interests

[eub]

pleonastic picked these five interests from my profile for me to say something about:

arp 2600

The electronic music lab in college had two ARP 2600 semi-modular analog synthesizers, side by side, so you could wire them together. I have never with any other hardware found it so easy to get sounds that surprised me, that I almost but not quite understand what was making them sound like that. And they were so often beautiful.

I should go hook up the synthesizers. They aren't 2600s, but they do all right.

high winds

Why is wind exhilarating? I and the air are touching. We always do, but I have no awareness of it in ordinary air (except briefly after I'd had a beard and shaved it off, and could feel the currents of air in a still room). The air is all over me, pressing the windward side and wrapping around the lee, and I hear the rush of the atmosphere everywhere engaging the landscape.

kathleen raine

There shall be no more sea

These rolling flowing plunging breaking everlasting weaving waters
Moved by tumultuous invisible currents of the air
Seem liquid light, seem flaming sun-ocean pouring fire,
And the heavy streaming windbeaten waves
Consubstantial with glint and gold-dazzle flashed from glassy crests.
On turbulence of light we float.

Why then should I not walk on water? Through water-walls
Of intangible light, mirage through mirage pass?
This body solid and visible to sense
Insubstantial as the shouting host of the changeable wind
Or fluent forms that plunge under wave, embrace passing through embrace,
Melting merging parting for ever,
Or oreads slender as a line of shadow moving across mountain's roseate face.

math and mysticism (i especially like that these two follow each other)

When I was creating the LJ account, I remember taking some care in the ordering of interests in the form field, so that neighbors were connected together in a wandering chain. And then when I clicked "submit" LJ alphabetized them. But these two landed well together -- they remind me of the cartoon by Rudy Rucker: Willie Wheeler(?) thinks of nothing, an empty thought bubble {}, and in the next frame thinks of thinking of nothing, a thought containing an empty thought {{}}, and then one containing both of those {{},{{}}}, in a construction of the numbers 0, 1, 2..., and the frames are now halving in width each time, to the edge of the page. Then he is thinking infinity (and I forget how exactly Rucker placed his ellipses for that), with a big cartoon smile.

Comments

[3smallishmagi.livejournal.com]

I bet you'd have fun poking around this site:
http://freemusicsoftware.org/category/free-vst/emulator

[eub.livejournal.com]

I appreciate the thought, but it turns out that software emulators frustrate me. Part of it is the technical difficulties -- people often write these things thinking it's a matter of putting together some table-lookup oscillators and direct-II filters and add some wobble and soft limiting to make it sound analog. That gets you say 80% of the way there for 80% of synth patches, especially the ones with a VCO -> VCF -> VCA structure, but it breaks down really fun patches. Audio-rate FM of a nearly-self-oscillating filter never seems to come out right. Or feedback systems.

And the other part is the frustration of the interface, when you take a patchboard and put it inside a computer and touch it only with one mouse pointer. Plus it's inside a *computer*, and computers are basically annoying.

Digital audio is a great *idea*.