Painting Book

More steady work on the painting book for the past two days. Reading and researching a lot, but I must remember that the most important parts of the book are the parts that can't be found elsewhere, those unique insights gained by my experience.

Good Vibrations, Guitar Hooks

A regular visit to Congleton Library's Good Vibrations event. Valuable as performance, but I found it all difficult, difficult to even match chords to time, never mind singing at the same time. The best results were those of single notes or leads along with the tune, though this depends on enough other musicians to handle the chord and main melody. I need to practice this much more.

After that, I some nice DIY work putting up some guitar hooks for Deborah. The heads of the screws supplied with the hooks didn't fit into them. I needed to re-drill the holes bigger because I had no screws with smaller heads. Drilling into the wall was as hit and miss as ever; one hole hollow, one as rock solid a metal, unable to drill more than 15mm. In the end, however everything worked out well. I cut down a rawl plug and used a shorter screw for the 15mm hole (for an acoustic guitar, the weight was inconsequential, one good screw would hold it).

Writing: Underpainting, Shading, Glazing

More days of writing, underpainting, shading, glazing. 31,402 words so far. ArtsLab number 5 is also now online thanks to Ray Hayes. Tomorrow we'll be going to Good Vibrations.

Writing

More writing, on impasto, metal substrates. Lots of time was taken up with research. Writing, deleting, writing. 25,012 words.

Oil Painting Book

A day of writing, about underpaintings and plastic surfaces. Everything is taking a long time due to research. Word count 22,760.

ArtsLab, Painting Book

Spend the morning updating the ArtsLab text, in preparation for any possible re-uploads of it to MixCloud. Added four more episodes to my account there, chosen by importance. I chose the first appearance of Deborah Edgeley, and the interviews with the since deceased Ian Parr and Dorli Nauta, and the first episode of Series 2, where the new format first appeared, complete with an interview by Jonathan Tarplee.

Worked from 13:00 writing and researching my book on painting, today mostly writing about imprimaturae. This book is taking, will take, a long time. I'd prefer it to be done in a few weeks like my novella, but I feel it will take several months.

SFXEngine v2.03, LFASS, ArtsLab

A full day. Began by updating SFXEngine, after discovering a small bug in my waking night. This led to discovering a larger bug (well, more like an error). I realised that I'd limited the Sine, Triangle, and Pulse waves to -24/+24 when this should be -48/+48. This was all fixed, tested and made live by 12:30.

Then, the new Fall in Green CDs arrived. I scanned and filed these, and did some more music admin regarding UPC codes. The admin of music is endless.

After that, I finally continued writing Oil Painting From Beginning To Master And Beyond, then launched the new SFXEngine pack. This evening, I'm typing up episode descriptions and track lists for the 118 ArtsLab episodes, to make it easier to upload the information to MixCloud (or any other platform) in future. This is a few hours work, but hopefully worth it.

20x20 Paintings, David Lynch, Zelenskyy, Bierstadt

I awoke early after many vivid dreams. I knew I had to paint today and started slowly. I looked at some paintings in the book '1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die' while listening to 'The Life Scientific' on Radio 4. At 10am I started painting.

The four works to paint were: 'The Magic Of Drama', 'So Many Profound Ways', 'Repercussions Of The Decline', and 'The Days Of Kronos'. All were 20x20cm, and I needed to paint all today, as they'll be sold for £20 each, far too little to be worth putting time into. This is the sort of challenge I like. I chose the titles at random using Wiki Quote, and had no plans or preconceptions, except that the first title, when chosen, suggested to me David Lynch, who's death a few weeks ago touched me deeply.

Thus, the first painting became a portrait, with a strangely angelic Elephant Man. The sky became smoke, as per a old plan for a Lynch portrait with smoking eyes and hair. The second painting became a portrait of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It needed a second theme, so I combined his image with a painting by the American romantic painter, Albert Bierstadt. His heroic portrayal of the American landscape would, I thought, be an ideal emotion to add. These themes: David Lynch, The Elephant Man, Albert Bierstadt, and Crows became themes, with Ukraine a tangible theme not present visually except for Zelenskyy here, and for the yellow and blue of their flag; colours the world has come to know.

The third painting became a portrait of a screaming girl from The Elephant Man, but in blue to a flaming sky and forest, from the Bierstadt sunset. The fourth painting became a simpler portrait of Lynch, but here blending into Bierstadt and smoke. I was struck by the fact that Lynch often used smoke and steam as antagonists, symbols of fear and evil; particularly in The Elephant Man, yet, he professed a love of smoking cigarettes. He died of emphysema, also indirectly killed by the California wildfires, so smoke, his nemesis in film became his ultimate killer. Were his smoke fears a manifest warning?

