Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Mercury is in retrograde

As an Aquarius, of course, I don’t believe in astrology. But sometimes, when things start going wrong in rapid succession, I ask my California friends and learn that Mercury is, indeed, in retrograde. I have no idea what this means as per Mercury’s position relative to the Earth (and certainly have no idea how this could possibly have any measurable effect on the Earth), but in astrology terms, it means things are going to break. It’s a bad time to start new projects. One friend, Polly, who actually worked giving readings, explained that this is actually a good thing in that it helps people weed things out and focus, etc. It’s important to lead a balanced life. So my last week or so has been very balancing.

So I mentioned in my last post that I was moving from CVS to svn (don’t worry, this won’t get too technical, but anyway, the next paragraph will be non-geeky). I was all set to start work on new projects for a new year and so I created the organizational scheme that I would use on one computer and when I tried to get it onto the other one . . . no dice. So I decided enough was enough and switched systems. Which was fraught with all kinds of peril. In brief, it didn’t like my data and wouldn’t work with it. Developers started to recognize my login name and ask if I could submit bug reports. This is not a good thing. I had to add every file to svn, one at a time, trying to figure out which one was the culprit. I never did find out, but this process was not fast. At least it’s all in now, so my data is more or less safe.
While this was going on, I finally realized that none of my classmates were going to volunteer to watch my dog. My supervisor would have offered, but his wife just gave birth on Monday, so I told him no. There’s a pet store near my house, that I’ve talked about before. the owner was the guy who told me that my dog would be stolen from in front of the supermarket. Anyway, he has a chip reader and I wanted to see if Xena’s chip could be read with a standard, English reader and I wanted to get advice about kennels, so I went back to the shop with Xena.
The smell wasn’t very nice when I first went, but this time, it was like the air was soupy with it. The shop is full of birds and rodents and other small animals and a cat and there was a pungent mix of the smells of their food, their bedding, their fur and their feces. They also do dog grooming there, so there was a smell of wet dog and the hairs brown around my the hair dryers wafted through the shop (if only I was exaggerating). There were cases of vegetables on the ground, which I guess were for the rabbits, and clearly some forgotten ones, behind the overly stuffed shelves, had been left to rot. I imagined that a portal had opened to some foul layer of hell and stinking demons entered and left through this shop, whose smell would mask their comings and goings.
The shop guy didn’t have his chip reader with him. As for kennels, there were no good ones in Birmingham. I would get Xena back half starved, with open wounds, if I got her back at all. One of his customers got the wrong dog back. I would have to go at least 50 km out of town to find a decent kennel. I looked dumbfounded and he went on, saying that it was midterm break and all the kennels were already completely booked anyway. And I should give him a ring and make an appointment to get Xena’s chip read.
Right. I like to get all my distress out of the way in one go, so I went in the barber shop a few doors down and asked for a haircut. When I tried this in The Hague, I was refused service. In other places, it’s lead to huge arguments about appropriate haircuts. Etc etc. Well, England wins for least stress place to get a hair cut. They asked me to clarify, but no arguments at all. It just got cut. Alas, not quite as well as my Amsterdam barber, but quite a bit cheaper. The barber was indignant about the kennel situation. “We have animal welfare laws in this country!” she said. “No kennel would treat a dog like that! They would get shut down, maybe go to jail.” Her assistant wrote down some phone numbers from the yellow pages (“Do you have yellow pages in California?”) and later I called them and the first one had space and I booked it. Yay.
So when I got back, I finished up my svn conversion and all seemed well and it was time to write the music that I had due. I approached a high profile blogger about trading a commission for a plug and a banner ad and he said ok, and then my backup thing went totally wrong and I had to email him to ask for an extra week. Yikes. So I went to work on that. There’s a sports theme, so I recorded some football sounds from the TV and then layered them in a sort of interesting manners and then went to record some processed white noise. I thought it would be nice to have it start with very strongly resonant filterings and settle out into plain noise, which could be faded down to sound like crowd noise. This is still my plan, but the nice thing about hardware synths is that you never really know how it’s going to come out. This is why it’s fun.
