jdontillman

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 a resonant LC filter.

How do you change the resonant frequency of an LC filter with a pedal mechanism? The pedal turns a pot, and that controls a capacitance multiplier circuit.

Simple and elegant.

Hey ho!

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 collection of Prince CDs, and set it to random shuffle play mode.

Great for a while, but then they complained that all the slow songs were bunched together. And perhaps the random shuffle play mode was sampling the songs, deriving the tempo of each, and adjusting the shuffle accordingly.

Very funny.

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Heh-heh, I independently came up with Fibonacci hashing for color many years ago.

My web app was drawing a diagram of N rectangular items, color-coded to tell them apart, with a table listing the details of each below.

(Normally I would use EIA standard colors, with a nod to my EE brethren.)

But I didn't want the colors to bias anything. So you'd normally try random colors. But random colors can come out weird and some can be close together.

So I used a Golden Angle around the hue circle, with a constant brightness and saturation. And sure enough, the generated colors were nicely differentiated.

BUT... not as nice as I'd like. Something was wrong.

It turns out that our perception of color is more complex. And when we're differentiating between colors, it really, really helps if the colors are familiar, and describable.

So simple colors like blue and purple are much easier to differentiate than a new weird blueish color and a new weird purplish color.

So my Golden Angle colors were technically superior, but not as good a user experience.

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-tone approaches are used occasionally in a piece as an expressive tool, or as a "new way of life" where the entire composition is serial, and the listener is stuck in it. Or all of a composer's work is serial.

Which is what makes it... challenging.

It's the same with Minimalism.

But used in smaller doses, it's a powerful technique.

Here's an example, in Frank Zappa's "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" there's a little section that's a 12-tone piece, starting with the lyrics "We see in the back of the City Hall mind...". It's short, it's weird, and it works very well in context.

And in Zappa's "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast", the middle instrumental section, the first 20 notes are going up and down a simple C-Major scale... (What could be more tonal?)... and then he rips into a 12-tone row. The result is downright delightful.

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 signification, as on For Trio, where the title indicates the physical positions of the performers. The titles can themselves be musical notation indicating to the performer how a piece is played. Some letters are identifiable as the initials of Braxton's friends and musical colleagues, but many titles remain inscrutable to critics. By the mid-to-late 1980s, Braxton's titles began to incorporate drawings and illustrations, as in the title of his four-act opera cycle, Trillium R. Others began to include lifelike images of inanimate objects such as train cars, which were most notably seen after the advent of his Ghost Trance Music system. Braxton settled on a system of opus-numbers to make referring to these pieces simpler, and earlier pieces have had opus-numbers retroactively added to them."

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 Sting

Paul Simon in the Park with Canticle

But You Can't Pick Your Friends

Vacuum Genesis

DEFMACROS

HOWSOMETH

INGDOTIME

SALENGTH0S

OMETHINGL

ETBFOLLOW

AAFTERNOO

NGETPRESE

NTMOMENTI

FTHINGSWO

NTALWAYSB

ETHISWAYT

BCACAUSEA

BWASTEAFT

ERNOONWHE

NEQBMERET

URNFROMSH

OWLITTLEG

REENPLACE

27"

A Lisp program in a song title, eh?

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 was written in Lisp.

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 anything.

Disappointed; no KL10.