Painting felt good, welcome. I completed all four paintings by 17:30 as planned. How sad I remain that I can't paint more, that no commercial gallery to date has given me a break. I can survive, like van Gogh, without sales or support, but things would be so much easier (not to mention profitable for all concerned!) if I had a sales outlet. I would certainly paint far more, have painted more; paint larger and more ambitiously, have painted larger and more ambitiously. There's no point in painting a large masterpiece here, as I know it would sit here as unseen as most of my medium-large work, and I have no more space. My lack of painting, when I can now paint better than ever before, saddens me, but I will do the best I can with the circumstances and tools that fate decrees. With these small competitions and exhibitions I have at least a little outlet, and one I've always taken used.

The Letters From a Square Spoon CDs are due to arrive tomorrow.

Today's painting has made me feel like an artist again, revived my soul. Onwards we must charge.

Vocals, Guitars, Dentistry

A slow day. Recorded the main vocals for 'How Lonely', then for 'The Light Bulb 1', then a trip to the dentist. It's hard to find one in Britain, nigh impossible to become an NHS patient, so I'm a private patient which is expensive, but I am lucky to have found this after 6 years or so without any access to a dentist. I remind myself that this was normal life for Beethoven and most people of the 18th and 19th century. The NHS is effectively non-existent for dentistry, with a declining number of legacy services distributed by luck and nothing more rational.

A little more work on the music when I returned, and guitar parts for 'Written on Rice' and 'How Lonely'. I recorded lots for both, but after hours of editing and trying this and that, the latter hardly used any, and I'm unsure if even the fragments that remain are needed. These tracks are just about complete I think.

My plan is to paint tomorrow, the 20cm paintings. I must summon strength and crawl forwards.

64-Bit Preparations, ISRC admin

A full day of largely programming. Prometheus and SFXEngine have been updated to make a switch to 64-bit versions relatively easy. Both programs and plugins compile in 64-bit without warnings, and 64-bit Prometheus works with a test plugin; I'd have to spent a day recompiling them all to get it fully working. It can't load any programs or sequences saved from the 32-bit version, as the save-file structure sizes vary between versions. I'm confident that 64-bit SFXEngine would be the same.

There are two key benefits to 64-bit versions. Firstly, that 32-bit programs are limited to 4Gb, and potentially memory-hungry programs like these would benefit from more memory. I've only once (in 24 years) touched upon running out of memory with Prometheus, and the recent options to switch off interpolation on a per-sample basis actually save lots of memory, but larger capacity can't hurt. It would make some tasks, like making SFXEngine capable of processing full songs, or long tracks for audio books, would be a good thing. It may be capable of doing that now, but there's no harm in increasing the capacity. The second reason is that 64-bit programs on a 64-bit system are 20% or 30% faster. Prometheus is already faster than its ever been, and would have to go a long way on this PC to slow below real-time, but there's no harm in increasing speed either.

The downsides are minimal. A 32-bit program is smaller and has a lower memory footprint, but both programs remain small. 64-bit Prometheus is 1.03Mb, vs 834Kb for 32-bit. Plugins are 10Mb; perhaps then 15Mb for 64-bit. MuseScore 4, by comparison, is 81Mb, yes 8 times bigger, yet less powerful. The biggest downside is that I'd need to make new file formats for everything, the 6th new file format for Prometheus (the program needs to detect and import all older formats). This means new data structures for everything that can be saved/loaded, identical in all but size. SFXEngine would be the same, though it is less complex.

Today's changes took until 3pm, and SFXEngine v2.02 is now published.

After that, much music admin. I hand-checked every ISRC code for duplication and found 3 or 4 more duplicates. These were not too serious as all duplicates were for the same tracks with very slight changes, 2 or 3 seconds shorter, for versions shared between a core album and a compilation. Of these, only one version of any track is currently released on digital platforms, so the admin burden is low and not too important. Still, each track needs a unique ISRC, so new codes were created for the offline tracks. Since 2001 I've recorded and registered about 70 music tracks per year, so today's checks involved 300 or 400 text-file searches to check that each code was correctly assigned to a unique recording. This was 2-3 hours of tedious clicking, but it's all done now, my first such check in 24 years.