My synth got kind of battered in the move (always tighten your bolts before shipping!), and this was my first time turning it on and, thank gods, it worked. So I set up my patch and tried to record it and got unfiltered noise. After a lot of head scratching, it became clear that the noise source was my mixer! Arg.
I took it apart and all the solder joints looked ok. I don’t know what I thought I could fix. I put it back together and reattached it and got the sound I was expecting. Yay. So I re-attached it to the computer and got nothing but noise again. Oh. Must be a software problem.
I went to download the manual for the Ardour, which is the mixing software that I use. (It’s free, and quite nice) and noticed both that the manual section I was looking for is not yet written (alas) and there’s a new version out with many improvements for mac users. (Huzzah.) The new version, though, didn’t like my version of Jack, which is an audio library that alot of free software uses. So I got the new version of jack and installed it and it wouldn’t run at all. And it completely blew away my old version. And then, slowly, I remembered that it had taken me over a week to figure out how to custom compile it last time so it would run on my machine. And I had never gotten around to doing the write up of what I changed to get it to work. oh crap.
That’s ok. I have other software. so I fired up Audacity, (which is also free software and very nice) and all it recorded was noise. ( . . . ) I tested my mixer again and it wasn’t working.
So a flaky mixer caused me to blow away my working software.
There’s no way I can finish this project without a mixer. So I have to buy a new one. In the mean time, I’ve missed the second deadline and created a mountain of work. This is not good.
What killed the mixer? It’s not surprising that it’s given up the ghost. It’s spent a lot of time bouncing around in a backpack and I plugged the american transformer into a step-down converter, which meant it was getting 50 Hz when it expected 60. Still, it functioned for 2 years in this manner. I’ve been having odd electrical problems recently. I go to sleep and leave things on (yeah, my carbon footprint, I know) and when I wake up, they’re inexplicably off. Still plugged in and switched on, but not getting electricity. Oh my god, the first time this happened was with my laptop. The battery had drained utterly and the power brick would not spit out juice. I thought the computer had died. But, unplugging and replugging fixes it every time so far. It’s hit my other computer, my speakers, my synths, a power bar (the light-up switch was not lit up). This is really weird. In other countries I’ve lived in, a plug in the wall means either that power is flowing or a fuse or breaker has gone. It doesn’t stop and wait to be replugged.
I think I need a UPS, which is expensive enough in the US. It’s going to cost a month’s rent here. They’re very useful in a studio, though. They suppress surges, they keep voltage steady in dips and brown outs, and, best of all, they tale a lot of noise out of the power and therefore make your gear actually sound better.
And I need to buy a new mixing board, which would be much, much cheaper in New York, where I’ll be on November 1, but stupid power differences and Britian’s odd obsession with grounded, fuse-containing plugs (hm, or not so odd after all), means that I should buy one in this country. Which is probably the most expensive place in all of Europe to buy electronics gear.
So, in summary, I have to spend a fortune housing my dog, replacing my mixer and getting a UPS. If I get my dog back, she’ll be wounded and half-dead. I totally blew it in a really high profile commission. My recording/mixing machine’s software is offline for the foreseeable future. My existing hardware is in danger. I have a meeting with my supervisor on wednesday and I’ve accomplished exactly nothing. Less than nothing, because before I had the potential of accomplishing something. But, to balance things, I don’t have to fight for haircuts. So it’s not all bad. Oh, and I’m moderating the livejournal feminist group again, which could go either way.
Still no social life, but my sanity is staying much more stable that I would have expected. So that’s good too. Really, things can only get better. Unless they don’t.

Migrating to svn

There exists a piece of software called CVS. It’s very handy for keeping track of files across multiple computers. So if you edit a file on computer A and want to edit it again on computer B, it is a way of making sure you have the most recent version everywhere. Also, if you keep the main data store on a remote server, it’s also a way to do network backups. The only problem with it is that it completely sucks.

