Hoc Opus

I swear, it's not a bong.

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:09:38 GMT

After three weeks, I'm finally able to (more or less) maintain a proper pitch on the baroque rackett. Unfortunately, I'm concentrating so much on getting the right notes out that my phrasing's shot all to hell... but one thing at a time.

Alas, YouTube really butchers the audio in standard-quality mode. It sounds a little better in high quality mode, but unfortunately I don't think there's a way to embed that version.

(Probably should have mentioned, I'm just playing the bass line on the rackett. I added the (synthesized) flute and oboe parts after recording the rackett.)

The 1939 Spouse Test

Thu, 15 May 2008 15:08:40 GMT

Yesterday, I ran across the 1939 "Tests for Husbands and Wives" which was recently mentioned in the APA publication Monitor on Psychology, blogged about on Mind Hacks and then picked up on boingboing. When the entire test was posted to Flickr, I figured it would be fun to turn it into an online test.

So: Take the Tests for husbands and wives, if you wish.

The bias of the tests' creator, Dr. George W. Crane, is pretty apparent. He surveyed 600 husbands and 600 wives, asking about the "chief merits and demerits" of their spouses, and took the 50 most frequent of each, then weighted them according to what he thought was most important to a happy marriage.

For example, a husband could get 20 points if he brings his wife to orgasm during "marital congress", but only ten points if he stays faithful to her. A woman gets five points for liking "children and unfortunates", but only one point for being a good housekeeper. The wife gets five points for each minor child she cares for (and no such equivalent exists for the husband). A husband with no demerits and every merit gets a perfect score of 131. A wife with no demerits, and every merit except caring for children gets a perfect score of 100 - she'd need to have six children in order to get a score of 130, or seven kids in order to beat her husband's score!

By today's standards, it seems to be much easier for a husband to get a good score than for a wife. I got 28 demerits and 104 merits, resulting in an overall score of 76 - which let me just squeak by as a "very superior husband"... at least by 1930s standards.

Useless Geekery

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:02:41 GMT

Things that didn't need to be done, but which I did anyway: an Asus Eee PC running OpenVMS/VAX 7.3 (thanks to the magic of SIMH):

(click to enlarge)

Somewhere in this house is a set of floppies upon which I backed up all of the files from my VAX account at college. If I can ever find them, it'll be a great bit of nostalgia to run those programs again.

The Farmer's Daughter

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:37:26 GMT

Getting back into SCA dancing. New kingdom, new favorites, new variations on old favorites. One of the ones we danced last Sunday was "Juice of Barley" - which, as it turns out, is not even remotely the same dance as "Stingo, or the Oyle of Barley", although it is done to the same basic tune. However, the recording the dancemistress had was just a bit too sprightly - I'd guess it was at least 140bpm, which made the "hands all around" rather hazardous given the slick floor.

So I threw this arrangement together, with a more reasonable tempo, primarily for my own safety (these aged bones don't knit back together as quickly as they used to). The melody is actually the variant used several decades later for "The Farmer's Daughter" (Cold and Raw the North did blow) in Wit and Mirth: or Pills to purge Melancholy.

Note to self: don't leave a capo on a set of gut strings overnight.

Catching up

Wed, 23 May 2007 03:30:56 GMT

Let's see, what have I been doing since the last time I posted in this journal? Following up on the Solo Strad Violin sample library, Garritan recently released a similar library based on a Gofriller cello (a viola should be coming out shortly). I helped Karen and some of her friends put together a machinima animation in Second Life, and one of the scenes seemed a little dry, so I used the violin and cello libraries to do a snippet of Eine kleine Nachtmusik. It worked out so well, I decided to finish the whole movement:

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, second movement (MP3, 6.85 MB)

For another scene where the actors encounter an avatar that looks remarkably similar to a well-known cartoon sailor, I worked up a fragment of the College Hornpipe using more varied instrumentation, which again I fleshed out a bit more afterwards:

College Hornpipe (MP3, 673 KB)

I enjoyed doing the first string quartet so much, I did up the first of John Adson's Courtly Masquing Ayres (1621), a quintet:

Ayre #1 (MP3, 2.24 MB)

Eventually I'd like to do all of them (though maybe breaking up the instrumentation, as the part-books indicate the pieces are "for Violins, Conſorts, and Cornets".

