darkblog resonate

the biggest difference between being employed in an academic medium versus a corporate medium is what i’m dubbing “irregular regularlity versus regular regularity.”

as an example, in my second year at the UofO, even though my weekly schedule was fairly regular, my daily schedule was highly irregular.  my mondays were 8:00-23:00 days between teaching classes, taking classes, teaching high school, and having 100th Monkey rehearsals, Tuesdays were 11:00-19:00 days with the occasional 8:00 at certain times because of the electronic computer lab, etc.  by contrast, my current corporate job has a fairly regular daily and weekly schedule, varied only by time of the fiscal year, special projects, or crises.  otherwise, it’s your typical 8 to 5.

When i was in school, the stuff that dictated my regular schedule also ended up dictating my free time schedule, mainly because of what needed to get accomplished for the next irregular regularity.  Homework for this class, writing music for this section of the marching show, finishing up some Max work, socialising with friends because we just got out of rehearsal, and the like.

again, this severely contrasts my current paradigm.  There’s very little structure to how i use my free time since all of my work obligations i handle during work hours.  This would be fine if i managed my free time well, but lately i don’t feel like i’ve had the proper balance.  if we break my free time down into five rough categories of poker, socialising (both online and in real life), projects, time-wasters, and other (being things like random british telly, social diddering, domesticism), i spend much more time on the time-wasters than i do on projects even though projects takes higher precedence over time-wasters in my head.

i attribute some of this to the fact that most of my projects lack of deadlines or goals like they did when i was in an academic atmosphere, whereas the time-wasters in a sense *do* have goals because i’m trying to break 700k on chain factor or achieve this ranking on prolific or the like.  This has been bothering me for a while, and i’ve been working to try to change it, but it’s been difficult to do so, particularly when the peak crisis i was dealing with at work ate up all of my time in late march and early april made me so burnt out that i didn’t have energy to do anything other than zone out.

Recently i started playing live poker games at a club downtown that’s open from 6pm until 2am, and this has introduced an element of irregularity to my regular week since i’ve been consistently going to the tuesday evening mixed games and the saturday evening tournament and cash games.  Last week i started to scheme in my head an idea to use this new irregular regularity to help designate other days of the week to specific projects and create a rough outline of a long term project goal timeline.  Not that the time-wasters would completely go away, as i feel they have their own place in my life that isn’t deteremental, just that those time-wasters would dominate my free time less.  So i might make, say, monday and thursday my online poker days with a mix of some minor project or admin related to said project that i don’t need to devote huge energy to or a lot of hours at a time whereas wednesday and saturday daytime is devoted to projects more completely whilst sunday is devoted to domestics and some “others”, all as broad big-picture guidelines that i can adjust or refine on the fly based on individual circumstances.

we’ll see what happens.  right now DSR Squared is occupying my project thoughts more than anything else, but a part of me is looking for some material to write a choir piece for Jenni Brandon (i’m thinking Steven Brust material), another part of me is coming up with some video game medley music for Laura, another part of me is trying to figure out what i want my next video project to be, another part of my head is thinking about marching band stuff again, etc. etc.

my head sometimes feels like it’s too full.

in the past year or so, automatic paper towel dispensers were invented, mainly for use in public restrooms.

At our workplace, the motivation for switching to automatic paper towel dispensers were touted as helping to “go green”, the new term for environmental friendliness. I suspect that it had more to do with cost-cutting as i imagine that they theoretically save the company money by decreasing paper towel use, or else the company would have bought all of us Hybrids or something.

But that’s besides the point. As i was thinking about the phenomenon of the automatic paper towel dispenser the other day, i thought about the next logical and brilliant step to take: automatic toilet paper dispensers. As opposed to having an individual dip into the toilet paper roll for whatever they’re worth, hit a button and it rations out the amount that is theoretically all you need to wipe. Maybe there’d have to be two buttons, one for “small amount” versus one for “large” amount to cover various needs.

Which sounds ridiculous, but so do automatic paper towel dispensers to me, even after all this time. Maybe we need to take cues from Demolition Man and figure out how to use the three seashells.

many will agree that the electoral college is an outdated system for determining our presidency, but no one can figure out what’s the best way to replace it.

here’s my idea:

everyone who decides that they’re going to vote has to take a comprehensive aptitude test. but not an aptitude test like the GRE or the SAT or something that’s just based on intelligence. it’s a much broader test that encompasses other things as well - mechanical things, house sorts of stuff, understanding of politics, awareness of issues, that sort of thing.

weight the individual questions based on some sort of predetermined system (as in answering 2+2=? isn’t as impressive as 13! mod 4). Then, based on the individual’s final result, weight how much their vote counts towards the final tally to determine who takes office. that way, someone who doesn’t know what end of the pencil is used to fill in the little boxes will only influence the vote a little.

