A steady day. Filed some of the existing Prometheus sequences, among other art administration jobs. The quick shift from music to mural will shift to something else soon. I need to pause to rest and plan.
It was the anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney yesterday and John Lindley hosted a poetry evening in his honour in Congleton. It was lovely to catch up with our friends there. The company was, like the poetry, good, inspiring, enriching. I'm blessed to know such people.
The Ly2 mural plans are complete. I'll need a high-working platform, some plastic sheeting and many other materials. The complexity of the design seemed to be a surprise. The result perhaps more of stunned silence than acclaim - though this is, actually, the best response to any artwork; stunned silence greeted most of Beethoven's symphonic premieres. All good artworks start with exactly that. Here it is:
The resulting mural would be 13x3M high. Here is a close-up of the Signalman, the central figure. Each grid is 1M:
And a mock-up of the shaded image:
The mural reads, as I may has said, right to left, with the industrial revolution on the right, and the present information revolution towards the left. There are many questions, uncertainties. Nature hides, cowers, everywhere.
Well, the practical work of painting will take over, then the performance in Nantwich. What then?
Those two words are the central message of my mural. We have the past, the now. What comes next?
In we breathe. Onwards we walk, gazing towards the stars.
Two full day of mural plans. Yesterday scanning and gridding the drawing and, with today, drawing out some of the smaller objects, 11 so far. I've allocated 3 days for the drawing phase, and will now complete this work like I would a canvas painting but on a large scale. I've also sourced more construction materials as I'll need to work at height for long periods.
Most of the work is concerned with the technical and practical aspects. I've desinged a pulley system to raise and lower the 'curtain' of plastic sheeting over the work, but I think such plans are excessive for a week-long project. I should be able to, in sections, raise the 14M curtain by hand each day.
A bad night of sleeplessness because of the full and intense day before, excitement and anxiety over this monumental design.
I woke late and have completed some basic admin work on We Robot and AI And Celebrity, then went around town for painting supplies, avoiding heavy downpours by amazing luck. I'm wondering if some sort of tarpaulin or covering for the entire 15M artwork would be a good idea. It would if I could find such a sheet...
In the late afternoon and evening, I put some cellophane over the drawing and shaded in the black areas. Despite this crude way of seeing the results, the final image looked excitingly good. Unique and amazing, to the extent that I've started to consider changing my visual art to match this style from now on. Monochrome has a magic because it gives equal power to the positive and negative spaces, white on black even more-so because we're used to seeing black on white drawings.
I've sourced the paint and bought the brushes and other materials. I also made a simple device of two pins with white elastic between, so I could pin a 'white line' to the black surface as a guide. This may be useful. There are a few tiny details in the design: a mouse, a few bees, a flower, the Crewe War Memorial. For those I'll make stencils. On the drawing, the memorial is 4mm across. It will be 5cm on the finished wall. The line of these objects, for every object, is really important, not the sort of thing that should be left to chance. My plan is to use coloured pencils to line everything out. Ideally, this would all be done first over about two days. If the wall and site were secure, were in a studio, I'd do that for certain, but I'm unsure about doing it this way left outside and insecure.
Since the meeting on Tuesday about the Ly2 mural, I've worked at it constantly in one form or another. Deb and I visited the site last night to measure it more thoroughly. The sign, being 3M from the side was so invasive that I needed to plan to avoid it. This measurement was vital. We also noticed that the whole surface slopes at a gradient of 10cm every 5M.
My initial 14x2M design was, today, refined into a new 13x2.8M design, on A4, but the concept was broadly the same. The idea reads, unusually, from right to left. I started with the roaring mouth; a machine mouth, of industry and the industrial revolution. It moves, from the right into the technological revolution.
Today I added some bees, and made a tiny plant on the left a sort of focus, hope perhaps. Many of the ideas here have been influenced by Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. One key aspect was about the industrial revolution, and the new new 'information revolution', which has taken/is taking place on that scale across our planet. His talk about science enlightened me to the fact that before the industrial revolution, science sought to probe and understand, but then and subsequently, to control. Our information revolution seeks to copy, store, harvest and hoard information. Nature does this, bees do, so perhaps the bees represent that, as well as industry and nature. There is a general theme of nature being conquered or assaulted here. My song featuring 'information hives' is part of the imagery too.
After that A4 drawing, I scanned and printed it in sections, tracing to a 1:16.666 scale image (8cm to 1M). This will be my master plan. I must then either make a third copy for shading, or use the master plan and make a smaller shaded mock-up to test the look with the colours.
It's been an intense day, but it seems that the ideal time (for me) to paint will be the week starting September 4th, hardly any time at all to plan, but enough. I'm unsure if David or the council can cope with such a schedule, but I will be ready.
