data world, we use strings to identify things. Whereas in link data, there's URIs that identify this for them. It has meant a mental shift from people just saying, you know, landscapes. Oh, no, what we really mean is this concept. And if the P-Wadi calls it ecological zones and the YCBA and the art gallery call it landscapes. Okay, that was a bad example. It's over-reconciled, but you see the point. Resources are needed. Trailblazing is quite costly, both in terms of technology. Ask Jeff afterwards how much ITS pays for the four duplicate systems in AWS. But also staff time. As Susan said, there's been more than 100 people working on this project over the last three or four years. Some of whom have full-time on it, some of whom only part-time. It is costly in terms of time. We have chosen to do this. We could have chosen to do something else. There is a finite number of people that work at Yale and I'm very grateful that Yale has decided to put its money where my mouth is and it comes to linked open data and this sort of thing. Hopefully, you've seen how it's going. So, that said, there are a lot of flowers along the way as per the photograph. There have been many joyous moments as well as many head-scratching moments as to why the technology is not working as we anticipated. So, to start to wrap up, we have some known unknowns in particular the extent of adoption. So, we believe that this is going to be well-used and well-loved but it's all in development as you saw. There are some rough edges. There are some visualizations to be finished. I did not demonstrate advanced search because it is not quite ready yet but we will be launching in spring. So, one of the questions that we've tried to keep in mind is what is something that is intuitive and innovative because it's very hard to find that intersection but that's where we're aiming. And then sustainability. By trying to ground this in teaching with collections, by grounding it in the cultural heritage IT pillar, by ensuring that all of the units are participating, we believe that we can make the sort of work mission critical but we don't know. We've seen the ODI if at Flounder, we do not want to see this happen again. So, one of our next steps is instead of using the data set and the platform just to surface this particular application, LOX, instead we want to have it as a service whereby the units or anyone can build their own applications on top. We've already seen some of the units say hey, the data in LOX is better than the data in our collection management system. Can we come and use the LOX data as a new collection website just for us? Because of this enrichment process, because of the reconciliation, because of the connections to all of the other resources. So, we are hopeful that by embedding the work within the cultural context and the technical context of the university, that it will be sustainable. So, Susan mentioned that we will be sharing as much as possible, that's absolutely true. We do use a proprietary database engine called MarkLogic, which is here in DC, which gives us that graph plus text functionality. That said, while we can't share that code, we can share everything else, including all of our data and image content, the processing tools for the data, the configurations and applications that were built on top of MarkLogic, the technical documentation and the documentation. If there's something else that you would like us to share, please do ask. It's only because of a lack of knowledge on our part, that we don't know that this would be useful and that we're not sharing it. With that, I will hand back to Susan. Just to summarize, this digital project is helping to shift our culture, is helping to change our culture. As Rob said, we've moved from collection discovery to really thinking about how we're going to change our culture, how we're going to change our image platform. We're improving our collection data and hopefully other people's data as well. We're bringing others along. It's improved our understanding of our internal culture, but more importantly, it's causing us to ask hard questions of the originating cultures of the objects that brings together these diverse opinions across the room to say, should we be doing this or should we be doing it differently? It has caused a more informed understanding of our cataloging practices from across the collections. You have those who catalog natural history objects talking to those who catalog books and there's knowledge going back and forth. There's a growing understanding of the different domains that are there. That people are really coming to want to work with one another. Early in this project, when we said we wanted to try to build this on the idea of linked open data, we would say, well, what's linked data? I don't understand it. It seems too hard. It seems really complicated. It's adding time. Why are we bothering? A colleague who just recently said, the entry for N. Houdian does not contain her name in cuneiform. Can't we link to that? Suddenly, we have curators and others who are just thinking about linking is the solution to lots and lots of problems. Why just be left with what's on the page here? Let's keep going. That's indicative of the kinds of new conversations that were happening. With that, I think Rob and I would be very glad to answer any questions or have a discussion. If you do have a question, please do use the mic so that it can be recorded. You said you're using a proprietary database behind it for open-link data. Why did you use it for proprietary? Instead of some of the other technologies? As part of the research process while selecting the backend platform, we had two teams of four people each each trying to build an architecture that pulled together open-source products or AWS products to do the same thing. They were Neptune for the Amazon side there was Neptune, Elastic Search and DynamoDB and in the open-source space there was Neo4j, Solar and MongoDB. We concluded by the end of probably the first half of a four or