And finally, this weekend I decided to give digital painting a try; I'd only ever used The GIMP to manipulate photographs, usually for humorous effect, but seeing clips of the "speed painting" genre on YouTube made me want to see if I could do that too. I figured my first attempt would look like ass, but I did a time-lapse recording of the entire process anyway, just in case. (Click the picture to see the video, if you're so inclined - but turn your speakers down if you're at work, as there's background music.)

It turned out a lot better than I expected it to. The portrait is of "Gwen Cooper" (Eve Myles), from the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood.

The Advancing State of Technology

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:16:00 GMT

I finally broke down and bought the Garritan Stradivari Violin virtual instrument. I had already expected good things of it, based on the samples I'd heard, but was impressed nonetheless.

Scanning through the unfinished pieces on my hard drive (of which, sadly, I have many), I came across a cakewalk from 1900 which had a melody I thought lent itself well to the expressiveness of the violin. I never finished the last page, but it's still a pretty decent length.

Cakewalk by John T. Hall, MP3, 02:18, 2.7MB

(While I'm opposed to bowdlerization on the grounds of prurience, its original name is rather offensive today for other reasons, as were the names of numerous cakewalks of the time.)

Playing the Strad library is a bit like driving a manual-transmission vehicle; your left hand is constantly riding the mod wheel to control the level of vibrato (and, when desired, moving the pitch wheel as well); your foot is working an expression pedal to control volume; and the right hand, as it plays, separates or overlaps notes to control spiccato/legato, varies the keystrike velocity to control the bow attack (or portamento on overlapped notes), and presses down on the keys while they're sounding to control the vibrato rate via channel aftertouch. Sounds complicated — and it is — but it provides a staggering amount of realtime control over the final sound.

The one fly in the ointment, for me, is that the instrument sounds exceedingly reedy and bodiless if added to a 96KHz project — which, alas, is nearly every project I've recorded since I got my M-Audio Delta 1010LT sound card. I'm hopeful, though, since Native Instruments (who make the software which "plays" the sample library) have been good in the past about fixing bugs.

Yet Another AudioEdit

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:24:06 GMT

Haven't done a Fark AudioEdit in a while, but I had to do this one: 'Weird Al' Yankovic's birthday was this week. AudioEdit a song for him. Sadly, I was one of only two actual entries. My entry, the Turnabout Polka, took a bunch of his original songs and stuffed them into a polka medley (much like he's done with other artists's songs on most of his albums). I wish I could have made it longer, but I ran out of time.

Need help in Massachusetts

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 14:29:51 GMT

There's some furniture for sale on eBay which I would kill to have. Unfortunately, the seller is in Massachusetts, near Cape Cod, and will sell only for local pickup (no shipping).

If I bid on this auction and win it, is there anyone on my friends list who'd be willing to pick them up for me and ship them? I'll pay all shipping costs, plus a fee for the gas and inconvenience.

Anyone?

A little Dixieland

Wed, 31 May 2006 15:26:38 GMT

Zach, my occasional animation collaborator, asked if I would arrange a portion of a Scott Joplin rag for Dixieland jazz band, for use in the closing credits of one of his animations.

Here's the original:

Sugar Cane (Excerpt)

And here's what I came up with:

Sugar Cane, Dixieland Style (Excerpt)

This is my first attempt at Dixieland style; I know some of the people reading this are jazz aficionados, so constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.

Blast from the past

Fri, 26 May 2006 13:15:33 GMT

I was looking through my backup CDs last night, looking for something, when I came across a copy of my POV-Ray files. POV-Ray was the freeware 3D software I used before Animation:Master; all the models were described in plain text, as a collection of geometric objects (spheres, cubes, cylinders, etc.), rather than created visually using a graphic modeler.

Anyway, I ran across an image that was about 90% finished; I just needed to do some electrical outlets, a mouse, and some cables. Given that I've forgotten everything I taught myself about trigonometry in order to use POV-Ray, I doubt I'll ever finish it. So here's what I had (click for the full-sized version):

The scene is modeled after the office I was working in at the time. Everything in there (well, with a couple of obvious exceptions) is as close as I could get to the real thing using a text editor, though in reality my desk was never that uncluttered.

Funny story: I actually got permission from Bill Amend to use the Fox Trot strip in my image, and the image of Dogbert was explicitly released into the public domain — but all the other comics are a nonexistent strip called "Poorly Drawn Chef", which I had to create myself because I couldn't get permission to use the real-world comics I wanted. (Okay, so it's not that funny. But it does cement in my mind the fact that Bill Amend is a pretty cool guy who answers his own email and will give a fellow geek a break.)