I've also found time to send a copy of AI and Celebrity to David at the local Cat Radio, and do some basic admin work on that. There are 5 weeks until the single release. Aside from designing and painting this large mural in that time, I must film and edit a music video, and rehearse for the Fall in Green Words & Music performance in October.
One aspect of this design I like is the two-tone colour aspect. I've not worked in two stark colours before, or at least rarely. This time I'm acutely aware of the power of negative space. Both spaces really are equal, when flat and in lines like this. The art of M.C. Escher is in my mind constantly as a result.
A steady day, slower than the last two full days. I entered the ING Discerning Eye and did some of the initial admin work for the single tracks. Then made some tools for the mural, three straight edges with handles for wall use.
Then a trip to town to re-measure the wall, the height and placement of the crucial sign. This is 3.1M from the edge, far deeper into the work than I expected. This will mean a redesign of the work, so I'll hold off until I can remeasure the whole site. The simplest option for me is to make it all smaller, but I need to know the centre and the gap between mine and David's work.
I bought a few basic materials, a brush and cord, plus some pencils for marking, but these were all the wrong colour - bah! This cheap box of 20 was less than the price of one 'correct' one online but even here, not one in the box was white or grey, or any neutral colour at all, as the box image indicated.
A busy day. I've decided to release a single in advance of the album, so today created a 3:30 single edit of AI and Celebrity, and added the unused tune Hydroxychloroquinine Aspartame as a 'B-Side'. It's a perfect song for this. I made it for the album but it didn't fit into the concept, and I'm unlikley to do much with it elsewhere. I've quickly made up a cover image.
At 12pm I had a meeting with Janey and David Jewkes about the Crewe mural. It's a large scale project, a painting of 15x2.5M but I'm enthused and excited by its prospects. The primary limitation is that a specific palette of stark, pastel-like colours must be used. No shades, no red for example. David and I agree that white on the dark background would be optimal. I've sketched out a few ideas. This monumental project (in every sense) will be planned quickly and painted in a week in September. I will need big brushes.
A full day, recording and editing subtitled lyric reading videos for We Robot. I accidentally set the shutter speed too high, so the videos were a little darker and therefore more noisy than they should have been, but the conversion wasn't so bad that I needed to re-record everything, but I did make a note for the future.
I was undecided whether to record them at all, but all of them have had some views, and there may not be any subtitled videos for the songs. I fully expect that some day, perhaps soon, the option for automatic AI generated subtitles will be available for all videos, even music, but there are benefits to manual subtitling. I can add drama by singling out certain lines, and of course, AI still makes liberal mistakes. In poetry, the correct words are very important.
For me, the process is recording, converting and combining the separate audio and video streams. Then editing to the correct length, and playing the video, noting the frame numbers for each line. Then copying each line as text, to make a series of images in Photoshop, then saving these out as separate images, and overlaying them all using an AviSynth script. Creating 13 1-minute videos in one day like this is perhaps the best I can manage.
Tomorrow I have a meeting about the public mural. I'm still musing about subjects, and materials, mainly materials, the general look and processes for what might be a work of monumental size. This will be an important work in every way. But all aspects of it are uncertain so far. It is, for example, rather late in the year for any sort of outdoor painting or public spectacle.
An unpleasant night of endless bowel, stomach, leg twitches, nightmares, and all-over shivers which persisted throughout the day. I felt like an invisible man made of jelly!
But I fought on and started with some programming changes to Argus. The software can randomly distribute numbers for (for example) the starting location of objects; say any place between -1 and +1, for 10 snowflakes. Now, this in practice looks remarkably odd, too 'random' for human liking. The results are often skewed or bunched up, too asymmetrical. I thought it might be better to always pick at least one -1, one +1, and the others should be averaged around the middle point. So I programmed this in, but, after all of it, wasn't sure if I should use it. I'll need to think. One reason not to is that actor numbers and frame numbers work well if the same number isn't repeated in a row, and the new system made such checks awkward.
I then started to create a new video for Flight Over Rust City, but it looked rather odd, and I found two or three of strange bugs in Argus, which needed correcting. All of this took me until 4pm or so! A full day for so little to show.
I also created a few Spotify Playlists with my songs, and others. This was valuable as it gave me a new perspective on my music. In particular I could see which albums and tracks were good enough, and which needed a complete overhaul. I realised that I've come a long way since The Dusty Mirror, a mere 3 years ago, 2020; but I've released 14 albums since then, upgraded Prometheus countless times, and learned and improved at each step, each month. I feel ready and able to, finally, record professional quality songs. I always new the other albums were training. My method is to learn by doing, and monitor to improve.
Then I scheduled a few lyric pages for the We Robot songs.
I'm now eager to do everything... new videos for the new album, remastering old ones... sheet music for old ones. So much to do. And I have the new mural to design, and a new London exhibition in the pipeline. Once again, I need clones to help me.
