Stratford, Another Violet Night Complete

A trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon yesterday. My first visit to this delightful town, more timber framed old buildings than even Nantwich. It was however very hot, around 30 degrees, and the 3-hour each way coach trip was a particular test of physical endurance; there was no air conditioning, it had apparently broken, though the coach was decades old and I suspect the company of stinginess regarding the use of this expensive device. The cramped heat and disruption to my eating routines led to a night of stomach agony (despite a light meal of only weak porridge at 7pm). Such trips take days off my life and today I am recovering.

I think that Another Violet Night is complete, and have listened a few times without wanting changes. I now dislike all of it, a sign that I'm ready to move on. I must try to promote it a little despite my prejudice. One notable aspect is that it's as dark as my paintings, as much about pain, loneliness, and longing as any romantic work. A Drive Through The Town was, by comparison, one of my most joyous and exuberant energy-filled works. The new album was made because I wanted a contrast and more raw humanity.

I have the tracks to divide, a listing on my website. There is a lot of other admin work regarding the music, once I'm completely certain the album is finished. Here are the tracks and times:

Album Complete, Machine Life Dominance, First AI Album

A slower day of music work. Made two tiny changes to the album, and I think it is now complete. I expect every new album to take less time, and each seem to take more time. I'm pleased with it, but already want to move on to something new and different. How impatient I am!

Most of today involved working on the filing admin. I store lists of all of the samples used for each track, and store any unique and unused samples that might be useful in future. Each album has a lyrics book, the iTunes Digital Booklet, full CD artwork (at least 8 pages), sheet music, mp3 tags, lyrics in plain text format, sequences, possibly any rough notes or concepts. Most of the source waves are deleted (those are in the Prometheus sequences anyway, and can be saved out).

I also found a little bug in Prometheus. It failed to calculate the sample sizes correctly in a song information export, so I fixed that. Another small update.

I need to wait a little and re-listen to be sure the album is complete.

I feel a little lost, that life is hopeless and pointless. Of course, it may be, we design our own 'point'. Reading about technology advances, I feel sure that electronic (robotic, non-organic) life will dominate biological life one day. Will machines need us? We seem to need all life here, from bacteria, to bees, but many species are superfluous and dying out through lack of utility to our needs. My brother is pessimistic about humanity due to climate change, but I suspect that the entire climate debate will be moot, as electric life may not care if it's too hot. Technology has a habit of leapfrogging our concerns in exponential timeframes. Machines can survive in far more harsh environments than humans, and the world is warming to suit them (and of course, the planet is in a 'mini-ice-age'; a warm planet would perhaps only be restoring it's historical balance). Machines are destined to dominate not through any superiority other than resilience. This is the only measure of Darwinian 'fitness'; resilience to crises. Of course, machines now need humans to make them, need electricity from our power plants, need factories maintained by people. It's hard to imagine a type of life that can exist without any biological help. We humans often underestimate our reliance on 'lower' animals and plants; would machines be equally reliant on insects, and us?

Machines are more informationally resilient, which is why I expect them to dominate. I would also expect this to be the case on other planets. If we detect advanced life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely to be electronic and perhaps then capable of living in space. Machine life could travel the stars by sheer weight of endurance. Centuries or millennia are easily traversed by machines which can lay dormant as they fly between stars.

The bigger our vision, the smaller we seem.

In other news, I tried to find the date of the first published commercial album written by AI. My Art by Machine was published in 2014. A news report stated that one 'first' AI album was published in 2017, and yet another project claims to be the first, despite being published in 2018. Of course, people have been making algorithmic music since the 1950s, but still, Art by Machine might be the first published album written by AI; primarily because I designed the AI myself.

Tomorrow, a trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Music Admin, Unknown Sounds Theme Finalised, Prometheus v3.75

Yesterday, transferred 4 more albums to a new distributor; 20 to go. I may remaster some, I'm unsure... it wouldn't take long for each album and I'd like to do this for most of the older albums to some degree. Only the most recent albums are volume and bass balanced (ah, the problems of a decades old catalogue!) - yet this work can take up valuable time. It may be more efficient to remaster them in batches of 3 or 4 each year. The middle of the day involved a small family birthday meal for my brother, who is visiting until Wednesday.