there’d have to be some guidelines. it can’t just be an isolated measure of intelligence or practical things or awareness of social issues - placing too much emphasis on any of those things individually would influence the presidency too heavily. a balance needs to be struck, determined and governed by a well-picked council.

this way, everyone can still vote, which i think is important to the democratic process, but it eliminates the total free-for-all nature of the voting system being completely equal.

and then of course there’d have to be an air-tight auditing process to prove that it was all done fairly and no one breached the system and all that.

whilst sitting with katie in my favorite place to get hot chocolate, she noticed that there was a painting on the wall in which the frame was not flush with the floor. Ansel Adams on a slight tilt.

we’ve had this debate before about how i like to have a small degree of deliberate chaos in my life which could have its representation in a hung painting or poster slightly off-kilter versus her need for visual order, and this brought it to the foreground again. While nothing about our contrasting viewpoints was new, this time it spurned two new ideas into my head.

one: create a work of art within a frame where the work itself is deliberately on a slight tilt from its frame. That way, when the frame is completely flush with the floor, the work is slightly crooked, or when the work is flush with the floor, the frame is slightly crooked. This gives the person who hangs it on the wall the freedom to interpet it however s/he wishes with no correct answer (even though most people would likely keep the frame flush to the floor).

two: create a computer windows environment in which the windows and their contents can be on a tilt. of course it would have to be user-customizeable, but the particular configuration i would employ would be a slight tilt, maybe 5 to 10 degrees in either direction. And i would also program some sort of randomizer - whenever a new window opens (beit a web browser window or new word processing document or what have you), the computer randomly chooses which direction and what degree of tilt the window will appear within a specified degree range (like -8 to +8).

i’m surprised that number two doesn’t exist already. you’d figure that other people would be into that sort of chaos like me and have more saavy computer programming chops than i do. But when i did an initial google, i didn’t find anything either Windows or Mac OS that would emulate something like that.

i wonder if i could get anyone to do something like that for me.

some years ago i quoted this passage from Issola in my other journal, but it seems appropriate to quote again as it and what it signifies has been on my mind lately.

You know, Loiosh, if anybody had told me yesterday that thirty hours later I would have rescued Morrolan and Aliera, nearly killed the Demon Goddess, and found myself trapped in a prison the size of the world, unable to decide if I was hoping to be saved or hoping not to be saved, I’d have said, “Yeah, sounds about right.”

You probably would have, Boss.

I think this says something about my life choices.

Uh huh.

in other randomness, my brother pointed me to this silly but clever little game called Rom Check Fail. pretty neat, although i wish that the switches weren’t so regular.

if you look at the evolution of music video gaming, some of the execution styles may be different (stomping arrows with your feet, playing fake drums or guitar) and some of the judgement granularities are different (guitar freaks gives you perfects/greats/goods/poors where guitar hero is you-get-it-or-you-don’t), but all of them follow a similar model: the performer or performers are executing based on what they see on the screen and they’re being judged based on how accurate they are to what’s happening on the screen.

I never got much into the co-op mode of guitar freaks/drummania/keyboardmania, but i’ve played Rock Band for a couple of sessions now and while i like it a lot, the nature of that particular game brings out a fundamental flaw in all of them - you’re not actually playing with other people, you just happen to be playing next to them.

As in, when you’re playing the game with someone else, what you do has no impact on how they get judged because everyone is keying off of what the game tells them, so everyone is executing in silos with the blinders on. If i’m the drummer and i start to fall behind the beat, it doesn’t matter to anyone else - they just do their own thing.

But a real band doesn’t operate like that, and marching bands/drum corps in particular can’t operate like that. Musicians have to be able to adjust to each other and listen to each other to be able to execute their best. At the extreme level, high level marching drum lines have to learn to be able to adjust and react to what’s happening around them to the millisecond sort of degree or else they sound dirty.

So i want a music video game to have the option to emulate that - to make it so that the judgement that is received is based on how the players are playing in relation to each other.

With something like Rock Band, simple enough. The drummer or the bass guitar or the rhythm guitar acts as the tempo lead, and the video game adjusts its “judgement window tempo” based on what that lead is doing. So if the drummer is the tempo lead and slows down or speeds up, the tracks slow down and speed up with him and everyone else playing has to slow down and speed up with him. Promote the idea of the ensemble truly being an ensemble.

With something like DDR, i had this idea where two players playing the same chart get judged on how closely they hit the arrows in relation to each other, so as opposed to getting a perfect by hitting your arrow within 20ms of the arrow hitting the casings exactly, you get a perfect by hitting your arrow within 20ms of your partner. Then turn on “autosync” (and furthermore autosync the music as opposed to just the visual arrows) so that if the couple slows down or speeds up, the arrows and music adjust with the couple.

