Humor Random Comments Thread

[ex-orbinaut]

We are almost at the point where you can literally write music in traditional script and a machine will read it back and play it for you. I don't think computers can read documents that well yet, but I don't think it's a reach to say someone could code that up someday.

You mean like this, maybe?

One of the simplest ways of generating hight voltage is to let the current build up in a large coil, then rapidly switch it off.
CRACK, goes the spark as the current dissipate.

I suppose the same would work with a popular resource.
Let the popularity build up, then suddenly make it pay-only.
Fluff, goes the money into your pocket as the popularity dissipate.

Difference is, here it's not as easy to start all over again as with the current...

Heh! Heh! Literally, an Induced Shock Profit.

Not as creepy as this.
The Police - Every Breath You Take - YouTube

One of the most romantic songs of the '80s and written about a stalker. :blink:

:lol:

Or this one, about a high school teacher tempted to get hinself into a world of trouble. There must've been a creeper somewhere in the Police's songwriting team:

The Police - Don't Stand So Close To Me - YouTube

Supposedly inspired loosely on the creepiest book ever written, in my opinion. Nabokov's Lolita, a study of pedophelia and premeditated murder, saved only in part by Nabokov's brilliant writing style. It still does not condone how a book on these truly vile subjects became a classic.

That Sting bloke is a bit of an enigmatic character, after all.

 

[C3PO]

It still does not condone how a book on these truly vile subjects became a classic.

It deals with the part of humanity that scares the out of all of us.

 

[SolarLiner]

Without instruments, a DAW would be just a way to produce nicer forms of noise.

(Taking "instruments" as physical instruments, such as guitars, pianos, etc.)

Without instruments, a DAW would still make the electronic music you hear, simply there would be no physically modeled instruments. With the freedom of sound that a synth brings, there would still be patches created that would look like a guitar, or a violin playing; the origin of such a sound would only be different. Physical instruments are used because one finds the sound good, whatever of its real of computed origin.
Your argument with the guitar is valid with hardware or software sythesizers too. You can make any sound you want and you don't specifically need to have any skill or talent (messing with knobs is a job everyone can do), but a skilled user will find the right sound for the song, and a master will find it in almost one shot.

 

[Urwumpe]

(Taking "instruments" as physical instruments, such as guitars, pianos, etc.)

Without instruments, a DAW would still make the electronic music you hear, simply there would be no physically modeled instruments.

But a typical DAW is no synth. It can include a synth module and can even have a sample library delivered with it to start working.

 

[SolarLiner]

Of course a DAW is no synth. A DAW is the studio that allows synths to play. But a DAW with no synth (a sampler is a synth) won't do anything good, except maybe being used as a software multi-track mixer.

 

[Urwumpe]

A DAW is the studio that allows synths to play.

As I said - it is a recording tool. Not a instrument itself. A synth also works without DAW.

 

[Fabri91]

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Ferrero"]The founder of Ferrero[/ame], the company behind Nutella has died.

 

[Urwumpe]

The founder of Ferrero, the company behind Nutella has died.

Thats a really sad day... Nutella is the only hard drug that I can't stop consuming.

 

[kamaz]

We are almost at the point where you can literally write music in traditional script and a machine will read it back and play it for you.

You can do it, but why work backwards?

Around 1990 I saw system where a synthesizer was connected via MIDI to an Atari ST which was transcribing the notes automatically. Given that Atari ST came out in 1985 and had integrated MIDI, I doubt it was a brand new thing...

 

[C3PO]

Around 1990 I saw system where a synthesizer was connected via MIDI to an Atari ST which was transcribing the notes automatically. Given that Atari ST came out in 1985 and had integrated MIDI, I doubt it was a brand new thing...

In the early '90s I played on a recording where the cue track was played by an Atari ST that was synched to the 2" tape. We recorded new music to the vocals from a live recording. The singer had died 3 years earlier so re-take wasn't an option. The original recordings tempo drifted quite a bit so the easiest option was to make a tempo map on the sequencer and use it as a metronome. Using current gear we could have made that recording in 2-3 days. Imagine making cuts using razorblades today. :lol:

 

[Andy44]

Imagine making cuts using razorblades today. :lol:

Given that I still shoot chemical photography and have a personal interest in old-school tech it sounds like something I would experiment with...

A lot of avant garde music from the 40s to the 60s was made with tape loops and such. Early Tangerine Dream, before Edgar Froese and friends got their hands on modular synths, was made that way. Probably a lot of it was never even released.