As the day wore on, my shivers retreated and I've grown back to just-about normal. I'm ready to focus again, and enter the week with a zen-like attitude for efficiency. Onward we march, our faces to the bronze sky. It is sunset, or sunrise?
A day of completing the We Robot Spotify Canvases. All day is gone yet I've not done much, spending a few hours reworking two of these. Life As A Robot Guard is substantially better. I created a simple old-fashioned computer sprite for him, and made him march:
I also re-worked Fake Plastic Lies, and programmed new things into Argus. I found time in the middle of the day to visit the centre of Crewe and the 'official launch' of the 'new' Lyceum Square. I met up with Deb and we saw Janey too, who pointed out the wall I may be painting - it seems to be wood, smooth, a good surface.
I feel both overwhelmed and unsure about everything. For the moment, work on We Robot will continue. I've worked non-stop all year, without a single day of rest, barely a single hour, though my productivity feels poor and everything is unrewarding by most metrics - though the quality of my work is good and continues to improve; and I'm still filled with ideas and goals.
It is nearly 10pm. I must awake early for another full day and full week of un-reward, except that burning of a full day of work. Onwards we roll our rock.
A second full day working on the We Robot Spotify Canvases. There is a broad mix of themes that unify them: lists of binary numbers (which spell out the album title), with fog, rotating cubes, hearts, and a robot face.
Silicon-Carbon Genesis and Flight Over Rust City are a little different, and P-L-Astic contains coloured blobs in a white 'sea' - rather like the images the music creates in my head.
About half of the time today has been spent updating Argus. One change was to make the frame numbers floats. Animation frames are, of course, integer values, but when modulated, they can dart across number borders, so it can be useful so set them as a float. Set the frame to 0.9, for example, and apply a wave with a depth of 0.2 and most of the time the final frame will be zero, but sometimes it will creep into 1.1 (and so 1). This change technically invalidates the old file format, but 90% of the films don't use frames, and at least half of those that do contain only zeroes. I've done a quick check on import for integer values 1 to 16. In float terms, those values are tiny, too small to ever actually be valid as floats, so it should be acceptable to check for those.
Many other programming changes to Argus took place, all relatively minor feature additions. I've also launched a Taskforce sale to try to quell the dearth of my income in this awful month.
Draft videos for all 16 tracks are now done, but none are rendered, merely designed and I'm likely to tweak them.
A full day of work on the We Robot Spotify Canvases. I started with rough pencil ideas for each of the 16 tracks, and each evolved into each other, crossing over. It was all rather fun and easier than expected, though intense, and still in progress. Another Argus bug was located and fixed too, so the program is now at v1.25. Using it made me wonder if anyone else would find it easy to use like I do, or whether people would just be baffled and confused by all of it. I still plan on releasing this on Steam at some point.
I began, unusually, with the easy ones, as these can be useful for the harder ones later. These canvases often share data or ideas. This time, too, I'm making two sets for each; one for Spotify and preparing the scene for a HD YouTube version.
About half were done today. More to come.
Science musings aside, a full day that started with recording a new video and the subsequent editing for the SFXEngine update. By 1pm this was complete.
I then started work on a new 'cycle video' for YouTube, for The Laughing Cavalier. These were originally simple translations of the Spotify Canvases, updated in scale for YouTube, but it's not difficult to add a little more to them, and actually easier to create a full video rather than a short loop. This one involved my first use of attached modulators on the fly in the animation. It made it a bit simple (a bit...) to make the objects move around, so I added a few cycles to the characters. I also discovered a few bugs in Argus as a result, so fixed those.
I've been contacted about the protracted mural for Crewe council, and offered a 'shared wall' but I'm unsure what this means. I'm happy to work within constraints. All art, all commissions in particular are nothing but working within constraints. My plan is for a Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, a Resurrection, Cookham, a Guernica; something large and complex in oils. They said that they plan on repainting the wall in a year... my first thought is that my painting will take a year. My normal, small paintings tend to take me a year. I'm unsure what they mean, but will accept the constraints as I discover them and do my best. So far, after 4+ years, I still don't know where the work is to be or even the very basic terms, size, materials, timing.
I have lots of possible jobs next. I need to record the lyric reading videos for We Robot, and the Canvases and Cycle Videos for that. I also need to complete the sheet music for Testing The Delicates. My obligations to complete one 'old' album for this new one is complete with Arcangel, but that was too easy and too short for my liking. I also need to re-record the piano parts for a re-recording of Cycles.
I still don't think that anything does or ever can fall 'in' to a black hole, and it still amazes me that this is ever postulated. Information itself travels at the speed of light, thus information can only exist where light exists. Where light is not (or cannot be), there is nothing, in every sense. Consideration of an impossibility at the 'centre' of a black hole is not relevant, as the centre is no more real than any other point beyond the event horizon.