What's going on?

Thu, 04 May 2006 00:27:49 GMT

My "real" blog is not syndicating to LiveJournal. Neither are the other two blogs run from my site. LiveJournal's getting a read timeout error, even though the site's responding just fine. Bizarre.

In other news, blindleadsblind may be surprised to know that last night's episode of House deviated from its usual predictable formula; after the obligatory several wrong guesses, the doctors did not finally hit upon the right answer in the last thirty seconds, and the patient died. Of course, this was because one of the doctors had become infected with the mystery illness, and they wanted to leave a nice cliffhanger for the TO BE CONTINUED... card, but still, it was a break from the routine.

Snakes on a Plane!

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 16:28:35 GMT

You either love the idea of Snakes on a Plane or you hate it. Sure, the plot has zero literary value — or perhaps even a negative value; it's like Witness crossed with the Sci-Fi Network Crappy "Original" Snake-Related Movie of the Week — but with Samuel L. Jackson being Samuel L. Jackson in it, it should at least be fun.

Anyway, Fark's current AudioEdit contest theme is AudioEdit a theme song for "Snakes on a Plane".

So here's my entry: Snakes on a Plane! (MP3, 3.6 MB, 2:12) I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Not work-safe due to strong language; also, minor spoilers (some character names, and a couple of plot points, including the fact that there's a certain kind of animal on a certain kind of vehicle).

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 01:25:37 GMT

I can't ever imagine a situation where I might use this icon, but the line (and Billie Piper's expression) amused me enough to make it anyway.

Vacillating

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 04:19:40 GMT

So, flummoxicated and I are going to visit England soon. Because it would be a bit expensive to buy enough memsticks for our digital camera to last us a whole week, especially given the rate and resolution at which we take pictures, I'm hacking an NSLU2 to check for the presence of a memstick in an attached USB reader, and if it finds one, move all the photos onto a USB hard drive, thus (a) preserving the photos for when we return (and sorting them into directories by date), and (b) cleaning off the memstick so it can be immediately reused. (It's working, now I just have to figure out the best way to automate it.) I also plan on rigging up a battery pack for it, so I can bring it with us during the day just in case we find something that requires taking a lot of pictures.

Now, I could carry all the separate items with me — the NSLU2, the memstick reader, the hard drive, and the battery pack — or I could put 'em in a case. Now, amongst the curios from my anti-cult crusading days, I've got a couple of Scientology E-Meters from the early 1970s that aren't doing anything — so I was thinking of pulling the innards out of one, affixing my components inside the remaining shell, and hooking up a couple of the front-panel switches to serve for on/off and AC/battery selectors. There are even convenient ports on the side that could be modified to accept the memstick and the power adapter, though I'd need to cut a hole for an Ethernet port. I'd also need to make extensions for the power and Ethernet to go from the side of the case to the back of the NSLU2's mainboard.

The desire to have (as far as I know) a unique casemod is warring with my fundamental laziness. So what do you think? Put a bunch of effort into something weird, or schlep a bunch of small parts around during my vacation?

View Poll: The E-Meter Casemod

The #1 Threat to Bears

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 01:36:42 GMT

Whipped this up for a Fark photoshop contest, exactly two years (to the day) after the last time I entered one. Two years?! Damn, where has the time gone?

A couple of new works

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 21:28:20 GMT

First, an orchestral piece inspired by an MMORPG I've been playing off and on for a couple of months. I would have called it "March of the Dwarfs", but that wanker Grieg already took that title (at least, before political correctness got to it).

March of the Stonebreakers

And then, for something completely different, an entry for a Fark AudioEdit contest: "Fabricate a dance track with nothing but video-game sounds".

Sinistard (Red Warrior Shot the Food)

The former piece was created with Garritan Personal Orchestra; the latter, nothing but samples from classic arcade games. A bright shiny penny for anyone who can name them all.

(Reminder: this LiveJournal is just where I post things I make — images, music, &c. My actual weblog is syndicated to LiveJournal as singingtaters.

Musickes Delight

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 05:23:21 GMT

SONAR 5 arrived today, so my evening's plans went out the window while I dove in and had some fun with it. I recorded "Musickes Delight", a pleasant little piece from Tobias Hume's Poeticalle Musicke (PDF). Originally written for two tenor viols (or lutes, or opharions) and a bass viol, I had arranged it for five parts in hopes that the Consort could perform and/or record it, but we went down to four members before we'd done more than play it through a few times at rehearsal.

