microsound and lowercase are not necessarily the same thing, though they can be. they both focus on the details of sound. microsound tends towards a 'digital aesthetic' (ref. kim cascone, microsound.org) and fine manipulation of very small particles of sound...
Indeed, much of the lowercase music is acoustic. The granddaddy of the movement, is a sense, was Morton Feldman, who created carefully constructed, often very long works, using conventional instruments at the edges of audibility.
There's also a crossover with the Phonography movement, which uses often very subtle field recordings.
I have a piece on the first lowercase sound compilation CD name "mouth. midnight." which is a pretty much unprocessed quiet vocal improvisation.
Re:What about sound quality?
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 1
While the idea of very quiet sound may appeal to some listeners, one cannot deny the concept that since this is recorded at a lower volume it is actually of lower representative quality. Why not record it at resonable volumes and play it at your desired listening volume level?
That is, indeed, how much of the lowercase music that I know is recorded.
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 1
sounds like they never heard of "Music on a long thin wire"
In it, Lucier strung a long wire across a cavernous indoor space, excited it with an oscillator at one end, and left to ring for a long time. The initial performance was broadcast for a week on the radio, and got a good listenership.
Lucier's work in general may be of interest to anyone intersted in the combination of art and science. Most of it involves simple and beautiful explorations of acoustic phenomena, such as the wire.
The headline attempts to lure us into the mistaken idea that: Minnesota bill lets Internet Users Block Disclosure
Hmm... it looks like whoever wrote this headline is unclear on either English grammar or American law.
In no sense can it be said that a bill "lets" something happen. At most, the bill proposes that something happen. Only when the bill is passed and becomes law does it have any effect.
A trivial difference? Ask anyone who has received a gerjillion SPAMs that contain the embedded lie that a US bill, never passed, allows them to crap in our in-boxes.
Er, that should be "Lather, rinse, repeat", unless you want to walk around all day with shampoo suds on your head. Did anyone do a usability test of the usability testing instructions?-)
Most people put in money at the "Suggested Donation" box at museums.
The box is usually within full view of others at the museum, so that there is social pressure to pay, which is not there on most Web sites. If you were living in a small town and walked into the local museum without paying, you can be sure that the whispers about your not paying would spread faster than a greased meme.
An analogy would be if a site had a frame listing people who had signed on within the past hour or so, in columns labelled "Thanks for supporting us!" and "Cheapskates", or maybe a periodic email listing these people. Sure, a few people would stomp in without paying anyway, and some would boycott the site, but I suspect that, if the fee were very low and the ease-of-use were exceptional, many would happily pay.
Re:Looks like someone doesn't like Campbell...
on
Star Wars as Pulp Sci-Fi
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Here's what the article boils down to: Hart is expressing disgust that basic pulp entertainment -- and I'll be the first to admit that SW is certainly that -- has been elevated to the level of seriously considered art via certain structuralist and post-structuralist criticisms that have come into vogue over the past couple of decades. Doesn't pedigree play a role, he asks? This is a #%$@ space opera, for god's sake!
Bzzt, wrong. Hart's point is specifically not that Star Wars in invalidated by being inspired by genre work, but rather that there is no need to dredge up specious classical references to justify it -- it came from both the best (Leigh Brackett, directly) influences from within science fiction and related media and some of the weakest (Doc Smith, distantly) . Does pedigree play a role? Perhaps, perhaps not -- but forging one will get you thrown out of the kennel club.
This means that whatever documentation you produce it should not duplicate information that can be inferred from reading the code.
Sorry, you lose ten yards and a first down for handwaving via passive verbs. "can be inferred" by whom?
Having been both a tech writer and a programmer, I've seen way too many cases where a programmer has failed to document what he did in a program, believing the code to be "obvious" and "self-documenting". Then the programmer leaves, another person looks at the code and is baffled.
No two people ever come at code with identical backgrounds and assumptions, and it's most often those issues which people assume that other can understand "of course" that contain the deep land mines that cause misunderstandings and problems -- and often these problems happen after lots of new code has been built based on mistaken assumptions about the old code.
I agree with an earlier poster: hire a documentation person. Now. Include that person in code reviews and give her access to the programmers. The stomach lining you save will be your own.
