erikschoster's comments

Other projects in a similar spirit:

Tom Johnson's Chord Catalog which organizes the 8,178 chords possible in a single octave of the piano: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chord_Catalogue

James Whitehead's All Possible CDs: http://www.jliat.com/APCDS/index.html

> This “thought” experiment although based on real “physical” objects can be treated as a simple mathematical object and so allows us to explore some of the consequences of this object or objects. The important feature is that any finite series is fixed, so greater sized disks, blue ray, whatever, is not significant to the idea, that is in a finite universe there are a finite number of finite objects. The size of the bit strings set real limits on the number of possible objects; web pages typically use 24 bits to encode colors, 8 bits for red, 8 for blue, and 8 for green that gives 256 x 256 x 256 or 16,777,216 possible colors, and no more.

> In Deleuzean terms, you could call this, all possible CDs, the “virtual plane”, thought experiment, in the case of 2 to the power 6265728000 of all possible audio on CD, a virtual set of possibilities or a virtual plane, and the actual physical CDs in the world are actualizations of these virtualalities. Actual objects, physical CDs, being intensities on this virtual plane. Actual CDs are not mere copies of there virtual counterparts, they are not re presentations of the virtual, for they have many more properties, many physical properties, color, size, shape etc., just as in the Deleuzean Virtual and Real planes, the real is not a copy of the virtual, but an intensity.

> Using this as a model we can “experience” actualities that are physically unlikely for humans if not in practice impossible, for 2 to the power 6265728000, is approximately 10 to the power 2000000000. There are only 10 to the power 118 particles in the universe so a full and total actualization of the virtuality of CDs seems impossible.

That would be a handy thing to do. A workaround could be to have a raspberry pi or similar as your ssh access point to a local network via ngrok, with your main ngrok service running on another machine on the local network in screen or tmux. Then just ssh into the raspberry pi, connect to the machine running the main ngrok service, drop into the session and reconfigure as you like?

A pioneer in computer music.

Full text, rest in peace Jon:

Dear Dartmouth Music Community,

We write to share the sad news that Professor Emeritus Jon Appleton passed away on Sunday, January 30, in White River Junction, VT. The cause of death was leukemia.

Jon was a member of the Music Department from 1967 until 2009, retiring as the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music. A composer with broad interests in classical, folk, popular, and film music, he was best known as a pioneer in the field of electro-acoustic music. Jon founded Dartmouth's Bregman Electronic Music Studio in 1967, with support from President John G. Kemeny and Gerald Bregman '54. It was one of the first such studios at an American university, attracting many visiting composers from around the world, and it remains a hub of sonic experimentation today. In 1989, Jon founded the Music Department's Master's Program in Electroacoustic Music (now Digital Musics) with composer David Evan Jones. Close to 100 students have since graduated from the program.

In the 1970s, Jon collaborated with engineers Syd Alonso and Cameron Jones at the Thayer School of Engineering to develop the Synclavier, the first commercially-available digital musical instrument, which was widely used in film soundtracks and pop music albums of the 1980s, including Michael Jackson's Thriller, Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones, and Frank Zappa's Jazz from Hell. Jon released more than 20 albums of electronic music during his career, including Human Music (1970), a collaboration with jazz trumpeter and Dartmouth faculty member Don Cherry. In 2003 Jon was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States.

A longtime resident of Hartford, Vermont, Jon maintained friendships with many of his former students and colleagues. At the time of his death, he was editing his autobiography, titled "Human Music." His manuscripts, papers and recordings are archived at the Rauner Library and the Dartmouth Digital Library Program.

See: http://www.appletonjon.com/ http://www.dramonline.org/composers/appleton-jon https://www.library.dartmouth.edu/digital/digital-collection...

Computers are best as (extremely useful) tools alongside other processes, contexts and humans in the world.

I've been using computers for (mostly sound) art for a couple decades, and I completely understand this mentality.