five month research exercise that the cost to maintain those connections, maintain the integration of the individual platforms was going to be much higher than the not cheap cost of getting a proprietary system. We're doing this because it gives us great flexibility in terms of how we can construct the queries. It has several internal APIs for building hybrid graph and text queries which has been absolutely invaluable in terms of advanced search and building all of those connections you saw in the demo from the individual two pages. It was absolutely not my choice. I'm an open-source guy by heart. I think a lot of us are but when we saw the performance and there's 50 million records 861 gigabytes of JSON-LD in there. When we saw the performance and the flexibility we were sold. I should say we are a not-for-profit. We are a not-for-profit by heart. I'm Sebastian Hammer with index data. Thanks for your presentation. I was curious, you mentioned early on that one of the criteria for this project has been to avoid creating a new system of record. It suggests an ongoing ETL type process out of the existing systems. starting to see the value in creating links and embracing this. So, do you see a path, a roadmap for moving or pushing this link data approach out into some of these legacy systems? How do you see those playing in the future? And I suppose specifically, I'm curious about whether some of the work that's already going on with link data and the library community, does that help this? Do you see it as kind of being... I know that you've sat in and been part of some of the link data for libraries, link data for production types of projects. Do you see that path and that work complementing this, or do you see this being a different path, a different perspective on this? No, I think they're extremely complementary. So, the way... So, yes, you're absolutely correct. There's an ETL that harvests the records nightly from the units and puts them through a pipeline that does the reconciliation and enrichment and transforms the records from Mark or from TMS data into link open data. So, the first step in that pipeline is owned by the units. I should be very clear. So, we, ITS and the Cultural Heritage Division, generally, do not own it centrally. Each individual unit has their own ITSARF, and they are responsible for maintaining their connection into the system. That pipeline then uses the $0s in $1s from Mark Records. It uses the equivalent ALSAIMAS links or the close matches to start to bootstrap the connections. Then, once it's got a critical mass of connections, it can then also use traditional label-based reconciliation. But it relies very heavily on the outcome of the Mellon Grant, whereby we had students and staff working together to find that critical mass of identifiers and import them into the systems of record in the units. We're short on time, but there's one more question. Yeah, Annie Murray from Calgary. Really hoping you'll come back and tell us how this impacted your teaching culture. So, if the people didn't cross the street to talk to each other then, but now the system is crossing the street, how do you think this is going to change the teaching practices of your various specialists? And will you make any physical accommodations or movement of objects around campus to enable that for the, so the students see it all? Thanks. Yes, to both. So, for example, one of the many committees that have sort of spun out of this is a Teaching with Collections Committee, and they are educators from across all the different units coming together. And we also have a Teaching and Learning Center, and we're working right now to embed a collection specialist into the Teaching and Learning Center so that when faculty come in and say, I want to consider different pedagogies for my classroom, there might actually be someone there who can then sort of refer back to us. So, it is, has sort of spread to that point. We have shared collection storage spaces that we are building so that you can sort of start to come together. But to your point, in order to teach across the collections, we're going to have to agree on security levels, transportation, art handling, temperature and humidity in the room and go on and on and on, but we're committed to doing it. So, I briefly mentioned that when the Peabody Museum, which is going through a renovation right now, reopens, next fall we're going to dedicate one classroom, which is in the secured area, to start exploring, what does it take to get all those pieces together? We do imagine a future where rather than having art handlers embedded in each unit, we start to create different positions that cut across so that it's one delivery truck and not four delivery trucks moving things all around. But there's a lot to go on that process. So, thank you very much. I know we're at time, but we'd be glad to answer any questions because we do end at five, right? Yes. Glad to answer any questions that you might have and we'll see you also at the reception. You'll be there? Yeah, we'll be there as well. Thank you. Thank you.


Talk about mixing music with free software. How about now? Yeah, that better? Yeah, I'm Mike Tarantino and I'm here to talk to you about mixing music with free software. I am a musician and a recording engineer. I have been a fan of free and open source software for a long time. As many of you know, I live in a free software loving household. And I came here... Yeah? And I came and spoke last year in Perth on a similar topic. I wanted to give that talk to explore how possible it was to incorporate free software tools into a music production environment. And that was a lot of fun. So I'm back here now to talk about mixing specifically. I've been doing that for about 15 years working in the music industry. When I started out, I moved to LA and I got a job at a studio, which is kind of how everybody does it. The place that I was at was weird in that it was this fantastic room with this like storied history and this gigantic beautiful