The industrial revolution was a revolution of energy. Science before this was about understanding nature. In the 19th century science became a tool to control and master nature, and so it remained. Things progressed, and perhaps there were revolutionary decades since, but the turn of the 21st century certainly marked a sharp change in the power of information. The interconnection of communication networks created an information revolution, and like the energy revolution driven by water, wind, coal, steam, this revolution will lead (and has led) to new theories of nature based on the necessity of, and manipulation of, information.
What do we know of information? It requires energy to store and to maintain. It is not certain, and decays over time, is broken apart. Information is transmitted at the speed of light at most, never faster. Information is explcitly temporal - this is one of its most magical properties, and is perhaps the key to explaining the structure of space and time, and other human phenomena.
I began to think of gravity. Gravity is a wind blown by massive objects against the material of space. Space must itself be (or have) a force of a sort, which resists or opposes this wind, so space must have an elastic power. Yet space can't 'blow against' wind equally, it has no source of energy, no eternal ubiquitous battery. Gravity has an energy, space has none - yet the two can, rather oddly, battle each other. How can this be? I thought of space again, like little tiles or flaps of paper blowing in the wind of gravity. I pictured a matted structure, something like this:
The picture consists of little tiles held together by springs. The 'wind' of gravity shines out at the speed of light, it is information, and it decays in an almost magical mathematical way corresponding to the exact area over which it propagates. The parts of space touched by it need to store the information about it, the curve of space-time at each point, so the little tiles are a bit 'bent', like mirrors which reflect space into time. The interesting point is that, as information, gravity isn't a 'force' as such, merely an informing voice. If space simply stores the information about its orientation it doesn't need energy to 'resist' gravity, it merely needs to 'forget' the information when gravity stops messaging, and forgetting doesn't require energy.
If there are little springs there, then perhaps those too act as communication mediators for this information, but perhaps they are not necessary; they are only needed if each 'tile' cares about (learns from or informs) its neighbour. So, our springs which, on a visual and emotional level, feel like energy are now, again, demoted to mere conduits of information.
Information requires energy to create it and to maintain it, this appears to be universal. Gravity must supply energy to register and maintain information's presence.
As far as I understand, if the wind of gravity were to vanish instantly, space would completely forget its orientation, and instantly and without any recoil, snap back to perfect flatness. I doubt this is the case. It may perhaps make more sense if the gravitational information of space were more gradually forgotten. As a purely informational construct, it may have no recoil. Unless, recoil can apply to knowledge; denial is this emotionally. A theory of physical denial would be extraordinary indeed.
A busy day updating SFXEngine today. A few changes to make to the program, but these change the look so I've spent most of the time updating the manual and screenshots in preparation for the public release of the update. Tomorrow I'll re-record a trailer video for it, with the new look.
In other news I've been contacted again about the long-delayed commission for an art mural in Crewe, part of the Ly2 redevelopment. This has been years in the queue. I've got lots of possible ideas but the basic details such as location (indoors/outdoors), size and materials are uncertain. Plus news of a new London exhibition.
Sigh. Today, a typical irony that, in an album about AI, Distrokid's lyric submission 'intelligence' won't permit me to submit the lyrics to P-L-Astic from We Robot due to the unusual capitalisation, so for future reference, here are the correct lyrics:
P-L-Astic
I am P-L-Astic.
We are T-O-Gether.
I am loved all morning
but I'll live for ever.
Will you L-O-Veeme?
Will you T-H-Rowme?
In the wide blue ocean?
And then F-Or-Getme?
When you G-R-Owup,
when you D-I-E,
will you be Re-Membered
or live on like me?
Woke late, but it's been a productive day. Completed the sheet music for the Arcangel tracks. The first took over an hour but the next 4 were done in 90 mins, so good progress. Then, more music filing for We Robot. I still need to do the spoken video recordings and edit, which is about a week's work. Next on my list are preparations for an update for SFXEngine.
This evening Deb and I went to a sort of open-mic type event, the songsters circle in Nantwich, a good night. I performed an interpretation of AI and Celebrity from We Robot; most of the words were there and a few chords, some new! It was a good night. When we return, I'll prepare better.
More of a restful day yesterday spent with Deb, a much needed pause from the endless rock-rolling, but I can't afford to pause. I managed to complete the SPDF sheet music, but also started on a possible remaster of the album artwork. I can't even remember if I had original artwork from 2001 or so, but I did burn one or two CD copies, so I must have. If so it would have looked like the 2008 300dpi version I made for the digital release, here:
In 2020 I decided to include my image on more album covers, so created a new cover, the current one at time of writing:
But I rather like the look of the first, so have recreated it in the new standard resolution of 635dpi (the new size requirements of 3000x3000px was one inspiration to create it):
This was rather tricky. The 2008 cover used a procedural texture created by Genetica, but that's lost, so I had to create a new one. This took most of the time. Re-rendering the logo at higher resolution was easier, but it's slightly compressed compared to before. I'm undecided what to do with it yet, but while on the subject of Arcangel, I decided to transcribe the music for the complex title track 'Mnemonic'. This has seven parts at least (I've ignored the drums and orchestral hits, which are musically superficial and easy to add later). Each of those parts play a different arpeggio or melody, but the track is musically extremely simple; all A-minor, G-Major, F-Major. My standard chords of the day.