It's quite simple. To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance. That means not only to perform, but also to listen, to provide material for a performance -- what we call composing -- to prepare for a performance -- what we call practicing or rehearsing -- or any other activity which can affect the nature of the human encounter. We should certainly include dancing, should anyone be dancing, and we might even stretch the meaning on occasion to include what the lady is doing who takes the tickets on the door, or the hefty men who shift the piano around or the cleaners who clean up afterwards, since their activities all affect the nature of the event which is a musical performance.
Maybe the Accessibility folk should look into this -- pronouncing "Mebibytes" is going to be hell for stammerers. And people who says "Mebs" a lot will sound like Mork.
Bug: Thinking of IT as Personal Property
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1
5. What about security? Riding around on a $3000 device that can't move faster than walking speed is a huge crime oppurtunity.
(No, this isn't a socialist rant...)
The whole issue of theft, as well as much of the problem of lugging these heavy objects into buildings, disappears under something like the Yellow Bike paradigm. If people could pick them up where they need them, and drop them off at the destination, they wouldn't need to worry.
It wouldn't have been much use getting between my apartments and my recent jobs, but it would have helped a lot at the jobs. It especially would help for quick jaunts to Kinko's-equivalents, or running between government offices, or among centrally located clients. Not much help in the vast bastions of suburban sprawl, but a lot of good in the downtowns of large cities (well, those that have downtowns). And very useful at large datacenters (assuming that any of the companies that run them still exist by the time that these puppies hit the market).
But where are the lawnmower *blades*?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1
Ooh, weak analogy. Only a vanishingly small amount of software gets written in situations where the programmer would get anything like a royalty. It mostly gets done on a salary, work for hire, or contract basis (except, perhaps, for Free software, where the programmer rarely sees a cent of any kind). If the company makes a profit on the software, that is rarely directly reflected in the programmer's income.
Actually, looking at the financial situation, many musicians might actually do better under that setup. But that brings in issues of ownership of the material, and the work-for-hire provisions that the RIAA keeps trying to sneak in.
Adrian Bunk has prepared packages to run 2.4 kernels on stable
Yup, I'd hunted down and installed those, which worked like a charm. It was upgrading the apps which drove me nuts.
"Fred," the man said, "should I buy a Ford or a Mitsubishi?" Fred paused, wiping some grime off his face, and said, "well, my last couple cars were Fords. You can get 'em real cheap if you buy the spare parts the factories would throw away anyway. Got my last car that way, and she's a beaut!"
That's a good parable, though I would think the files Debian provides would be a hair better than "the spare parts the factories would throw away". And actually, the parts were OK.
As another analogy, imagine being told, "Just put these parts in a pile and zap them with this here ray gun". So you get the parts, get the ray gun, point it at them, and out pops a little flag saying that to use it, you have to get just one more part, but it's in a lion's cage. So you fight the lion, get the part, install it, try the ray gun again, and it excretes a little blob of penguin poop, which congeals to tell you that actually you need one *more* part, which is at the bottom of the ocean. And so on...
BTW, I did get the potato disks from LinuxMall. In retrospect, maybe I should have swallowed my uncertainty and just gotten the Woody disks, rather than believing that upgrading piecemeal was the better approach.
I look forward to its release. Unfortunately, that will be too late to be used in my project *sigh*
Sure its not difficult to change a text file full of URLs and then type "apt-get update" and "apt-get dist-upgrade" (which would automatically upgrade your entire OS from Progeny to Woody), but then again, I have seen people claim that its difficult to install applications on Linux, which is as easy as typing "apt-get install whateveryouwant".
I keep seeing Debian people claiming that everything is simple (even ze orchestra is beautiful) if you know the magic incantation "apt-get".
It ain't so.
To be able to do that successfully, you have to have
1) managed to install Debian right the first time
2) either high bandwidth or the ability to tie up your phone line for a near infinite amount of time
3) either a modem or an ethernet card that you have somehow gotten to work the first time.
I have been trying to install Debian for the past two weeks on a laptop without either floppy drive or a functioning network connection, here in an area where there are, as closely as I can tell, no other Linux users, much less a LUG. Unlike those who have infinite time to diddle their boxen for fun, I'm putting Linux on it for a particular purpose, which has a deadline.