Writing

Up from 7am and a day of writing, with a pause to add the 64-bit enhancements to SFXEngine. Writing has been slower. I'm unsure of the scale of the work. I'd like it to be epic and huge, but I continually think that many technical aspects, like a list of colours or pigments can't compare with an online database. I considered an online component to the book. The job seems, at the moment, overwhelming.

Art Books, Flight Dream, IRSCs, Prometheus 64-Bit

A frustrating few days, I've kept busy but don't feel I'm on a track, darting between too many different things.

Most of yesterday was spent on my art book. There is much to write here. I also started to think about Prometheus and how difficult or easy it might be to make it into a 64-bit application. It is rather easy, but there are a few caveats. One is that the files have pointers in the structures, eg. "long* lppointer". Of course, the data there is irrelevant, it's zero in the file, it's there only to make saving faster, but it means that the file structure itself is a different size on a 64-bit system. The solution is to have a file structure which simply uses an unsigned-long as a substitute, not a pointer, thus it can be the correct 32-bits big on a 64-bit system.

Overnight I had many fantastical dreams. I dreamed I could see the end of the world, which took place at a music event. The event was planned by Creative Crewe, and included as an organiser my old headmaster, Mr Bowers, a well-liked teacher, and the father of someone in my school class. He appeared in my Facebook feed yesterday due to the sudden death of his wife. The event included musicians, and a piano or harpsichord which could be split in two, high/low, through the keyboard and each half wheeled around. I was disappointed not to be asked to perform at the event, but held a hope in my heart that I'd be asked, I felt that they simply didn't think to ask me, quietly desperate though I was to be part of the event.

The event took place in a circus tent of some sort, and three signs, like giant keyboards hung above the ring; left, centre, right. In the cobbled courtyard outside, Deb was there with a bowl haircut, perhaps a little like Princess Diana, perhaps a little like my memory of the school friend. I became aware that she was in love with another man, an electric guitar player who was part of the show. Without much fanfare or any words, she left with him, leaving me heartbroken. The grey courtyard was high up on some rocks, and jutted out into the sea like a castle, and there was something medieval about it all. In my suicidal despair I leapt from the walls to my death in the churning sea below.

To my surprise, my descent slowed and I started to fly forwards, low over the waves, rather than hit the bottom. I began to feel happier, and glancing up at the horizon saw a fantastical city in my distance, among brightly coloured clouds, like a painting. The city appeared to be New York, or a fantasy version of it, with the Statue of Liberty appearing in the centre as I watched. I fell to the ground, which was now a beach of rippled sand and sea water. The beach was full of small gemstones, transparent cubic zirconium and very pretty. There were strange women around, like angelic beings.

Thus ended the dream.

Today I discovered, by pure chance, that I'd accidentally assigned the same ISRC code to two different recordings, one on The Dusty Mirror and one on the new Letters From A Square Spoon. This is a disaster for record keeping, these need to be unique. These codes are used in many places to identify the usage of a recording. I'm so lucky to spot this today, 4 weeks before the release of Spoon. This timing allowed me to remove the release in progress and re-submit it correctly. I was also set today to order the CD copies, which also include this code; so I managed to do this with the correct code. The codes are used in many places, but today I've managed to correct them all.

Duplications like these are rare, I've done it once before in the 15 years or so I've been creating codes; but this error was much more important than my older one, as today so much depends on accurate reporting and detection of a recording. I'm blessed to find the error today.

After that I worked on Prometheus 3.60, preparing it for 64-bit. The first step was to remove (the old and deprecated) DirectInput which I used for key-press checking. I don't really need it at all, as Windows itself has enough function for checking the keyboard, so this was done. Then I had to change strlen() to my own routine, as strlen returns a 64-bit value in Win64, and 32-bit in Win32. 32-bits is best for both for me, so I replaced it. The only other change was changing ITEMIDLIST* to PCIDLIST_ABSOLUTE when using SHBrowseForFolder().

After that, Prometheus compiled and ran in 64-bit for the first time. It didn't and can't do anything. It needs 64-bit plugins too, and needs a new file format and converter for it; but it's an amazing step to get it this far. These changes will probably bleed into the sibling programs of SFXEngine and Argus.

How Lonely Vocals, Prometheus v3.59, New Book Begins

A slower day yesterday, started by re-recording the main vocals for 'How Lonely' as they were too gentle before, but now seem a little harsh. I've stepped back somewhat from the music to reflect. After that, a trip to a friend to help with computer maintenance. I also updated Prometheus again after finding some minor bugs. This allowed me to add a feature to batch load and save instruments.

