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Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

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Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#31

Post by esafak »

jmalicki wrote: post #14
alephnerd wrote: post #11

This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry. DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and caching, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top o…

I came into a CS and math background without CE or EE, and took two dedicated optimization courses (one happened to be in a EE department, but had no EE prereqs), as well as the optimization introduced in machine learning classes. To be honest a lot of the older school optimization is barely even useful, second-order methods are a bit passe for large scale ML, largely because they don't work , not because people aren…

Muon is much more sophisticated than Newton's method. Neural networks have started to borrow techniques from statistical mechanics, and various branches of maths like invariant theory that were previously rarely used in engineering. CS is not dumbing down; its needs and focus are changing.

I've never needed or benefited from most of the EE curriculum. There is an opportunity cost in learning things you don't need.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#32

Post by tclancy »

RyanOD wrote: post #19

I've often marveled at the success many guitar players had with experimental electronics - Hendrix, EVH, Les Paul, Brian May, Jack White, and Tom Scholz (special case, of course) are just a few examples.

The podcast "History of Rock in 500 Songs" (full disclosure: I am a devout, slavering fan) provides these on the regular. I was actually smiling when I heard a fairly new song that attempts a really flat, fuzzed out sound because it made me think, "Buddy Holly invented that by accident with a broken speaker". One of the episodes on The Who goes into the Marshall behind Marshall amps in similar detail.

I suppose if I were going to recommend a single episode to Hacker News though, it would be https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-... which begins with at least a half hour on the amazing (if not happy) life of the guy who invented the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#34

Post by Slow_Hand »

Nice article for engineers to understand something that most guitar players will intuitively know.

One of the great things about a hi-gain setup like Hendrix's is how the feedback loop will inject an element of controlled chaos into the sound. It allows for emergent fluctuations in timbre that Hendrix can wrangle, but never fully control. It's the squealing, chaotic element in something like his 'Star Spangled Banner'. It's a positive feedback loop that can run away from the player and create all kinds of unexpected elements.

The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so.

A great place to hear artful feedback would be the intro to Prince's 'Computer Blue'. It's the squealing "birdsong" at the beginning and ending of the record. You can hear it particularly well if you search for 'Computer Blue - Hallway Speech Version' with the extended intro.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#36

Post by [deleted] »

Nition wrote: post #29
solomonb wrote: post #21

I strongly believe that if you set aside genre preferences the solid body electric guitar coupled to a tube amplifier is objectively the greatest electronic instrument ever created. All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience. See: https://www.scr…

There have been some interesting keyboard input devices coming out which allow for more expression than normal piano keys, using a sort of hack to the MIDI system called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression. For example the Seaboard Rise or the Osmose. Depending on the instrument it's possible to do per-note pitch bends, change pressure while holding notes, perform vibrato etc. Visually the physical movement is not as in…

[deleted]

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#37

Post by pdntspa »

solomonb wrote: post #21

I strongly believe that if you set aside genre preferences the solid body electric guitar coupled to a tube amplifier is objectively the greatest electronic instrument ever created. All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience. See: https://www.scr…

> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience

Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.

Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#38

Post by squeaky-clean »

yayitswei wrote: post #8

This is one of the few articles where I noticed a bunch of LLM-isms and still read to the end because it was interesting.

I didn't see any LLM-isms. Emdashes I guess, but I expect those in actual articles, they're only fishy in social media comments.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#40

Post by anthk »

solomonb wrote: post #21

I strongly believe that if you set aside genre preferences the solid body electric guitar coupled to a tube amplifier is objectively the greatest electronic instrument ever created. All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience. See: https://www.scr…

Ahem, just two words. Yamaha DX-7.

Synth music elevated electric bound tones to anything ever heard.

I remidn you that most of the rock and roll and rock music was about speed and mimicking the sound of a rumbling car engine, as it was a symbol of the freedom in America, being able to run away from your toxic communities to find yourself better anywhere else.

That was the message for the young with rock and roll: a speedy engine for your ears.

Electronic music was like replacing a car with UFO evoking you a space travel.

With the progressive subgenre of techno music you got the same feeling, but with no subtle hints. Heck, one of the most known songs in Spain ever, "Flying Free", literally remixes the sounds of drifting cars between the melodies, making the listener really happy in a very direct way as tons of youngs in the 90's got into the outskirt night clubs... by car. So they felt as driving an infinite highway rave with no end for days.

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