A day of programming yesterday. I wanted to change two things about my Multisample plugins. The first change was that the correct sample is chosen based on its pitch (which is how it should be) but if a note is bent across a boundary between two samples it will switch, starting the new sample from the start. This is rare, I've got used to not bending multisamples, but I thought that it shouldn't be too hard to choose which sample to play only when a note is triggered, not every cycle (and this would be faster too). So I programmed that.
I also added a new 'Randy Multisample II' plugin which lacks the optional random delay (these, in practice, are rarely useful, so it can be more efficient to have an engine that lacks the delay and therefore buffer) and added a random pitch option. Before this it was not possible to detune Multisamples at all, except by using a different Pitch Modulator engine which applies to the whole sound, not just one engine. The rationale behind the new engine is that it would allow a slight, random pitch change to each note, which when layered with many others will sound more natural.
This is because real life is a dance of high-speed random events which are averaged out, or quantised, by our minds to produce reality. CGI, Computer Generated Imagery, in films looks awful. The movement looks really fake, even in the latest and most expensive films. It works best when non-natural objects are animated, like the toys in Toy Story, or for machines; plus, the audience suspends belief when confronted with it. We all know it's fake, so don't care that it looks fake, it's just a story. After 40 years, CGI still looks terribly unrealistic, from Star Wars, to Lord of the Rings, to Avatar II, and one reason is that real life is an amalgam of lots of hyper-fast random movements which are quantised into an average by our perception. The CGI simply picks the average, so all of the motion looks too smooth, too liquid, and unrealistic (of course, this applies to appearance as well as motion; this random dither is a universal attribute of existence).
All aspects of reality, not just imagery, are a dance of random motion and its quantised average. Atoms themselves dance around an average and never rest on what is 'correct' because that mathematical perfection is infinite, which is necessarily beyond the scope of reality.
The programming was something of a distraction. It annoyed me that my source code is now huge under Visual Studio 2022 due to 'IntelliSense'. The plugin code is about 4MB - and that includes all of the old and unused prior versions of the code, but the whole project can be 400MB! - one hundred times bigger due to look-up database tables that Visual Studio builds to (so-called) 'help'. I don't want any of that, but I can't switch it off for this project, only for ALL projects, and even then it's not clear if this will reduce the project back to a reasonable size. The odd thing is that these tiny plugins are now way bigger than the whole of Prometheus itself, when their code is but one small page per plugin. They really need to add the option to disable IntelliSense per-project. I don't need it.
In the evening I listened to Kate Bush's 50 Words For Snow, which was as sleepy, achingly sleepy, so achingly boring, as I remember. It does have a mood; that of a late-night, drugged-up jazz club. The poetry is as good as ever but everything takes about three times longer than it needs to be and there is close to zero drama, or variation in tempo, pitch, chord. Beethoven's Late Quartets are hummable pop tunes by comparison.
I've finalised the words and tune to The Legend of Zurbaran, which continues the idea of inspirational artists, like van Gogh, being inspirational because they can be copied and bettered, rather than as guides for one's life. Of course, this isn't exactly true - there are many realities to 'inspiration'; the best of which is one who simply makes great things that enhance the world and our souls; but it's a good enough viewpoint for a song. The tune switches to an F-minor and F-Major improvisation for the central words part.
