The Fugue

So I've been reading up on what makes organ pipes tick (ok, so they don't tick). It's very fascinating and yet very simple. It has surprised even me that it has made me think about making my own.

Now, I'm not crazy enough to build a large organ, at least not without gobs of time and money and the proper tools. I'm still nurturing the dream of building just a MIDI pedalboard, remember.

Still, there is a project that I can see myself taking on someday. I could build a positive organ. ("Positive" rhymes with "beef.") It's a little one-manual organ that has just a couple of stops. It's portable like a dresser with wheels is.

But not just any positive organ. A crazy simple positive organ. I'm thinking PVC pipe, because working with metal and wood intimidates me (and I don't have the tools). That may change before I actually build it. Who needs a case? If I'm going to build a pipe organ it's going to be naked so that people can see how an organ works. So build it onto/into a simple push cart or something. As for wind, what good is a portable organ if you have a loud motor that needs electricity? If I had cash for a nice quiet blower that would be one thing, but since I don't maybe I'll go with a simple bellows like they did in the olde days. Keyboard? Tracker's the only way to go on something like this, which means I'll have to break my anti-woodworking pact. But on a positive organ where the pipes are right there, the action should be simple.

This is very early stages of the dream, but I'm imagining 8', 4', 2', and 2 2/3'. 8' and 4' for sure. Probably 49 notes (4 octaves) on the manual. So that's 100–200 pipes. I hope my attention span is that large. Of course I can always start with one stop and go from there.

You may wonder how I'm going to fit an 8' stop in an organ I pretend will be portable. You can take a 4' pipe and cover the end and it will resonate like an 8' pipe (and though it's not made of wood will hopefully sound not entirely unlike a Gedackt).

If none of that made any sense, just click on this link and say "that'd be cool!"

For my musical notation needs, I use LilyPond.

LilyPond is to music as LaTeX is to writing. I prefer to edit LilyPond files in Vim and compile them with lilypond at the command line. However, on OS X LilyPond.app is a front end to the compiler. An IDE of sorts. Not a spectacular one, in my opinion, but it does have one thing going for it: when you click on a note in the PDF preview, it takes you that note in your LilyPond source file in the IDE.

On Leopard, LilyPond is severely broken. The IDE will "start", but there is no menu. Further, if you are on Intel, when you try to run it at the command line, it just keels over and does nothing. It so happens that the workaround to this problem and using LilyPond without the IDE are almost identical solutions, so I'll describe them as one and the same.

First, and this is the only difference between Leopard brokenness and just wanting to run on the command-line, you want the powerpc version of LilyPond.app, not the Intel version. So go over to the download page and get the ppc version (the one that says it's for G3, G4, G5 Macs).

lilypond and its friends are in Lilypond.app/Contents/Resources/bin. You could add this to your PATH, but some of the binaries in there are things that I have installed elsewhere (e.g. with MacPorts), and I don't want them overriding my PATH. Likewise, I want lilypond to be able to find the binaries it expects, and since they're taking up disk space anyway let's help it along. So I wrote a script. A LilyPond launcher if you will. I call it ly and put it in my path, and then I call e.g. ly lilypond foo.ly. Here's the code:

#! /bin/sh
APP=/Applications/LilyPond.app
PATH=$APP/Contents/Resources/bin:$PATH
exec "$@"

Customize APP to point wherever you want to keep LilyPond.app. This will load up the environment that will give lilypond the best chance of success. You can run any of the binaries in that directory with ly, but the most common case is to run lilypond. So I recommend putting this in your .bashrc:

alias lilypond='ly lilypond'

The first time you run the ppc version of LilyPond, or anything else, on an Intel machine, it will seem to take forever while Rosetta fires up. Be patient. Subsequent invocations are quick enough.

Once upon a time I was on a quest to get Ogg Vorbis working on a Mac. I tried the QuickTime Components project and it worked for awhile. Then it broke with QuickTime 7. Truth be known, it never worked all that great before, though it did decode the music. Then I found VLC and never looked back.

Today I learned that somewhere in the interim Xiph.org filled the gap. Now you can download XiphQT, stick XiphQT.component in /Library/Components, and you're off and running. This is precisely how the issue should have been addressed in the first place, and I'm glad it finally was, whenever it was. I'm also happy to have been ignorant of the fact for so long, since I despise iTunes for other reasons, and this tells me I've lived without regular iTunes abuse for a long hapy time.

Today I presented a 1-hour seminar on Computer Music to a summer camp group here at New Mexico State University. We talked about what we can do with computers, demonstrated Ardour, Audacity, and GarageBand, and had a good listen to a few quality pieces. We even mentioned U2.

My presentation is available as a PDF, and it has links to all the interesting sites we mentioned. For those that weren't there, I'd like to point out especially Real World Remixed where you can download sample packs for some great music, including Peter Gabriel and Afro Celt Sound System songs, and remix them yourself with something like Ardour. Hours of fun!