Fortunately, somebody wrote a new system called Subversion, or svn for short. There are a lot of different ways to migrate from CVS to svn, but I went the slacker route. I had some, um, glitches. To spare you my pain, here’s a slacker howto:

Moving the Repo

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
cvs -d [path to repository] export -D now [name of respository]

Ok, while that’s going, let’s think about where you want to stick your svn repositories. I stuck mine in ~/svn/[name of repsitory]. Every one gets it’s own directory, no sharing like you can with CVS. I tried sharing and I had a disaster, alas. Anyway, let’s say you’re logged in to the machine where you’re going to host your repositories, and, for purposes of this example, your repo is named “Documents.” You’ve got it exported from CVS and sitting in ~/tmp/Documents/
Ok, part of the reason that CVS sucks is because it’s so damn hard to move things around or delete them. Well, go to town! Now you can! Once you get everything looking lovely, create yourself a svn repository and put your data in it.

mkdir ~/svn/Documents
svnadmin create ~/svn/Documents/
svn import Documents file://[full path to your homedir]/svnrepos/Documents/ -m "Initial copy"

Ok, where that says, full path, it means what you get when you type: “cd; pwd” (without the quotes). If you type that, make sure to go back to our working directory: “cd ~/tmp”

Getting Client Machines up to speed

Ok, you have two options. One is to just blow away the repository that you have checked out of CVS and check out the new one from svn. Boom! You’re done! However, if you’re using this as a backup strategy, you probably haven’t backed up every file. For me, that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the file and want to keep it around. It just means that I can regenerate it or I can live without it. Not because I want to, but . . .. I have a bunch of files that I don’t want to lose, but not so much that I stuck them in the repository. Which leads to the second option.
Remember, slacker means brute forcing. If you have a million client machines and not, like, 1 or 2, you’re going to want to write a script. But if you’re lazy and only have a few machines, it can be faster to do it by hand.
So when your were busily beautifying your directory tree: moving, renaming, etc? Do that to your version on the client machines.
Now, get rid of all those stupid CVS folder. This is easy. Cd into the root directory of the repository. Type “rm -rf `find . -name CVS`”. But don’t take my word for that. First try “echo `find . -name CVS` | less” and make sure you’re listing the directories that you actually want to delete. (Obviously, skip the double quotes, but keep those weird backwards single quotes.)
Create a temporary directory on your client machine and check out a copy of your new repo there

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
svn co svn+ssh://[network host]/[path to repository] Documents

Ok, there’s like a million ways to access a svn repo, but that’s the best one. Ask your sysadmin to set it up.
Now, this is the fun part. Let’s call the CVS repo A and let’s call the new one B. There are files that are in B that are not in A and vice versa. Copy all the files that are in B but not in A into A. This includes a bunch of .ssh directories. One in every folder. If there are files in B that you would rather have than the version in A, then copy those too.
Wasn’t that fun? Now do it for all your client machines. Ok, there is now an issue of files in your checkout versions that differ from the ones in your repository. So go to you client machines and do some checkins.

Internet at Home!

Huzzah!

I still had to go to school today, because I’m playing a piece tomorrow night at the Ikon Gallery, (7:00 PM) and my supervisor wanted me to verify that it would work on the computer that’s going to the gig. I left Xena tied in the hallway, in a gesture to the no-dogs-in-studios rule. This failed to appease the studio manager who spoke to me about it while I seethed with unreasonable rage. I showed enough restraint not to drop out of school on the spot.
Why so stressed? I dunno. It sucks that Nicole has left. And I was biking to get my cell phone back from the unlocker when a car came closer to my person than I think I’ve ever experienced before. Even when the truck hit me last summer, it didn’t feel as close. And this was much higher speed. My bike is as big as a motorcycle, so I don’t understand why cars don’t give me as much room as they’d give a motorcycle. Or maybe they do, which is also alarming. I felt shaken up. I went to a bike shop to get a day-glo safety vest, but they didn’t have anything that wasn’t hugely gigantic.
they were next to a pet store and I finally have a phone number, so I went to see about getting Xena some tags. The guy at the store told me that dog-theft is rampant in the Midlands! People steal dogs left and right and demand ransom or sell them for vivisection or use them as bait dogs to train pitbulls to attack! I shouldn’t leave my dog outside of the supermarket unless I’ve locked her with a lock! Some of his customers had pets stolen! Somebody once brought in a stolen pet for grooming! The guy behind me in line said his cat had been stolen!
Good fucking god.
So if I don’t get flattened by a car, my dog is certainly to be stolen or at least threaten health and safety in the music studios. Girls scream and run away when I walk her. What’s up with that? I mean, college women, especially ones displaying cleavage and drunk sort of fall over themselves trying to pet her, but younger ones and ones with higher necklines are terrified.
In other news, My ‘installation’ is terrible and I’m scrapping it. I wasted like 30 hours on it. I was at school until 11:30 trying to make it less dull. I almost succeeded, but not at all. The only thing that could make it a worse disaster is to spend more time on it. I’ve got the anti-midas touch right now.

