This sample was generated from the code above, which uses Demand UGens to sequence notes/wobble rates on lines 5 and 9. Line 6 adds a bit of slew to the pitch signal, so it glissandos (slides) from note to note, faster up than down for heightened drama.

The signal path for the sound runs: initial synthesis, distortion, filtering, a simple spatialization effect and amplitude enveloping.

The tone is initially made up of a VarSaw oscillator whose width parameter (0 = downward sawtooth, 0.5 = triangle, 1 = upward sawtooth) is “wobbled” by the LFO (line 11). A pure sine wave an octave lower is added to this (line 12). The Decimator UGen distorts this signal by rounding values to an arbitrary degree of precision (i.e. 8-bit, 2-bit, 3.2-bit) as modulated by the LFO. This produces the higher-frequency content of the signal for the filter to do it’s magic on.

The result is a bit like that seething “filthy” sound that’s so popular these days. I’ll probably do a dedicated post on it later, but the trick seems to be several square wave oscillators frequency modulating one another in turn, all through a band-pass filter.

Now that everything is sufficiently noisy it’s run through a nice emulation of the Moog ladder lowpass filter on line 14.

Line 16 splits what has until now been a monophonic signal in to two channels, each of which has a separate delay on it, the values for which are LFO-modulated out of phase with one another (so when one maximally delayed, the other has no delay). This gives the sound some (subtle?) “width” when played with stereo separation, but if you were to play this on a real rig (in mono), there would be destructive and likely undesirable interference muddying up the low end. To dodge this, you could split the signal around 65Hz and only apply delays to the high end before reconstituting it.

The triggered LFO is specified on lines 7-10. Worth noting are the phase angle bounds the Phasor UGen is sweeping through: pi to 2pi – only half of a full sine wave before resetting. Playing with these bounds can produce some interesting variations on the standard wobble.

I’ve really exaggerated the distortion to highlight the character of the sound on headphones or monitors. If you were to produce a track for dance floor use, you’d want to either generate sub-bass separately, possibly raising the line synthesized with decimation an octave or two, or ease up on the distortion; as it stands, this would be kind of weak. Try commenting out line 14 (the filter) before tweaking any parameters.

He kept a written log of his life broken up into five minute intervals. He claimed his diary was complete, that every minute over the course of 20 years was carefully accounted for by thousands of words a day, a task that the interviewer characterized as having taken over his life. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Chronofile, the only similar effort I’m aware of, broke up the day into comparatively slipshod 15 minute chunks. I suppose you have to limit the temporal specificity of your log to avoid falling in to an recursive loop of logging one’s logging…

Reminds me of a very short story by Jorge Luis Borges: On Exactitude in Science.

Do not try and sit down and write a complete song. Songs that have been written in such a way and reached Number One can only be done by the true song writing genius and be delivered by artists with such forceful convincing passion that the world HAS TO listen. You know the sort of thing, “Sailing” by Rod Stewart, “Without You” by Nilsson What the Golden Rules can provide you with is a framework that you can slot the component parts into.

Firstly, it has to have a dance groove that will run all the way through the record and that the current 7″ buying generation will find irresistible. Secondly, it must be no longer than three minutes and thirty seconds (just under 3′20 is preferable). If they are any longer Radio One daytime DJs will start fading early or talking over the end, when the chorus is finally being hammered home – the most important part of any record. Thirdly, it must consist of an intro, a verse, a chorus, second verse, a second chorus, a breakdown section, back into a double length chorus and outro

It is going to be a construction job, fitting bits together. You will have to find the Frankenstein in you to make it work. Your magpie instincts must come to the fore. If you think this just sounds like a recipe for some horrific monster, be reassured by us, all music can only be the sum or part total of what has gone before. Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested. They have to believe it is through this sojourn they arrive at the grail; the great and original song that the world will be unable to resist.

So why don’t all songs sound the same? Why are some artists great, write dozens of classics that move you to tears, say it like it’s never been said before, make you laugh, dance, blow your mind, fall in love, take to the streets and riot? Well, it’s because although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before their own soul shines through; their personality demands attention. This doesn’t just come via the great vocalist or virtuoso instrumentalist. The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes – a million years of pain and lust.

We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.), we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on them. As Spider Robinson points out…

There are eighty-eight notes. One hundred and seventy-six, if your ear is good enough to pick out quarter tones. Add in rests and so forth, different time signatures. Pick a figure for maximum number of notes a melody can contain. I do not know the figure for the maximum possible number of melodies–too many variables–but I am sure it is quite high.
…
For one thing, a great many of those possible arrays of eighty-eight notes will not be perceived as music, as melody, by the human ear. Perhaps more than half. They will not be hummable, whistleable, listenable–some will be actively unpleasant to hear. Another large fraction will be so similar to each other as to be effectively identical: if you change three notes of the Moonlight Sonata, you have not created something new.

To be fair, there are worse progressions to rip off.

I’m pitching the idea of developing an electronic goban, which I’ve described on the HacDC wiki.

Many clients exist to play Go on computers/handheld devices. These are wonderful in that they can record your game in the SGF format, which is (near) universally used by players to review their games (an important part of getting better, often done with a teacher or opponent). They’re also handy when you’re moving around, and can’t set up a bunch of slick stones on a slab of wood (trains, planes, automobiles, bicycles). For casual games, it’s nice to be able to stop and resume at any time.