space and all the gear you'd ever want. But when I got there, it was being run by a guy who mainly used it as his own personal writing room. And so the good parts where they had one of everything and you could go on downtime, you could learn how whatever you wanted to use worked and record your own projects and whatever else if you were sly about it. But you didn't get that kind of lots of people coming in and checking out how everybody worked and networking opportunities that you're kind of supposed to get in those situations. But those writing sessions were great. They were enormous, you know, two engineers and a midi guy and synced computers and tape machines and a 108 channel console with every channel filled and you're constantly trying to combine channels from the computer to free up one more slot on the mixer to bring in one more drum machine or something. Oh, still? My face too big? Alright. So there were these massively complicated sessions and it was great to be a part of it. Whenever I got to do it, I was like, you know, this tiny little peon and I was running the vocal switcher which was this custom made box for sewing up different tracks and you could do that on the console but they didn't like the switching apparatus so they had to build their own device and they'd be sitting there and say okay, we want to audition the first three words from this line and then the next word from this take and then the next 11 words from this take and they'd hit play and then they make the edit they want to do and those kind of jobs are funny because there's nothing really complicated or involved, you're not really using your skills but at the same time, when it's going well you feel like you're part of this incredible machine that's like making music possible and that's just kind of magical. But after 18 months, that was kind of enough of that I was ready to go just do something else when my next session came in and the band was Coldplay and it only lasted three days. There was this weird communication issue where they were sending files back and forth to LA to London but not getting any response. So they packed up and asked him what I should do, explain my situation and so we went out to lunch and he gave me like an hour of boilerplate, you know, what you do is you work the studio and you make the connections and what I had been trying to do before and then at the end he said, oh by the way I'm starting up a studio at my place and so I did, I helped him wire that up and I helped the engineer out on the session that came into the place and when that guy was booked and the session kept going, I slipped into his chair and I ended up working with that producer for a long time for the next nine years or so and in that time I worked on a lot of big projects that was when I did the big James Blunt record, this is me with him outside of Sunset Sound Factory rather, although it wasn't big at the time we were working on it and getting yelled at all the time and wondering if it was going to pull that from under us in downtime I worked on a lot of tiny projects, this is me in my basement at the time with Baltimore recording artist Victoria Vox who if you haven't heard of you should because a couple of months ago she played with the Kiwi Lailies which is this year long educational program where kids learn to play the uke and then give a performance at the Auckland Uke Festival I think and that's her doing her thing, not the guy in the yellow pants in purple hat but the other person on stage so after LA I moved to New York to be with Karen and I was still going back to Los Angeles a lot and still doing projects at home, that kind of got scaled back with the birth of our child where I now still work on things and still mix but mostly do it in napsized increments but in that 15 years I have mixed a lot of projects and I want to talk a little bit about what that means and how free software can be used to do it I've been sticking my toes into the free software waters since I had a distro that I unfortunately cannot remember running on a PowerMax 7200 and I could barely check email and I thought I was super cool regardless and I've looked in from time to time on what you can do audio-wise with this stuff and it's really been cool and encouraging to see the steady progress and when I did the talk last year I was really amazed actually at how far harder specifically the digital audio workstation program had come and this here in going over that talk last year to prepare I was very much heartened again to see that I feel like the usability and stability and kind of everything that you want has taken another jump which is great and I'm also pulled in the direction of free software of course by Karen as I mentioned before who is one of the smartest people I know and I have no doubt that when she turns her attention to mastering the ins and outs of audio production she will excel at it as she has at everything else but that has not yet transpired so when I told her that I was going to give this talk and what I wanted to do she said okay great so what really is mixing well in the most sort of top-down way of looking at it mixing is turning a multi-track I have file written here but can also be a collection of different audio on tape into stereo so and the effect doesn't matter whether you're dealing with a two inch tape machine and a thing to play it back besides your dishwasher and a head stack that's this big or a digital audio workstation program that requires a lot of specialized experience to know what to do with the point is that you need this specific playback environment to listen to it and you're trying to turn it into something that anybody can listen to on their car in their car or on their stereo or on their phone or on their phone and when you do that you have a lot of decisions to make the basic ones probably you've got an idea about getting the relative volumes of all the elements together and panning where they go in the stereo field you will be using effects to correct problems to