You can't move forward, make progress in making something better on your own, progress is moving towards something new, something else, so that new, else, is vital. The best moments of creativity come from clashes of opposites, times of transition, because of this. No change means no progress. Information is change, to stay the same is to inform nothing, to do nothing.
Last night I dreamed of watching battles, as though in a computer game, watching a soldier or lone man finding and dispatching various enemies. I took control of him, and found myself faced by a giant blue Genie, as big as a house. He was on a road, angry like a raging bull, hurling rocks and flaming boulders at me, spewing fire and thunder. I ran backwards in panic. I fired some shots from the rifle I had, then threw the gun at him, then a knife. These had no effect. I then ran to the right and leap on his back, grabbing blue fronds, tentacle-like hair-like objects. I pulled and began to tame him and he changed from blue to white, a furry dragon like Falkor from The Neverending Story. We flew together, and he became a woman.
I think this is all about music, my recent challenges and battles coming to a happy end.
I decided to pause on the music a little and work on music programming. I've rarely used MIDI in Prometheus, usually as an import as guide track to a piano track I've recorded externally. Now, with the MODX, and more timbre options, I feel that more control would be useful. My MIDI exporter/importer always had the option of attaching a Set Parameter event to notes to map the Velocity (volume) of the MIDI notes, but the plethora of those events, one per note, are difficult to edit, as they can be in any MIDI editor. Even in the excellent Sekaiju it's a matter of typing each velocity by hand.
Today I've added a slew of commands to mass process selections of these events. The most interesting is the ability to apply the current modulator (my modulators are short wav files, I find this to be the most flexible solution) to the values, so everything from gentle ramping up/down across a series of notes, to much more complex modulations like this, are now easy:
All processing happens on a selection, and the modulator can be reset at the start of the song, the start of the selection, or span the exact range from first to last event. This was quite complex to work out as the song itself can vary in speed, those events can look regular, but the tempo itself might be being modulated. Well, it seems to be working. This should allow, for the first time, a useful MIDI export, rather than the simplistic guides for external editing my exports used to be.
In other news, my father is now home from the hospital after nearly a week of tests and monitoring; though many of the tests didn't take place. Mum asserts that he became far worse in hospital than at home.
My brother has also been arrested, again, for his zealotistic eco-protesting. As far as I am aware, arrest is and remains one of his primary goals. I remain sceptical that such actions help the environment, though the biosphere certainly needs helping.