Art is supposed to be some sort of window to the soul or something right. Does it say something that I tried to create something that took patience to appreciate? That started invisibly and crept up on you until it became a short speaker-murdering wail of feedback? I tried it with Pink Noise at first. Then I was walking towards the studios and heard somebody running it! How could this be?! But then I realized that what I heard was a leaking toilet in the men’s room. Yeah, so I tried switching the sound source to formant synthesis. And I ended up with something approximating a flock of deranged ducks. Which is not interesting for more than a few seconds at the most. So I switched to a tape loop of Bill OReily talking about falafels. No! Talking about lesbian gangs terrorizing innocent straight men. First, I thought the three minute long segment was laughably silly. The pink pistols are a GAY MEN’s self-defense group. Why would lesbians carry pink guns? Sheesh. But then I realized that the “gangs” he was talking about were victims of hate crimes who tried to defend themselves but then got arrested and sent to prison for it. Listening to this 381260421364 times is not happy. Which is why I swore no more of these pundit pieces, right. Anyway, it was still boring, so I quit.
I told the bit about the running toilet to Scott and he agreed that perhaps abandoning it was for the best. He is a really, really, really nice guy. He could tell how pissed I was and offered to dog sit and try talking to people, etc etc etc. He’s much too nice to be a supervisor of postgrads. He’s doomed to bitterness.
Maybe tomorrow will be fun.
In even further afield news, my brother is moving to Beaverton, Oregon. I have mixed feelings about this. Among them: Hey, only I get to move away from California! The rest of you have to stay there awaiting my return, so when I finally come back, I can pick up right where I left off! I demand that my friends continue to meet in our old hangouts on our old nights and somberly remember me by ordering a pint of cask-pulled ale and pouring it solemnly on the ground in memory of their exiled homie.

Weekend Report

The lounge with the electrical plugs and the wifi is shut and locked on weekends! I sat outside of it on a bench and checked a few email messages, but my laptop battery is not young, so I had to quit before I could post anything to my blog. I went inside the computer music labs and they don’t have internet access. You can get to a server, but not outside. Ok, I see why you wouldn’t want people using music lab computers to read comics, but they also can’t get to online help files either.

So I sat in the lab, waiting for my battery to recharge and staring squarely at my navel, when another postgrad came by. His name is Zack (I think) and he’s also after a PhD. He’s also a SuperCollider guy and also left behind from the Copenhagen trip. He asked me what I was up to and I whined that I was all alone in the world (woe is me), so we went out for a beer that evening.

I told him that I’d see him at school again today, but I didn’t go in. While I was navel gazing, I got an idea for a multi channel piece and I thought I’d get a stereo version working and then go add channels. But I haven’t been able to get a stereo version going.

So while I’ve been debugging my code, I’ve been trying to make a playlist of makeout music that I think Cola would like. Shockingly, this side project is not making me feel less lonely. Maybe I should write a makeout music generator to rival Nick Collins’ JPop generator. I need samples of women singing “uhgh” and “ooh” and all those sorta sexy R&B vocals. Anyway. What’s your favorite makeout music and why? Leave a comment. (Anybody that says Stimmung has to sit facing the corner for an hour.)