transform the elements into something else to give them more impact more of a sense of what they are supposed to do and you're telling the story of the song and not getting in the way and what I mean by that is when you listen to a successful track there's kind of a sense of inevitability about it where it's hard to imagine it's like it just sounds like what it sounds like and you wouldn't want to change anything and if you're listening to a less successful one, if you're listening with technical ears you might think to yourself I didn't hear that kick drum and now the beat's not working as well or you might think that line in the vocal I would have raised that 3db and then you could hear it better but if you don't have that sort of technical background you still hear the same stuff but you might think of it like the beat kind of went away and I'm not grooving anymore or I was following the lyrics and now I can't because I didn't hear that line and all that stuff kind of it takes you out of the moment and it makes you think about it instead of feeling it and all of a sudden you're outside of the song and that's bad mixing so if you're going to do it with free software, if you're going to do it like I did you're going to use Arter, I used version 3.5.143 and the CAF suite of plugins there are a ton of plugins in the free software world and that last year actually was one of the big a pretty large barrier to getting into using Arter as a mixing tool. You may have been able to get a better organized view of it last year but I was not able to figure out how so when I went to put a plugin on a track, when I wanted to try to find an equalizer for example, you got this huge list and maybe a third of them would say have the word equalizer in the title but they weren't sorted by name but if you did sort them by name some of them were called TAP EQ and one was called something else that starts with M EQ and one was just called EQ so it was very hard to get a kind of mental picture of what the options were and then to top it off when you would try something that didn't have a very descriptive name and you weren't sure what it was it was about 25% of the time it would suddenly make no noise or give you intermittent static instead of the track they were trying to affect so it was hard just from a, I don't know it's not a user interface thing exactly but it was kind of impenetrable to sort of get into what you could actually accomplish that's been much improved when I was interviewing time the first time I did it without even remembering the problems before the first time I tried to plug in you got a list of folders with things categorized into what they do which is great the CAF plugins however which I knew were the ones I wanted to use were all sorted in a folder that was cryptically called plugins but if you know that you can find them all and get to what you want to do the other issue that I had was with the version of the CAF plugins that came with Ubuntu Studio you couldn't add too many or you became increasingly likely to cause some condition which would make your session not open and it wouldn't say there are too many CAF plugins you can't open the session anymore it would say I don't know something cryptic has happened and you must start again but when I figured out what was wrong the answer was to get the latest version from Git and build it from source and so I did and I don't really expect that to get a big reaction from this room but among my friends in the audio world this is a huge deal thank you there was some way towards answering the question that I had from my talk last year can I recommend this to colleagues of mine the answer last year was pretty much no I think in the right context it would be something that somebody without a huge interest in hacking and building things from source code could get into and get some real work done at a fairly high level and that's exciting that's really cool to me so what are the CAF plugins ways to apply effects to your tracks to change the sound of things some basic categories of those effects are equalization and filters that's going to affect the frequency information of the sound give you more low end or high delay and reverb, time based stuff where you're creating more copies of the signal but delayed in time compression affects the dynamic range make the distance between the quiet parts and the loud parts less modulation effects sort of falls into delay and reverb as well modulated up and down which causes these weird swishing metallic phase effects so let's talk about them EQ first, used to emphasize or deemphasized frequencies that you're trying to get at, if you know what that is bear with me, if you don't it's just like the low and high knobs in your car stereo if you've ever done that and turned up the low end and all of a sudden you can hear the bass drum and it all sounds full and warm and then you turn up the high and the guitars probably speak a little better and you can understand the words and hear the symbols you're doing the same thing with an equalizer plugin with more sophisticated control over the frequencies that you're affecting the goal is to clear out what you don't want to hear and emphasize what you do the best thing of course, and anytime you talk to anybody about recording, I always tell you you have to get it right at the recording stage and you're not trying to need to add a bunch of you know, add a bunch of low end later, you should try to capture the beginning with the microphone and that's true, but oftentimes you're not mixing your own stuff and other times it's impossible if you're recording at home, you probably have a pretty limited space and it's going to be tough to figure out exactly how to get the sound that you want without annoying the neighbors and also tearing out all the walls and putting in weird amounts of insulation and foam and everything so yeah, so EQ can help you sort out a lot of those problems the CAF EQ plugin let's see, Karen told me not to do this but I'm going to try it