I'm still considering options regarding ArtsLab. One option is to upload all of the episodes to YouTube but mask off the commercial song content. This would be a better solution than MixCloud, which would/will ultimately delete it all anyway.

Today, I've charged into a new book about oil painting and have written about 5000 words. This is something I've wanted to write for a while. One key element is that it is more of a reference guide than a how-to book, something foe beginners and masters alike, but something which can be referred to over a lifetime. The order and structure will be unusual, and something a little like Cennini's book.

Album Admin and Filing

Two frantic but productive days of album admin.

First, Deb pointed out that on her fancy PC, our album art was a little fuzzy. I examined a few common resolutions (I think she has a 4K monitor) and reasoned that it was time for an artwork upgrade. The downside is the bandwidth and memory of 81 albums/releases; which feature a thumbnail and (usually) three booklet images. Before, each image was 400x400, with 300x300 for the pages. After some calculations and tests, 1000x1000 for the full album seemed a good size, so I spent yesterday updating all 81 releases.

The older albums varied in their artwork standards, so many needed revisiting and tidying up. That, more than the actual conversion, took longest. All in all, the 289 images took all day.

Today, revamping my primary music catalogue. Each album has a main type code (called a Release Group in Musicbrainz) plus sub-codes for media or 'Release', which is normally a CD release and a digital streaming release. Some are concurrent. The Flatspace Soundtrack, for example, is released on CD, and Bandcamp, and Distrokid (Spotify etc.), and Steam, all at the same time. Some releases replace and supersede older releases (some CDs are on a second edition, for example). Some have different tracks/audio for CD and Stream releases, in fact most of the newer albums do, like the Fall in Green Salomé album, although most of my post-2020 releases (which is a lot, perhaps a third of my total artistic output) don't have CD versions at all. When I do make some, their music will be different from the stream versions. All of this information needs storing in a clear way.

All of those codes and releases are now in the public Cornutopia Music Catalogue.

This took all day, and also helped spot a few 'bugs' and inconsistencies in the filing. You can't create without a good filing system; you'd get tangled up and lost. After that, renaming some folder names to clarify and unify these standards in the album filing system too.

Next, I must make and prepare the CD art for Letters From A Square Spoon.

Letters From A Square Spoon Preparations

Attended the Spoken Word Open Mic at Hopes & Beams last night, a nice gentle night

A charge into a day of work preparing for the release of our Fall in Green album, Letters From A Square Spoon. The admin work is huge, and frustrating in that a lot of the same data (like who performed what, when, where, and who the studio personnel were, as well as who wrote/created it all, who owns the rights from when and why etc.) has to be entered in different ways for different organisations multiple times. All of that in addition to the basics of uploading tracks for sale, and the start of any public (or press, if one is lucky) information about the actual music and how brilliant it all is.

I still have much to do, but a lot is done. I'm struck with the irony that the public and hugely complex database on Musicbrainz is far easier and faster to edit than any of the official national music registration organisations; and Musicbrainz usually stores more information (it doesn't store the performance personnel information above, though). It's a pity that none of these databases or organisations agree to simply collaborate.

Onwards we forge through the jungle of life.

More

The day has flown. I started the day by listing another painting on Saatchi Art, having learned that I'll be a 'featured artist' next week. This is so nice; my profile there has less than 10 followers, it was dormant for a few years, but last year I started to add new works and focus more on it. I need a break like this. Contrast Saatchi with Society 6 which simply closed my account without so much as a single snippet of help, despite being more popular terms of hits and likes.

I've spent most of the day working on the melody and words of a song called 'More'. The words are deceptively simple, but have taken all day to craft into shape. Sometimes there is a difference in choice of words for a song vs poem. One line was 'To stop the worry'; this works well poetically, I changed it to 'To stop the panic', as it has a more music in it. The 'aah' vowel on 'panic' is nicer than the muddy 'orr' of 'worry', and the staccato p and c sounds add punch and drama to the sound.

The song has a Beethoven's 5th rhythm of xxxX with the last note being the first of the bar. I used the opportunity to try to simplify everything, and make the bass more of an incessant chug, which matches the meaning of the song, an endless trawl for more.

I wanted the chorus to climb and seek, so it rises in key and has a few unusual chords. The song is in my commonest key of A-minor, breaking into F-Major for the chorus (my commonest break too), but then switches to Bb, then B, D#-sus7 and D#, then G# before bending back to E-Major and A again. The effect is as I'd hoped.

