cornwall - a pale slim ghost

weeknotes 24: river goddess

14 days ago weeknotes beach cornwall paradise park eurorack music bbq work inlaws aws sick

i am Mildly Sick. headache, fatigue, aches, temperature. i keep thinking i'm fine then making the mistake of standing up. i have stuff i want to do. i'm running out of summer weekends.

a final few days in Cornwall, went to Portscatho to eat mackerel from the Hidden Hut and find out who is the best at beach (it's Adorable Three-Year-Old Nephew). made a sandcastle with a tower and a moat. couldn't get the moat to hold water so i had a brief stint as a river goddess. love watching hydrology happen right in front of me. then the tide went out and my— uh i mean, the river's— water table got too low. got in the sea. sunburnt my legs under the water. 10/10 would beach again

then Paradise Park, a childhood staple for the inlaws. it's a little bird sanctuary in Hayle, great fun. saw a red panda get fed then sleepily climb forty feet up a tree. yes i know that's not a bird. ate a Philps pastie; went around the little train a couple of times; didn't get landed on by a sun conure during the free flying bird show, although the pram in front of me did. hornbills are straight up dinosaurs.

that evening a barbecue. Matt invited Choo. Choo brought her entire family. Molly caught wind of it and brought Olly, Martin and Akira. Akira brought Max. and so a low key outdoor family dinner turned into a Get Together. i had fun at least! Matt and Meli had fun once everyone left and we could chat around the table and watch the satellites fly past.

the drive back was surprisingly tame; no Adorable tantrums, did it in under six point five hours which is pretty good going with two stops. finally dinner with the father- and step-mother-in-law where i even said some words.

thursday, drove to Royal Albert to drop off the car then drove the DLR into the City for the office. back to work not with a bang but with a whimper. in hindsight maybe starting to come down with whatever it is i have now. a day full of provisioning AWS services which was in fact fun. ate a Shake Shack korean BBQ burger which tastes exactly like a Burger King bacon double.

been gradually working on getting the Good Sounds out of my big eurorack case. i picked up a Ziqal Dimension Mk3, a gorgeous little wavetable synth voice that does MIDI polyphony and sounds incredible.

like that adage about engineering teams being immutable (you can't add or remove team members, you can only create a new team with an additional or removed person), every time you get a new eurorack module you've got a whole new instrument. it's starting to feel like an instrument that makes the kind of music i want to make. i really really need to practice more.

sorry it's portrait i thought Youtube would recognise it as a Short and bestow it portrait video status oh well

weeknotes 23: birthday parade

21 days ago weeknotes live coding music wedding cornwall pride cadence

we're in the southwest for Phil & Sharay's wedding, a three-day affair in a manor farm turned holiday cottage complex on the Tamar. we camped in the field which was surprisingly okay even with Adorable Three-Year-Old Nephew in the next tent over.

pictures nicked from facebook i forgot to take any

pizza and poker on the first night (chips only; won my first hand with a straight and then gradually lost everything).

day two was the ceremony, outdoors. Phil's vows were just straight up Sonnet 18. there was a string quartet, but they didn't play Hey Nonny Nonny. canapés and Pimm's in the garden, pâté and roast lamb for dinner. Phil's 17-year-old did a shot then read her speech. i cried a lot.

day three, lazy morning, barbecue lunch, pool party. me and Sophie sat by the pool and did cryptic crosswords. we made our excuses, said our goodbyes and congratulations and drove to the inlaws in Cornwall that afternoon. absolutely bagel signal when setting off so i did the whole journey by signposts and vibes which was fun. i know the A30 and A39 pretty well at least.

yesterday was my birthday. Sophie made french toast with bacon and maple syrup, then we went to Truro where they'd put on a whole parade just for me!

left-right: Olly, Molly, Phil's american friend Allie who stayed around despite Phil now being somewhere in the mediterranean, Alex, Choo, Meli, Matt, Adorable Three-Year-Old Nephew, Sophie, me, Johanna

okay fine it was Truro pride. i've weirdly actually never been to a pride before. it was extremely wholesome. mother-in-law gave me a tshirt that said "sounds gay, i'm in" and a big pride progress plus intersex flag that i respectively wore and flew for the parade.

then Adorable Three-Year-Old Nephew had enough of the crowd so we dropped into Waterstones and bribed him with picture books.

ever done live coding? whenever i talk to people about it nobody knows what it is. "wait so like you're writing code in front of an audience? to do what?" "uh, make music, generate visuals" "wait how?" "you write code that generates sound and run the code" "what how does that work?" "i have no idea on what level you're not understanding this, i just explained it"

there's an incredible growing scene in London at the moment, events happening basically every week. i've been to a couple of the meetups and an AlgoRhythms (open mic night kinda format). hugely fun, incredibly welcoming. lots of people (but let's be honest, mostly Lu and Daniel) have put a lot of work into making the scene that way. i love you all.

i've been working on a... it's weird. it's a spreadsheet? with an embedded lisp-like language. and a standard library for WebAudio. see i'm a very visual and spatial thinker, and for live coding text always felt very rigid and limiting to me.

i suppose Nudel has the multiple panes which does let you split things up and organise things spatially. in a spreadsheet the space isn't just where you put things, it's part of the execution environment, it's inherently live and malleable.

with a spreadsheet the expectation is that you the user are part of the program that's running, moving things around, tweaking and crafting things as they're executing. Excel is the world's most popular live coding environment. it just doesn't do music.

here's Cadence:

copy this and paste this into A1:

(trans 120)	dest	"; ↓ note sequence"
"; ↓ saw reverb pluck"		'c4
(seq '4n (: 'C2 'C7))		'(eb4 f4)
($> A3 (play A5 '8n))		'a#4
(synth '(oscillator (type sawtooth)))	"; ↓ kick drum"	'g4
(-> A5 A7 dest)	(sample "https://pages.ghost.computer/garden/garden_bd/kick01.wav")	'bb3
(reverb '(decay 40) '(wet 1))	(seq '4n '(c0 c0 c0 c0))	'(d5 f5)
	($> B7 (play B6 '8n))	
"; ↓ square bass"	(->> B6)	
(synth '(oscillator (type square)))		
(seq '2m (: 'C2 'C7))		
($> A11 (∘ (- 24) (play A10 '2m)))		
(->> A10)