In the evening, I heard back that my Unknown Sounds music is acceptable, such joy and relief. I spent the evening working on edits and alternative versions. I used the swing option to create a relaxed version with a calypso-like feeling which was so pretty that it could be a hit song in itself.

One offshoot of these changes was an idea for Prometheus, to show the length of training silence. Most songs, most renders, should end in silence, but sometimes we have reverbs or echoes or other tails that stop the silent end. Until now, it was a matter of noticing this and simply rendering for a bit longer, but as of this morning the length of silence is monitored and returned. If the track isn't silent at the end it shows the number of tracks still sounding. Another little upgrade. Prometheus is now on version 3.75.

Late last night I re-listened to Another Violet Night. It's great, but there are still a few little changes needed, mostly to 'Breakfast of Delight'. Paul's visit is disrupting the week a bit, so it's a good time to work on these.

Onwards we roll.

Zeitraum II

A sleepless night. I feel tired and achy, perhaps my daily exercises are too much for me, slight though they are.

When working on the Unknown Sounds tune I found the need a few times for a start-offset parameter for the Zeitraum engines. These play a sample with independent pitch and speed, but they are more like a sample version of 'oscillator synchronisation'. They have a robotic and tinny sound which works well for some applications.

So today, I added that Start parameter, and a Wait parameter too, to delay playback. These now match the parameters of normal sample playback, which is useful because Zeitraum is often layered with normal samples. I corrected one little error, which reset the playback to be a few samples late; so now it lines up exactly, and optimised several aspects of the code too. None of this was urgent, but it is one of those time consuming jobs that can be done 'when I have the time', and today I did.

My brother and his partner are visiting for a birthday celebration, so this little disruption to routine stops me from some jobs, so this was a useful one. Tomorrow I'll re-list a few more albums. I aspire today to prepare some papers for underdrawings.

Music Bits

Much as I planned to paint today, I found myself working on the Unknown Sounds theme for the morning, recording vocals, and new vocoder part using the MODX. The Microkorg Vocoder sounds great, the MODX not so good, but I'm unsure if it's merely a lack of presets or an inherent lack of quality. There are always so many parameters.

A great tiredness hit me for the second half of the day, and swollen gums, perhaps I'm a little run-down, induced by a sleepless night. In the late afternoon I sang a the last few vocals for the new album, some 'aah' sounds in the sky for 'Breakfast Of Delight'. I'm thinking of releasing All Controlled By Someone as a single, and if so I'd like to add a B-Side (even though Emubands awkwardly consider a 2-track release an album). I've got a few older songs that are just about finished, so I dug up 'I Can Heal' from the ancient times of my first experiment with vocals with The Harlequin Kings.

Gosh how low the vocals are. I can sing it instantly better now than I could then, even in this low register, but my voice doesn't sound good there, it's like a guitar with loose strings, hard to get a good tone or volume, and few overtones. I sang it all though, but I think it would be better to rewrite the melody (I can actually sing the entire song an octave higher than originally, but this is a bit too high), so I've improvised it up a fifth or seventh here and there. The tune fits the chords but it doesn't seem to sound natural... perhaps I'm used to the old melody so much.

I'll keep trying, but perhaps I should forget this for now and move wholeheartedly towards painting.

Unknown Sounds Theme One

I'm working on a potential theme tune/song for the Unknow Sounds podcast, so today was a charge into this. The criteria were perfect, strict enough to inspire by limits, free beyond those.

I've written a few jingles and themes before, many for the ArtsLab show, and a theme for a possible animated DVD Review programme (an ambitious concept!) proposed by Stuart Ashen. This was somewhat similar to all of those, lots of saw-based synths, a bit like the music I've written for IndieSFX over the years.

I began with a bass made from two detuned saw waves an octave apart, and a chord of C-Major, then added some saw stabs, and an orchestra hit for emphasis. I wanted an electro-pop feeling, so created a beat of broadly synthetic sounding drums, something like 'Maniac'. Many iterations later, I decided to slow the tune down and break into something like a rock rhythm, as the music show has a lot of indie rock, then it moved into some strings (yet more tracks! There are more sounds, tracks and things happening in this 30-second theme than any song on Another Violet Night) and a French horn. Initially the main theme was C-F-G, and the rock part A-min, F-Maj, E-Maj, G-Maj, but I changed the rock art to A-min, F-Maj, E-min, E-Maj, then used a plain G for the strings part to lead back into the initial melody.

