SONG: “Turn Me Back”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: “CRISPR’s hopeful monsters: gene-editing storms evo-devo labs,” Nature, 17 Aug 2016, as used in the post “Prepare to make prehistoric monsters..”
ABSTRACT: This is the first song I’ve ever recorded on Linux. I’ve converted my 12-year-old secondhand laptop to Lubuntu and am running Reaper (the recording program) in WINE (the thing that makes Linux pretend to be Windows). Love the way the rest of the computer works now, hate the way Reaper keeps freezing up in mid-
(ugh)
-procedure. Phooey.
Keeps me up late, for one thing.
This is a song that, other than the computer-wrestling, fell together pretty well, at least as an instrumental. There are about two and half more verses I couldn’t really fit in, but I think the general idea gets across not too clumsily: It’s about using CRISPR to make *yourself* more primitive to wipe away your memory and all those missteps that led to you being human in the first place. Sort of “Since we broke up, I wish I’d never been born!” taken to an evolutionary level.
There’s the original guitar thing, a little bit of guitar tweedling, a whistle (that was originally there as a placeholder for the melody), a cello in the choruses and a double bass in the verses, and two SoundFont drums (one didn’t have a very punchy snare). That’s a lot for a program running inside another program running inside a free operating system on a near-antique computer to handle. With more processing power, I think I could have de-hissed and de-popped the vocals a little more, or just recorded a slightly cleaner track. But there it is.