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

John Wall didn't own a sampler until he was 40. Life can go ways, it's good to remember.

Here's some random thinking about types of sound synthesis that interest me after work today... synthesis is a huge field. Digital synthesis especially has the promise of exploring the full spectrum of possible sounds. It's the appeal and maybe the fallacy of digital synth...

Sweet little squirrel skittering across the telephone lines in the snow, not slipping too much

Whenever I write `O_RDWR` it makes me think of Martin Crane

["the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle#Degradation_of_human_life)

I took the evening tonight to try to do some cleanup on the new pippi.renderer module. The cython Instrument interface is a little more like a wrapper for the lpinstrument_t struct, which makes passing things around somewhat easier to think about. Just like most of the C AP...

taku sugimoto's *since 2016*... down, deep... into the depths... pitch-sound-forms...

the beauty as it flies

Nice to feel like I'm making steady progress on this again. Triggers are triggering in the new python instruments once again!

I'm pretty excited to pick up on serial triggers again, and try out some synchronized motor/relay stuff now that this is all working again...

The python wrapper on top of the new C astrid instruments is still acting weirdly. I'm not handling keyboard interrupts properly and messages are getting passed to python in surprising ways sometimes... Back and forth for a while but I settled on a basic pattern of: Handl...

Fumbling once again to take a python unicode string and pass it to a C function that wants char * this morning I figured I'd write it down for next time. The basic dance is to encode the string as bytes, store a reference to this as a python object to prevent it from being g...