erikschoster

I think Paul Batchelor would be a great interview subject. He's the author of many novel libraries, tools & languages for computer music & graphics: https://paulbatchelor.github.io/proj/ (Soundpipe & Sporth are also embedded in the AudioKit platform for iOS among other places.)

For sure. Accessibility should also encompass things like making content or functionality usable on terrible networks and ancient devices.

It’s nice to a number of articles making it to the front page that prioritize fundamentals, but it made me sad to see accessibility listed here as a second class topic. It goes well beyond HTML annotations. Opening the door wide shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Would you mind sharing this list?

Reading this was really useful for me. It does a great job of going into depth on high level topics like the python data model and also goes deep into lots of more isolated practical topics like covering useful data structures buried in the standard library, a very good discussion of unicode, and concurrency topics, etc, etc.

Python is changing a lot and there is for example no in-depth discussion of the typing module in this book because PEP 484 had only just been written the year before its publication. There's still about four pages dedicated to the topic written as an aside to chapter 11 which discusses interfaces.

Even though it's 5 years old and there have been plenty of additions to the language in that time, I think the book is still plenty useful today -- I still pull it off the shelf as reference from time to time if I'm going into the weeds.

That looks very helpful -- thank you!

> What ever happened to slashdot.org?

I asked myself the same thing not too long ago and ended up putting slashdot back into my RSS reader for a while. I was (sort of) surprised to see that basically everything in the "best of" HN RSS feed was also covered in the slashdot feed. They were almost identical for the few weeks I was subscribing to both, the same stories are covered...

Bandcamp and many independent music shops and labels (like electrocd, boomkat, etc) offer flac downloads. It’s too bad streaming services like Spotify don’t support direct purchases of drm free files like bandcamp does, I’ve never understood what the downside to giving the option to purchase files would be for them.

I make a folder called "notes" on any given machine and make a new text document inside of it when I have a note I want to make. I know this isn't clever and "it doesn't scale!!!" but I have multiple computers and it's easy to merge the notes into a single backup, and I always know where to go for the notes I take.

If I need to share a note, I use a github gist but it's also just a linear text storage so I'll prolly replace it with something else at some point...

I read it in college and plan to read it again! It blew my mind the first time and I'm looking forward to coming back to it 15+ years later.

Like _Manufacturing Consent_ it's one that I think I'll probably revisit in pretty wide intervals because of the commitment involved, but I think it's worth it.

Add a class called "active" or similar, and write your css to target the element when that class is present.

    .element.active {
        color: red;
        font-size: 30px;
        font-weight: 700;
    }

There are plenty of mature text-based options for music programming. For example SuperCollider (which also serves as a sound engine for many other front-end languages), Faust, ChucK, RTcmix, Csound (one of the oldest and still widely used & developed), HMSL, Hiroki Nishino's forthcoming microsound-oriented LC language, Paul Batchelor's stack-based Sporth... and on and on. Not to mention many options for using your general purpose language of choice with a music synthesis library, I'm the author of one for python called pippi. Paul Batchelor's C-based SoundPipe library is meant to be embedded. (I'm using parts of it in pippi.)

And so on!

(FWIW Max also has many text-based options like the lower level embedded gen language, and many bridges to higher-level languages like javascript, python, lua for programming at control rate...)

I also got early access, and ended up signing up for a librepay account as well because I was curious to try it out. (Stripe setup went OK for me. Here's my project FWIW: https://github.com/luvsound/pippi)

I set up tiers, because they seem to encourage it, but they're all basically just early access to stuff that I'll make free anyway.

I work for a listener-sponsored radio station and I really think this model is pretty exciting -- keep access free for all and allow those with the means to support it financially. (And rewards I'm sure are good motivators for some.) It also means you aren't beholden to "the man", shareholders looking for profit, etc...

FWIW I've had the version of these that doesn't come with bluetooth (R1280T) for three years and I'm still happy with how they sound.

See also "Low-level percepts predict emotion concepts across modalities and cultures". https://psyarxiv.com/myg3b/

You might like WFMU (especially if you're into weirder things) which you should be able to pick up on 91.9FM if you're in the NYC area.

