I dragged myself to the workshop in a state of exhaustion this afternoon, half blind with fatigue for reasons too tedious to detail.  I arrived first, five minutes before the session was supposed to start.  Tim got there a few minutes later.  Luckily, the kids didn’t arrive until five minutes after they were scheduled to arrive.  It was an odd day, slight underwater feeling, everybody sort of floating around jellyfish-like.  I don’t think more than 20 frames were shot all session, the usual number is two or three hundred frames.

I called two kids over, gave them headphones and the three of us began making a soundtrack. I couldn’t get the wonderful new Audiobus interface to work, but I gave them a taste of the cool sounds and after a few minutes of futility, apologized for not having had time to learn it well enough before the session.  I shut it down and switched to garageband, which I know well, and which neither of these kids had used.

Within moments Lily was moving her hands purposefully on the touch-screen.  They recorded an adorable track of childish bickering, but neither of them liked it much.  I deleted it as they watched and they did it again, less contentious and still adorable.  They still didn’t like it.   I told them to leave it, we could mute it.  Lily dragged a drum loop they chose into the track.  I told them to listen to the beat and play along.  I urged them to play only a bit, since they could always add more on the next track, and it was impossible to subtract if they otherwise liked the track.   They pulled up another mic and began pounding the table in time with the drums.   They played a piano together.  I took my headphones off and walked over to see what the animators were up to, after muting the piano at their request.

When I got back I saw they’d deleted their adorable vocal track, along with the piano.  I was dismayed, and told them so.   They were too busy to pay much attention to my dismay, another girl was with them now, drumming on the table.  I put a pair of headphones on her and walked away to start cleaning up, as Lily’s twin brother laughed, headphones on, pounding the table.

As we were leaving I said to Tim, “that’s what happens when you let the inmates have complete control of the asylum, you get no input into the output.”   Tim commented that kids always find their own voices weird and distasteful when they first hear them played back, and that’s probably why they’d wiped out the adorable tracks.

I walked a good way with the heavy pack on my back, and a duffel bag hanging at the end of my arm.  I was actually too tired to stop walking, and as the temperature began to drop I paused to pull my hood over my head.  I sat on a bench.  I ate a slice of pizza and took Excedrin.  I eventually got on the subway and listened to Bill Moyers when I was not nodding out, and when I was.

Made it up to my apartment, took my clothes off and got under the covers.  Charging the iPad I decided to listen to the track, see what they’d wound up with.  I’ll be damned, they had a vision.  They weren’t going for adorable, it was the percussion they were after.   Two tracks of poly-rhythmic table banging, along with the drum track.  They had an idea they were going for.  I was impressed.  They hadn’t opted for any of the fancy gimmicks they’d tried in garageband, they were going for the real thing.   Playing the only instrument they had, the table, they jammed, creating a convincing jungle of percussion.