Sunday, January 29, 2012

The Softness War

Music production in recent years has been dominated by a Loudness War. CD sound is 16 bits at 44.1kHz, so there's an upper limit on amplitudes and RMS noise value; nevertheless using audio compression (not compression of the digital encoding to MP3, but literally squashing the peaks down to fit inside the 16bit limit, while suggesting to the ear that the sound is so loud it would need more bits to represent it).  Record companies found that louder music seemed more impressive regardless of its other qualities, so they started insisting on heavy heavy audio compression so that it sounds like you're listening underwater.  The more one company did it, the more their competitors had to out-do them.

I think the same thing is going on between butter and bread.  The bread manufacturers want to have the softest bread, so soft that any butter will tear it.  The butter makers, on the other hand, want to prove that their butter is so soft it can be spread onto wet tissue paper and leave the paper intact.  Of course, this is not the loudness war - its the softness war.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

insane difficulty

'The revolt of nature against man' begins GK Chesterton in 'The Club of Queer Trades', has been reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than the large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs.'

Being familiar with what Heidegger calls obstinacy, described above as revolt, I am often found cursing loudly at my computer when (for example) I try to hook up the audio, and the ports are tiny, dark, snarled in cable and inaccessible. Often I exclaim at the 'insane difficulty.'

The thing is, the problem is always that I'm doing it wrong. There is a way that will work, but I haven't found it, and am instead repeatedly trying things that don't work. When I get rid of the insanity, I greatly reduce the difficulty.
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Saturday, January 21, 2012

Two Korg Nanokontrols for DAW on win7 64-bit

Yes I have two Korg Nanokontrols (not ver 2s - these are the pure breeds with 9 sets of controllers, not 8) working in Music Creator 6 (and presumably any DAW).  Who wants to touch me?

I said who wants to friggin' touch me?

When I first tried to use one nanokontrol with the Korg drivers, it didn't work at all.  Getting rid of the Korg drivers revealed that the windows default driver for usb midi devices works fine.  I added the second with some trepidation, but the windows driver registered it cheerfully enough. Midiox could open both devices and register input from them, but Cakewalk Music Creator could not.  The nanokontrols would get dropped from the Midi Devices immediately I hit 'Apply'.  Midi-yoke is not going to work on Windows 7 64-bit, but Loopbe1 by the wonderful nerds.de can serve as wiring betwen two programs.

The working config is:
1 nanokontrol as the selected input in Midi-Ox, with the output mapped to the loopbe1 'virtual cable
No other midi input selected.
Now, when I open Music Creator 6 I have 3 midi devices for the two nanokontrols - two of them are 'nanokontrol' and one is loopbe1.  By ticking loopbe1 and one (the correct one, which is a bit of a guess) of the nanokontrols, I have two nanokontrols, working perfectly to input to my DAW.

I don't think the Korg Kontrol Editor will like it much, but I might be able to use Midi-ox to tie up one nanokontrol and edit the other.  And yes, it is surprising to be reduced to such chicanery in these days.

(Of course, now I have no excuse for not making music.  Nuts.)

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Learning

My little son is 6 months old tomorrow.  He is on the way to sitting up - he can balance on his rump if he's holding my fingers or leaned against the back of the couch.  One of the interesting things watching him, is that he doesn't know what sitting is.  It isn't a specific thing he does.  When he tips over, there's no event - no change from doing one thing to doing something else.  All he really is consciously doing is seeing things and trying to grab them, and hopefully, put them in his mouth.  He can do that while on his side, and the whole time he's tipping over onto his side.

Heidegger aimed to give an account of our interaction with the world without intentional content, so that we would seamlessly or effortlessly deal with or cope with the world, except in breakdown cases. I think Heidegger is weak on learning: it's obviously necessary, but its necessarily a dynamic process which he wants to find a static structure underneath. And I think if he had thought more about learning, he might have had some trouble, because there is a time when a skill becomes a thing - it puts on a handle and becomes a group or a super-group, that can be called on by the for-the-sake-of-which, which is the ineffable purpose or project that is enough to make use of us and makes us us.  I guess I think there is a faculty of reflection which includes a rationality, and which is linked with our symbolic faculty.  The handling of a pattern of practices is like the inner world's equivalent experience to naming.

My son has no handle on sitting; the first sitting comes before the handle on it.

(I could go on and on:

  • about his for-the-sake-of-which at this early stage which is what I think Hegel calls satisfaction in a very raw form.
  • about the research I saw the other day about how anaesthetic works by interrupting the interaction between the rear of the brain (where the world is recognized and the body mobilized, controlled and maintained) and the front of the brain (where reasoning and symbolic processing are conducted) and consciousness collapses when you stop the relation (me) between the recognizing and acting parts (me) and the reasoning and symbolising parts (also me). (Kierkegaard reference.)
  • enough.)

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Employment

The toil of work is a curse. There is work which is not toilsome, but it seems to me that actually existing capitalism tends to drive work toward toilsomeness. Making a movie is a joyous creative act, but not if its Transformers, and not if most of the work for the creators is not creative choices but trying to get funding, defuse strikes, fire people, incorporate box office building names and their terrible advice.

There is a heroic capitalism of inventing things, having insights and taking risks; but it quickly degenerates into a race to the bottom between copycats - who can tighten the belts of their suppliers the most? Who can lead consumers to pay most while getting least?
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The Brothers Karamazov

Inspired by Bert Dreyfus, and a dearth of podcasts I wanted to listen to, I've started listening to The Brothers Karamazov from Librivox. I'm enjoying it a lot, although the many names are difficult. Favourite moment from the description of a young woman, Lizaveta, who suffered an abusive childhood, lived rough, and was probably brain injured. The villagers are very careful of her because 'she was an idiot, and therefore the special favourite of God'

(Not quite a correct version, working from memory.)
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