Henry Purcell, 1600’s

What Has the Internet Done to Comedy? A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast Discussion (#74) http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/MMQieqihsyk/what-has-the-internet-done-to-comedy-a-pretty-much-pop-culture-podcast-discussion-74.html

More grist for the mill, thinking about what’s different about the net for music.

a collective for change agents
— Read on commongood.cc/reader/leadership-and-the-small-group-by-peter-block/

My thoughtful read for the day. A little bit biz-culture for my taste, but some good points.

Mathew Dryhurst
— Read on www.mathewdryhurst.com/

And Holly Herndon. Brings back mixed memories of Mills’ CCM.

Not sure. Maybe?

youtube.com/watch

So this is the future that the Lincoln Project sees for the right wing in the US for the next few years. Not a pretty outlook.

https://www.wired.com/story/clever-strategy-distribute-covid-aid-satellite-data/

Ok, this is amazing. Togo, in 10 days in April, rolled out a program to pay it’s poorest citizens a bi-weekly amount directly through their phones. The program identified the neediest recipients through a combination of a machine learning algorithm that associated satellite imagery of roof materials, road types and so on with phone usage stats like amount of credit top-ups, etc to send text messages to the neediest inviting participation and asking a couple of verification questions. It matched the phone to voter id records, then within three minutes or so made the first direct payment to the recipient.

Three minutes. Four or five questions over SMS. Micro-targeted to those who needed it most. Fully automatic, trackable, auditable.

With the collaboration of a team from uc berkeley, northwestern, and a non profit cash distribution service.

This is Togo, people. Let’s get these people to port the system to the US and throw out all the paper checks, overstressed unemployment systems, Congressional bickering, …

COVAX
— Read on www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/123736995/new-zealand-to-purchase-covid19-vaccines-for-pacific-island-neighbours-including-samoa-and-tonga

I love this. And further, the COVAX initiative is the focus of the Gates Foundation here in Seattle, so there’s a beautiful synergy between my home country and my adopted state.

Oh, this is beautiful.  There’s a Markov-chain travesty generator like the one I used for AP:21 Bits, and recommendations for other types of generators, amongst all sorts of other useful stuff.  Thanks, Leonard!

Source: leonardr/olipy: Python library for artistic text generation

Good God, this guy’s prolific. He did Beautiful Soup, used by Pythonistas for years as best-of-breed, but there are multiple pages of his software projects linked to his blog. And on top of that, he’s written two novels and works for the NY Public Library. Wow.

We’re all locked indoors; no live performances. Prompted by a musician friend of mine, I looked around for mechanisms for using the Internet for performance. The perceived problem was latency: you can’t hear what the other performers are doing simultaneously with what you’re doing. This latency is irreducible across long distances, limited by the speed of light, but with consumer-grade tools it’s a real issue.

The musician in question had evolved a practice that accommodated this, by making music with long tones that didn’t involve millisecond-accurate synchronicity. She and her compatriots could sing, hear each other singing, and make changes over fuzzy time scales that worked. A good adaptation to the medium.

I recalled Phil and others building pattern-based instruments that synchronized every n beats. So, eg, if the pulse was 4/4 and we were improvising across the net, any change I made would be heard by the other guy one bar later. Again, good adaptation to the medium where the aesthetic of the music is partly a product of the medium it’s performed in.

True to form, CCRMA want to adapt the medium to existing aesthetics. To that end, Chris Chafe and others have built tools to reduce the latency to sub-perceptual levels, so people can play “regular” music across the net and the net becomes invisible, just a wire. This sensibility echoes the ideas that I remember differentiating CCRMA from the Mills CCM when I was there. At the time, they were working on using large computers to recreate the mechanics and the sounds of “real” (existing) instruments like pianos, in imitation spaces that recreated “real” spaces using tools like convolution reverb, as a way to validate the work prior to using it more imaginatively. Most of their pieces were not realtime, so lots of tape music concerts. In contrast, the Mills aesthetic revolved around realtime, interactive, improvisational, … necessitating small machines with their limitations. Rather than trying to supercede the limitations, the aesthetic involved investigating what about the limitations were interesting, and led to different ways of thinking/composing/performing.

You see the same sensibility in, eg, experiments with machine learning and music, where the success of the experiment is judged in how accurately it recreates something about “real” music …

Seems like this distinction is still in place. So the question that’s interesting to me is: what is it about the Internet that makes it different as a medium?