Following the advice of seasoned users, I went with the "stable" release, then upgraded to kernel 2.4.13, which required stuff from "unstable", as did lots of the apps that I needed to run. To install these things, I've had to
a) download the files to my desktop Mandrake system over a slow phone line, following dependencies by hand while trying to remember what I had already downloaded to not duplicate effort
b) since I can't seem to write data CDs on the Linux box (I can write audio CDs via cdrdao, but no other software seems to be able to speak to my CD-R drive), transfer the files over the home LAN via Samba (which is mysteriously slow)
c) burn them to CD on the windows box then walk the CD over to the laptop
d) try to install, find out that I've missed a file, and have to go through the ridiculous process again.
I'd be tempted to just leave Win98 there, except that the much smaller latencies in Linux (especially with an appropriately patched kernel) are important in the near-real-time sound processing that I need to do. And I believe in the whole Linux thing. It's just maddening down here in the trenches.
FWIW, I gave up on Debian last night and am installing Mandrake, which, yes, I was able to walk into a store and purchase off the shelf, and which I've installed on other systems before.
I'd like to try Debian again, maybe when I can afford a high speed connection again (yes, another laid-off dotcommer). Or maybe some ruby slippers will appear to make "apt-get" faintly useful.
I'll lay money that some of the people in Chicago and New York expressing outrage at the attack on the WTC have given money to the IRA to use to buy semtex to murder British civilians.
semtex? A deadly macro package? I know trying to use TeX has driven some to the brink of insanity, but I hadn't heard of it's having caused any murders...
But the name "George Tirebiter" is so outrageous sounding as to be ludicrous. It's obviously contrived...
I can think of a couple of ways that that name could happen, imagining that a family with the German term "Arbeiter" in their name came through the Ellis Island Name Scrambling Office. (And yes, I know about the Firesign Theatre reference.)
But if you have a name like mine, you *never* assume that others' names are faked.
It's great to see this new miniseries, but why would you adapt TWO stories into one series, rather than preserving the second (actually third) story for an additional miniseries...Strange
IIRC, The book Dune itself was actually first serialized as two distinct serials, called something like Dune World and Prophet of Dune.
I've heard second hand a funny anecdote about Frank Herbert proclaiming after each of his books that the complete Dune saga had now been told -- and a smartass radio host playing back for him a tape of all these statements when he came on to tout one of his later volumes.
Slashdot Mirror
microsound and lowercase are not necessarily the same thing, though they can be. they both focus on the details of sound. microsound tends towards a 'digital aesthetic' (ref. kim cascone, microsound.org) and fine manipulation of very small particles of sound...
Indeed, much of the lowercase music is acoustic. The granddaddy of the movement, is a sense, was Morton Feldman, who created carefully constructed, often very long works, using conventional instruments at the edges of audibility.
There's also a crossover with the Phonography movement, which uses often very subtle field recordings.
I have a piece on the first lowercase sound compilation CD name "mouth. midnight." which is a pretty much unprocessed quiet vocal improvisation.
While the idea of very quiet sound may appeal to some listeners, one cannot deny the concept that since this is recorded at a lower volume it is actually of lower representative quality. Why not record it at resonable volumes and play it at your desired listening volume level?
That is, indeed, how much of the lowercase music that I know is recorded.
sounds like they never heard of "Music on a long thin wire"
In it, Lucier strung a long wire across a cavernous indoor space, excited it with an oscillator at one end, and left to ring for a long time. The initial performance was broadcast for a week on the radio, and got a good listenership.
Lucier's work in general may be of interest to anyone intersted in the combination of art and science. Most of it involves simple and beautiful explorations of acoustic phenomena, such as the wire.
First of all, i-95 doesn't go to texas.
I see you've never driven from Texas to DC. First you go south on I-95, then west. At least I have.
It helps to actually watch the show, and *shock* maybe even look at a map,
The headline attempts to lure us into the mistaken idea that: Minnesota bill lets Internet Users Block Disclosure
Hmm... it looks like whoever wrote this headline is unclear on either English grammar or American law.
In no sense can it be said that a bill "lets" something happen. At most, the bill proposes that something happen. Only when the bill is passed and becomes law does it have any effect.
A trivial difference? Ask anyone who has received a gerjillion SPAMs that contain the embedded lie that a US bill, never passed, allows them to crap in our in-boxes.
Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin and Kirsten Dunst and the lovely Mary Jane.
Damn, that's one versatile actor!
The next poll: how many minutes will it be before we start getting spam promising us degrees from Virtual U?
OK, here's the reference, for either of you that have somehow not yet heard of DJ Shadow.
5. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Er, that should be "Lather, rinse, repeat", unless you want to walk around all day with shampoo suds on your head. Did anyone do a usability test of the usability testing instructions?-)
Most people put in money at the "Suggested Donation" box at museums.
