RLPF.ar

How clever. I've managed almost a whole month without a single word here! And this is vacation time. I have been writing a lot of code, though. I'm tempted to say that I'm fairly close to the point where I can put Hadron aside for a little while. The caveat, of course, is that most dangerous of phrases: "Just one more thing..." When is there ever only "just one more thing"? This whole project has been about one thing turning into two, into five, into 12... if I turn my attention to something else in the next week or so, it will be by force of will rather than by actual completion.

I'm proud of this week's success: a graphic editor for the fundamental type of "event pattern" in SuperCollider. Lots of little moving parts: adding and deleting rows, drag and drop to reorder, connecting to other Hadron plugins, connecting control signals from other Hadron plugins into pattern calculations. But it's working nicely and it's quite useful, worth extracting from Hadron and publishing for general use. I might even use it myself when composing, as a pattern sketchpad.

Guangzhou is a bit boring over the holiday. This is a city where people come to work; when the major holidays roll around, the population drops noticeably. One can actually stand comfortably on line 3 of the metro, even at rush hour; at other times of the year, it's never quite as bad as Tokyo (no station guards with white gloves needed) but it is (ahem) cozy. There is less stimulus, but more quiet time to focus on challenging problems. I made good use of it.

I did escape for an overnight to Shenzhen. I'll have to collect my impressions of that place another time, except to say briefly that it's very new, very modern, and a consequence of newness (it started to develop into a major metropolis only within the last 30 years) is a strange, unrooted, ephemeral quality. There's more there than Gertrude Stein's "no there there," but perhaps a bit on the antiseptic side for my taste.

The highlight was an exhibit at the Shenzhen Museum of sculptures from the collection of Juan Antonio Perez Simón. No especially major pieces (though a Rodin stood out), but all the works were beautifully executed.