For some time now Slashdot has ben getting more and more immature. Or I've been getting less tolerant of immaturity. I'm not sure which.

A story run yesterday was the last straw. It's time to move on. I'm removing Slashdot from my RSS feed.

The story was entitled Unrefined "Musician" Gains a Global Audience. Here is the blurb:

"An unskilled musician performed a catchy pop instrumental for more than one million YouTube users even though he can't play a lick of drums or piano. The 22-year-old Norwegian's tool was stop-motion video,

Hey Slashdot, guess what? If you compose music that people enjoy (i.e. catchy), you don't qualify as unskilled musician. This guy is obviously skilled at many things. He can obviously compose a catchy tune, knows a lot more about drums than I do, is very skilled with a video editing program, has a good comedic sense, and is good with a tracker. I know a number of composition majors at BYU who can play about as much piano, drums, or anything else as this guy. He and they compose music nonetheless and they are skilled musicians.

Skilled performer? No, at least not with those two instruments. But a skilled musician and video creator. Go watch Lesse Gjertsen's Amateur and Hyperactive. They're enjoyable.

Goodbye Slashdot, this reader has decided to leave your unrefined "news site" for the script kiddies.

My GAANN fellowship will be sending me to New Orleans in November for the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC). I'm pretty psyched about this. I've never been to an academic conference, and I've certainly never been to a conference about Computer Music. It's going to be a blast, and it's going to be very informative. Hopefully I'll be able to network with some people in the field working on research similar to my own (which will begin in earnest in January, since my coursework is (almost) done after this semester). There will be Computer Music conferences, and I'll be sure to catch some good old New Orleans Jazz too.

I haven't asked yet, but I'm hoping GAANN will send me to the Linux Audio Conference in Berlin next year, too.

I get the impression that most users of MIDI sequencers step record. At least, the writers of the sequencers pay little attention to live recording. For evidence, I cite the abundance of tracker sequencers available for Linux, and the three major sequencers for Linux (IMHO) which all fall short in the relatively simple task of accomodating people like me who prefer to record things live: Rosegarden, Muse, and Seq24.

Live recording is not complicated. You need a few basic features, and you need to make them accessible from the keyboard without touching the mouse. Here's an excellent UI model (that makes me drool):

And here's a list of those basic features:

• FF, REW, Stop, Play, Record
• Replace and overdub modes.
• Punch
• Loop
• Metronome
• Lead-in of 2, 1, or 0 measures. My old Roland JW-50 from 1992 did a great job with this. You had the option of no lead-in but you also had the option of key-triggered recording. That is, you press record, and the thing starts recording the moment you start playing. This is extremely useful.
• Track muting and solo
• 16 tracks
• Variable speed (percent of tempo) for slow and fast recording.
• Undo

That's it. Most sequencers have some or perhaps even most of these features, but leave out essential aspects such as no mousing, replace recording, no lead-in, and not crashing. Rosegarden goes a step further and makes the simple things that you take for granted difficult as well (but it does everything else under the sun and it's hard to justify not using it).

Seq24 is unique in its failure because it is oriented at realtime performance. Note that word, "performance". It could perhaps just as easily be good at realtime recording if it tried, and then in spite of its loop and pattern-based approach it would still be an excellent sequencer for us non-pattern junkies. (Sequence a Bach organ fugue in a tracker, I dare you.)

If I have the honor of speaking to someone who is writing or improving a sequencer, please consider the keyboardists and take my thoughts into consideration. Believe it or not, the lack of these basics will drive a keyboardist crazy just as fast as mousing will drive a CLI junkie crazy. Which is quite ironic as most step-recording Linux sequencer developers are probably CLI junkies.

dilvie got me to add knobtweakers.net to my RSS feeds a while ago. Admittedly I usually don't listen to it (I need some good podcast software but that's another post). But the other day I did listen to the Enicma song Lost in an Unfriendly World, and I loved it. So I decided to see what else I might have missed and started digging around the site.

I downloaded the Knobtweakers Best of 2005 Compilation and listened to it today. There's some great stuff in there. Here's what I particularly liked.

• Goof by Binaerpilot is absolutely delightful. This is the epitome of what makes electronic music cool. This is the kind of music I dream of making.
• Count to Six by I Am Robot and Proud is cute and fun. Hippity Hop!
• Nerds, Inc. by Bliss is both enjoyable and hilarious.
• The Young Punx' remix of Madonna's Dance with Someone Else makes me laugh.
• Clear Light by K-Oscillate is a neat synth world sound that holds my interest and exhibits some very interesting synth as well as very analog vocals.
• The Young Punx do it again with an fascinating and fun remix of 60's bossa nova by John B: Drum and Bacharach.

Also deserving of honorable mention:

• For a Day by Le Zero
• Digital Bliss by Underground Bass Masters

Almost all of the songs are right up my alley, but those are the ones that really stuck out at me after the first listen.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, you ought to check out Computerville by Lunar Shuttle Disaster which is an excellent and fun piece made in Linux. Enjoy!