There are some necessary lyrics, but I didn't worry about the melody for these, simply fitted a tune to the chords without much thought. I always imagined the main words in a vocoder, like Kenny Everett's many jingles. By 4pm, I was ready to record those, and recorded a short guitar part, and some chord strokes too. The guitar lead config, for my future reference was 0AA, Modern-Lead, B-string.

Main vocals remain. All day has been spent here, though an early hour until 10am was spent with Deb looking for possible furniture. I spotted a nice frame, so bought that for a future painting. I have lots of frames now, and lots of surfaces, and lots of paints. Now I need lots of plans, and lots of ideas.

Cathedral Of The Polar Bear Painting

Started the day by cutting three 6mm MDF panels for paintings, and one canvas board. Two of the panels are for a planned duet of portraits of Claire Luce. The painting I perhaps love most is my old Claire Luce painting, mainly because I see it every day, opposite my bed as I sleep. I've often thought about painting another, and I like painting these old film stars as training. I like plain painted portraits as much as I dislike landscapes. Any idiot can paint a landscape, and most landscape painters seem to be talentless and artless, like landscape photographers.

After that, and my daily muscle building I felt utterly exhausted! But I brushed this aside and decided to paint. I've had two days of painting this year, but both were rush-jobs for urgent exhibitions, with little or no planning. Fun works, nothing major. My last planned painting of 2024 was called Cathedral Of The Polar Bear. It features a bear gazing majestically upwards into a blue sky, with a lozenge shape beneath in dark red, gold, a symbol of god or heaven perhaps, something both deathly and heavenly. Of course my aim was a feeling, so I'm trying to express that in this description; these descriptions are not the plan. I decided it needed more, and added some prostitutes from 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'. These add a black humanity to it all, making the (endangered if not doomed) polar bear appear yet more majestic and beautiful, more like Jesus. The painting is completely romantic.

By 17:30 the painting was complete, though I need to glaze the lozenge shape with a richer red and more gold.

Little Jobs

The day still disrupted by workmen, but managed relative productivity. Started by updating my album filing such that older 16-bit mastered albums now store the final files in CDMaster folders, and some clearer separation for the albums (all future ones I suspect) that have separate CD and Stream versions.

I then updated two tracks on Cycles & Shadows, to burn a new CD master for future replication. Gosh! The remaster is only 2 years old yet is sounds outdated and poor compared to my modern standards; but I'm being harsh. It is a huge amount better than the first version, and most of it is as good as ever. Since 2023 I've added a few crucially useful things to Prometheus; the Cathedral Limiter which perfectly (mathematically perfectly that is, the best it can be) limits audio, allowing them to get much louder with ease. Secondly, the Spectrum EQ features, which though present for this remaster were relatively new. I wasn't used to using them. I've also since added a (hardly ever used) 10-band graphic equaliser, and now the new per-track Spectrum, which is perhaps more useful in spotting where the mix is sticking out. For this album EQ was post applied, informed by the Spectrum. I don't do this now, but balance before the final output.

Now I tend to set CD volume at about -10 or -11 LUFS (when I started, I did this too, but gradually changed philosophy, only since about 2020 and my pop-ra have I reversed this). This isn't important on this album as it is more like classical music which is not limited like pop music.

My main critique of this remaster are vocals, which are rather quiet and a little muffly, these were pretty much unchanged since the first version. Today I've adjusted these for two tracks, so the forthcoming CD version will be a little different than the stream version. For me, that's always good. I still listen primarily on CD, and want the CD version (which is, after all more expensive) to be the best version. Mastering of any sort is a long term thing, it's good that I do so only after many years. In 5 years I'm sure to be that much better at everything than today.

In the afternoon, I scanned, framed, and photographed in frame the new small painting for Bickerton, Land Of Destiny:

After that, two more albums moved, 24 yet to go. I may finish before the end of the year. I have one small vocal part I'd like to do to complete the new album, then I can move into painting until winter. Next on my re-recording/remastering target is The Myth Of Sisyphus.