anyway looks like that if you've seen one, you can probably figure out what to do with it pretty intuitively it's worth looking at the bands there are three types, the filters which are the ones on the outside high pass and low pass, I have the low pass one engaged which is the right most knob the frequency is going to be where it starts to cut off everything at the ratio which there is 24 decibels per octave and at that frequency point it actually starts attenuating the signal a little bit before and I believe the frequency point is where it's down by 3 dB you can also on this one go to 12 decibels per octave or 36, steeper is going to be more pronounced effect or more filtered and less steep is going to sound more natural there's one thing missing, do people know what else you might expect to see on a filter that's not here cool, resonance is a control that's on a lot of them and what that does is put a little bit of emphasis right at the point where the filter engages, I see B-down knotting and I'm sure he knows exactly what the mechanical justification for building analog filters is and what this is replicating that's fantastic and I'd love to hear that talk not today but what that does in audio terms is really emphasize the frequency where the filter is and it's going to make a less natural sound if they do like a breakdown in a dance track and there's a snare drum going and it goes that's the filter it goes up and you know leading you to the breakdown where you start to dance, it makes you dance, that's the filter's for the shelving bands are the ones on the inside of the just next one to the right from the high pass filter I've got the low pass on just to show you what it looks like you can see it raises frequencies below the frequency that you select and that after a slope because it's just everything below that to be affected and then the middle bands are the parametrics where you set the frequency that you want to affect the level, how much and then Q which describes how wide the curve is going to be higher values of Q go really narrow that can be really useful for correcting problems if there's a I don't know a singer with a really annoying bit of presence in their voice or a microphone that picked up a lot of that annoying presence you can kind of notch that out with a bit with a narrower Q it's going to be more apparent so if you want a more transparent effect lower values of Q will widen it out let's see this is probably good now there's no way to tell you what frequencies you're going to use to make something sound good it's going to be different for every instrument and every song and every person doing it who has an opinion about what sounds good and so this is what you should do for the kick drum I tend to like 80 hertz a lot and it seems like it's hard to capture that without also getting a lot of low mid information a lot of like 200 to 400 hertz so I end up punching up around 80 a couple of decibels at 80 hertz almost every song I did next on the kick drum and the 200 to 400 hertz I generally end up pulling out that's pretty typical on drums those low mids are real problem frequencies because kind of everything the fundamentals of all the instruments the acoustic instruments anyway are going to be in that range and so you can fill it up really quickly and end up with a track that sounds kind of dull but if you carve that out of your drums then you have room for guitars and pianos and voices and everything else that wants to try to cohabitate in there and it's kind of the same thing with toms with tom drums you end up cutting those out you do too much you sound like you're stuck in the 80s and that may or may not be a bad thing for the snare drum that can often be a problem frequency that gets into vocal intelligibility like 1 to 3k is where a lot of the frequencies that help us to understand the words people are saying are located and snares seem to have a lot of that information so you can get into weird problems where you try to you know you try to turn the snare up to where it's supporting the groove in the right way and it sounds annoying and you pull it back and suddenly the groove is not happening and that issue can be sorted by cutting out a little bit of 1k overheads on the drums the same misuse as before cutting out 400, 2 to 400 can help make room for everything else unless you're trying to use the overheads for the main sound of the kit you know try to say if one was better or worse than the other but it's not really sometimes you'll be leaning on the close mics you'll want really very present close articulated kick and snare and for that case you're going to use the close mics mostly and cut out the low mids from the overheads other times the sound of the kit in the overheads is really nice in which case you'd probably cut out less of the 400 on cymbals a really wide boost at 10k is often pretty nice but every cymbal is really different of course too and you end up having to use your ears because often when you do that there will also be some kind of peaky ringing frequency that as you turn it up gets emphasized and has to come down 300 hertz on electric guitar often sounds good 2k I almost always end up boosting 2k on electric guitars it just makes them sound more like guitars to me I believe that's where the treble knob on Fender Amps is located around and it kind of yeah it just makes it sound like I expect them to sound piano is problematic and because it covers such a huge frequency range it wants to take up all the space so you often in a rock context or something where there's a full band arrangement you often end up carving down a lot of that with filters around 1-2k again often can be problematic and a lot of problems can be sorted sometimes by cutting it out and voices that one kilohertz range is obviously important for both intelligibility and also with too much it starts to get annoying and nasal and you know you just figure out which is happening in either boost or subtract also 6k for some reason seems to add a nice little