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I feel like I'm watching this 3walks project unfold in front of me one little recording session at a time. Usually at this point in a project I hate everything but I've been pacing myself a bit more and I only hate parts of it right now.
Spent the morning before work re-arranging my studio, or at least getting a start on it. I found a new home for my mixer so I can use my computer more easily for recording again. Louis the cat doesn't even seem interested in sitting on it anymore, so that's good. Little space optimizations make a lot of difference.
Attempting to reconcile my interest in generative radio with my desire to be mostly offline...
The power went out last night and it was kind of fun. I should invest in some candles though.
Rainy & gross days are A-OK.
One of those days where everything seems lost.
Today at the river I wished I had a recorder with me. I'm usually content to just listen, but maybe I'll bring one with just in case from now on... sitting and listening to the usual river sounds, behind me a theatre troupe started to rehearse. Then, a barge passed, making a low slow tone as it moved along. A while later: a train made way probably 20 feet from the stage. Among all that: fish jumping. It was nice.
Keith Rowe deciding to give up the guitar because he made one unintentional move is surprising -- the implications of obsession with control for someone who has been so invested in improvisation is weird. Still, he obviously doesn't need a guitar to get the job done & it must feel terrible to have to fight your body to do what you most love. (That much I can identify with for sure.) Anyway, this new Erstlive recording of his final guitar concert is very nice. (And the moment he calls out where he loses control is totally invisible in the context of the rest of the performance...)
Debugging new firmware in a notebook by the river is fantastic, but some days I get more accomplished just sitting and looking out at the water.
Just watched a very exciting update about the state of Nim... I'm trying to stay skeptical because it sounds too good to be true, but there's one way to find out I guess!
The slower I move, the more I actually accomplish.
Sigh... printer is still just as broken as ever. Oh well. (At least it makes for a fine standalone xerox machine...)
Oh happy day! A firmware update for my extremely crappy printer. Fingers crossed I'll be able to print from an SD card finally...
When I hear the word productivity recently I hear it as wasting time. Maybe I'll revive the term busybody. There was never such a busybody as the productive person.
I feel like I've been sitting on a plane near a crying baby so long that I don't even remember when the baby started to cry, or why I'm on this flight in the first place. I was just sitting there on the tarmac, miserable. Now I'm off the plane, I'm back home in a quiet & peaceful spot, my thoughts free to explore ideas for days on end like it was when I was 16 years old.
O Menander, O life, O Cheers, O Frasier, which imitates which?
I really like refactoring. Clean(er) code feels nice.
(Last txt was a bit cryptic, but I have on long term lone 90% of a synth that a couple friends produced a few years back, and I'll finally be able to start digging into their world.)
Synthesis weekend approaching. <3
I feel a bit idiotic for only just realizing this, but I can basically just worry about porting over the unique parts of pippi into the new c89 libpippi. Stuff like the Tukey osc, my pulsar osc, waveset synthesis routines, dynamic stochastic synthesis etc etc. Everything else I can just use the daisy DSP stuff or good old Soundpipe! Obvious I guess, but still nice to realize... that will get me more quickly to the music part. :-)
Oh, rad! I wasn't expecting this to work... I used dvdbackup to mirror a copy of a 5 channel James Dashow album, which also comes with a stereo mixdown... and I can just play the VOB files back directly with moc like any other album! Nice work moc devs.
*Peeks at HN.* Ah, I see you are arguing about your favorite programming languages again. Carry on...
I got kinda excited because I discovered my crappy new printer can print PDFs from an SD card. At the moment the only way I can get it to print halfway reliably is to upload a file somewhere and have the printer download it. Anyway, so much for offline printing... I have yet to get it to actually print a PDF. It seems like you have to use special Canon software to create the PDF... I may have to give this printer to someone with a smartphone. Are all new printers a big pile of internet-connected garbage now?
All glory to the public domain
Every time I dip into my stack of computer music journal I get totally overwhelmed in the best way. Among those recently earmarked to read: a 1988 article about applications of the wavelet transform...
I'm no Luddite. (I'm a computer musician for crying out loud.) New tools are not bad -- as long as they remain tools. The internet for example, is a wonderful tool, but it's not a very nice *place to be*... the land of privileged images. (I say typing this message to upload at some point later on today...)