The piece that I’m actually working on uses feedback. It’s got a comb filter and it also feeds back into the whole synthdef. I use a InFeedback.ar and I track the amplitude with an RMS. There’s a tiny amount of noise going into the circuit and it builds up very slowly through feedback. When it gets above a threshold a bunch of envelopes start going and everything gets zeroed out. I multiply the output of the comb by zero and the input of the comb by zero and the noise by zero and set the comb’s feedback to zero. Heck, I zero the buffer that the comb filter uses. There are zeros everywhere. So when I lift the zeros, it should sound like I’m restarting it from the beginning, right? No! It very quickly builds up past the threshold and zeros again and builds quickly and zeros and builds quickly. I don’t get it.

From Last Week

Nicole left very early yesterday morning, alas. By the time I post this, she will (hopefully) be in California. I spent all yesterday morning feeling sorry for myself, but eventually roused myself into action, at least to answer the door when my last delivery of boxes arrived.

My next door neighbor came over while I chatted with the delivery guy and Xena ran around loose. The neighbor chastised me because he had found dog shit on his driveway the day previous. “It wasn’t my dog.” I said, which was true as that the first and only time Xena has ever been allowed off leash on the street. It was like he didn’t hear me, so I repeated it. He clearly thought I was lying. He wanted an apology. meh.

I set up my bedroom studio and it looks pretty good, but during shipping, the bolts came unscrewed in one of my synthesizer cases and the modules got slightly battered by bouncing and the loose screws. My favorite module, the MOTM 440 low pass filter, suffered visible damage. One of the knobs had come loose and the back cover of it broke off and now it catches when I turn it. I took it to school and asked the lab assistant about it. He lent me some tools and I re-tightened it and he told me to take it home and see if it worked. I screwed it back into the case, but I still haven’t tried turning it on as I have fears of it suddenly catching fire or something equally unlikely. The moral of this story is to use the correct mounting brackets and not try to fake it with just bolts and washers. Or if you do try to fake it, tighten them before you ship. And then tighten them again before you strap them to your bike and pedal them home. And don’t put it on a rack where it will bounce around a lot, but in the trailer.

Speaking of which, my trailer is also broken. I think it’s from running into stuff and not from carrying around my synthesizer. It’s wide and it sticks out on one side and lord knows i’ve bashed it into things a bunch of times. Anyway, it has a spring attaching the hitch part to the main part, so the spring lets it swivel some. the spring, however, is sprung. I think this is easily fixable. By somebody with tools.

My supervisor and all of my colleagues are off in Copenhagen, putting on a concert with an array of 80 speakers. They call this system BEAST. Apparently, I’m going to be a part of BEAST in the future, but for now, the only people I know in town are my housemates. They’re nice people. But I have no friends here except for my dog, who is nice, but doesn’t talk much and has a disturbing tendency to roll in horrible things she finds in the park.

I read Fingersmith last night. It’s a thick book by Sarah Waters. It has a really good plot twist in it. And unlike the last book by her that I read, the lesbians don’t die in the end. The book is kind of sexy, actually. So I woke up this morning feeling even more sorry for myself than yesterday.

I’ve read a lot of fiction lately, after a long run of none at all. The downside to this is that after I read a lot and sit by myself, I start narrating my life to myself in my head (c’mon, you know you do it too, sometimes) and as I’ve read two novels placed in the Victorian era recently and I’m in England, I’ve begun narrating to myself as if I were some sort of bloody Victorian (you see that “bloody” there? alas). I guess as long as I keep it to myself, it’s not a big deal, but as you can see, it’s sprung out and effected my blog, and thus yourselves, dear readers. . . . (Are those crickets I hear? Damn.)

The weather has been sunny the last two days, and thus at odds with my disposition, which is for the best. I need to find a book shelf, I think. I went to two charity shops today. I thought this term “charity shop” meant something like the Goodwill store in the US, and there is a passing resemblance in that they both seem to involve used clothes. But either I went to the wrong two shops or the similarity sort of runs out there. The “charity” part seems to just refer to the owners of the shop. The might sell a lot of new stuff. And the people working there seem to be normal shop keepers or maybe volunteers, I don’t know, but they’re not getting the sort of job training that folks at Goodwill are getting. No scent of lisol. No air of poverty. Maybe I went to the wrong shops.