But thanks to the magic of multitrack recording, I was able to bring it to life anyway:

MP3 format (3.4 MB)
Ogg Vorbis format (3 MB)

Played here as a wind quintet of flute, oboe d'amore, English horn, bassoon and contrabassoon.

(Heh heh heh... the "oboe of love"...)

New Webtoy

Fri, 13 May 2005 20:35:12 GMT

My cow-orker, who leaves next week, took his calendars down recently. I didn't realize how much I actually used them. Being too cheap and lazy to go out and buy a calendar of my own, I threw together a Calendar Generator Utility in PHP. It looked a little too plain, so I added a couple of bells and whistles. Just give it the URL of a (decently sized) image on the Web (or select one from your local computer), plug in the month and year, and it'll send back a PDF file of the calendar.

If you're so inclined, please give it a try; if you can break it, let me know so I can fix it. Enjoy!

And why not? The Desktop Meme

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 03:48:39 GMT

Gakked from galiana_db and the_red_shoes.

I'm not much for memes, but I'm proud of my desktop; I made it myself. The left monitor's image was "modeled" in OS/2 System Editor (the equivalent of Windows Notepad) and rendered with POV-Ray; the right was modeled and rendered in Animation:Master.

01: Take a screencap of your desktop.

To cap a desktop:
1) Press "Print Screen" (prt sc) button on a PC or cmd-shift-3 on a Mac
2) Open your graphics program-o-choice
3) Press CTRL + V or go to "edit > paste"
4) Save image as a JPEG

02: Upload the screen cap to your image server.

03: Reply to this entry with A LINK TO your screencap. Along with any explanations you feel are necessary.

04: Post your cap in YOUR LJ along with these instructions

And the desktop. This is a significantly reduced version, obviously; click on it for a version scaled down to 50%. (The full-sized version was over half a megabyte, which is too ridiculous to post.)

No, vecchio infatuato!

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 02:59:56 GMT

A litle while ago, a friend asked if I'd create a soundtrack for his animation project. He was entering a competition, and in order to keep his entry out of legal entanglements, he needed a recording that wasn't copyrighted by someone else. So I synthesized an orchestra, and through the magic of Internet collaboration we each recorded vocals. It turned out pretty well, I think — and it's an order of magnitude better with the animation accompanying it.

Unfortunately, the contest was canceled because there weren't enough entries. But that doesn't stop us from showing it elsewhere.

I hope you'll take a moment to enjoy Soap Opera. With a bonus cameo by flummoxicated!

A couple more...

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:00:50 GMT

Two more pieces performed with Garritan Personal Orchestra:

A pair of very brief Hymni written by Guillaume Dufay;
My arrangement of an English country dance, Cuckolds all a row.

I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out.

Gasp! A post!

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 07:46:27 GMT

This week, I got Garritan Personal Orchestra, a relatively inexpensive orchestral sample library, and though I've been working mad overtime I managed to find some time to play around with it when I should have been sleeping.

I took a couple of old songs I'd arranged for the Calais Consort and reworked them a bit:

The lascivious Lover and the coy Lass, or "Pish, fye, you're rude, Sir", from Thomas D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to purge Melancholy (1719), in a rendition for flute, violin, viola, cello and harpsichord; and

The shepheards woing faire Dulcina, a ballad from ca. 1615, performed as a string quintet. I'm going to have to expand this one with some variations, because it's just too short with only one verse, and without the lyrics, simply repeating the same thing over and over again would get boring.

It's kind of a pity the Consort no longer performs Dulcina; I think it was one of my better arrangements.

Current Work In Progress

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 10:49:41 GMT

Here's what I'm working on at the moment, in my (suddenly reduced) free time. Most of the people on my friends list are probably too young to know what these are.

(Click the image for the full-sized version.) I still have to do the textures (bump maps, "dirt" and so forth) so they look less "computery", but I think the modeling phase is done.

Ancient Pop-Culture Test

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 02:00:26 GMT

View Poll: Ancient Pop-Culture Test

Clarification: this guy.

Missed it by that much

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 19:17:49 GMT

I was hoping to have the model finished by today, to coincide with the premiere of Stargate: Atlantis. But alas, I had other, more important projects, so I'll have to settle for "almost finished".

Click the thumbnails for the full-sized versions. There are also a couple of large (2048x1536) textureless renders of the entire model, front and back, but they're not quite as exciting.