Happy solstice: Sun, it will be nice to see you again.
week 74
– My last day of my internship at The Echo Nest was today. I will miss them.
– The good people at This Is My Jam are doing their Jam Odyssey again this year. If you want to actually know what I cared about this year, it’s a pretty good place to start.
– The School for Poetic Computing
– The NSA paid RSA to weaken one of their random number generators. This is disgusting on every level.
week 73: smaller things
Apparently nothing happened this week. I am packing to move back to Montreal, realizing how much of a hermit I’ve been this year, and thinking of ways to fix it.
week 72: small things
– So this is really interesting: Bespoke controllers.
– TWO HOURS from the Paradise Garage closing party.
– In other DJ set news, I am slowly catching up with my massive backlog. Some highlights have been Deepchord’s RA Podcast anbd the Mr. Sunday Night / Gowanus Grove closing party
– Julia Easterlin put out a summary EP in October: you should buy it.
week 72: automatic music hackathon
I went to Brooklyn, I went to a hack day, I built a thing called grid, which touches on a few things that I am wrestling with for my master’s thesis.
Grid takes an image from Wikipedia, turns that image into, wait for it, a grid of buttons, and then maps those buttons to pitches, based on the scale that you specify. The mapping is based mostly on the colour, and slightly on the location of each button in the grid.
Specifically, the mappings are:
- Colour saturation is volume: more colourful colours are louder.
- Pitch class is hue, mapped to the given scale: hue, like pitch, wraps around.
- Octave is brightness: lighter colours play higher octaves.
- Timbre is the RGB values: they scale a sine, triangle, and square wave.
- Filter frequency is diagonal: the x + y location in the grid.
The synthesis is all done in WebAudio. This hack would be much more impressive with a good synth behind it, which I will try to build at some point.
This is related to my thesis in terms of converting abstract geometries into mappings. In this app, the mapping is set, and I’m taking the first steps at going from the Real World to abstract geometry. It’s probably the simplest abstract geometry possible, but it will do for now.
MMHD
Also, I am going to NYC next weekend for the Monthly Music Hackathon! The theme is Automatic Music – it’d be great to see you there.
thor vs. the internet
At work, we listen to a lot of music from the internet: either a paid streaming service, or YouTube. At home, I listen to lots of music from my harddrive, because I feel that buying music is important. In addition to streaming services making very little money for musicians, I’ve always been leery of them because I’ve never had that much luck finding techno jams on them.
So, I decided to test it. I maintain a list of music that I need to obtain. I ran through the first 200 singles from that through the search function of a streaming music service*, and counted how many tracks the service could play for me. The results:
Thor: 88 (44%)
Internet: 112 (56%)
Advantage internet – but not by much. And only being able to hear 56% of the music that I want is not that great – so I certainly won’t forgo buying music, for now. I could, in theory, cut my music budget by streaming half of my tunes – but that is not really what I am after.
In defense of the internet, some tracks on that list are vinyl only and are not available anywhere in digital. I was also surprised that some very rep-heavy techno labels (L.I.E.S., for example) have their catalogs up. Once someone make a plugin that allows for DJing via streams, we’ll see a very interesting debate, for serious.
*names changed to protect the innocent
romancing the throne
I finished a mixtape about love, for a friend’s wedding. It is in fact the Mixtape About Love, the canonical, best one, for all time… at least for me.
In an attempt to make music scarce again, this mix is only being distributed as a wedding present (and as a post-dated wedding present) – so you can’t hear it. You can hear all the tracks that I couldn’t fit in, over at This Is My Jam, over the next month or so.
week 71
Things from the internet:
– blend.io is almost my dream app, in terms of being able to make my own custom mixdown of any song.
– OK, the music video for Like A Rolling Stone is actually really good.
– Science Fiction as Interface, on 99% Invisible and on the amazing scifiinterfaces.com.
week 70
Things from the internet:
Rolling Jubilee: Important, still important. (I also realized this week that Twitter has been a key influence in pushing me more and more to the left, especially over the last few years. So it goes.)
The Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names. Yes.
Soulwax slows down gabber to 115, becomes amazing. (Look at the dancers, aiiiii!)