Had a nice talk last night with J about digital art. We talked a little about Walter Benjamin's "Work of art in the age of..." and the description of a kind of linear conception of *technological* history in art, where there's this sort of idea that spectacle follows technological breakthroughs. The stunning architecture of Gothic cathedrals, the impact of hyperrealism in an age before photography, and so on. J mentioned "post-internet" art, and he's been working for an artist who is working on new ways to present digital artworks... which is still very much within this linear conception of art history being basically a story of technological innovation... and that all just feels hollow. If we accept that one role of art is to be transcendent in some way -- to pull us into a critical or aesthetic place where life maybe looks different, or we can step outside ourselves in some small way and mingle with something much greater than us. The awe-historical timeline, maybe... If that's the case then the place to look for awe in 2021 is not in networked digital spaces per se. I think, as Jameson suggests, we need to find some way back to a positive relationship with nature. It's only the awe of the interpersonal and inter-natural that seems interesting now...
The artifacts in these Cheers episdoes are great. Sometimes, they must have lost the film and the scene switches to videotape, dark & warbly. This episode seems like it's running about 0.5% too fast, the intro sequence warbles audibly. I love watching for out-of-focus shots, overblown lighting & shakey cameras. It's so alive.
Using my score for Each Band of the Telephone Wire as a case study to see what to add to libpippi next. Looks like I got a ways to go, but I might be able to make a simplified version of this with a few new modules...
One of these days I'm going to have to finish reading the GNU Make book...
Huh, everybody's booking tours already.
It's still fun for this trombonist to press buttons on a trumpet. It's such an expressive & neat instrument. Small, mechanically fluid (compare twiddling fingers around on a trumpet to the huge gesticulation when moving quickly from 1st to 7th position on a tenor trombone etc) and I'm still impressed with how easy it is to glide the pitch across more than a semitone just with your embouchure. It's basically the opposite in trombone-land, I'm so used to the clean popping between partials of the trombone and manipulating fine pitch with the mechanical affordance of the slide. The trombone wants to settle into a resonance really strongly, which is not at all like the trumpet where I frequently get lost as a beginning player and find myself needing a reference pitch when picking the thing up cold most of the time.
Hm. c89 doesn't define sinf in math.h... so maybe I should target c99 in libpippi for the sake of microcontroller performance...
Hm. c89 doesn't define sinf in math.h... so maybe I should target c99 in libpippi for the sake of microcontroller performance... needs further investigation.
Art Ensemble of Chicago on the turntable all day. <3
I added two large carrots to today's drinkable veggies, and handful of fresh spinich to go with the frozen kale. Note to self: don't forget the banana next time and add a little more mango and maybe this is the recipe.
Capitalism consumes history and nature itself. Omnomnomnom
I could never choose between working quickly and working slowly. It's not either-or -- if everything was quick I'd miss something, if everything was slow I'd miss something else.
On the usefulness of slow work: sometimes you have to cut to cure. The last pass I made was bold and sliced up an underlayer I'd previously felt a bit precious about. It was totally the right move, and I can hear what this thing could be again because of it. If I'd tried to rush my way through it, I never would have heard things that way.
Picked up on a long-term project over lunch. The last time I worked on this I made lots of changes I completely forgot about, and it sounds much better than I remembered. That's nice when that happens! I also thankfully found the original pitchmap for the entire thing, so writing additional parts will be much easier... I'm going to see if ardour has an API that will let me programmatically insert labels at each chord change into the session. That would be very useful!
Chasing the new is like observing a zero crossing. There's probably no zero, the interesting thing is the relationship between what came before and what came after.
Clever writer, poor reader
I could quote rhetorical gems from every paragraph in this introduction. I forgot how fun Jameson is to read.
Another great one from Jameson in this introduction: "our utter forgetfulness of the past exhausted itself in the vacant but mesmerized contemplation of a schizophrenic present that is incomparable virtually by definition."
lol Jameson: "this unforeseeable return of narrative as the narrative of the end of narratives"
Another nice insight: Jameson rejects postmodernism as a social order -- and in that sense it does sort of operate ahistorically as just a new permutation of capitalism; a conservative absorption of culture, not a progression.