sheen to me that I always find appealing I wanted to play some things to illustrate what I was talking about mostly about the drums so this is a song I worked on for a bit I pulled it up in Arter this is the intro with no EQ on the drums and the bass guitar I have no idea what it sounds like standing like parallel to the speakers so I hope this is you know you can hear it at least a little bit I'm going to play just the drums and the bass I'll still with none of the EQ that I finally settled on so to me that kick drum is really flabby there's a lot of information in those low mid frequencies that we were talking about before and the bass also kind of extends down below where I want it to and it kind of obscures the low end punch of the kick drum this is just the drums and bass again but with the EQ applied and here is the whole track so is that instructive at all let's see if you know it's good when the bass extends down that low there's a kind of counterintuitive thing that happens where it ends up kind of feeling like it has less bass or it can and the point is like I'm trying to get the main fump of the kick drum to happen pretty low down and if the bass is there too then instead of getting a sort of rhythmic injection of around 80 hertz then you get just this sort of constant barrage of information which reduces that rhythmic effect so that's basically the idea of what I was trying to do and conversely if there's a bunch of those low mids in the kick drum then it can affect where the bass guitar is speaking and you get less of its rhythmic function which is to go dum dum dum dum so compression we use compression like I said to reduce the dynamic range to make the soft parts closer to the loud parts that can help things not get lost in a mix where if somebody's voice for example is loud but then sometimes gets quiet if you can imagine that if that's just playing along in the mix then you suddenly won't hear it and the compression can help make it easier to just hear it the whole time. It can also be used to manipulate the attack which is the first thing that you hear when an instrument plays. It's the sound of the pick on the guitar string for example or the hammer on the piano or the stick on the drum and it can be used to totally suck the life out of any recording and to illustrate that there's a couple of songs from some popular songs the top one is Blueberry Hill by Fats Domino and what do we notice about that it doesn't extend all the way to the top or bottom of the available bit space it doesn't even approach the maximum volume that it could which is fine because there's a lot of space between the peaks the things that are hitting and punching are happening fairly relatively infrequently and then the signal is allowed to then reduce back to a natural level and compare that to the next one down which is Michael Jackson's thriller from about 30 years later I think it was 82 and 56 now there are different sounding tracks obviously they're different types of songs so they sound different regardless but it's a lot fuller if you had to describe the waveform compared to the one above it's just fatter it's bigger there's more information and the average volume is going to be a lot louder and further the peaks are a lot closer they're a lot more of them and they don't extend back down as low although they're still very clearly defined so there's a transient in the middle stereo file and the last one is Shake It Off by Taylor Swift which in spite of that bit in the middle when she tries to rap it's basically a square wave when you're zoomed out this far if you zoomed in very close there are peaks and valleys and stuff but there's also going to be a lot of places where the level of the sound is just completely cut where the waveform rather is completely lopped off and if you do enough of that it becomes audibly distorted I listened to it on a laptop which kind of increases the harshness that you would get from lots of distortion anyway the speakers are kind of designed to make you go deaf it's good, it's well mixed, it sounds right if I could suppose to, it also fatigues your ears really fast and probably is bad for your mental health after a while but the trend obviously has been to get an increased average volume and a lot of that is achieved with ever more extreme amounts of compression on both the individual sound sources and on the stereo file that you're mixing so for you to do that you may use the CAF compressor talk a little bit about what the controls are the graph there is trying to tell you what it does it's input gain on the x-axis and output on the y can you see the faint line going from the bottom left corner to the top right? that's the unaffected signal so whatever the level in is going to be the same as the level out what do we notice about the solid line above it? well it's higher which is showing the effect of the makeup gain towards which is the bottom right knob and that's just going to be the amount that you turn up the output to compensate for the amount of compression that you've got the threshold next to that is also a very faint no it's not a line it's just the point on that graph where the slope of the solid line changes and what the threshold does is as the signal the compressor if its volume exceeds where the threshold is set then the amount of gain that is output above that threshold is going to be attenuated by a ratio which you can set which is the next knob over 2 to 1 is a good place for subtle effects 4 to 8 for more aggressive and if you go as high as 10 you're basically limiting where you're just not letting anything go above that threshold like Taylor Swift the knee is set to zero there which means that as soon as the signal hits the threshold it immediately has the ratio applied to that input gain if you turn it up then that sharp change of angle becomes on the graph a curve which just means that as the signal starts to approach the threshold it's going to be attenuated a bit and by an ever-creasing amount until it reaches the full