It's easy to get latency this low with ALSA+JACK.

Edit: and it's possible to go much lower, for example look at the linux-based Bela: https://bela.io/about#why-latency-matters

This is interesting anecdotally but for those trying to make a living from their music, I would argue direct subscriptions seem far more stable and useful as part of your income. For example bandcamp or something like patreon, where I can subscribe to some artist I really like for $1-3/month or something and get access to everything they do. That's the closest model I've seen for non-huge-industry folks making a living from recordings -- which is of course usually supplemented by touring and a dozen other hustles. (for example mastering or teaching)

IMHO overall it doesn't feel like the situation has changed all that much in this era though. The same huge institutions remain magnets for a handful of lottery-winners (big labels, funded orchestras, etc) and everyone else is scraping by in myriad ways, though the ways are a bit different now.

I've been using an x201 for programming and music production (and everything else) since 2014 and don't see myself making a change anytime soon. (Though I recently picked up an IBM server from around the same era for less than the cost of a new cellphone, and now I have what feels like a supercomputer to do offline audio renders and such that are possible on the x201 but take a long time...)

I do enjoy the peace of mind that if I drop my laptop in a lake, the cost of replacement is somewhere in the $100 range and dropping every year. But I agree with the author of this article that it's also a nice way to (without really having to think about it) keep the software I write reigned in and usable for people who don't have the latest multi-thousand-dollar hardware.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States from 2014 is very illuminating of the strategy of colonization and empire building in the US. It also connects the dots to the present day very well.

The minimum number of speakers for a horizontal ambisonic setup is 4 but you need at least 6 to localize sound in a full sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonic_reproduction_systems...

I'm not sure if massive speaker array systems like BEAST (http://www.beast.bham.ac.uk/about/) use ambisonic diffusion techniques, I think part of the appeal of ambisonics is the relatively small number of speakers you need for full sphere spatialization.

(It's also interesting to see this subject pop up here. Maybe because Zoom is offering a consumer option now? I've heard good things about the octomic: http://www.core-sound.com/OctoMic/1.php )

And even going back to the 50s with plotters and mainframes -- this book has a lot of cool examples: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520268388/mainframe-experim...

These are really fun shapes to play with -- here's another little python script to draw animated hypotrochoid frames that can be stitched together with ffmpeg: https://github.com/hecanjog/hypotrochoid.py/blob/master/hypo...

I stole the relevant bit from here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22894942/plotting-hypotr...

Here's one video example: https://vimeo.com/99493389

Another, from 1978: 'A Fortran Coloring Book' https://archive.org/details/9780262610261

Rap music says something. It's hard not to read this project as just a further disenfranchisement its authors.

Sounds a lot like this: https://youtu.be/xzL-pxcpo-E?t=933

IRCAM has been doing some really cool stuff in this area for a long time. Check out their pages on corpus-based synthesis for example: http://imtr.ircam.fr/imtr/Corpus_Based_Synthesis

> High latency feedback forces you to be more methodical in your development and think about the changes you're making.

There is also an attitude in computer music that low latency audio and realtime systems are simply part of the march of historical progress and ultimately represent a step forward from the days when composers could wait a week to hear 15 seconds of music rendered.

I found that I like the think-write-render-listen-repeat loop that comes from a compiled music workflow. (I discovered this when writing a -- initially very slow -- nonrealtime python computer music system which in the early days would sometimes have me waiting a few hours to render a couple minutes of music.)

Realtime computer systems enabled all sorts of new forms of live improvisation, interactive algorithmic systems, etc but sometimes it's very nice to have to sit in a quiet room with a text editor or notebook and think your way through the next long render.

Many developments in jazz of the 60s and 70s are just starting to become normalized and institutionalized in the 21st century. Check out the history of the AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago for one important example:

http://www.npr.org/books/titles/138018824/a-power-stronger-t...

Glenn Greenwald says "he's fine": https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/761995125824360448

Oh interesting: Aaron Swartz's father was the founder