Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexilliamson | Hacker News Reader

Slightly OT.

It seems like there is an uptick in music production-related posts on HN lately. Which is awesome.

Has it always been like this and I'm just now noticing? Or, if it is a recent phenomenon, do we think it's because folks are trying to connect more with arts, in light of everything going on?

Anyway, this is very cool and I'm happy to see it!

View on HN

The plural of anecdote is not data and all that but COVID resulted in me buying a midi keyboard and I’ve been learning Ableton live.

(And messing about with the idea of using a midi input device to control batch jobs)

The plural of anecdote is data. You just need to know that your anecdotes are reasonably trustworthy.

Useful Ableton thing: you can paint out a scale in notes, move those notes to -1 (left arrow key), then fold the scale on them. I like to lower the velocity on the top and bottom of each octave so I always know where they start and stop.

It seems as though quarantine/lockdown has been seized as a good opportunity to finally tackle a project or two.

I know three people who are working on something music-related off the top of my head, and and countless more working on something a little more lively than an every day weekend project.

It doesn’t have to be music of course, but I think there is a lot of overlap in the hacker<—>musician Venn diagram, as alluded to above.

It might come and go, but I find it to be pretty consistent. There is, in my experience, a strong overlap between hackers/computer scientists and musicians; for one anecdotal example, Donald Knuth is an accomplished organ player.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html

I hope Dr. Knuth is a registered organ donor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com