Where Leon Theremin, Bob Moog, Raymond Scott, John Cage, and Alex H. Smith Meet

Okay, I didn't think of this, but...

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:41:24 GMT

Wolfram Alpha is working on definitive answers to those really hard questions

More Noodling on the Minimoog

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:09:17 GMT

And another....

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:54:24 GMT

I'm on a roll.

Same two patches, same chord progression more or less. Notice how playing the chords in a high register and shifting the Moog to a low bass completely alters the mood.

Moooog!!

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:39:34 GMT

Still no video... Working on that. However, here's a short audio bit

"Macs have regisrty too"

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 13:27:13 GMT

"Windows uses Unix server at work, that's why Intel chips can work in Macs"

I'm fairly certain that the plists and binary blobs in ~/Library/Preferences are almost NOTHING like the centralized Windows Registry. This guy also claims there's a registry in Unix.

I could just let this go, but for a few details.

First, this guy is telling OTHERS that he is an expert on computers.

Second, he's telling them this in the context of helping them protect against Conficker-C.

Third, the basis of his expertise is that he works at Best Buy.

Sorry, but my head just exploded.

Later, his girlfriend was on, defending him, saying he really does know computers.

What is left of my head has ALSO exploded.

Universe: It Goes To Eleven

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:31:24 GMT

Everything
In your universe
Is a surface.

Your four dimensions of space and time,
The quanta,
Electromagnetism,
Gravitation,
All the surface of a great manifold.

And, if Hawking is correct,
and the universe has a wave function,
then as Feynman, we can sum over histories,
revealing the many worlds of Everett and Wheeler.

By what strange math is the manifold universe bound
That we should see the results of paths not taken,
And yet by decoherence, be forever unable
to retrace those steps and arrive
in that other world?

Shröedinger's Cat is not dead, not alive,
in one universe or another.
It is not God playing dice, but the flow and ebb
of higher dimensions.

Then to the sound of strings we vibrate, each with
our own function, summed over histories, decohering across
the manifold.

Wherein, once again, I spend my discretionary income.

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:51:47 GMT

Consider it my personal economic stimulus plan.

Also, this is a followup to this post

Back in January, the folks at Moog Music announced that they were only making 200 more Minimoog Voyager Old School synthesizers. Already they're getting hard to find.

Now, there's no denying that it's a quality instrument, and worth every penny, but at the time I was reluctant to spend that much money. The window of opportunity is closing, however, and soon these will be just as hard to come by as the original.

So, it was time. I've ordered my Minimoog. It should arrive TOMORROW. I hope to have pictures, and maybe even some sounds up by the weekend.

Thinking About Vocoders

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:14:01 GMT

I've had a DIY Vocoder project in the back of my mind for much of the last six months. I dredge it up now and again, and look at it, see if my thinking regarding the difficulty, or my ability to afford it has changed and then put it back. Finally, I've had enough of this, and it's time to start putting the idea to paper with a view toward building the thing.

Homer Dudley's 1930 invention of the Vocoder (a portemento of the words Voice Coder), was an answer to the need to conserve bandwidth on heavily trafficked long-distance telephone lines. By only sending the slowly changing voice envelope information (as a series of vocal formants), and then re-synthesizing the speech on the other end using a noise source, intelligible, if somewhat robotic-sounding speech could be heard. The technology had applications in cryptography, allowing the transmission of secured voice messages (and indeed completely confounded the Germans in WWII).

Dudley's design was, of course, fully analog, involving filters, peak detection, amplifiers and mixers. The model for how vocoders in general work is still valid, even with the advent of DSP techniques like phase vocoding and Multiple Excitation Linear Prediction (MELP) vocoding.

I'm not going to try to draw a diagram just yet, but here's how it goes in terms of Dudley's filter version.

The modulation signal (can be and usually is, a human voice), is passed through a fixed filter bank, with each bandpass filter having it's own independent output channel. Each channel is then passed through its own peak detection or envelope follower circuit. This represents the analysis portion of the device.

