Devin Walters

Another attempt at articulating what I'm talking about! Forget TSO; I've changed a few things and am calling TSO "Rubato" instead. It will have an OS X GUI written in MacRuby, and will give the user the ability to craft sequences by simply typing words, sentences, paragraphs, and so on. I've drawn a bit of inspiration from what rubato means in Italian:

Rubato (roo-BAH-toe) A practice common in Romantic compositions of taking part of the duration from one note and giving it to another. It involves the performer tastefully stretching, slowing, or hurrying the tempo as she/he sees fit, thus imparting flexibility and emotion to the performance.

My last post on TSO sheds a bit of light on how I plan to make the logic of the beats, notes, chords, etc. work in Rubato, but this post reveals how the user will interact with the application to expressively perform music in a live environment. Stay tuned for a demo.

I’ve obsessed for the past few years over a project that basically involves turning letters into tones, words into chords, sentences into melodies, and paragraphs into complete musical thoughts. It’s difficult to know where to begin, but here is an example of what I imagine:

The house is red. It has a window, a door, and a chimney. Three people live there. It’s in a nice neighborhood.

Let’s take the first sentence, and map the key of C to it:

T h e  h o u s e  i s  r e d.
A B C  B D G B C  F B  E C D.

So how do we make this work? This stage isn’t really all that complicated. What becomes interesting now is interpreting the random values we’re assigning to this sentence using various perspectives from the music theory side of things, to make a sound structure to build upon. Our first sentence defines domain in which other words and sentences will be interpreted.

A B C could be played in any variation as single notes, in harmony (A C would probably sound most recognizable), or perhaps we’ll just pick one note from that word and use it. How “house” will act in this context brings another level of complexity to the table. “The” defines the starting point arbitrarily, and “house” must use what it contains to work with “The”. Depending on the type of music you’re trying to reproduce, there are many many paths one might take in deciding what “house” will mean to “The”. I’ve only taken a limited amount of college level music theory, but I’ll take a stab at how I might proceed. For the purposes of demonstration, let’s call “The” a chromatic A B C musical phrase.

B D G B C contains a G chord (G B D (the V chord in the key of C)). If no possible chord existed in this case we could do the same as we did with “The”, only this time, it would be keeping in mind what “The” represents musically. Our domain is a little more narrowly defined now that we have a starting point. I could give you a bunch of examples of how we could proceed, but I’m going to try and keep this post quick and dirty. Let’s call “house” a G chord.

Our current work at this point in case I’m losing you:

A B C (G chord)

Now we tackle “is” in this context (F B). B is the leading tone in the key of C, and happens to come before the final word in the sentence, so let’s use it.

A B C (G chord) B

Finally, “red” translates to E C D. We’re heading home with the leading tone, so let’s use C and E in harmony.

If you’re still reading, we have a sentence!

A B C (G chord) B (C E).

Check out how it sounds by listening to midi representation.

I’m going to put this to bed for the night and edit to include the details I know I’m forgetting. This idea has been in my head for a long time and committing all of those fleeting thoughts to paper is going to be a challenge. Thanks for reading. I hope anyone who has experience or thoughts on this subject will comment. Input is much appreciated.

a world of ideas is a huge archive of lectures on all sorts of interesting topics. For those of you who know me: When I say something that sounds really pretentious like "I saw a lecture the other day about [fill in the blank]", this is probably where I found it.

Toss anything you found particular interesting down in the comments and I'll be sure to check it out.

More evidence I know absolutely nothing about life:

I would be remiss to not mention: Link

For those of you who have seen the video above, the book is certainly better. It's a quick read and I highly recommend it.

A quick rundown of interesting links I've been perusing the past week:

• Here is a great article about reading C type declarations.
• Camping Explained is a series about all of the neat meta programming going on inside of the tiny camping web framework.
• _Why gives us a few hacks for playing with my favorite dynamic tiling window manager: wmii3.

It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of words were anymore. So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.

Check the rest of them out here.

Someone decided to pick up the old hackersmovie.com domain and turn the entire script into IRC format. The result is good fun.

Observe:

 *** Hacker (hacker@some.hacker) has joined channel #OTVSystem
 <Dade:#DadesRoom> hey!
 <Hacker:#OTVSystem> U HAVE TREAD UPON MY DOMAIN & MUST NOW SUFFER
 <Hacker:#OTVSystem> WHO R U?
 <Dade:#DadesRoom> zero
 <Dade:#DadesRoom> no uh wait.
 *** Dade is now known as CrashOverride
 <CrashOverride:#OTVSystem> CRASH OVERRIDE.
 <CrashOverride:#OTVSystem> WHO WANTS TO KNOW?
 *** Hacker is now known as AcidBurn
 <AcidBurn:#OTVSystem> ACID BURN
 <CrashOverride:#DadesRoom> unbelievable!
 <CrashOverride:#DadesRoom> a hacker!
 <AcidBurn:#OTVSystem> ACID BURN SEZ LEAVE B 4 U R EXPUNGED
 <CrashOverride:#DadesRoom> yeah ok Acid Burn
 <CrashOverride:#DadesRoom> thats enough
 <AcidBurn:#OTVSystem> I WILL SWAT U LIKE THE FLY U R
 <AcidBurn:#OTVSystem> I WILL SNAP YOUR BACK LIKE A TOOTHPICK
 <CrashOverride:#OTVSystem> MESS WITH THE BEST DIE LIKE THE REST
 <AcidBurn:#OTVSystem> YOU ARE TERMINATED
 *** CrashOverride has been kicked off channel #OTVSystem by AcidBurn (CONNECTION TERMINATED)

This is almost as good as some of the lines in Hackers.

I just started getting into the mix with MacRuby. MacRuby is Apple's official at building a bridge between ObjC and Ruby. I wont go into too many details, but I have found a few nice tutorials on building a quick MacRuby application with XCode. So, without further adieu here they are:

• MacRuby Random Number Generator
• Basic MacRuby Tutorial