Charles 𝄢 H

Overly intellectualised shitposting is "provocations"

The long shadow of acousmatic techniques chills us all.

A computer must never make a decision, therefore computers can never improvise.

This album is all based on the sounds of the ratchet, a percussion instrument that is also sometimes a children's toy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_(instrument)

It is wildly experimental and also surprisingly musical.

Amirkhanian is a percussionist and his compositions are usually Text Sound Poetry. This album uses those techniques applied to a percussion instrument and some collaboration with other instrumentalists.

It really shows that 'tape music' techniques still have a lot of life in them. It is super interesting.

Ratchet Attach It from Charles Amirkhanian

https://othermindsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/ratchet-attach-it

Fmod is this cool music system for game design that's sort of both static and responsive. The composer creates themes and also composes transitional segments.

So if your character is hanging out at a fun place they hear happy music, but if they move into a sad zone, the music becomes sad in a way that sounds composed and intentional.

So as I'm writing some stuff for busking organ, I realise that part of what I want is this kind of reactivity. Are we doing another loop around the verse and refrain or are we headed for the code and the next piece?

Indeed, can we play theme A and use algorithm B to generate an accompaniment in real time? Ideally I could use a few inputs to move through different musical regions that might be fully or only partly deterministic.

I kind of don't want to reimplement fmod in python, though. Maybe there's already a library.

I spent a lot of time today making an arrangement of La Danse des Canards today and its fun, but I can already tell that its too fixed.

Tbh I'm mostly modifying existing arrangements to be in a playable key and it feels both like a lot of bother and also insufficient.

I won't lie, computer music feels kind of dystopian in general right now

I learned the word "qualia" yesterday and my first thought to synthesise that knowledge was (unfortunately?) "something which cannot be experienced by an LLM"

This is a very hilarious* riff on Cornelius Cardew's denunciation of Stockhausen.

Why did Cardew denounce Stockhausen? Because he was a Maoist and their major activity is denunciations.

• Not actually funny.

History of computer music keynote

Computers were slow in the 1970s. Composers then started with a blank screen, without even instruments predefined. Oliveros said, "you have to build your own instrument."

Everything was new and exciting. Their computers were built for the military industrial complex. Special hardware for audio was needed. They were big and expensive machines.

This is why FM was exciting - it was cheaper.

DAC were also expensive and not made for music.

But CDs had high quality DACs, which was new. The mac came out. The DX7 came out. It was multiphonic. The laser printer also came out that year, kicking off desktop publishing.

Now, we can synthesise more sounds in real time than we can hope to manually control. The complexity makes composing slower.

In 1976 it was time to start thinking about automated control with "musical intelligence". Will neural nets save us, the speaker wonders?

Reviving this thread for two reasons:

1. I forgot to include citations!

2. I think it's maybe my unfair gloss to suggest that Jack Halberstam might endorse forgetting as a way of disrupting intergenerational trauma.

Indeed, in Wellerstein's post, he identifies two kinds of knowledge: book learning and tacit knowledge. Book learning are the plans for how to make a rocket. Tacit knowledge is having the skills to do the precision welding on the fuel lines. You need both of these to run the nuclear programme. This is the required technical knowledge.

But, I will argue, it's not the only kind of knowledges and not the only kind needed to run a nuclear programme. In order to run a nuclear programme, especially one with the ability to literally kill everyone, you need to want to run such a programme. It's not a binary decision to be able to end the world, but thousands or millions of smaller decisions about how and why to build such a massive, sprawling system.

The 'why' is another form of transmitted knowledge. Why on earth did people in the 1950s decide that they wanted to run the world as a suicide pact? This cultural mindset, which persisted until at least the 1980s was engendered in people, an invisible form of knowledge transfer.

@murpunktat@graz.social

Hello,

This looks very interesting! I have a background in network music, data sonification and public engagement and I'd like to apply, but I have a couple of questions.

1. Is this open to non-EU citizens? I have British and US passports.

2. Can you say anything about the data? It seems like this has already started? What kind of data are you collecting? What kinds of questions and prompts have you used thus far?

Thank you!

Charles