I agree.
Startup Proposal: Intelligent Traffic Signals
127 karma · joined March 7, 2009
He lives in Palo Alto, California.
http://www.till.com for details, articles and fun.
Startup Proposal: Intelligent Traffic Signals
The classic Vox / Dunlop/ Cry Baby wah-wah pedal used by Hendrix, Gilmour, Clapton, Harrison, and so many others, is built from a resonant LC filter.
How do you change the resonant frequency of an LC filter with a pedal mechanism? The pedal turns a pot, and that controls a capacitance multiplier circuit.
Simple and elegant.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/75144.75174
(!!!)
(Wait, what? That Stanley Jordan?) (Yep.)
Great for a while, but then they complained that all the slow songs were bunched together. And perhaps the random shuffle play mode was sampling the songs, deriving the tempo of each, and adjusting the shuffle accordingly.
Very funny.
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Heh-heh, I independently came up with Fibonacci hashing for color many years ago.
My web app was drawing a diagram of N rectangular items, color-coded to tell them apart, with a table listing the details of each below.
(Normally I would use EIA standard colors, with a nod to my EE brethren.)
But I didn't want the colors to bias anything. So you'd normally try random colors. But random colors can come out weird and some can be close together.
So I used a Golden Angle around the hue circle, with a constant brightness and saturation. And sure enough, the generated colors were nicely differentiated.
BUT... not as nice as I'd like. Something was wrong.
It turns out that our perception of color is more complex. And when we're differentiating between colors, it really, really helps if the colors are familiar, and describable.
So simple colors like blue and purple are much easier to differentiate than a new weird blueish color and a new weird purplish color.
So my Golden Angle colors were technically superior, but not as good a user experience.
12-tone serial composition is simply a technique for removing natural tonality from a composition.
I think the big issue is whether 12-tone approaches are used occasionally in a piece as an expressive tool, or as a "new way of life" where the entire composition is serial, and the listener is stuck in it. Or all of a composer's work is serial.
Which is what makes it... challenging.
It's the same with Minimalism.
But used in smaller doses, it's a powerful technique.
Here's an example, in Frank Zappa's "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" there's a little section that's a 12-tone piece, starting with the lyrics "We see in the back of the City Hall mind...". It's short, it's weird, and it works very well in context.
And in Zappa's "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast", the middle instrumental section, the first 20 notes are going up and down a simple C-Major scale... (What could be more tonal?)... and then he rips into a 12-tone row. The result is downright delightful.
Quote from Wikipedia:
"Braxton often titles his compositions with diagrams or numbers and letters. Some diagrams have a clear meaning or signification, as on For Trio, where the title indicates the physical positions of the performers. The titles can themselves be musical notation indicating to the performer how a piece is played. Some letters are identifiable as the initials of Braxton's friends and musical colleagues, but many titles remain inscrutable to critics. By the mid-to-late 1980s, Braxton's titles began to incorporate drawings and illustrations, as in the title of his four-act opera cycle, Trillium R. Others began to include lifelike images of inanimate objects such as train cars, which were most notably seen after the advent of his Ghost Trance Music system. Braxton settled on a system of opus-numbers to make referring to these pieces simpler, and earlier pieces have had opus-numbers retroactively added to them."
"All Clockwork and No Bodily Fluid Makes Hal a Dull Metal Humbert
In Heaven Every Elephant Baby Wants to Be So Full of Sting
Paul Simon in the Park with Canticle
But You Can't Pick Your Friends
Vacuum Genesis
DEFMACROS
HOWSOMETH
INGDOTIME
SALENGTH0S
OMETHINGL
ETBFOLLOW
AAFTERNOO
NGETPRESE
NTMOMENTI
FTHINGSWO
NTALWAYSB
ETHISWAYT
BCACAUSEA
BWASTEAFT
ERNOONWHE
NEQBMERET
URNFROMSH
OWLITTLEG
REENPLACE
27"
A Lisp program in a song title, eh?
Question: How does the salinity and pressure of deep sea water affect that 4C point?
Because the sensors are mounted on that very land.
So tectonic movement will certainly have an effect. And you can see remnants of earthquakes in some of the data.