The signals from the analysis portion are then passed to re-synthesis. The vocal formant data in the form of envelopes is used to control the gain on a bank of voltage-controlled amplifiers. A carrier signal is fed through a second fixed filter bank, whose outputs and sent to the amplifiers. Each channel is then input into a mixer, and out comes speech at the other end.

It was none other than Wendy Carlos, in the late 1960's having seen vocoding in action, who realized that the carrier signal didn't have to be a fixed noise source, but could, in fact, be a musical tone, which would result in a "singing synthesizer". Carlos was perhaps just naive or silly enough to ask Bob Moog if he could make "something like a vocoder", using the standard Moog modules of the time, which Bob being Bob, he did. The results of this can be heard in all their glory on Wendy Carlos' "Timesteps", which was used in part in Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange", along with an except from Beethovan's Ninth, which now sounds rather dated, but nonetheless features among the first musical uses of the vocoder.

Moog's original kludge implementation lays out all the details of how a vocoder works by constructing it in modules, and thus, understanding it becomes a wonderful tool for understanding vocoders in general. In terms of putting together a DIY project, building it as discrete modules, even if they're then placed behind a single panel, makes excellent sense.

After Moog and Carlos, the Kraut-Rock phenomenon of Kraftwerk designed and built their own vocoder, and audio pioneer Harald Bode designed a 16-band unit which later was sold under the Moog label. The absolute pinnacle of musical vocoder design was arguably the EMS Vocoder 5000, but these were large and expensive studio units. Dutch manufacturer Synton made much more affordable (still pricey) units, with great performance and intelligibility.

Of course, one can easily achieve the same effect nowadays in software using DSP techniques, and any number of software vocoders exist. But to me, that's just no fun at all. There is also a nice 8-band vocoder kit from PAIA, but again, it's not floating my boat. Give me a good pair of fixed filter banks, some envelope followers, some VCAs and a mixer, and let me toss them together and see what I get.

Field Upgrade

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:29:52 GMT

Winter 2009 NAMM is underway, which is always a fun time due to the many new product announcements.

At the very top of my list this year is this Moog Music Etherwave Plus Field Upgrade, which adds pitch preview, a headphone jack and headphone volume control, Control voltage outputs for pitch and volume, and a gate output for triggering events and controlling external synths (with the classic 1V/Octave analog signals).

Too bad I have to wait an entire month. I so want to fire up the soldering iron right now!

My Life as a William Gibson Novel

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:13:19 GMT

My Job: I work for a large Japanese mega-corporation, tracking down evil doers in cyberspace who would harm my employer's network.

My Entertainment: A massive, virtual-reality game, which I share with 11 million other people.

A Quixotic Quest of Mine: Recreating a nearly lost technology of the previous century.

Back in the 1980's when "cyberpunk" first started showing up, I read it, of course, but thought "This is just too weird". William Gibson's "Count Zero" with it's voodoo priests worshiping AI gods they summoned from cyberspace... But toward the start of this century, I encountered the mail administrator of a small Papua New Guinea ISP. Known only as Posopis Menaga (sound it out), he worked for Bigpela Bosman (again, phonetics people), at Wewak Intanet, and spoke only tok-pigin. Understanding him through the pastiche of mangled english and german words, which is now the OFFICIAL language of his country was a fun activity. But it was then that I realized just how close to reality Bill Gibson was.

Of course, we have no god-like AIs, but here was a Papua New Guinean, barely removed from real-life headhunters, with both the technology, and the skills to enter and move around in this "shared hallucination". He was participating in the vast electronic conversation, making a useful contribution.

