Might be a repost but devine just uploaded

fascinating video essay on music notation software

I've been playing with a new DAW and I gotta say, music production is still infuriatingly complicated. I'm using Native Instruments Kontakt and Bitwig in this particular instance. I need to "route" some notes connected from various tracks in Bitwig to a VST virtual instrument. I managed to make it work in 3 or 4 different ways, all of them requiring clicking through 3px-10px wide GUI controls (Kontakt doesn't support GUI scaling and everything is super small...). Things are hidden behind a trail of clicks in buttons, drop downs and select boxes ... frustation level: Lenny Kravitz's scarf.

Looking at alternative music notation again ... a bit of a rabbit hole. I was excited about dodeka but after actually trying to use it and staring at it for a while I find that it lacks redundancy, everything looks like a floating rectangle. KlavarScore looks good for piano playing. Found a small proposal (https://fastgram.org/) that both augments and simplifies traditional notation to good effect, I think. For guitar found this "brenna method" which uses color and shapes to add circle-of-fifths information to the fretboard. I feel like a combination of these elements could be fused together for a visualization that could help play and understand music in different instruments.

Just found about https://www.nime.org/

Despite the click-bait/culture war title, this video is quite good: ... and everything it has to say about music theory also applies to our default notational conventions. (I would add, perhaps controversially, that most of the same things are true of our mathematical notation.)

As mentioned in #C5U3SEW6A, MIT have opened access to all of their journal archives. People interested in computer music might particularly want to have a look at the Computer Music Journal and Leonardo Music Journal: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/comj https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/lmj

love this: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2013/hip-hop-transcriptions/ pretty nice (seems obvious after you see it!) idea for a way to combine time box units with standard notation

Nestup is an experimental markup language for musical rhythms. It's specifically designed to break away from a fixed musical grid. The name is a contraction of nested tuplets, which are hard to program on a piano roll but easy to notate with Nestup. https://nestup.cutelab.nyc/

https://xenpaper.com/ xenpaper Text-based microtonal sequencer. Write down musical ideas and share the link around.

https://sol-hsa.itch.io/sassy A modular synthesizer as a spreadsheet. Neat.

This is pretty cool https://ludotune.com/

I'm still lurking, and still playing with music & live coding stuff. I've just been a bit busy lately. Part of my current effort is to try to make a combination note and text editor view for sheet music. I think there is interesting potential here to have a 2-way text->music representation that can be edited both as a simple stream of text tokens, and as visual notes. ... but for now I'm working on the complex issue of drawing musical notes and converting from a stream of tokens representing the music. If you've seen my previous work, you'll know one of my interests is closing the gap between the live-coded music and the expectation of how it will sound.

❤️ this: https://twitter.com/simongeist/status/1494393714164174856?s=12

Anyone at NAMM? Let's meet and talk about Lamdu and your projects. Most of the time you could find me manning or hanging around the Sound Radix booth.

I recently made my audio components into a module; handles setting up audio, doing FFT, connecting to Ableton link, reading and playing midi. There's a video: https://github.com/rezonality/Zing

Jimmy Webb is one of the top songwriters of my generation. We are truly lucky to have a recording of an interview of Jimmy Webb done by someone who has a clue and had the balls to stump up his own money to make it happen. Why should you care? Quantization is not the only way to deep dive into a subject. Developing theories about monads will never help you create content as good as what Jimmy Webb created. No type-checked language is ever going to touch as many humans as “The Witchitaw Lineman”. An interesting question is “Why?“. I think that Raskin’s “The Humane Interface” was just beginning to scratch the surface of this question, along with Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”. In songwriting, there is the concept of “co-writing”. 1+1=3. The best creations come from teams of people with complementary skills. Everybody in the room gets an equal cut. Isolationist songwriters sometimes succeed, but co-writing teams succeed more often.

I discovered Philip Glass by chance, signing out "glassworks" cd from library based off album art. At the time I was coming off of listening to overtly technical music like prog, metal etc. I was tired of self-indulgent guitars & meandering song structures that never end, and then I found philip glass who created textures I could have never imagined with use of very simple melodic loops & rhythms that when layered ontop of each other created the most rich, beautiful & outer-worldly music. On a personal note, his career is also extremely inspiring as someone who didn't reach mainstream success until well into his 40s (and IMO his best work started then), and still making music now late into his 80s. I had a go at music in my early 20s and got burnt out, but knowing I have time to enrich & progress as a creative is a very warm feeling.

Really beautiful ambient drone album, my favourite Tim Hecker album.

Strudel now has inline visualisation https://strudel.cc/?dbk9t_AYAIc8

Studel v1.1.0 is up! https://github.com/tidalcycles/strudel/releases/tag/v1.1.0

ran into this strange and wonderful physical modeling synthesizer called Anukari which has a lot of lovely 3D VPL concepts in its interface design: The dev also did an ADC talk and there’s a lot of interesting computing going on under the hood, like using the GPU to do all of the physical modeling math:

I'm working on a web based modular synthesizer: https://noodlesynth.com

A few people were asking for a link at the London meetup earlier, so posting here: https://lisp.trane.studio/?tutor Code/docs here

Coloured dots for making a sequencer - the same company are making a MIDI controller using plants too

See Jacob Collier play with Google's MusicFX DJ. https://www.youtube.com/live/IUQW5LgBZvQ He basically uses MusicFX as a sort of silly sampler. It's a more interesting use than whole-cloth generation. This is what he comes up with in about two hours https://www.youtube.com/live/IUQW5LgBZvQ?si=neSJnd8eUKZU8cNh&t=6047. Now that I notice a Transcript button on the YouTube page, I should be able to pull out some interesting quotes without undue effort (ordered thematically):

Let's see if we can mine some from the depths of the unknown brain... https://www.youtube.com/live/IUQW5LgBZvQ?si=khhFJ02r2gdXMtDl&t=1462.

Do you ever just find everything's infinite? Do you ever find that everything contains infinite potential? [Welcome to exploring a latent space] https://www.youtube.com/live/IUQW5LgBZvQ?si=VlVQNoVItFhBgnZS&t=5928.

Okay I have a plan. Just kidding I don't have a plan https://www.youtube.com/live/IUQW5LgBZvQ?si=yXDHDA8uGSUSBAfX&t=4995.

The moment everything starts to be really realistic it's just not interesting... So many things like this that I've tried are designed to directly imitate things: it's like do this exact thing like this person would. But the thing I love about this is that it's yeah it's designed to not do that. It's designed to be strange, and it's just fun https://www.youtube.com/live/IUQW5LgBZvQ?si=SVpsAXq8P-VUA47y&t=3306.

You, the person, get to apply your own taste to it because the AI doesn't have a point of view like that. It doesn't have taste. You have taste, but you can still use all these materials to make your thing more interesting https://www.youtube.com/live/IUQW5LgBZvQ?si=TeZxailbomhdNN0N&t=5588.