I may transcribe the other few tracks soon (and will certainly do so eventually, this is a primary goal). It seems that the MED export will work fine.
One other job today was creating a full-screen video of a simple loop for YouTube, a sort of analogue of the Spotify Canvases. If this works then I'll do it for all of the We Robot tracks, as it's quite easy to do once the Spotify loops are done. Those may be time consuming as I've no graphical material to draw upon. Unlike The Golden Age, I've not created a full suite of album artwork.
Now I'm tired and feel ever beaten by the galley drummer, the whip of the guards ever driving, but I remain full of a deeper energy. I want to complete so much, both neaten and re-record older albums, now that I can massively improve their quality. My skills are better than ever before. New art would be wonderful, and represents the ultimate goal of every artist, but I must also both promote existing art, and file and enhance existing art - that latter requirement a new one for the music age. Painters never really 'improve' their old canvases.
I have sheet music to transcribe, and older albums to remaster or re-record. The remasters of Synaesthesia and The Infinite Forest were superb, huge improvements over the old versions and were easily worth it. The remasters of Animalia and Tree Of Keys were less useful. The Dusty Mirror is but 3 years old yet I can do (sing, and produce vocals in particular) far better now... but even so, it might be better to wait rather than rush-in there. Next for me, is work on Cycles & Shadows. I've made a lot of technical improvements since 2017.
I'm aware that my time, my life, my money, everything I have, is running out. When I pause I feel the cold breath of approaching doom, but I must do my best and work quickly and efficiently; hard and indefatigably, and doing the best I can, to make everything the best it can be. On we march. On we charge.
A full day of music admin yesterday, filing music with various authorities, checking for potential Spotify Playlists. Then, a fix to a small bug in Prometheus, and switching the new Pythagoras engine for the old Hammalogue. I found a bug in Hammalogue which inverted the first sine wave, which explains why 7 waves added together seemed to balance out when divided by 5 rather than 7.
I also experimentally transcribed the sheet music for SPDF from The Arcangel Soundtrack, using MED. It was rather painless, though the music is itself rather big due to containing all parts. Finally, I announced the new VCF filter plug-in for SFXEngine.
Generally the day was one of extreme tiredness, weakness. I wish I had time to rest, but must endlessly work to chase pennies, or more often the hope of potential pennies. I live in a concentration camp of eternal work in a skeletal quest for raw survival and the hope of something better. The whip of the guards drives me.
So it goes. Onwards we roll our rock.
Lots more work on We Robot today. The final sheet music was completed. Surprisingly, the music to Someone Else's AI was easier to score than Mothmoon.
Mothmoon is very hard to score exactly as it's all an arpeggio preset from the MODX. For historical reference this is a modification of the preset 'Inauguration' with MC_70s Rock arpeggio on 1st Woodwind and none on flute, among other changes. The vocals were improvised over the top too, so also difficult to score, and I've lost the MIDI sequence for the electric piano playing at the start (if I ever had one, I may have just played it live as an audio recording instead).
Rather than score the darts of notes I've scored the chords, which may help more anyway as those are the notes held when playing.
Then, lots of more admin work. A final proof of the music. Android Heaven needed extending by 2 seconds as it didn't fade completely. Then submitting it all for distribution and an October 27th release, preparing the sheet music for release on itch, and burning the CD Archive Copy. Filing the sequences and the sheet music, and noting frame sizes for each track for future videos. The next stage is making the Spotify Canvas animations. After that, all of the basic filing is done, and I can think about promotion.
I must also start to score another album. With each release, I score one old one too. I've managed quite a few already, since deciding to do this, considering how much work it is. 8 albums or EPs now have scores, 25 remain to do. This work is hard and grinding, but isn't all work. Oh for more time to make new and better art. I'm ready to move on, but I also enjoy this tidying, neatening activity.
A full and exhausting day scoring the We Robot music. I'm reminded how much work this is, and why I haven't done it with all of my albums (not that I had the ability before). I've finished My Baby's Non-Binary, Fake Plastic Lies, Life As A Robot Guard, P-L-Astic, Android Heaven, I Think You Love Me and Silicon-Carbon Genesis. They varied hugely in the workload and time. Non-Binary and Fake took most of the day. Android Heaven surprisingly long, and Silicon surprisingly short.
