erikschoster

Would you mind sharing a reference to some of this research? I haven't heard this and am currently considering working soylent back into my regular diet.

I don't see myself ever bothering to keep the default windows install on a thinkpad but this really hurts my impression of the company regardless. I've had my eye on the new X1s and had planned to upgrade my X201 this year but now I'm having second thoughts.

Who if anyone has taken over the place of great laptop for linux / development?

Can't reply to your comment williamcotton, but what you suggest doesn't change the nature of the practice, just its practical focus.

Does the fact that engineers have to eat change the nature of engineering fundamentally if the way they are able to eat changes?

Okay. So great, because capitalism has absorbed artistic practice in some way into its structure, now artistic practice is capitalistic.

This makes little sense. It's funny to see that capitalist aping of artistic practice is now being regarded as a new era in artistic practice by this guy though.

Art has had a fascinating relationship to capital well before capitalism, but to confuse its continuing ability to survive with some kind of fundamental transformation of the practice is kinda silly.

Yes, okay: what is art?

The answer isn't: commerce. No need to go so far back, but just look to cave paintings to discover that these ideas of economy and capital are only sidelines and contextual footnotes to the practice of art.

It's not formalized in any way, but we have a small team that works this way. I would imagine it would be hard to scale, and takes the right sort of people, but it's a really great environment to work in. We are constantly experimenting and everyone is welcome where they feel they can be helpful - our video production team is deeply involved with the devops side of our streaming server for example...

Of course it just comes down to preference, but as someone who finds his work beautiful even in reproduction one point of context is that many (maybe all? not sure) of his pieces were made for very specific spaces, to enhance the environment -- restaurants, etc. I think this is why I've never found seeing them in a museum to be a significantly transcendent experience either. It's my understanding that they were made to be lived with, even if just for a few hours, and to have a conversation with the space they were meant to be installed into. Not things you study and focus your attention toward specifically, but things that transform the environment you're in. My favorite Rothko experiences are just prints that I've found a proper home for in my apartment, honestly.

Hey thanks for being so understanding! I just want to say that I feel badly for being this negative, it's out of character for me, but this is a realm that's close to my heart and I'm just critical because I care about it and want to see projects like these exceed my wildest expectations.

You should also take my comments with a grain of salt because my hopes for things like this are for lack of a better way of putting it musically bound. I can't help but listen to this as art, and so I'm responding to it that way. I'm taking these pieces as things for close listening.

I think making long renders for static streaming is a fine approach by the way - have you thought about automating a re-render more often for each piece?

A more expensive alternative would be to run a dedicated render server to generate music in realtime, and then multiplex the stream on demand with something like wowza. Makes me miss the days of r4nd.org: http://rhizome.org/discuss/15607/#29894

Good luck with the project & thanks again for sharing!

"Stochastic" made me hopeful - thinking hey Xenakis, sonic exploration of data, etc - and "background music" made me skeptical - thinking here comes another garbage piece of general midi mapping that passes for generative music.

It's hard for me to be so negative, but this is a bit like posting your new bootstrap site on a design forum. Not that HN is all computer musicians and generative composers, but some of us are. This might be your first step into generative music, or music in general, and please keep sharing! Some of the best advice I ever got when starting to write music was: you're going to write junk for quite a while, don't let it discourage you.

I'd love to hear more about the specifics of what you're working with algorithmically.

After listening to more of the "deep ocean" mp3, it sounds like you have a set of 10 or 15 short gestures, and the algorithm is determining the order they'll play and how they'll be stacked. Good place to start! If you aren't interested in applying systems to the material itself, a next step might be to just play with amplitude over time. You can prolly increase the overall density of samples if you apply stochastic envelopes to each, without affecting the still mood -- it might help reduce a feeling of monotony, too.

There's a popular paper on the technique by Godfried Toussaint that explores it in depth: http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf

Same here. It should work theoretically though. Chromium on linux is supposed to have speech synthesis support via festival. I have festival installed, and speech-dispatcher, and just checked chrome://flags but no luck. :-/

James Tenney's thesis "META Meta / Hodos" is another great attempt at constructing a real music theory. https://www.scribd.com/doc/167561563/James-Tenney-Meta-Hodos

Very cool to see so many python music projects here! I suppose I'll add mine, which is also sorely lacking in documentation and is very much in a pre-release state: https://github.com/hecanjog/pippi

I've been dogfooding it for my own music since I started working on it, here's a recent-ish album made with it: http://music.hecanjog.com/album/solos-for-unattended-compute...