Hey; if they can handle 52ft tides, they can handle anything.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/
Sea levels have been monitored for over 100 years... because of commerce.
East coast US seems to be going up about 3mm/year, or a foot per century. That's on top of 7 foot tides.
West coast US is very steady, barely moving at all.
The sea level is dropping in Alaska by 10mm/year. Dropping in Scandinavia also.
Some cities show rising sea levels, but really the cities are sinking due to collapsing aquifers; New Orleans and Bangkok. And measurements made on river deltas are always going to be wild due to silt and all.
Most notably, I can't find an example in the NOAA data of the rate of sea level rise increasing due to industrialization. Anybody?
Ahh, fond memories.
Indeed, we had a Foonly. I don't know the model number, but it was a single rack unit. We used it as a server, software development, SUDS electrical CAD, etc.
And yes, it's name was "pos". That was never meant to be particularly nasty; more like an optimistic end-of-an-era kind of thing.
And I have to say, it was pretty reliable. I can't remember it ever dying.
At least two early Symbolics folks were involved with Foonly, so I assume this was a prototype unit obtained in some deal.
And I'm a huge fan of new possibilities.
BUT most of the musical operations we see in the digital world are not "new possibilities", but rather cheap imitations of previous work. Samples, drum machines, simulations, emulations, modeling, etc.
And especially the separation of the musician playing the instrument from the sound making mechanism. That's a biggie. It's a kind of alienation, and that's going to have a dramatic negative effect.
And this is consistent with the original complaint about modern pop music not being very good. Sure, the key change might not be the best example, but the point still stands. If there are so many new possibilities, why does the music suck?
"The Blues" is a very limited form, yet it has provided about a century of wonderful creative music.
If I'm writing a string quartet, I don't complain that a particular note can't be sung by a gospel choir instead of a cello. Just as a painter doesn't complain about the canvas being 2 dimensional.
Of course DAW's can handle key changes.
The issue is that working full time in a DAW environment seems to have a tendency to displace a number of important musical sensibilities.
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Digital isn't inherently bad, but...
If the ENTIRETY of your music production is done on a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) app, with its available tools and plugins, that's gonna have an effect.
And I think that's what we're seeing.
If today's music producers used the DAW only for recording, and stayed away for composing, arranging, and becoming proficient at playing instruments, things would be much better.
The author is referring to the up-a-half-step modulation that Barry Manilow tactically used all over the place.
I call it a "Manilow".
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But yeah, it's just one of the many elements of musical craft that's missing in today's popular music.
Sampled sounds are (by definition) lifeless.
Sequenced rhythm tracks are unnaturally consistent.
See Paul Lamere's "In search of the click track": https://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/02/in-search-of-the-click...
A lack of rhythmic variation. Consider the folk tradition of wandering from the time signature; Pete Seeger and early Paul Simon for instance. And the Beatles, certainly
Generally a lack of pickup notes, or "anacrusis".
And the lack of an inspirational melody or chord change.
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60's pop music was, I think, a special case because the hit songs had to get noticed and appreciated in a worst-case listening environment; typically a crappy AM radio.
And after going through heroic efforts to get the ratios of notes exact, you're probably going to want to add a little vibrato or chorus effect to give it more warmth and character. So it's self-defeating in a way.
Nonetheless, the exploration of alternate tunings can be fascinating.
Not a weird convention at all.
(I'm a big fan.)
With that wonderful man page.
I'm just struck by the zenlike simplicity of the original question, "What is a Major Chord?", compared to the random bits of technical jibber-jabber that would confuse the hell out of a poor soul who would dare to ask such a question, both in the linked blog post, and the discussion here.
A bugle has no valves, it can only play the natural harmonics of the horn, as determined by lip pressure.
x3, x4, x5, and x6
Thus the ratios of the available pitches are 3:4:5:6.
That's a major chord (with the "fifth" down below).
All your iconic bugle calls ("Taps", "Reveille", etc.) are the notes of a major chord.
But the harmonic or inharmonic content of the instrument does not address the original question.
And it leads to confusion; putting your first and last sentences together implies that a piano is not a western musical instrument. We know that's not true.