Feathers dripping dry from the drainspout with a new thought on his lips: *this is tedious*.

I'd like to share this essay I wrote about process music for Roots/Routes:

Where do you place agency in a process-based music system?

Here's something of a plan... On the microcontroller side messages get sent as lpserialmsg_t structs: typedef struct lpserialmsg_t { uint16_t type; // corresponds to LPMessageTypes enum used by normal lpmsg_t messages size_t size; // when greater than 0, the followi...

The project of the moment is to get serial messaging bidirectional in some kind of sane, useful way... I haven't touched pretty much anything in astrid or pippi land in more than a week. (For a nice reason! I got really hooked on a book my cousin lent me last week.) The har...

Some clunking machine at the coffeeshop is in perfect sync with the pop song playing on the sound system.

Oops! The magic smoke has arisen from the tweeter.

No space for space

I don't hate fun... ...I think?

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

away from keyboard, chair, life, etc

I was planning to go camping today, but it was a pretty crappy rainy day and I decided to stay in... I tried mounting some of the amplifier into the box I was thinking of using for controls... didn't feel really great about any of it, and I'm starting to think I just want to use two channels anyway.

I'm thinking about just adapting the pulsar test drone, adding some more controls but keeping it probably pretty simple in terms of inputs and outputs... I'm not really sure, but I felt kind of overwhelmed by trying to figure out the mixer stuff I wanted to build into it all... and realized I can do it in software if I break out some controls instead...

Hooray, I hit a bit of a milestone today! I'm pretty sure there are still some memory leaks, and I've got some work on the new sampler left to do... however it's pretty exciting to be testing out some coordinated events with a little astrid script orchestrating the solenoi...

Best way to write programs: turn off the computer.

I've been working on the external bits of the system now, which I'm a bit worried about being able to finish by mid-June... it's coming along though. I think I'm going to try to fit everything into a project box I got a while back that's maybe just big enough to fit: The ...

Astrid is much less leaky now -- I wasn't munmapping the memory segments that are created to send buffers to the mixer so they were just piling up and eventually filling /dev/shm.

There are still some more leaks to fix somewhere tho!

Meanwhile, I'm playing around with adding some beepers into the rain setup...

Edit: they're a lot of fun to play with as tactile objects.

There's that memory leak! This little improv is silly but I'm pretty excited that the input sampler is working again in the python instruments. That pesky (and big! bigger than I thought -- it ate up all my memory really fast doing lots of renders like this) memory leak is next up.

Slogging along again on the new shared memory sampler -- it's coming along though. I discovered that some weird issues I was having (where sometimes the sampler would copy frames into the ADC and sometimes... blow up with -nan values getting written into the sampler) was --...

Spring clearing

Glue my grandmother’s earliest ancestors onto the inside of an enamel urn.

Technical processes and conceptual ideas just like individual musical ideas and passages are not sufficient to be an end in itself. On the contrary it is the way that all these elements interact with and are connected to one another that creates a musical result which – transcending stylistic conventions – is in the position to cultivate its own physiognomy, while at the same time remaining ever versatile and – as Im Januar am Nil still shows 30 years later – surprisingly original and new.

Poller, T. R. (2015). CLARENCE BARLOW’S TECHNIQUE OF “SYNTHRUMENTATION” AND ITS USE IN IM JANUAR AM NIL. Tempo, 69(271), 7–23.

Took a detour to finish writing something, but more boring astrid developments will be forthcoming soon... (And maybe some interesting ones, once I push past this current plumbing stage with the shared memory sampler?)

rain

Recordings mingle with the present

Recordings erase the space around you

the context is an input

It's been a week of spring cleaning in the astrid world. Lots of unremarkable cleanup, though I ended up getting bit by garbage-collected cython strings when I realized that I was passing the instrument name to astrid_instrument_start as pointer to a garbage-collected strin...

heard a bird

Hey, it's April! In astrid-land, I'm still debugging issues with the new lpsampler interfaces and working on getting the ADC sampling interface working in the python instruments. The (mostly stupid, as usual) issues with the shared memory backing are mostly sorted and libp...

"As HANNO says, 'My music is a universal hymn to the primitive pain and pleasure of being human'"

My coworker started chatting over `wall` this morning as we were both on the same server investigating something... it's the best chat client haha