I can't really speed this up. One goal is to include the parts that are important or useful; everything has to be done manually. Very rarely everything in a song is scored, if ever. Only the very simplest piano-solo tracks could include that. I wonder why I do this, but the documentation is part of the job of music publisher. Perhaps nobody will ever care or read these scores, but, in my meticulous way, I want to preserve them. One reason is because it's the fundamental drive of living things to organise and store information accurately; so this task is, by this philosophy, in harmony with nature, and so certain to be beneficial.
There are some useful and instant practical applications. I've spotted two mistakes in the lyrics, and this sheet music will be needed for future performances.
Two tracks to go, then I'll start on the Fall in Green Testing The Delicates scores. I must also find time to proof/preview the music itself, then submit for an October release.
I woke early and thought about sine waves. I thought about pink noise and Pythagoras' vibrating strings. When making pink noise, one starts with white noise, then add successive totals of noise at half frequency. Now, this can't be fully synthesized in real time because time extends; you can't determine the single lowest note, the total number of layers needed. For example, to make 16 samples of pink noise you start with one wave of 16, one of 8, one of 4, one of 2, one of 1. Easy; but real-time isn't 16 samples but goes on for 'ever' (well, a finite but undetermined time).
You can start with one wav, then add more as it 'grows' in time, but that couldn't continue for ever, you'd run out of resources. Now, I realised that this happens for the universe too; for two reasonings. First, I started with the idea of an infinite number of overlapping sine waves. This would produce white noise, I imagined, but of course, you can't have 'infinite' sine waves in the universe, for the same reason you can't have infinite layers when making the pink noise. Things will start at high frequencies, then get lower and lower by layers over time; whether sine waves or noise turning from white to pink.
The sine waves will also interfere. I thought that some interferences would result in stable forms, and that this principle may help explain different species of particle, something like string theory, but more like an evolution of stability from a sea of chaotic waves. Chaotic arrangements (not Pythagorean resonant 'beauty') would dissolve.
I think more on this. One other conclusion is that this universe is not one of many, not one of an 'infinite number of possible unverses', but it is ONE; that this is the only possible universe, that Earth and all of the stars as we see them are the only possible arrangement there could have ever been.
I rose early and started by programming an audio plug-in called Pythagoras, in honour of my new idea, which is actually a simple arrangement of 7 overlapping sine waves of any different tunings. The result is a plaintive sine-organ sound, which is pretty, but probably not very useful, so at 10am, I filed it as a curiosity rather than include it in Prometheus.
Then, a tiring and exacting day of work on the We Robot sheet music. We Are The Damaged took some time, as did the complex solos which exist only in MIDI format and needed note-by-note processing, but the results are accurate enough. Flight Over Rust City looks amazingly simple in the end:
That's it for the 70 second piece, but there is a lot of timbral complexity, swerving and bending of the drone-like notes. Maybe I should add that to the score.
Working on the We Robot sheet music today. Many of these tracks will take a long time, particularly the meandering piano improvisations. We Are The Damaged may have taken me 10 minutes to play for the song, but has taken over 4 hours to transcribe, even using my helper tools. The synth solo in the middle was recorded in one take live on the Microkorg, so has no MIDI data or anything except the resulting wav. This would not be easy to transcribe for a human (or an AI - I suspect that AI would, in fact, struggle with this task). I wonder if the wild improvisations by Roxy Music on their albums were scored by the publisher?
Three tracks of 16 done in draft now. This job, this transcription into this ancient medium, will take all week I think.
A slower day of admin work on the album after a late listen and a few small changes to the balancing. This step necessarily, or at least benefits from, work over several days so that each listen sounds 'anew'.
Now have a list of other album related jobs, many completed today: Making a lyrics booklet and image pages for the lyrics for each track, publishing the cover design on Society 6 (not that I've ever, in 20 years, had a sale of album artwork).
Once the final mix is complete I can delete most of the source waves. I don't keep them all, only those that might be interesting for historical purposes or useful in future. Any recordings used in the actual sequences can be saved out by Prometheus if needed. I do, however, note a list of all of the waves in all of these folders, in case that information is needed to know what was actually there. This process takes about a day. The album artwork itself is as good as finalised.
I also need to film some subtitled lyrics videos, and prepare the looping Spotify Canvas videos. I'll probably make full-screen versions of these for YouTube too, for the first time, though I could relatively easily modify all of the existing ones to create a 'square' video for YouTube anyway. Many albums now have these little looping videos.
Another step is the music notation of this, and at least one older album. That usually takes about a week. All for the glory of art, the reward is the feeling of doing my best. This feeling is a key drive of life. We are at our most happy when doing our best in our sphere, then doing this better yet.