The big downside is face to face interaction. It’s simply nowhere near as enjoyable to play by passing a handheld back and forth or staring at a computer, the latter not being particularly portable most of the time anyway.

So the plan would be to build something that’s as close to the form factor of a real goban, but shrunk a bit for portability, and completely electronic. I’d say about a 30cm square (~1 foot for the unit challenged) and no thicker than a paperback book would be a good size. Something you can throw in a bag without hesitation. It should have as intuitive an interface as possible, the ability to automatically score the game, and best of all store games and export them to a computer somehow.

I wired up a simple astable multivibrator 555 timer circuit (which outputs a series of 5 volt pulses) whose frequency I could control with a potentiometer. I got a 6ft lamp extension cord, cleaved the two wires in two and cut one to put the relay in line.

The primary reason to do the test was to see how much latency the 100 watt incandescent bulbs display at various rates. The bulbs take a little while to get to full brightness after current starts to flow and even longer to become totally dark after it stops. A little bit of this is okay, and the trailing edge will actually produce a neat ghosting effect as the meter falls off. Too much latency though, especially in reaching brightness, will mean a dim top edge to the meter and a disappointing disconnect between sound and visual.

By playing around with rapid pulsing and watching it closely I don’t think it will be a problem. It’s difficult to tell without seeing several of these in a row though, so I’m going to try to measure the brightness curve from the following video and see if I can write a quick simulation (using processing?) of what the completed meter would look like with these bulbs. The camera’s auto-exposure function sensor latency will skew the data a bit, but it should be enough for a rough idea. Alternatively, when I get an oscilloscope (what can’t they do!), I could use a photoresistor to measure the brightness curve more precisely.

I’ve started a photoset for this project here.

This is Patterson Office Tower (POT) on The University of Kentucky campus. It’s home to a small cafe/mezzanine, an obscure mathematics library, and the offices of all the professors and bureaucrats who don’t fit in the endearingly inefficient buildings elsewhere on campus. If, as civil engineers like to say, architecture is the art of wasting space, it’s oft-scorned brutalist style seems to be a good example of what would happen if we eschewed the discipline altogether.

On top of this mercilessly orthogonal concrete form is the broadcast tower of Radio Free Lexington. Despite it’s “dim bulb” 250 watt transmission power, the station currently reaches most of Lexington’s 275,000 or so residents via terrestrial broadcast thanks to the height of the tower and the hill it sits on. The FCC has approved WRFL for an upgrade to 7900 watts, which will let us reach a much larger swath of the central bluegrass.

So I have this idea for an installation I think would work well to draw attention to the station either in celebration of the upgrade or as a means to gather support for it. Following in the steps of the green building hack at MIT and the Blinkenlights Project I’d like to turn POT in to a giant real time volume display of the station’s broadcast.

To be more specific, I want to take a row of windows (or more, as money allows) in the building and place lamps in them to form a vertical bar VU meter. The overall effect will look like the video below, but 16 stories tall and visible from miles away. You could tune in to the station during the evening and watch this huge column of light on the face of POT leap up and down in synchrony with the music. I’m grinning just thinking about it.

How could that be done? Well the Blinkenlights and Green Building projects were both able to run significant amounts of cabling from large power supplies to relays across several stories/rooms. POT is in constant use so cost and difficulty considerations aside we can rule out any scheme involving huge cable lays.

Happily, the signal we want to represent is already available as radio broadcast on every floor. So instead of switching a huge number of lights from a central system, we can put a radio on each floor and have each set of lights switched autonomously in response to the signal it receives.

So the basic plan is to have a simple lamp with, lets say, three 100 watt bulbs in each window. You have a relay (actually, this relay) that can switch the bulbs on and off quickly in response to a low voltage signal. This signal is provided by a simple circuit that detects how loud the signal coming from the radio is, and while it’s above a certain threshold, activates the relay to turn on the lamps. By setting that threshold slightly higher on each successive floor, you’ll get that VU meter effect.

That circuit to sit between the radio and the relay will be an envelope follower and a comparator (probably an LM339). The envelope follower may be as simple as a diode to rectify the signal and a RC low pass filter. The whole apparatus (lamps included) should cost less than $40 (that’s a high estimate) per floor. Assuming we do 16 floors, and a few red ones on the top floor for a cool peaking effect, that’s around $800. Probably less. But let’s say $1000.

I’m currently working on a prototype of a single unit. I’ve already got one of the relays to play around with. The problems remaining are…

• Finding some radios that can run off a wall power supply, yet are cheap and can be had by the dozen
• Designing and testing the envelope follower with an oscilloscope. The big question here is what kind of time constant should be used to prevent flickering but not take too long to fall off.
• Finding good potentiometers for adjusting the threshold of the comparator.
• Packaging all of this, wiring everything safely, and in a duplicable way.

Then it’s just a matter of finding funding and convincing the powers that be (who do you even ask? the building super? each individual office holder?) to let us set it up. It could easily be reused or expanded (add some band pass filters for a frequency analyzer), and different locations provide for some interesting opportunities. For live events, you could use a low power FM transmitter to drive them instead.