We're just passing full bloom postmodernism I think. The flowers are wilting, we're trying to find nature again... it's impressive that Jameson was writing these observations when late capitalism was just starting to show its budding colors. He also looks pretty good in this introduction for being vocally skeptical of the whole "end of history" thing... the mention of Walter Benjamin predicting some kind of fascist rise of a culture obsessed with aesthetics is also pretty amazing. I'll have to read more about that. Jameson claims by the time he's writing this (mid 1990) that Benjamin's worries were unfounded and it's all just a bit of "fun" actually mirrors the fake news "just kidding" fascist culture of today... maybe Benjamin got it exactly right.
Doing some lunch break re-reading of the introduction to Jameson's Postmodernism... at one point he describes postmodernism as a parasite on modernism. :)
"Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which 'culture' has become a veritable 'second nature.'" - Fredric Jameson
Louis the cat is squeezing himself as hard into the corner of the window screen as he can, longcat nap-style.
Today's batch: 10oz frozen kale, 10oz frozen mango, 1/2c coconut water, 1/2c pineapple juice blend, 1c water, 1/2c greek yogurt, 2 bananas, 4tsp ginger juice, 4tsp chia seeds, 2 heaping tsp matcha, 1 large spoonful of peanut butter, 4tsp hemp hearts.
Graphics programming is so much fun :)
Oh if you could hear me now, meowing the Cheers theme... maybe we're neighbors!
There's a whole world of musical possibility between total serialism and total intution.
There's a whole world of musical possibility between total serialism and total intuition.
New smoothie batch today: 2 bushels of kale (filled the food processor up 2x!), 3/4c carrot juice, 1/4c orange juice, 1/2c coconut water, 1/2c greek yogurt, 2c frozen mango, 2 bananas, 1tsp matcha, 4tsp chia seeds, 8tsp hemp hearts, 8tsp ginger juice.
I'm actually running out of things to do online when my modem is on. It's a nice feeling. :-)
Yeah, the OJ is the problem taste in here. Next time no OJ, more kale & ginger!
Experimenting with new fruit & veggie delivery methods. Today: 1 bushel of kale, 1/2c carrot juice, 1/2c carrot & orange juice mix, 1/2c greek yogurt, 1/2c coconut milk, 2c frozen mango & strawberries, 1 banana, 1tsp matcha powder, a sprinkle of chia seeds & hemp hearts... yum! It's too sweet for me though. Would be nice if it were a little thicker. Could use 2x kale and a bit less... maybe just cut the OJ? Dial back the coconut water? Strawberries too probably, but mostly because they make it all a sickly brown color haha. Oh and I forgot the ginger!!
After listening to pop music I feel like I need a shower. Like after a day at the beach.
lol race against the clock to perform a system update before the timer on my cable modem brings me back to blissful internet-free-land...
This experiment is really working out well so far. I feel like I have so much time in the day! I'm not doing this to be "more productive" but without constant distractions from the internet all day here I am at my lunch hour having already put in a full day's worth of work basically, and still I had plenty of time to go run errands, play with my cat, have a nice breakfast, study my topic de jour, etc. Always-on is bunk.
This experiment is really working out well so far. I feel like I have so much time in the day! I'm not doing this to be "more productive" but without contant distractions from the internet all day here I am at my lunch hour having already put in a full day's worth of work basically, and still I had plenty of time to go run errands, play with my cat, have a nice breakfast, study my topic de jour, etc.
At some point between high school and college I had a kind of personal revelation that seems silly in retrospect. Until around then I'd considered the stuff I was doing on the computer with sound and the stuff I was doing with pencil and paper (scores my friends and I would perform) was the same. I'd kept them basically in their own corners -- there was the sound art type stuff and there was the pencil and paper composition stuff. Suddenly it clicked that these were the same thing -- it was all sound, all music... obvious as that sounds now it felt incredibly freeing. I think I'm experiencing the same moment now in considering my music work and my audio/visual/generative work as different threads... the walls are coming down and it all feels so obvious yet again in retrospect. :-)
I'm experimenting with just powering on my cable modem for three hours a day... once in the morning, once at the end of the work day, and once in the evening. So far it's a vast improvement.