There are many DSLs for music! Here are a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_programming_language

Many of which are inspired by or even directly based on Max Matthew's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSIC-N

I think that's a fair point. In this context "absolute nobody" reads more like "worthless" to me, rather than just saying something like "unknown" and it seemed unnecessarily harsh.

"In this case, this guy is an absolute nobody."

He's an artist and musician who seems to be actively performing in the chiptune / computer music worlds.

Even if he wasn't, there's no need for name calling.

Dropbox is returning a 509 status code on the file, but I can't wait to take a look at this. My interest in this specific machine comes from its important place in the history of computer music with Lejaren Hiller's Illiac Suite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0njBFLQSk8 http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/history/illiac.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illiac_Suite

Very cool. I have a sense of the punch card era, but this is the first anecdotal write-up of an intermediary period that still relied on paper input that I've seen. Thanks for sharing!

I eat up computer history, but it's especially nice to hear firsthand accounts about seemingly mundane stuff like workflow.

> oddly not so much free software

The Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph is the closest thing I can think of: http://arss.sourceforge.net It hasn't been updated in a long time but it's still very useful!

Michael Klingbeil's SPEAR is also open source, but a slightly different beast - focused on manipulation of analysis data as a set of partials - it's still insanely useful: http://www.klingbeil.com/spear/

Chris Penrose's excellent Hyperupic was the first tool of this kind I remember encountering, inspired by Xenakis' UPIC system: http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/MusicAndComputers/chapter5/05_... It died with OS9 to the best of my knowledge.

EDIT: Just to say that Alexander Zolotov's work is blowing me away. I didn't realize he was behind SunVox until now, but the portfolio of his projects in this thread is really inspiring.

Can you cite any more specific info? I'm very curious. From the demos, the sound externally and direct is pretty much equivalent to the silent brass system I picked up in 1999, but without that huge bulb sticking out of the bell of course!

I don't mean to speak for the person you're addressing, but I suspect this was the part that was surprising: "some form of safety valve that allowed class conflict to be mediated and ameliorated was better than the alternatives as far as the interests of the upper classes".

That's not an obvious truth, and doesn't deserve self-important snark.

I've also read 'Propaganda', and would also recommend it despite its age.

I'd be interested to know a little more about the historical context surrounding this piece - was Franklin responding to some well known problem of the time like a rise in the price of candle wax or lamp oil? The essay seems like an attempt to encourage people to conserve resources using the vehicles of sarcasm and humor. I wonder how common it was at the time to wake up around noon though?

Edit: tantalor sums it up better. :-)

I wonder if these numbers take into account direct sales to musicians on services like bandcamp. I assume the article mostly (entirely?) refers to publicly reporting music distribution & publishing companies. If so, there's a significant part of this story missing.

Surprised this isn't a bigger thing on Hacker News.

I love it, thanks for sharing this. Added to my personal site: http://www.hecanjog.com

That's great news!

I suppose Jitter is a big honking extra option, yeah. :-) I read the original comment as suggesting that SuperCollider was somehow lacking in flexibility compared to Max/MSP, which isn't true. They're all excellent tools with different approaches.

Signal flow approaches like Max/MSP and PureData are awesome and have their own strengths and weaknesses - but certainly they have no more or less 'options' or capacity for complexity than any similarly mature text-based DSP system like SuperCollider or ChucK.

Network data sharing and sync across arbitrary host applications would be really excellent. Here's an idea: cross-platform plugin (LADSPA + AU + VST?) that syncs to other instances of itself over a network via OSC for arbitrary data sharing (here, let me pipe the midi data from my keyboard or controller over to you) - or receiving (here, I'll take the event stream I'm getting from you and translate it as Midi Time Code input for sync) etc etc.

Really anything to bring some of the flexibility possible already with network communication over OSC w/ tools like PD and SuperCollider to the world of turnkey audio apps would probably find a welcome audience!