Our chief adversary in those days was typified by one Alan Ralsky, a former two-bit con-man who'd learned like the rest of us to trip the vast network, and discovered the tools to set himself up a new scam. Ralsky, his Russian programmers, and his Chinese business partners... Let's just say he set the stage for things as they are now. Ralsky's been indicted. His Chinese partner has plead guilty and will turn evidence against him. The Russians? Never caught. Still out there, making tools for the new generation of cyber crooks.

As the economy crumbles around us, a woman in Maine embezzles $32,000 from her employer (a national donut-shop franchise) to send to a group of shadowy Nigerians.... In Nigeria, these guys are heros. They set up computer centers in remote villages and bring technology and jobs to some of the poorest people on Earth. The locals defend the con-men with thier lives against police raids. Are they evil? How do you explain that to a poor Nigerian farmer, who because of them, can rest easy that his children will have enough food and warm clothing?

The Nigerians are at the forefront of efforts to break technologies like CAPTCHA, meant to keep them from automating signups to free email accounts they need to perpetuate their scams. At first, they used a human-wave approach, hire locals to surf the signup pages and pass the limited "Turing Test" that the CAPTCHA represents. Now, there are AI tools that can break CAPTCHA (It was always too simple). Think about this. Advanced AI in the service of Nigerian crimelords. DAMN YOU BILL GIBSON!

PEBKAC "Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair" Russian "virus writers" haven't actually written "viruses" in ages. Even Microsoft Windows is now secure enough that traditional paths of infection don't work. Instead they focus on an old old trick pioneered by the ancient Greeks. The Trojan Horse. The typical end user is naive. When the computer says "click here", they click there. All the "virus" writer has to do is present a suitably appealing "click here", and the end user will gleefully subvert his own computer's security, and install the software turning it into the tool of the bad guys, part of a vast zombie network, churning out ads for all sorts of nefarious services.

Yes, my life is a William Gibson novel... At least on good days.

On bad days? Let me introduce you to Mr. Cyril Kornbluth...

Now where did I put that turban?

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:25:35 GMT

More Warcraft sillyness.

It actually takes only a little effort to level tailoring skill high enough to sew together a flying carpet. The main difficulty is finding mobs you can use as cloth pinatas. The required weekend of munchkinism is happily over (I'm not into the "kill everything and loot the bodies" school of roleplaying, which sadly is what the online games lend themselves best to). Alas, this isn't my primary character, so I haven't spent the effort to get the high-level flying skill for the really FAST version.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:17:24 GMT

Or in this case his helmet.

This is Gymer, a storm giant. Okay... KING of the Storm Giants. High atop his helmet behind the third spike is a speck of green. That is my gnome mage, who is about 30 inches tall. Yup, he's big. Those are DOORS he uses as shin guards. Those are size 600 shoes (Gymer's rather proud of them, as he's fond of stomping on things with them). We stomped on a lot of things together, mostly the endless waves of undead attacking us. But at last we stood triumphant at the top of these stairs. Time for a dramatic pose.

Headed Home

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:23:03 GMT

Two weeks vacation is now over.

I'm headed back to Dallas.

Hopefully, there'll be time to organize my notes and post in detail about my trip. It's been fun, and I've seen a lot of people I've missed while away.

But, I missed many others. Going to have to come back yet again.

A Chicago-Style Hot Dog in Seattle

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:04:23 GMT

Not many words one can attach to this.

Bahn mi

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 03:24:54 GMT

My love of a good Vietnamese sammich is no secret.

Nom nom nom nom

How I Spent My Vacation

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:16:55 GMT

Okay folks. What am I doing in this picture?

No, don't guess. I'll tell you.

Some years ago, I taught a very basic class on mushroom cultivation. My friend Lowell took the ball and ran with it, to the point of building his own laminar-flow hood, and running his own mushroom spawn.

The picture above is me, running spawn of Lentinula edodes (Shiitake) using Lowell's laminar-flow hood. This is actually the second incarnation of the hood, made with a surplus air-handler from an old A/C unit, a new-old-stock HEPA filter in an unpopular size, and some leftover laminate scrapes to make up the work surface. I hope to have more photos from this up when I get home from vacation.

