Viewing profile — jdontillman

I agree. Startup Proposal: Intelligent Traffic Signals https://till.com/articles/smarttraffic

Capacitance multipliers are how wah-wah pedals work. The classic Vox / Dunlop/ Cry Baby wah-wah pedal used by Hendrix, Gilmour, Clapton, Harrison, and so many others, is built from…

See also: Stanley Jordan, "APL For Music". https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/75144.75174 (!!!) (Wait, what? That Stanley Jordan?) (Yep.)

Hey ho!

Also see my article "The Mechanics of Moore's Law" for an analysis in terms of economic feedback loops with usual adaptive characteristics. https://till.com/articles/MooresLaw

There was a delightful Usenet post way back around 1990, where someone described how they had just purchased a new multi-CD player. They very excitedly filled it up with their coll…

Heh-heh, "challenging" is the polite term. 12-tone serial composition is simply a technique for removing natural tonality from a composition. I think the big issue is whether 12-to…

Jazz composer Anthony Braxton. Quote from Wikipedia: "Braxton often titles his compositions with diagrams or numbers and letters. Some diagrams have a clear meaning or significatio…

Game Theory's album "Lolita Nation" features a song called: "All Clockwork and No Bodily Fluid Makes Hal a Dull Metal Humbert In Heaven Every Elephant Baby Wants to Be So Full of S…

In their earlier years, the Symbolics 3600 series machines included a Motorola 68K series Front End Processor (the "FEP") for booting the main processor. And the assembler for that…

Fascinating; thanks. Question: How does the salinity and pressure of deep sea water affect that 4C point?

Exactly. Because the sensors are mounted on that very land. So tectonic movement will certainly have an effect. And you can see remnants of earthquakes in some of the data.

(Largest tides on the planet. The bay acts as a kind of resonant organ pipe amplifying the tides on the Atlantic Ocean.) Hey; if they can handle 52ft tides, they can handle anythin…

The NOAA Sea Level Trends data and visualizations are fascinating: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/ Sea levels have been monitored for over 100 years... because of comme…

Disappointed; no KL10.

Yes! I've been using this for years. It's great.

Symbolics veteran here... Ahh, fond memories. Indeed, we had a Foonly. I don't know the model number, but it was a single rack unit. We used it as a server, software development, S…

I agree. And I'm a huge fan of new possibilities. BUT most of the musical operations we see in the digital world are not "new possibilities", but rather cheap imitations of previou…

Solid point.

"More tools" is not necessarily a good thing. Music, as any art form, thrives on limitations. And without complaint. "The Blues" is a very limited form, yet it has provided about a…

I don't think you can separate music, or any art form for that matter, from the artist's craft, skill, expressiveness, resources, and materials. --- Digital isn't inherently bad, b…

Indeed. The author is referring to the up-a-half-step modulation that Barry Manilow tactically used all over the place. I call it a "Manilow". --- But yeah, it's just one of the ma…

Solid point. I never thought about Equal Temperament as an example of Worse is Better, but yeah. And after going through heroic efforts to get the ratios of notes exact, you're pro…

That's exactly right. Not a weird convention at all.

The Nashoba Valley Winery near Hudson, Massachusetts features some very tasty wines made from Cranberry/Apple, Pear, Gravenstein, Peach, Plum, Raspberry, Strawberry Rhubarb, and mu…