The box is usually within full view of others at the museum, so that there is social pressure to pay, which is not there on most Web sites. If you were living in a small town and walked into the local museum without paying, you can be sure that the whispers about your not paying would spread faster than a greased meme.
An analogy would be if a site had a frame listing people who had signed on within the past hour or so, in columns labelled "Thanks for supporting us!" and "Cheapskates", or maybe a periodic email listing these people. Sure, a few people would stomp in without paying anyway, and some would boycott the site, but I suspect that, if the fee were very low and the ease-of-use were exceptional, many would happily pay.
Here's what the article boils down to: Hart is expressing disgust that basic pulp entertainment -- and I'll be the first to admit that SW is certainly that -- has been elevated to the level of seriously considered art via certain structuralist and post-structuralist criticisms that have come into vogue over the past couple of decades. Doesn't pedigree play a role, he asks? This is a #%$@ space opera, for god's sake!
Bzzt, wrong. Hart's point is specifically not that Star Wars in invalidated by being inspired by genre work, but rather that there is no need to dredge up specious classical references to justify it -- it came from both
the best (Leigh Brackett, directly) influences from within science fiction and related media and some of the weakest (Doc Smith, distantly) . Does pedigree play a role? Perhaps, perhaps not -- but forging one will get you thrown out of the kennel club.
This means that whatever documentation you produce it should not duplicate information that can be inferred from reading the code.
Sorry, you lose ten yards and a first down for handwaving via passive verbs. "can be inferred" by whom?
Having been both a tech writer and a programmer, I've seen way too many cases where a programmer has failed to document what he did in a program, believing the code to be "obvious" and "self-documenting". Then the programmer leaves, another person looks at the code and is baffled.
No two people ever come at code with identical backgrounds and assumptions, and it's most often those issues which people assume that other can understand "of course" that contain the deep land mines that cause misunderstandings and problems -- and often these problems happen after lots of new code has been built based on mistaken assumptions about the old code.
I agree with an earlier poster: hire a documentation person. Now. Include that person in code reviews and give her access to the programmers. The stomach lining you save will be your own.
A sample:
Maybe the Accessibility folk should look into this -- pronouncing "Mebibytes" is going to be hell for stammerers. And people who says "Mebs" a lot will sound like Mork.
5. What about security? Riding around on a $3000 device that can't move faster than walking speed is a huge crime oppurtunity.
(No, this isn't a socialist rant...)
The whole issue of theft, as well as much of the problem of lugging these heavy objects into buildings, disappears under something like the Yellow Bike paradigm. If people could pick them up where they need them, and drop them off at the destination, they wouldn't need to worry.
It wouldn't have been much use getting between my apartments and my recent jobs, but it would have helped a lot at the jobs. It especially would help for quick jaunts to Kinko's-equivalents, or running between government offices, or among centrally located clients. Not much help in the vast bastions of suburban sprawl, but a lot of good in the downtowns of large cities (well, those that have downtowns). And very useful at large datacenters (assuming that any of the companies that run them still exist by the time that these puppies hit the market).
And how noisy is it?
Ooh, weak analogy. Only a vanishingly small amount of software gets written in situations where the programmer would get anything like a royalty. It mostly gets done on a salary, work for hire, or contract basis (except, perhaps, for Free software, where the programmer rarely sees a cent of any kind). If the company makes a profit on the software, that is rarely directly reflected in the programmer's income.
Actually, looking at the financial situation, many musicians might actually do better under that setup. But that brings in issues of ownership of the material, and the work-for-hire provisions that the RIAA keeps trying to sneak in.
Adrian Bunk has prepared packages to run 2.4 kernels on stable
Yup, I'd hunted down and installed those, which worked like a charm. It was upgrading the apps which drove me nuts.
"Fred," the man said, "should I buy a Ford or a Mitsubishi?" Fred paused, wiping some grime off his face, and said, "well, my last couple cars were Fords. You can get 'em real cheap if you buy the spare parts the factories would throw away anyway. Got my last car that way, and she's a beaut!"
That's a good parable, though I would think the files Debian provides would be a hair better than "the spare parts the factories would throw away". And actually, the parts were OK.