The locals here are friendly and are getting gradually more intelligible. I’ve been talking with other dog owners in the park. And when I was strapping horrible, cheap dollar-store plastic junk to my bike, a bicycle enthusiast approached me to talk about old fashioned delivery bikes and the hilliness of Birmingham. When you look around you from where you’re standing, it looks flat. But there are valleys everywhere. There is a nice, light Danish city bike that I want, but can’t presently afford, nor do I have parking space for it. I’ve been daydreaming of putting a bike rack in the driveway. I’ve got myself convinced that it’s a great idea.

Now, however, it’s a great idea to stop typing and go do something else.

Address

55a Frederick Rd
Selly Oak
Birmingham
B29 6NX
Great Britain

Actually, I’m, alas, uncertain about the last line there. Should it say “England?” “United Kingdom?” Or what? I live in England, and I know it’s a small part of the whole country, much like Holland is but two provinces of the Netherlands. But what is the name of the country in which I live? What’s the difference between “United Kingdom” and “Great Britain?
While I’m on these sorts of questions: What’s a licenced restaurant? What’s an off-licence shop? Does “going around with your dog” mean brining her to the country or just to that particular establishment? How did I end up in a city with even worse weather than The Hague? Why are posh british accents like nails on a chalkboard? It doesn’t matter if they look out the window and just say, “oh, it’s raining again” I want to bash them with my laptop and shout “shut up, you insufferable twit!” but maybe that’s what comes of eating tiny, cheap jelly donuts for breakfast and the resultant sugar crash.
In other news, my dog is a health and safety violation. Um, because she’s rabid and will rip your throat out. And she covers floors with all sorts of dirt and germs that could not have found it’s way indoors through any other means, especially not shoe bottoms.
I’m so dumb. Never ask permission! Just do it and when somebody tells you that it’s not allowed say that you’ve already been doing it for weeks with no problem.
This country is extremely paranoid. I mean, I’m glad to finally live someplace where they’ve heard of smoke alarms. But the sheer number of fire regulations here . . . all explained to me in detail. I had to ask if the building burst into flame every tuesday. They act as if EVERYTHING is a ticking time bomb. The building will burn to the ground any moment now. the dog will go mad an attack. The kids will go mad and attack (why else are there so many stupid surveillance cameras in the student lounge?)

Yesterblog

Yesterday, the first business day of my Birmingham residency, I got my student ID card and worked out how to get on the campus wifi network with my laptop, but, alas, not my n800. Given the way the network manager (doesn’t) work, I dispair of ever getting my n800 onto the network.

Then I went to the sole rehearsal for the John Cage piece Lecture on the Weather which I will be performing in on October 12. For those of you unfamiliar with this piece, it was commissioned by the CBC (Canadian National Radio) in honor of the American Bicentenial and premiered in New York in 1975. Scott, my supervisor, explained that the CBC New Music folks were a bunch of Vietnam War draft dodgers, which explains why Canada was celebrating the spirit of ’76. (America declared independence from England in 1776. “Spirit of ’76” refers to this declaration.)

The piece is made up of text and squiggly lines. The squiggly lines are treated much like Scratch Music. The text comes from Henry David Thoreau and includes random selections from Walden, Journal and Essay on Civil Disobedience. Cage points out in his preface that the last of those inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The first of those names, especially, might explain why NONE of the Brits in the piece had ever heard of Thoreau.

One of the greatest philosophers in the United States completely unknown here. Good gods.

I don’t know how I feel about the piece. The text is ok. Actually, it’s alarming how much it continues to resonate. I just read the novel Affinity by Waters (author of Fingersmith) and it’s largely about mistreatment of women in prison in the UK, 30 years later than Thoreau. I can read that and think “thank gods they fixed those problems! It’s a great relief that it’s not like that anymore.” But when I read Thoreau, I think, “Arg, nothing has changed.” Constitutional originalists continue to plague the land. The US continues to wage aggressive wars. Our taxes are still used for evil.

But it’s just weird hearing it read in British accents. by people who have no idea what they’re reading. Who hear the phrase “Walden” and think nothing. Who say “Concord” and have no association with it.