A good and full day. The final volume setting stage of finishing the album audio, the angst over the mixing now over. I'm so pleased to have developed my Cathedral Limiter! It makes this stage painless, if not actually joyful. Volume levels are something of a contentious issue. A level of -14dB LUFS is a de-facto standard, as the giant Spotify imposes this. Many CDs have louder levels, though a plain analogue recording limited to a simple peak, like classical music, like a CD from the 1980s or early 1990s would be a quiet -19dB or so. My beloved (again) Hounds Of Love is around this. I can't say I've ever noticed or cared, and I generally prefer the sound of these older discs. Music that's too loud or flat bothers me more. As I've said my times, I can't bear to listen to Björk's Utopia as it's mastered so badly.
I've made my music about 14dB or a little louder. One other reason for limiting is 'headroom', giving some space between the highest peaks and a technical maximum. It's possible for volumes to go over the max during playback, so headroom can actually improve sound quality, depending on the quality of the playback equipment. My Cathedral keeps everything sounding great.
Anyway it was enjoyable to set the final levels. I listened to each track and checked the lyrics too. One query I had was about the phrase "A.I." - and how to write it. Is seems that 'AI' is normal, as with CD for Compact Disc. CD has almost become a word in itself, but one pronounced as though it were initials. I suspect that if CD or AI were pronounceable, they would be words by now. Anyway, this means that my final tracks, for the CD version, are:
1. Do You Know Where Your Heart Is? (03:09)
2. We Are the Damaged (04:00)
3. Joy from a Machine Code Perspective (01:11)
4. Robot (02:45)
5. AI and Celebrity (04:57)
6. My Baby’s Non-Binary (03:46)
7. Fake Plastic Lies (03:11)
8. Mothmoon (02:42)
9. Life as a Robot Guard (02:03)
10. P-L-Astic (02:49)
11. I Think You Love Me (03:38)
12. Where Is Love? (03:46)
13. Flight Over Rust City (03:49)
14. Silicon Carbon Genesis (03:07)
15. Android Heaven (01:16)
16. Someone Else’s AI (01:22)
The lettering in P-L-Astic was an issue too. Should it be "P L Astic"? or "P. L. Astic"? In the end I was inspired by Tammy Wynette's D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and kept the hyphens which were part of the title.
For the art, it's mostly done, but I've decided, unusually, not to create the full 8-10 pages of CD booklet artwork, not until I need to print a CD. I can use the time to work on videos or the sheet music, the lyric boxes etc.
This is my best album from a technical perspective, and from a performance perspective, and as good as any other from an art perspective. I feel empowered and ready to create more, thought this has taken me months of ups and downs and is likely to be as obscure and ignored as all of my music work is at this time. I know that this is the usual case for art, though, at most stages of most artists' careers, historically. Lack of attention doesn't make the artwork less valid, but more important. Still, many of these songs have hit potential. If, one day, I'm a music superstar, rememeber this obscure blog post and know that it all started here (well, 24 years ago, then here).
On we charge!
The end stages of work on We Robot, mixing and mastering. Lots of small changes, plus work on the cover art. Some designs:
I rather liked the cyan one, it reminded me of the old Dragon 32 colours, but also Spirograph. I'll use both, but probably the bronze one.
Most of the day was spent mixing, tweaking. I always find this an anxious time, a strange quest for perfection that's elusive because there are no right answers, no perfect mixes. If it feels right and sounds right, it is right, and a mix is part of the art too. Listening to the wonderful songs on Hounds Of Love, I also note how bassy they are, how perhaps I'd have boosted the upper end a bit. I listen to how Tony Visconti's Bowie records had quite a lot of bass in the vocals, versus Queen's records which have that cut extensively.
In other news, Taskforce v1.06 was launched too.
Completion of Taskforce today, but a frustrating day. Last night I thought that the work was done, and in the morning ran the program to watch it lock out alarmingly on start-up. This sent me into a panic, nothing seemed to be wrong. The core code worked fine yesterday and had barely changed.
I ran it again a few times, trying different error checks. Then, after 30 mins or so, everything 'magically' fixed itself. It appears to have been caused by Windows security or something like it... this is extremely annoying (partly because I have no idea what the problem was or is). It happened with Radioactive too, if I recall. It is increasingly common.
Yesterday, checking for program data in the user's Documents folder caused two security alerts, just loading my tiny data files that the program itself put there. I had to think of a way of storing the campaign progress that didn't involve 'Documents', but after a few hours and time-consuming experimentation I simply ditched the concept and unlocked all of the missions from the outset. So players from v1.06 will be able to see all of the game and play it in any order. Traditionally, the unlocking of new levels is a key part of a game, to unfold its progress like a story told, but I thought in this case it probably improves Taskforce anyway. The Achievements are a new goal, and getting stuck on a level is no fun. Also the original Taskforce game on Amiga allowed any mission to be chosen; the same was true of Hilt II, and my beloved Airbourne Ranger on the Commodore 64, so why not here.