amount of attenuation so talk a little bit about how to affect the attack because those are the two controls that we didn't talk about there's attack and release and what that means is how long it takes for the gain attenuation to take effect and then the release is how long it takes to return back to its normal level if both of those are very low that makes it more like just a limiter that stops the gain from increasing above a certain amount if the attack is at zero it's just going to kill any transient information at all, any sense that there's a sort of peak sound that happens before the sustaining part of the sound with lower values but still not particularly high a sense of attack that wasn't there before or emphasize whatever is there because the initial transient happens which happens quickly enough not to get attenuated by the compressor and then the sustaining part does get pushed down if that's also above the threshold so by setting it right if you've got a lifeless bass guitar for example just kind of thumping away and not particularly functioning rhythmically you can put a compressor on it to increase that and get more rhythmic drive out of it and higher values are going to just make it more transparent and also make it do less release oh yeah if you set a very low release time it's going to increase the average volume because it will immediately rise back up to the threshold instead of waiting to do that after the level of the input goes down below the threshold in the first place let me try to play you what I'm talking about this is the drums from that same song with no compression here is the same drums this is an extreme amount of compression applied to them do you hear what that does? the snare sounds a lot longer that's the main thing I was trying to get out of that, that and more cymbals and the reason is the whole kit is above a certain level and then it's all getting crunched down so the decay from the snare that you get in the activation of the room ends up happening at about the same level as the initial attack on this extremely compressed version and what that lets you do then is combine them back down to the same level and when you combine the two, the uncompressed with all the unaffected transient information and the compressed one with the sort of extended emphasized decay of the snare then you get that which sounds to me more like what I expect drums to sound like in a rock context how are we doing? I didn't talk about delay at all but I think we're five do people want to ask questions or should I keep going or what should we do? question just in terms of if I get a vote in what we do now with our time I'm loving being able to hear the differences between two different tracks and for me if we could have the comparison side by side so like play one track and then play the other track right after it and then talking for an aft but not in the middle. Is that possible? Am I being too picky? Yeah, no I cannot talk. I can just play stuff and because I'm loving being able to hear the differences. Sure. Thank you. I'm going to talk for 15 seconds about what was going on there for the audio geeks which is just, does anyone know what parallel compression refers to? Yeah, kind of. Okay, so in this setup all the drums are feeding two buses and one of them is compressed and one of them isn't and so if you mute the compressed one you get the first thing we listen to if you mute the uncompressed one you get the second thing. When they're both playing you get the combination which is what we want. We want both compressed and uncompressed signal for the transients and the sustain and the ambigination. Yeah. In the compression plug-in down on the bottom left I think I saw a mix knob I was wondering how doing parallel compression is different to adjust to the mix. Literally reading my mind. Yes. The mix is a handy knob that lets you just adjust the amount of unaffected versus the amount of affected. Now in this setup you can't see it unfortunately. The buses are nah, the plug-in window is broken. Okay, the buses are over there towards the right and there aren't actually any other plug-ins going on to accept the compression. So in this case there is no difference except usability. I personally would rather look down immediately see what the level of one is and what the other be able to adjust them individually rather than having one knob that affects the level of each but what the parallel setup would let you do is apply more effects to, apply different effects to the compressed versus the uncompressed. So if you want to EQ them differently you could, if the compressed one was giving you a lot more thump in the kick or really harsh symbols which could easily happen. That's kind of with extreme compression especially it ends up kind of emphasizing the stuff that's already emphasized. Then you could use some EQ to dial that back but not have that EQ affect the uncompressed tracks. So I have a somewhat of a tangential question. I don't know very much about audio engineering but from things that you've told me and producer of my podcast Dan Lynch have said there's kind of a garbage in, garbage out truth about audio engineering. If your source tracks don't sound good there's only so much you can do with a tool like this to clean them up. And so given that a lot of people in this room probably if they're going to do any of this they're going to do it with whatever equipment they have around whatever mics they have around do you have suggestions about how to get the source tracks good enough so that when you start feeding it into this process it's going to give you the best results? That's my recording talk. So come next year to... is it Canberra next year? One thing I'll say is controlling your space. We know what it sounds like when you try to record your voice on your microphone on your laptop and you can hear it reflecting off of the walls and this sort of really but not quite horribleness and if you try to put that stuff into a track all those artifacts get in