Anyway, after rehearsal, I got access to the school studios and a bank account. Yes, a bank account on my first day here. I’d feel very proud of myself, except that they really bent the rules for me, but were unreasonably strict when it came to the many Chinese students waiting in line. Racist bastards. After I get my student visa, I’m switching banks. In the meantime, though, I need a bank.

I feel disappointed with myself. I should have probably told them to fuck off. But, complicating my perceptions, the gate keeper who was giving a hard time to the Chinese students was white, but the guy who actually opened my bank account was black and had Jamaican parents. He was wearing a wrist band praising Marcus Garvey, one of the 117 national heroes of Jamaica.

Today: cell phone unlock, household crap, make posters advertising music commissions.

I’m raising my prices to £10 ($20.25-ish). Order before the prices go up! celesteh.etsy.com

The move

The following post was typed on Sunday evening

I decided to delay my ferry trip to the overnight ferry, which turned out to be a very good idea. The day ferry wouldn’t have disembarked until 23:00 and getting from Harwich to Birmingham at that hour would have been exhausting. Not that six hours of sleep in a tiny bunk on a big boat wasn’t also exhausting.

Fortunately, all of Xena’s paperwork was more or less adequately in order. There was much todo because there was no written record of what date she got her microchip inserted. The fact that it was detectable and the number matched the reported number was not enough information. I offered to call my vet in California and ask, but instead the person checking suggested that I might suddenly remember the date and write it down. It came to me in a flash. Sort of. More or less. Anyway, Xena cleared immigration.

I should back up a bit here in my story. The ferry left from Hoek van Holland (“the Hook of Holland”), which is a bit more than 20km south of Den Haag. There is a very nice bike route that goes along the sand dunes to get there. Very pretty. We opted not to take it because the non-pretty route is flatter and less windy and I was carrying probably 100 kilos of stuff. No really. My bike is, um, not made of carbon fiber. I had a backpack in one saddle bag, which contained two computers and a whole lot of cables. A backpacking backpack on the back rack which contained all my paperwork, a synthesizer component (specifically a sherman filter bank), a sleeping bag, a bunch of camping gear and more cables. On the front, I had the giant basket I got for moving Xena around. She doesn’t like it much, but the basket itself is still handy. For example, in this case, I fileld it up with all of Xena’s dog stuff (toys, pillow, food, ceramic bowl, the door to her crate, etc) and also a bottle of Czech communion wine, a bottle of abscinthe, a small bottle of african compari, um, yeah. And finally, I was towing Xena herself, with the two halves of her crate stuck over the trailer.

It was rather much. When we got to our cabin on the boat, I passed out almost immediately.

The Mayflower left from Harwich. When the Pilgrims got tired of Leiden, they went back to Harwich and sailed for America. What’s little known is that they were actually supposed to leave a year earlier than they finally set out, but they got delayed by the confusing and contradictory signage.

The British immigration guy did a bit of a double take when he saw our bikes and the amount of crap on them, but we got through much more easily than I expected. It was way better than when I came two weeks ago. Then we got horribly lost and biked in large circles trying to get to the train station. Also, everything was bloody backwards. Cars on the wrong side is a lot to deal with at 6:30 am. (Okay, 7:00. Fine, 7:30, but still . . ..)

The train ticket from Harwich to Birmingham cost as much as the ferry. I saw a sign yesterday for a flight to Spain and a round trip airplane ticket from Grenoble cost less than a train ticket from Harwich to Birmingham. About half-as-much less, not just a few pence less. (I’m imagining them trying to get from London to Cardiff and going via Iceland because it’s cheaper.) (This is all Thatcher’s fault, but that’s a later blog post.)

We arrived in London and Nicole procured a bike map of the city. We had to get from Liverpool St Station to Euston Station in 1.25 hours. No problem, there are even bike signs up around the city. No problem until . . . that sound I hear could not possibly be the sound of hissing, rotating around like a Leslie speaker. Um, damn.

The back tire of my Dutch bike completely deflated in a few minutes. Some of the Londoners didn’t quite understand what “Dutch” means in this context. It means that my back tire has a fender, a shirt guard, saddlebags, a chain guard and a few other pieces of flat metal designed to keep me out of contact with the tire. Also, the bike is gigantic. It’s the Cadillac of dutch bikes. Meaning it rides nice, but it’s big, heavy, inefficient and hard to find parking for.