One offshoot of the change is that the final 'game completed' Achievement will trigger when completing the last level, even if nothing else is completed; but I'll fix that next time. For now, the changes have been big enough and stressful enough. Each copy of the game is about 1Gb, and I need at least 5 copies to develop it: Steam Full Version, Steam Demo, My Full Version, Source Code Version, and the Steam Installed Copy. By far my biggest game is uncomfortably large to develop.
The Steam Achievements seem to work, so I'll leave things for now for fear of breaking something - that emotion sums up programming today. Before, things worked or not. Now so many things seem to be untestable and break (or fix) themselves without warning or explanation. I may add Steam Stats in future, but I'm unsure what. There are many I can add, from Games Played, to numbers of Shots Fired, or each type and quantity of Enemy Killed... but those wouldn't really add anything to the game. A good statistic might be a general performance measure, but that's hard here... shots fired compared with hits would be a pseudo-random measure of the unit skill... Turns to Complete each mission..? Well, I'll muse on it over the coming months/years/decades.
An odd thing about Windows is that running a program after 24-hours seems to 'settle it in' for security. I'll test the game again tomorrow and if it still works then I'll release the update. I'll update it again if it sells.
I had planned to update Gunstorm II next, but my nerves have been shot working on this, and the odds of that game selling are not good, though it would probably recover it's $100 fee eventually.
The world feels anxious everywhere. What was colloquially a 'job-for-life' is getting more and more rare. A job-for-life means a specialist doing a trained job, and it's been the staple, the core of civilisation since Jericho 12,000 years ago. Civilisation has supported people sufficiently to allow them to specialise, but now it seems that specialists are becoming rare. People can't make a living doing one job, but need to do several, and 're-train' often. Skills appear, and in a flash are outdated. People need to become their own managers. Deb and her colleagues are being trained to do management jobs (for no extra money, as you might expect), and managers fired or being trained to do every other job. The workman who fitted her bathroom floor the other day is not a carpet fitter, but a general odd-job-man, expected to know everything from gas fitting, to electrical work, to plumbing, to decoration; harder jobs and all at basic pay.
This feels unusual, maybe without historical precedent. We need a new philosophy for humanity that will help because there appears to be enough food and shelter for us all.
A busy but stressful yesterday with monthly backups, then an enjoyable time putting up a 2M window blind.
In the afternoon, some initial work on Taskforce. I've had 7 sales of the game in the past year, not much, yet this was a surprise 7. At times I think that these type of games of mine are somewhat cursed.
Amiga Taskforce was fun, though very crude, and was distributed to thousands of people via a cover-disk on CU Amiga magazine; the staff there were always kind to me. I made many friends, my first, really, via that cover-disk. It looked poor, but had its charms as a game, though of course, I made no money from it. One such friend, Andrew Cashmore, helped me with Hilt then Hilt II, on Amiga. Hilt II was a critical, but not commercial hit; it didn't sell a single copy back then, but remains a popular Amiga download to this day.
I quit the Amiga and entered a low period of struggle working on my first PC game, Arcangel. This took 18-months of hard work. It was essentially a 3D isometric remake of Hilt II (even some of the levels were re-used). This was a dispiriting time, the lowest period of my life. I had no income or friends during the development of Arcangel, the game itself became a strange passion, my only comrade, my friendly rock to roll in my Sisyphean way. The publishers that were lined up ripped me off, and an incomplete, publisher-exclusive, version of the game was distributed across 'pound-shops' without my knowledge or consent, so those years were lost. After some reflection, and a final decision to self-publish, I made lots of small games, then eventually the much more popular Flatspace series.
After Flatspace II I spent another 18-full-months, a longer period than any game to date, working on PC Taskforce. It was my most complex and feature-driven game of this type, but upon launch, it barely sold. Less than 20 copies in the first 5 years. Flatspace, by comparison sold 20 copies in the first two weeks. It was the failure of Taskforce that made me realise that, after 30+ years of trying, games were a dead end.
Yet, I've always liked Taskforce as a game. This, my biggest game, gradually became old and unable to work on modern computers. I thought it needed at least to be 'out there' as part of my artistic canon. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I spent a couple of months updating the game substantially. Again, the sales were similar to the first time; it seems that my hopes always outpace the results.
Still, I'm now updating the game again, spurned on by the 7 sales of the past 12-months. Perhaps I can learn something about Steam Stats and Achievements coding, and it shouldn't take long to update.
It's been a difficult and hard day of programming, but I have hopes that the update will be ready by the end of the week. My psyche, or body, can't cope with programming now. It drives me insane and hyper-anxious on many levels. After this, my body tells me, I must avoid computer work of this sort.