If i had to build a piece of electornic music programming from scratch that could do something like that i bet i could pull at least a basic form of it off with some complex Max/MSP work. In an actual music video game that would be more challenging. If i knew the ins and outs of stepmania programming i could probably change the code to measure the judgements based on each other, but i wouldn’t be able to get the “adjust the BPM of the song based on the player’s performance” part since it’s not fundamentally built into the code (and no, speeding up the song in the extended options screen doesn’t count).

fun to think about.

yesterday my brother forwarded me an article from New Scientist entitled Robotic drumstick keeps novices on the beat. I’m still wrapping my head around what i think about the whole thing, but i can initially say that even though i’m a pretty big promoter of technology in music and music learning, i believe that there’s more lost than gained from this particular approach over the long term.

at first glance it seems to have potential - the gap that we have in teaching anyone anything physical is the lack of being able to directly influence subtle adjustments of muscle memory. This robotic contraption has the potential to create a consistent approach to drumming between a lot of different players which has practical application to, say, marching percussion lines in which creating a consistent approach to playing the drum is paramount. But that’s a very particular context and one that i firmly believe doesn’t serve to create good musicianship in the same way that giving someone a step-by-step recipe instruction doesn’t in itself create a good chef. and as far as i’m concerned, good musicianship is what should be the ultimate end goal of even the very first steps of music pedagogy.

to me, the development of the mechanical skills should move beyond the process of physical imitation to a process of mental understanding. When serious students initially learn how to hit a drum or breathe into a mouthpiece, they’re translating what they’re doing physically into a cognitive recognition and experimenting based on internal and external feedback to find what will produce the best result. The more times they can say in their head, “this feeling makes this happen, that feeling makes that happen,” the more they can truly comprehend the relationship between what is happening physically, how that affects the sound and their perception of that sound, and what sort of mindset has created that effect.

Having a mechanical guidance system like this feels like it takes the mental understanding aspects out of the equation and reduces instrument learning to a physical process instead of a musical one. The article says that the subjects “learned how hard to hit the drum 18% more accurately than when they tried to mimic a rhythm after just hearing it.” If you treat it like a physical process only, you’re surely more likely to get instant gratification statistics of that nature, but why would we ever want to train a musician to not listen? How many problems do we have already with virtuoso instrumentalists who may be technically amazing but don’t know how to blend with the ensemble or stay in time or move out of time with an ensemble? How many of those who could hit the drum 18% more accurately will become better musicians than those that didn’t? How many could be potentially worse?

Some might argue that a tool like this can at least be used as a source of guidance for those that are struggling, but i think that the pedagogical approach needs to be consistent with what ultimately creates the ideal musician. Yes, there are people who have gaps in their physical technique, but a tool like this seems like it’s a) a cheap and easy shortcut that doesn’t create cognitive retention of the concepts, b) assuming there is only one technique or that that technique cannot waver, and/or c) promoting the notion that understanding the physical aspects of sound creation supercedes the need to learn how to listen.

ultimately i think it stifles the creativity of the performers and what sense of individualism they can bring to a piece of music. if i wanted to hear a technically perfect and literal rendition of a piece of music designed to be played by a live acoustic performer, i’d stick the music into my MIDI sequencer and call it good. i find that the use of this sort of technology in music is far more valuable in other paradigms, such as the silly but awesome Tsukuba Series. If that’s not a good use of music technology, i don’t know what is.

i’ve had a blog through livejournal for almost six years now. it’s time to change it up a little bit.

the design of my banner went through a lot of failed attempts. the original idea was to take a particularly visually appealing portion of one of my modern-notation pieces and contrast-gradient the music into the existing gradient background. The problem with that is when you move a black foreground and a white background gradually to a white foreground and a black background, the middle foreground grey matches the background grey. can’t have that.

So i cut up parts of the music into three segments and tried to place them in such a way that they would flow from left to right, but it was too disjunct and too busy no matter what i did with the colors and the positioning. Unsatisifed, i nixed two of the segments and kept the accelerando and started fiddling with its placement. The original placement was smaller than what you see, gradienting to a stark white and existing below the “darkblog resonate” header.

The problem with that is that it left the middle very empty. Putting other music there had already proven to be unsuccessful, so i tried putting something else there, a textured treble clef not unlike the treble clef that I have in my livejournal icon, but after a week or so of looking at it and getting some general guidance from katie, it was determined that that just didn’t fit the bill.

I *think* i’m happy with the final design, for which i can thank katie for guidance. expanding the accelerando figure to encompass more of the screen and changing the gradient from a complete white to a spotlight grey feels more subtle and less intrusive.

i think that’s the 01:30 entry you’re going to get. As a “Grand Opening!” blog entry i think i pretty much failed, but i’m pretty happy with the bio page, so that makes it okay. If you haven’t read it yet, do, because it explains why i decided to create this blog in the first place.

and yeah. welcome to my new world.