the way. So I mean I've done ridiculous things like set up some mic stands with towels over them so that you know to keep the reflections down. I knew some people who had a closet where they just put foam on all the walls and were able to get kind of a deader sound that way and you know you don't necessarily want the deadest sound possible but if you have that you can then apply like reverb and delay effects to get a sense of space whereas the space that you actually had available was terrible. You know what I mean? So that's a big issue is just controlling the space here and kind of eliminating it from your recordings. I was interested and you said you had all these different libraries that you could use and I know that people will always lament they're like digital you lose all this wonderful retro analog stuff and I was wondering if you could talk about are some of the libraries in there sort of designed to give you back like you know like stimulate like ribbon mics and Leslie effects and all those weird retro kinds of things. Yeah. That stuff is not so great at least as far as I was able to determine within the plugins that are available in order. There is a bunch of distortion plugins that you can kind of add in a little bit actually speaking of which to kind of get you into that sense of equipment running near its limits like hearing the effect of circuits that are kind of starting to maybe have a problem or not. And the compression does some of that same stuff that can start to correct for something that was recorded conservatively where you don't get that sound and it sounds kind of limp and anemic and if you run it through a compressor that can be one way to start to try to get some of that life back even though I said compressors before we're going to suck the life out of everything. For everything I say the opposite is also true which is I don't know. I mean it's very frustrating about recording but it's also one of the things that keeps me interested in it. Now seems like a good time to play the bass. There's also some parallel processing. And what's that? Just a follow up on that. The outdoor software will load Windows VST plugins and that opens up a much faster library of effects that you can possibly use. Yeah, it absolutely will. And why didn't I? I don't know that there's a... I didn't honestly look into it all that hard. I don't know if there's a huge library of free VLC plugins. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, cool. So yeah, worth noting absolutely better options here. I also had stability issues still doing this even this year. And so adding another layer of... it doesn't run them natively, does it? Like you need to add... You do need to install wine to Windows Emulation layer. Right. But I think you can actually load them straight in now without hooking up Jack or anything. Yeah, since I... if things had run swimmingly and I hadn't had any crashes or weirdness, then I would have gotten more adventurous about adding in more layers of software. I was scared off by somewhat frequent crashes and issues. But you're absolutely right. And there are many more options besides the CAF stuff, even just that come with it. And many other options that you can look into finding online to enhance what you've got. What are we doing? We were thinking about... oh yeah, listening to the bass. So this is what the bass guitar sounded like without compression. Sounds like a bass guitar. Exactly the same to me from theirs. It may not be the system to really demonstrate in a pronounced way the effect that that has. However, there was also some parallel processing applied to that. There was a second bus of bass that's distorted. And the sum of them sounds like this. So what that second bus did that was running in parallel was add some distortion. There's actually... it's funny that you talked about getting those analog sounds back because there is... I think they called it like the tube saturator or something like that. And that's what used for that one to get the distortion. What distortion tends to do is increase the upper harmonic content. And so from that sort of very low bass guitar, you suddenly get it speaking a little bit more in the midrange. And in this track that seems to be beneficial. We have time for one more quick question. I'm very conscious of the time, but I'm wondering if in about three minutes you could tell us how not to go horribly wrong with reverb? Yeah. When you say horribly wrong, you have specific problems in mind, like turning it into mud and... I'm just conscious that you do tend to use reverb in recordings, particularly vocals. And it's an area where it can go very pear shaped very quickly.  Yeah. I don't have recordings, but the big thing that will do is it just muddies things up really fast. It can. And so often what I find is that instead of in places where you think you'd want to use reverb and make a create like a virtual room to put the sound into you're going to use delay instead. Which kind of gives that sense of space. It's not really reflections that you'd get from a reverb plug-in or from an actual room that you're in where, you know, when I'm talking to you, you're getting the sound from the speakers directly but you're also getting it bounced off the walls and coming to you which takes longer. So putting on just a little bit of delay, like on the order of under 20 milliseconds. And not super loud and not with a whole lot of feedback either can kind of give you the sense that something is seated a little further back or put it a little more in a space which can help sit things into the mix. It's kind of the classic thing with vocals, right, where you do all this work.  And also just using it when there's space to not when things are really full and when there's a lot of information happening in all frequencies and not when the tempo is too fast. That's all we've got time for unfortunately. Thank you very much. I can present you two with one of these beautiful things. Awesome, thank you. Thank you very attention.