– I finished mixdown for HOLD, which doesn’t sound like this any more.
– HOLD will be release as part of the Get Excited & Make Techno project, later this week.
– I made a mixtape! It’s about moving to Montreal, surprise surprise.
– I realized, when watching a cat play some vinyl, that one thing that key-locked digital DJing loses is the pitch up / down that you get on vocals when cranking a tune up or down.
– I’m into the final edit stage on TORNADO SONGS: many thanks to Laine, Alex, and Nathan for telling me what double stops are impossible.
– Started a thing called MONTREAL COMPRESSION EXERCISES. Don’t know how much will come of it, but we’ll see.
week 19
music for distance
I’m going to Montreal! This is what I’ll be listening to on the plane.
1: Hannah Read – Only You Will Know [hannahread.com]
2: Lusine – Gravity [Ghostly]
3: Julia Easterlin – Go Straight Away [juliaeasterlin.com]
4: Talking Heads – Once In A LifeTime [Sire]
5: Maximo Park – The Coast Is Always Changing [Warp]
6: Julia Easterlin – Eyes On The Prize [juliaeyesprize.com]
7: Thor Kell – Sunbird (Jillian Hanks, piano) []
week 18
– I have 343 pieces of vinyl. I probably had about 1200 to 1300 before. Well then.
– I am over the moon, as I’m done a full draft of TORNADO SONGS, and all three pieces for the Composer’s Kitchen workshop.
– The Dream|City webapp is working: Connor and I just need to write the music.
– I can recommend you to Bleep’s Guide To Electronic Music in the strongest possible way.
week 17
– I have given away 10 of my 14 crates of vinyl. Wow.
– A draft of my tune for Get Excited & Make Techno is here. It’s a weirder version of 2007-esq “deep trance.”
– I have sketches of all of TORNADO SONGS. Woooosh. I’ve edited all the songs into cleaner version too; I need to clean up the outro and interlude, and then it’s “done.”
week 16
– I finished MULTITOUCH, an exercise in having an entire string quartet play a ‘cello. I look forward to telling you all that I’ve been thrown out of the Composer’s Kitchen workshop.
– How to write a Ph.D thesis in 3 months. Because I may needed it later, but also because it has lots of appropriate workflow related things.
– I have no more books to give away. Whoa.
– I booked a flight to Montreal. Whooaaaaa.
– I got sick! Can’t recommend it.
week 15
– I finished VIII and IX of TORNADO Songs: I just need to write the interlude and a total draft is done.
– I got a decent track going for Get Excited And Make Techno: you can hear the current version here.
– We’re halfway through Get Excited And Make Techno! Woo!
– I organized all of my techno vinyl, and gave a good chunk of it away. I feel like I’m missing an arm.
– Beat Surfer is a kind of amazing iPad app. Non-linear-ish sequencers are super duper interesting to me.
– I wrote a jam called I NEVER LIKED BRAHMS, for string quartet. It’ll be worked on at Composer’s Kitchen, in August.
week 14
– Big thanks to Sub|Division for having me out to open Lucky.
– I submitted my placement exams for McGill. Gulp.
– DREAM CITY has a working but unstyled prototype. Still lots to do.
– dancer.js is another JavaScript audio library. Do we even need another programming language?
– I’ve got the vocal line and bassline for the final TORNADO SONG. Now I need to fill in the harmony and write two instrumental interludes.
– Are these amazing, or are these amazing?
week 13
So a lot of things happened. Most of them I covered in their own posts, so. Here’s some smaller things:
– I applied for a Leap devkit. If it is half as good as it looks, there’s lots of things that can be done with it.
– We just did week 2 of Get Excited & Make Techno – now the real writing begins.
– Synthesis in JavaScript. Look out.
– Matt Ogle pointed me to this: it’s about adjusting technology to the scope of us puny humans, which I think is important.
live forever
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Ray Bradbury died today; he will be missed. He was born in 1920, and lived to 2012. He wrote roughly a million short stories, an authentically classic novel in FAHRENHEIT 451, and many, many other things. He was the last of those who defined science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Ray. His passing (and especially his passing at 91!) is the end of an era that was probably over before Heinlein died in 1988.
For me, Bradbury dying is a final nail in The Future as a proper noun; it is the final passage from a world where we imagine the future to a world where we live in the future, all the time. And that now-future that we live in changes all the time, in ways that we can’t fully grasp. When I was fifteen and devouring the science fiction canon, I was certain that I would live to see humans on Mars. Now, I am no longer sure if humans will make it back to the moon ever, much less within my life time. This has been coming for a long time, to be sure. Bradbury’s death makes it final.
So, the Future is over. Our dreams are smaller, less full, more adult. We’ve lost Ray Bradbury, and things will never be the same.
how to dj, really
A while back, I posted a request for DJs to tell me how they picked their next track. The exact question was: “How do you pick what track to play next?”
I got 20 responses, covering 1959 words, ranging from one sentence to full essays. Then, being me, I made some tag clouds (using tagcrowd.com), and did some n-gram analysis in Python.
So here’s the top 25 words:
It is interesting to me that TRACK has twice the frequency of CROWD.
Top 50:
Now we get things like BUILD, BPM, DANCEFLOOR, and DRUM
Top 100:
Down at the bottom: SLOT, BASS, ORDER, FUN, TEND.
After that, I did some analysis of n-grams. A “gram” is just 1 or more words in a row. “more words” is a 2-gram from the previous sentence. Tag clouds do 1-gram analysis, so I started with 2-grams. The top twenty 2-grams (and their numbers of occurences) are:
“try to”, 8
“on the”, 7
“the track”, 6
“tracks that”, 8
“want to”, 5
“so i”, 5
“of the”, 5
“i can”, 5
“i have”, 5
“a track”, 5
“the crowd”, 5
“they are”, 5
“i will”, 5
“i want”, 5
“the energy”, 4
“with the”, 4
“have something”, 5
“work with”, 5
“if i”, 4
(I’ve bolded the ones that are most interesting to me.)
3-grams got pretty useless pretty fast:
“words separated by”, 2
“a sort of”, 2
“i want to”, 2
“from 70 through”, 1
(…etc. Nothing too useful there.)
There were no 4-grams that appeared more than once. Likewise with 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10-grams. HOWEVER. When I ran 5-grams, a key line jumped out a bit:
“have something to work with”, 3
I said when I started analyzing DJ sets based on musical data that most DJ “just play what works” – I’m pleased to see the same verb show up in a text analysis.
This is nothing like a proper study, but it is all I have time for, for now, and I think it’s interesting just the same. Many thanks to James, Stephanie, Nathan, Emmett, Dustin, Emmanuel, Derek, Drew, Alan, Jesse, Christoph, Doug, Tim, David, Jared, Jordie, Quinn, JP, Laughlin, Teagan, Will, and Mike.