As another analogy, imagine being told, "Just put these parts in a pile and zap them with this here ray gun". So you get the parts, get the ray gun, point it at them, and out pops a little flag saying that to use it, you have to get just one more part, but it's in a lion's cage. So you fight the lion, get the part, install it, try the ray gun again, and it excretes a little blob of penguin poop, which congeals to tell you that actually you need one *more* part, which is at the bottom of the ocean. And so on...
BTW, I did get the potato disks from LinuxMall. In retrospect, maybe I should have swallowed my uncertainty and just gotten the Woody disks, rather than believing that upgrading piecemeal was the better approach.
I look forward to its release. Unfortunately, that will be too late to be used in my project *sigh*
Sure its not difficult to change a text file full of URLs and then type "apt-get update" and "apt-get dist-upgrade" (which would automatically upgrade your entire OS from Progeny to Woody), but then again, I have seen people claim that its difficult to install applications on Linux, which is as easy as typing "apt-get install whateveryouwant".
I keep seeing Debian people claiming that everything is simple (even ze orchestra is beautiful) if you know the magic incantation "apt-get".
It ain't so.
To be able to do that successfully, you have to have
1) managed to install Debian right the first time
2) either high bandwidth or the ability to tie up your phone line for a near infinite amount of time
3) either a modem or an ethernet card that you have somehow gotten to work the first time.
I have been trying to install Debian for the past two weeks on a laptop without either floppy drive or a functioning network connection, here in an area where there are, as closely as I can tell, no other Linux users, much less a LUG. Unlike those who have infinite time to diddle their boxen for fun, I'm putting Linux on it for a particular purpose, which has a deadline.
Following the advice of seasoned users, I went with the "stable" release, then upgraded to kernel 2.4.13, which required stuff from "unstable", as did lots of the apps that I needed to run. To install these things, I've had to
a) download the files to my desktop Mandrake system over a slow phone line, following dependencies by hand while trying to remember what I had already downloaded to not duplicate effort
b) since I can't seem to write data CDs on the Linux box (I can write audio CDs via cdrdao, but no other software seems to be able to speak to my CD-R drive), transfer the files over the home LAN via Samba (which is mysteriously slow)
c) burn them to CD on the windows box then walk the CD over to the laptop
d) try to install, find out that I've missed a file, and have to go through the ridiculous process again.
I'd be tempted to just leave Win98 there, except that the much smaller latencies in Linux (especially with an appropriately patched kernel) are important in the near-real-time sound processing that I need to do. And I believe in the whole Linux thing. It's just maddening down here in the trenches.
FWIW, I gave up on Debian last night and am installing Mandrake, which, yes, I was able to walk into a store and purchase off the shelf, and which I've installed on other systems before.
I'd like to try Debian again, maybe when I can afford a high speed connection again (yes, another laid-off dotcommer). Or maybe some ruby slippers will appear to make "apt-get" faintly useful.
Let's hope they never sign "John Doe" to a recording contract....
Too late. John Doe's band, X was on Elektra, part of the old Warner/Elektra/Asylum, as far back as 1982.
These young punks don't know nothing about the old punks. *grumble* *grumble* *creak*
I wonder how long before MP3s of this song exist despite the copy protection.
Er, you *do* know that the single was released on the Net several weeks ago in various formats and
immediately appeared on Gnutella, etc., right?
I'll lay money that some of the people in Chicago and New York expressing outrage at the attack on the WTC have given money to the IRA to use to buy semtex to murder British civilians.
semtex? A deadly macro package? I know trying to use TeX has driven some to the brink of insanity, but I hadn't heard of it's having caused any murders...
But the name "George Tirebiter" is so outrageous sounding as to be ludicrous. It's obviously contrived...
I can think of a couple of ways that that name could happen, imagining that a family with the German term "Arbeiter" in their name came through the Ellis Island Name Scrambling Office. (And yes, I know about the Firesign Theatre reference.)
But if you have a name like mine, you *never* assume that others' names are faked.
Joe Zitt
It's great to see this new miniseries, but why would you adapt TWO stories into one series, rather than preserving the second (actually third) story for an additional miniseries...Strange
IIRC, The book Dune itself was actually first serialized as two distinct serials, called something like Dune World and Prophet of Dune.
I've heard second hand a funny anecdote about Frank Herbert proclaiming after each of his books that the complete Dune saga had now been told -- and a smartass radio host playing back for him a tape of all these statements when he came on to tout one of his later volumes.
They're using Golden Grahams as currency? What if they crumble? Will my wallet stay crunchy in milk?