Category: Technical
Descent into madness (FFT noise reduction)
December 22nd, 2011Rewind about a week. After months of great performance from my Frankenstein voice recognition setup -- headset mic --> JACK --> PulseAudio --> VirtualBox running WinXP --> Dragon NaturallySpeaking -- suddenly dictation accuracy went into the… more »
Mid-Autumn Festival
September 14th, 2011Monday night was the annual Mid-Autumn Festival, also called "Moon Cake Festival" in honor of the traditional dessert. I did not have moon cake at home, but I did meet a friend for dinner at a nearby Hunan-style restaurant. Spicy! Walking through the nei… more »
Reflections on Max/MSP
June 23rd, 2011(Or, "Because I don't have enough hate mail") I've wanted to write this one for a while -- been saving up. It's a loooong rant... One of my tasks this year was to teach Max/MSP to a graduate student. This has turned out to reinforce my feeling that S… more »
Instrument building, instrument maintenance
May 28th, 2011Every so often, all musicians have to take care of their equipment: instruments go into the shop for repairs, singers take "vocal rest," and computer musicians... upgrade and debug software. I'd been postponing an upgrade to the current development ver… more »
Another tool to fall in love with
May 7th, 2011The job: Strip out the live audio from the video recording of the last performance of Affectations and replace it with a new audio track. Why? The original audio revealed a bug in the SuperCollider code, causing some long notes to be played for about 20… more »
Neo-complexity rhythm generator
May 1st, 2011Last week, in my SuperCollider lesson, my student came in with an excellent question: how to generate rhythms similar to "neo-complexity" composers such as Brian Ferneyhough. (During my grad school days, we used to mock this loose-knit band of composers… more »
First go with Lilypond
April 27th, 2011Switching over to Linux means losing Finale for music notation. I had heard rave reviews of Lilypond from other SuperCollider users, so I installed it along with a special-purpose editor named after the Italian early Baroque composer Frescobaldi. I didn'… more »
Everything's better with a real-time kernel
December 29th, 2010Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Jack2
[Geek stuff...]Preparations for the Affectations shows at the Kennedy Center were marred by a limitation policy of Jack1. What's Jack1? It's the first major incarnation of the Jack Audio Connection Kit,… more »
Rant: Pay software that should be free
December 21st, 2010One of my students came to his lesson today rhapsodizing about a program he wanted to use in his final project: Atomic Cloud. Naturally, I encourage this kind of independent research! But there's a catch... it's shareware, $19 to register (half price at… more »
Seen hither and yon
December 14th, 2010(Geek humor in 3... 2... 1...) In the Spring documentation Jimmy's been reading lately: "[an] MVC controller stereotype." Really? And which controller stereotype would that be? Jewish mother? Chinese mother? That's even better than new Person() in the… more »
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