It's a nice thing to try to step outside of it though: I think you'll find computers get a lot more exciting when you don't try to live inside them.

Was it this? My coworker sent me this last week, I haven't tried it but it seems related: https://woob.tech

Legos; also the ender 3d printer. I had a nostalgic time putting the ender together. Felt like a lego set. That's not saying it was trivial (it challenged me) but that I trusted it every step of the way not because of previous experience, but because of the obvious well-designed aspects of the experience as I was putting it together. For example: I put on a part sloppily, and trying to attach anther part was the first real resistance I felt in the entire process -- physical that is, I had to study every page of the manual for a minute or two before even being able to figure out what the next step would need to be, but it was always clear after studying.

This happens to me all the time too. Seems to happen even when just muting / unmuting.

I had a very similar experience. IIRC I did 90 minute naps every 4 hours for a week. My first full night of sleep after a week of 90 minute naps felt like waking up after one really extremely long and weird day.

I'm finally reviving a little music label, mostly offline. Just mailed out the first batch of "catalogs" I printed at home (with an axidraw pen plotter, much fun to play with fluorescent inks and etc) to mostly friends and collaborators.

Ah, OK I was on the completely wrong track. Thanks for explaining!

Would you mind elaborating a little or pointing us toward where we can read more about this?

I just (more-or-less blindly, not grokking the actual math behind it) ported the yin algorithm from someone else's implementation this year and tau was defined as a range where tau min is samplerate / freq_max and tau max is samplerate / freq_min where freq_min and freq_max are the bounds of the detection algorithm, at least as I understood it. My port works but I never really understood tau (except as I described) -- if there's a way I can refactor this with a fixed tau that would be very interesting!

This looks really great, I'm looking forward to trying it out with my bandmates! (Who live in another state.)

That's an interesting approach. When I care to save every iteration of something I'm working on, I usually just put this functionality into the render script itself. For example something I was working on last year produced renders that were around 20 or 30 minutes long (I primarily work with audio) and I decided I wanted to save every permutation of the script as I worked on it, so I just added a few lines at the bottom to copy the script next to the render. A few hundred lines of python isn't a big deal to save when I'm already saving hours of audio renders.

I don't usually do this though... after 15+ years of doing generative audio work saving every iteration feels a little like hoarding.

Bhob Rainey's Peev attempts to do something like that: https://github.com/mphonic/peev

Yes it's actually paraphrasing the title of a nice piece she contributed to the second issue of the Spectres journal published by Shelter Press! The full title is "Instrument design is composition, resonance is harmony." It's an inspiring essay -- the Spectres issue on Resonances has a number of other nice essays from composers, sound artists etc loosely grouped around the subject.

It's nice to see this here -- as Ellen Fullman said, instrument building is composition.

Sound examples at the link below, this is a better overview of what segmod is about than the github readme:

> Segmod is a non-standard sound synthesis that embraces the discrete nature of digital sound. All sounds created with Segmod result from the concatenation of simple periodic waveforms, such as sine, triangle, and square waves. The sixteen contributing composers have employed a vast array of different compositional, aesthetic, and technological strategies, ranging from inaudible sounds, to neural networks, chaotic functions, careful micro-montages, and analysis-resynthesis techniques. While the results differ widely in sound, all lead back to the idea that synthesis can be seen as a form of composition.

https://dumpfedition.bandcamp.com/album/segmod

> For music, synthesis and DSP are basically solved problems.

This composer respectfully disagrees. For example, there is a world of synthesis research that Luc Döbereiner has called "non-standard" although I prefer his phrase "compositionally motivated sound synthesis" which is not concerned with the reconstruction of known sounds, but exploring the margins of the possible. I don't see an end for that project in our lifetime.

https://direct.mit.edu/comj/article/35/3/28/94344/Models-of-...

Artists typically don't get paid for their work unless they are working in a commercial field where their work is used to sell something else...