After a long while I found a bike shop, who agreed to fix my bike. But then freaked out when they saw the size of it. Apparently, it wouldn’t even fit in their workspace. (What, is their work space on the 7.5th floor?) They sent me to another bike shop who said they could do it on Monday. Sob story. sob story, ok come back in an hour. “Those chain guards are a real pain in the arse.” “Yeah, but they keep grease off my pants. [long pause] trousers! trousers!” (for Brits, pants = jockey shorts.)

It was then that I passed off the dog trailer to Nicole, who was aghast at the amount of stuff I was hauling. Not that her load was light. I’d say it was more or less even when she had the trailer. Anyway, the rest of our trip was pretty unremarkable.

We got to my flat and my key didn’t work in the front door. Fortunately, my flatmate was home and recognized me from our very brief meeting two weeks ago. He’s terrified of dogs. So is his sister, who is my other flatmate. They want Xena to stay in my room all the time. I’m hoping their fear decreases. Meanwhile, Xena is terrified of the stairs. She’ll go up them, but shakes in terror when asked to descend. There’s a climate of fear around here.

My room is large. It has a big bed and a table and a bed-side table and weird modular closet stuff in the closet. The bed has a pink upholstered headboard. the bed actually has a good mattress. Since arriving, I’ve spent most of my time asleep on it.

When I go out, I cannot decipher the Brum accent at all. It was actually easier to communicate in the Netherlands because there when it became impossible, I could ask “Sprekt U engels?” and we’d switch to something I could understand. What am I going to ask the Brits to switch to? I can’t understand my housemates either. I think they’re from Nigeria, but I should ask.

Things to do tomorrow:

  • Go to my letting agent and exchange October rent for a working key.
  • Go to school and get an ID card and get on the network
  • Purchase dog food
  • Purchase a bathmat and two waste baskets
  • Find an ISP
  • New tag for dog
  • Unlock cell + new SIM

Algorithmic dance music generation

Nick Collins

His laptop is signed by Stockhausen.

He wrote a techno generator 10 years ago, which was silly. So he’s trying it again, but with synthpop. The new project is called Infno.

When you press play, you want something that’s different every time in a significant way. (This sounds like old school video game music.)

Whoah, it really is different everytime! Still video-gamey, though. This has garnered applause from the audience.

The lines all know about each other and share data. The order of generation matters.

This is really cool.

Also, he has the idea of generative karaoke! Ooh, now there is audience participation. More applause.

This is the coolest thing ever.

There is a computer-written pop song from 1956. Kako will be singing the lyrics from that song. The melody here is not known in advance.

This sounds like jpop. Also like drunken karaoke. Wow, a lovely disaster. I am in love with everything about this. The singer is muddling through. Wow, now she’s getting it, sorta.

Applause and cheering.

Now he’s playing techno.

More applause.

Algorithmic lyric generation is next!

A paper will be forthcoming.

Loris: a supercollider implementation

Scott Wilson

Loris is an additive sound modelling method.

A sines plus noise approach. Noise is assigned to partials, modulating partials with a filtered noise source. This is a lossy process but is perceptually accurate.

Loris is a class library which can do some interesting things with partials. The python api is very good.

Data is exportable in several formats. Spear, a piece of free software, is nice for editing some of these file types. Also the command line tools are good.

Loris was not developed for real time use. It’s not fast to compute this kind of analysis. Sometimes, you must change params to get a good analysis, which can be a problem for real time. Also, in real time might not want to listen to every partial, but that’s also computationally expensive.

Analysis yields a partial list with envelopes for freq, amp, bandwidth, phase, etc.

Scott sticks analysis results in an sc object. There are 4 classes. Some ugens, data-holding classes, an oscillator.

The oscillator does all the partials. Can do some spectral difusion.

Can stretch stuff, mess with bandwidth, do funny things with different partials to move them around. This may work with prevois topic.

New release forthcoming. This is cool.