The face mask is only a necessity because Lowell and I wanted to talk while I worked. If you keep your mouth shut will working with the mushroom spawn, you won't breath onto it, which greatly reduces the chances of contamination.

Guess what this is?

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:22:13 GMT

Three guesses. First one doesn't count.

Wherein I don a hat

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:41:56 GMT

It's a nice hat. From Barmah, of Australia, it's their "Foldaway Cooler". Leather brim and top, with mesh sides and a braided hatband.

Apparently, I look good in a hat.

Evil!

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:41:28 GMT

How evil are you?

Werein the power goes out, everywhere but here, and the pizza place across the street

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:19:55 GMT

Weather was rainy today, which is typical for the Northwest this time of year. Not typical was the cramping in my legs and soreness in my knees.

Network connectivity has been flaky all day, with the wind outside howling, and the rain pouring down, and my knees aching...

The pizza place across the street seems to be doing a brisk business tonight. The reason being that half the town is without power. We just happen to be lucky enough to be in the other half. ;)

Now, I'm glad I stayed in and did nothing all day.

Pho Dac Biet

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:56:16 GMT

My love of a good Vietnamese beef noodle soup is no secret. So a pleasant surprise was finding that the billiard hall next to the hotel where I'm staying doubles as a Pho restaurant during the day. Nom nom nom nom!

Of course, I order the pho with brisket, steak, meatballs, tripe, and fatty tendon... Pho Dac Biet. The "small" is plenty large enough. A couple of cha gio, and I'm set for hours.

A trip to Than Brothers in Seattle would be the best thing, but not always in the cards. These days there's plenty of pho right in Bremerton, as my pleasant surprise confirms.

Looking For A Reason To Post

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:17:28 GMT

It's Wednesday, which was supposed to be a slack day. Some banking, some groceries, do the laundry so I have clean clothes for the next four days...

And the day went pretty much like that.

I'm sitting down to a cup of tea. This is a small hotel, not run by a major chain. It's very nice for all that. I've been upgraded to a room with a kitchenette, which has already allowed me to make my own fried rice for lunch. I have some sausage, linguini, and peppers to throw together for tomorrow night.

I was sorely tempted to buy some of the chanterelles that were for sale at the Fred Meyer. Have I become that desperate? If I wait, there will be mushrooms, and I will have them for dinner. Patience is the game. My local friends all have jobs and can't just take off mid-week just because I'm in town. Still, the forest calls to me.

=========

I'm thinking of bandpass filters and envelope followers. A single word sums up my current electronics obsession:

Vocoder.

A vocoder (the word is a portementeau of "Voice Coder"), takes the formants of the human voice, and imposes them on a carrier signal. It was designed, and primarily used as an bandwidth-saving and encryption device. However, in 1969, Wendy Carlos reckognized the musical possibilities of the vocoder, and had Bob Moog design one using his standard synthesizer modules.

Since then, the vocoder has become something of a standard (some would say cliche) in electronic music.

Alas, the very best of the hardware vocoders for musical use are no longer made, and fetch outrageous prices when one comes available. Kits are out there, but they are crude and limited. So, it looks like the start of a DIY project.

Were the stipes viscid?

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:47:42 GMT

John Cage on Alex Smith on Lactarius.

http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/s.cgi?n=114

Vacation Part III (Serendipity)

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:26:07 GMT

My hotel is located next to a brand-new pho restaurant. Yay!

Vacation Part II

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:40:13 GMT

I'm back in my home town and juggling the demands of old friends.

I'm not used to being popular.

The mycological society wants me to join them on a field trip up the Skokomish River. They also want to get me on video. Meanwhile, my friends Miriam and Ernie want me over for dinner. I'll be visiting with my parents on Friday...

Busy...

The phone rings. The phone almost never rings.

This is such a break from my routine.

--B