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| a practical guide to electronic music |
Posted 2010-05-18 19:43:01 by
Jim Crawford
| <Chris> | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v26eXtuatCE |
| <Jim> | they're in the military, they have to be legal, right? |
| <Jim> | what do you call this kind of music? melodic trance or something? this isn't the first time i've heard one of these songs end on a toneless drum hit. it's completely governed by music theory all the rest of the way through, not a single interesting chord or progression, but they can't remember to hit the tonic at the end. |
| <Chris> | isn't it house? |
| <Chris> | is trance house but with those supersaw lead/pads? |
| <Jim> | yeah, i guess! |
| <Jim> | louis says if it has gates on everything and four on the flour -- uhh, he said "floor" but i'm keeping it -- 909 and cheesy drop-out-build-up dynamics, it's trance :) |
| <Danny> | hm, yeah, i don't think trance is allowed to be in a major key |
| <Jim> | is it happy hardcore? :) |
| <Danny> | i don't know, man |
| <Danny> | it's not hardcore enough for happy hardcore |
| <Jim> | happy casualcore |
| <Jim> | gated pads in a major key over a house beat is definitely a style i've heard a lot* |
| <Danny> | no search results for 'electronic music genre flowchart'. this seems like a conspicuous hole in the internet |
| <Jim> | there was totally one of those |
| <Danny> | yeah? |
| <Jim> | http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ |
| <Jim> | it has a wikipedia page :D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishkur%27s_Guide_to_Electronic_Music |
| <Danny> | hah |
| <Danny> | i think what i need is more of a cataloging algorithm that works per song, with questions like "does it go 'boom-tss-boom-tss'" and "is it >150bpm" |
| <Jim> | that would be incredible :) |
| <Jim> | you could base it on one of those binary tree "20 questions" solvers you can find in 1980s books of basic listings you can type in |
| <Jim> | fuck, you could totally do it from a celebrities in prison* node! |
| <Elena> | oh man! |
| <Elena> | that would be the most hilarious set of nodes |
| <Elena> | "ugh, there's this song stuck in your head, but you're not sure what genre it is" |
| <Elena> | and then the next 20 nodes are questions about the song |
| <Jim> | that would be awesome :) |
| <Elena> | i think the most amazing would be if at the end of every branch of the tree, it would be all "Oh, of course! It's $Song by $Artist!" with a different song that fits the description each time |
| <Elena> | i would get to noding, except i don't know anything about categorizing songs, and i need to go to the bank |
| <Jim> | word |
| <Jim> | i'll foist it off on one of my friends |
| <Elena> | sweet |
| <Jim> | i'll paste the past few lines of this chat to each of them, except changing "one of my friends" to their name |
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| the best way to eat beans |
Posted 2010-02-23 23:20:25 by
Jim Crawford
| <Chris> | i got a pressure cooker |
| <Chris> | did i tell you? |
| <Chris> | i cooked beans in fucking 15 minutes! |
| <Me> | wow :) |
| <Chris> | it's like i just had my own personal bean revolution |
| <Me> | that's pretty crazy. i don't know if i'd feel safe with something that powerful in my home |
| <Me> | it'd be like owning an assault rifle |
| <Chris> | yeah, i mean, the thing has the potential to explode, blasting 400 degree steam every what way, along with any other food matter inside and bits of metal! |
| <Chris> | have you used one? you like bring it up to pressure (15psi or so) and it starts like spouting steam violently out of a little spout, off and on.. then you know it's good, you turn down the heat.. cook for however many minutes, then to release steam fast you put a fork under the valve to lever it up.. and then the steam shoots out for like 2 minutes. you have to step away. |
| <Me> | that sounds scary as fuck :) |
| <Chris> | it sort of is, but once the adrenaline's flowing, you're like in for the ride of your life |
| <Chris> | especially when it leads to eating |
| <Chris> | it's like that guy who pushed that car off the tracks.. he was all amped after that.. mad adrenals |
| <Chris> | if only someone had run up and handed him a taco, he could feel like i did after having cooked these beans two nights ago |
| <Me> | okay, you've sold me! |
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| audiosurf vs. the music game genre |
Posted 2010-02-01 21:42:17 by
Jim Crawford
Playing a good music game, I slip into a groove with the song and get to know it from the inside. When I'm playing at my best, it feels like I'm letting my conscious mind go, so my reptile can brain take over, process the audial and visual information in synchronicity and translate the patterns directly into commands to send to my limbs or fingers. To “become one with the music” is a cliche because it happens and it is awesome. After mastering a song in a rhythm game, I find that I understand the song, musically, much better. This is the magic of rhythm games: they put you inside the song and show you how the music is constructed, by giving you high-level visual patterns to match with the music and asking you to prove that you “get” them.
Sometimes I get into a similar flow-state in Audiosurf, finishing with an unexpectedly high score. Afterward, I invariably realize that I was completely ignoring the music. The visual information presented by Audiosurf is mostly random. The patterns that connect to the music are coarse-grained at best and misleading at worst. It is not edifying. By associating itself with games like Amplitude and Rock Band, Audiosurf is a scam.
Sidebar: Impressed by Audiosurf's pattern-detection code? Here, let me ruin the magic for you. Audiosurf looks for three patterns in the audio stream, all trivial to detect from a DSP standpoint:
- Periodicity in the low frequencies. This allows Audiosurf to undulate the “road” at the tempo of the song.
- Transients covering a wide spectrum, such as a distorted guitar stab or a snare drum. This allows Audiosurf to place colored blocks that, more or less, fit the music. Often, it screws up and places a block slightly ahead or behind the stab, asking the user to internalize false patterns.
- The overall loudness of the music, which feeds into the speed of the player's vehicle and the slope of the road.
The rest is just tuning the algorithms involved. Well, that, and the human brain's tendency to see patterns that don't exist.
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| ASL |
Posted 2010-01-20 23:06:20 by
Jim Crawford
Elena pointed out to me one way in which American Sign Language is awesome:
| <Elena> | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEjRHFom1Kk |
| <Elena> | i'd especially like to bring your attention to the line "we met all kinds of people and we, we fucked everyone" |
| <Elena> | in ASL, the sign for "meet" is two fists with the index fingers extended, brought into contact at the base of the hand |
| <Elena> | and ASL allows a type of syntactic marker that oral languages can't |
| <Elena> | ie, you can set an object or person in a location in space, and then refer to them by signing in/at that location |
| <Elena> | (very useful when you're talking about a number of people) |
| <Elena> | so, the line for "we met all kinds of people" is expressed by signing "meet" in multiple locations |
| <Elena> | excellently, the sign for "fuck" is the same as the sign for "meet" but with the middle finger raised as well |
| <Elena> | so "we fucked everyone" is expressed by signing "fuck" at each of the locations where "meet" was just signed |
| <Elena> | to me, that seems really poetically done |
(Elena has a more thorough writeup of this over on her Livejournal.)
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Posted 2010-05-02 23:28:53 by
Jim Crawford
Posted 2010-04-30 20:13:20 by
Jim Crawford