It falls into my ever-growing "wierd things I wish I had more time to play with" list.

---------- Post added at 05:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:25 PM ----------

This guy does music with tape loops.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/looped

His thing is that he loops it until the tape wears out, so the sounds deteriorate as it goes along. I tried to listen to it and found it got really boring after a short while, but I like the concept.

 

[C3PO]

Given that I still shoot chemical photography and have a personal interest in old-school tech it sounds like something I would experiment with...

You can still get excellent results from chemical photography plus some cool effects that are hard to replicate digitally. I've had enough hassle with tape equipment that I don't miss it at all. I have a couple of quality VST plugins that sound authentic on all but the "harshest" studio equipment. I will take digital editing over cut&splice any day. I do feel the nostalgia but I've figured out that the good ol' days weren't good because of bad equipment.

I do like splashes of retro when it's well executed and not like a "sledgehammer". I get goose bumps almost every time I hear the gramophone needle at the start of "When I First Kissed You" by Extreme. But when someone tries to use it as the basis of their soundscape I loose interest faster than Lance Armstrong sprinting out of a pharmacy.

 

[Andy44]

I do like splashes of retro when it's well executed and not like a "sledgehammer".

Agree. I like to pick and choose which retro tech to play with, but I don't want to go back and actually live in the 70s or the 30s. Just visit for a while maybe.

 

[C3PO]

I do like to play around with retro stuff, and I'm not only talking about music equipment. I just don't like to rely on it to do get the job done.

 

[Andy44]

The wind chill factor here is supposed to be as low as -30 deg, which is pretty extreme for the DC area. There are bound to be a lot of downed trees. Is it wierd that I find this exciting?

---------- Post added at 11:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:07 PM ----------

You mean like this, maybe?

Immediately after I read your post I downloaded that app and just tried it out.

It reads printed music fairly well, but it gets a lot of false hits if there are accidentals on the music sheet, and it also tends to read the staff lines as some sort of chords.

For handwritten music script, it's a bit less effective as you might expect, but it still impressed me that it works as well as it does.

I had to do a fair bit of editing, and it doesn't understand ties or slides or things like that, and I don't see a way to make it do a swing rythm, but it's still a really cool app despite all the limitations.

 

[Matias Saibene]

A common day in Orbiter-Forum

Not as creepy as this.
The Police - Every Breath You Take - YouTube

One of the most romantic songs of the '80s and written about a stalker. :blink:

Its the official song of the NSA.

Fantastic, beautiful song

- NSA AGENT DETECTED

The founder of Ferrero, the company behind Nutella has died.

Thats a really sad day... Nutella is the only hard drug that I can't stop consuming.

Talking about Random Comments Thread...

It deals with the part of humanity that scares the out of all of us.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

 

[mojoey]

'Plan B is not to automatically double the amount of gunpowder in Plan A.'

 

[ex-orbinaut]

The wind chill factor here is supposed to be as low as -30 deg, which is pretty extreme for the DC area. There are bound to be a lot of downed trees. Is it wierd that I find this exciting?

Yeah, been hearing about it on the news. Like minded on that count, I find nearby volcanoes erupting and smallish earthquakes exciting around here!

Immediately after I read your post I downloaded that app and just tried it out.

It reads printed music fairly well, but it gets a lot of false hits if there are accidentals on the music sheet, and it also tends to read the staff lines as some sort of chords.

For handwritten music script, it's a bit less effective as you might expect, but it still impressed me that it works as well as it does.

I had to do a fair bit of editing, and it doesn't understand ties or slides or things like that, and I don't see a way to make it do a swing rythm, but it's still a really cool app despite all the limitations.

I am glad you tested this, I expected it might have a few limitations.

Nevertheless...

Around 1990 I saw system where a synthesizer was connected via MIDI to an Atari ST which was transcribing the notes automatically. Given that Atari ST came out in 1985 and had integrated MIDI, I doubt it was a brand new thing...

I was myself pretty sure that a program that read sheet music was already around, which is why I did a quick search, because I have a very vague memory of reading something similar to what kamaz describes at around the mentioned year, when I still had an Amiga.

 

[Andy44]

When you consider that sheet music is a sort of graph with the x-axis being time and the y-axis being pitch, and lines to help fix a reference, it doesn't surprise me that 1980s computers could do it, provided you set up the initial conditions just right.

The real challenge is reading accidentals and other wierd markings.