Oh huh, I always thought the golden hour meant both sunrise and sunset, but I guess photographers usually call twilight the "blue hour" -- makes sense! Planning a little blue hour trip to a patch of lush forest by the river at the end of the week. :)
twtxt is still the only "social media" that doesn't actually feel like social media to me... maybe because in reality the damn thing is just a text file on my server. :-) <3
I don't know why I ever stopped growing wheatgrass for Louis. Sometimes I see his face light up as he remembers it and pops over to the windowsill to bury his face in sweet sweet grass. :)
I like establishing routines more than keeping them I think.
I can see the sinewave of my own mood skimming through past twtxts...
Maybe Satoshi was an anti-capitalist after all?
Idle thought: what if the way out of capitalism is just to destroy the social acceptance of normal fungable currency, not power structures or capitalism itself per se... The crypto craze actually might be the prelude to currency eating itself? Then what? Maybe instead of incentives based on wealth accumulation, society can find its way to more socially positive behavior, where debts are expressed in terms of your benifit to society in general... It's nice to think about, anyway.
Just discovered an unsaved vim buffer sitting in a local tmux session I forgot about for days now. Yikes. At least it was easy to remember where I left off. :)
@jlj agreed...! makes me think of the intro to Helmholtz' *On the Sensations of Tone* where he points out that the book presents his findings as though he'd taken a straight path to the clear road while the actual research process looked more like spinning in circles and getting lost in the woods... also thanks for the rainbow video link, looks interesting!
Now playing: David Grubbs - The Coxcomb. Hell of a record.
It probably looks cool to present some info on social media or a personal wiki or etc with zero context... I really wish people would cite their sources more often though...
In life, triage is toughest.
Maybe I'll move to Alaska and become an unlicensed private investigator specializing in art and jewelry theft.
Went to the river to forget the internet for a minute, but it's so nice out I'm having picnic table office hours for a while now too. <3
I'm ready for the social media era to be over now.
Doing a bit of MIR literature review today, catching up with what's happened in the last few years. (At least the stuff I'm interested in right now!) Essentia is tempting although huge. Still might be the best fit for our use-case...
We got a little snow the other day, but the forecast has been calling for it so much there must be someone nearby buried in it. For now my window is open and I can hear the drain flow as it melts back into the river...
New life goal: play the rhodes part in the Bob James Taxi theme song with a Bob James cover band.
Kitty discovered my little stash of TRS cables hanging by the desk. Well, now it's half a stash hanging by the desk and half spread over the floor or in his mouth.
There aren't enough blankets in the world to smother me into sleep. ...but I'll take them all.
I need to start thinking smaller, maybe. Short term. Now. Sometimes I live in the future too much, maybe.
The new badges on the merveilles webring site are wonderfully useless fun. I'm looking forward to seeing more pop up & it's a nice choice to have them hosted remotely so I can keep tinkering on mine too. :-)
Communication in 2021 is surprisingly fucked. We've abandoned technologies that are totally fine (email, RSS, xmpp, even SMS and amazingly normal voice telephone calls..) for a mileau of closed bullshit platforms that don't interoperate. (slack, discord, iMessage, etc etc etc) This is not a novel observation but it drives me nuts.
DNA lounge emails have a clever method to get you to open them... they always begin with a joke, so you can just see the setup in your inbox... and have to click in for the punchline. Effective!
Someone just sent me a video they made for a song I did almost 20 years ago and it made me feel very happy.
I'm curious if gemini will survive. Maybe that doesn't matter or is the wrong way to think about it...
I can never remember the order of the potrace cli arguments for some reason.
Related: I didn't realize Kyma was originally written in smalltalk. The ACM paper linked in the scholar search above looks like an interesting read... "micro" for them in 1988 meant microcode...
I'm completely incapable of taking notes or brainstorming at a computer. I just tried it again and failed... notecards it is again then.
My nephew this weekend after we spent a few minutes on the phone trying to debug an issue with discord audio chat: "I suppose I could just call you with my telephone when we play..."