The Light Bulb 1, The Fall of America

More of today's work was on 'The Light Bulb 1', a complex song in five parts. Part 1 is a simple melody in electric piano which emerges from a background sound of a record player and some sine waves. The scene takes place inside a light bulb, so the sounds are designed to paint this.

The music changes into more drama, and some ascending notes. Yesterday these were wide string chords, but today I worked on making these into a staircase of strings (in the mode of Handel), but changed these into a live piano instead. This introduction is about reminiscence.

These then switch into a deeper analysis, and here the warm strings appear, with a bass drum, but this collapses into stabbed piano chords as the filament of the light bulb is torn apart; before finally the last part revives the first, as we look at the broken bulb.

There are many challenges here, partly the transitions between parts, but also in painting images efficiently and clearly.

I listened to The Dreaming again last night, Kate Bush's best album (though closely followed by The Hounds of Love). This scene painting is my goal too. Her genius, and a large team, took two years to create it, and I'm almost moving to the stage where my albums are taking a year each. I should be grateful to creep forwards in micro steps, as I have today.

Meanwhile, America as a country and empire is disintegrating. The slight effects evident now are nothing compared to the huge effects which will be evident in a year, two years. The world may enter a new 'great depression' economically, or engage in new, needless wars, for no gain. All of this is more than the work of Donald Trump. About half of Americans, and a huge percentage of politicians agree with his completely wrong ideas and ignorant political philosophy. This then is partly a failure of democracy and political education. The most democratic country in the world voted to destroy itself, largely though ignorance, and partly though deception and a breakdown of trust. Nobody really knew what Donald Trump would do, but trusted that the systems of government would prevent him from doing much harm. Those people were wrong, but perhaps even now a majority are too blind to realise the harm being done.

America has a 'right to bear arms'. I presumed that this was an implicit right to use those arms to attack tyranny; that the right to bear arms was a right to kill tyrants. Perhaps it's merely a right to own weapons, but not a right to use them, which seems somewhat pointless (if sensible). Either way; this right was one failsafe of the democratic government against tyranny. Another failsafe was the right to free speech, but now 90% of America's media is controlled by about 6 huge corporations, all of which are espousing the same rhetoric of compliance with the government, due to coercions made by it. Emotional pressure is so hard to define in laws, and in constituions.

The first step of holding a government to account is knowing when they are doing wrong. One area where America excels is political awareness, in people's belief in and knowledge of their written constituion, but many areas of politics, in many countries, remain a mystery to so many of its people. Not knowing, or not caring, about how civilisation works is a dangerous decadence.

How Lonely, Written on Rice, The Light Bulb 1

Two full days of music work. I'm reminded how long it all takes. Some of the time is spent experimenting and crafting, but even when I know what I want, it takes days to record and sequence everything.

I decided yesterday to change the tempo of 'How Lonely' to 130 BPM from 120, and made many more small tweaks to the production. I've done little on this today, but have experimented with an electric guitar part. I finalised 'The Paper King' yesterday, and worked a little on 'Written on Rice'.

Today, the monthly Windows update led into work on 'Walls and How to Hit Them', a song I'd largely completed, but needed a little work today including one new vocal part. Then some work on the rather dour 'The Light Bulb 1'.

I constantly wonder, in song like this, whether it's work making. These strange arty songs, perhaps they will never be someone's favourite? But no! This is impossible to know. I listened yesterday to some Ultravox songs to analyse the production. The strange songs 'Waiting' and 'Dreams' almost fit into this category. I need aims; and one is variety, what is new, different. Sometimes these things act as bridges to other works of surprise and brilliance.

I recorded a keyboard intro for 'The Light Bulb 1', then added sequenced string chords. Pushing forwards is hard here, I struggle with the timing on moody songs, which have no regular rhythm, and so no opportunity for melody and sub-melody.

More Song Produciton

Two full days of song production work. Lots of vocals created an added for 'How Lonely', and some for 'Written on Rice'. 'How Lonely' has lots of vocal layers in the manner of 'Video Killed the Radio Star'. Certain lines have 3 double layers (all vocals are recorded twice to make a stereo pair) to form chords. This adds up to make a lot of layers and hours of tedious trimming and arranging. There are a few vocode layers too. 'Written on Rice' has a few similar layers for the chorus.

This all adds up to many hours of arranging. I found time to start a new track, though it's a strange atmospheric piece, which features the sound of the planet Saturn, and an arrangement of 8-note choir chords, creating an effect like the somewhat frightening sounds in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I started to watch a film called After Blue last night which was amazingly inventive, and inspiring. It looked crude at times, and reminded my of an early 80s pop video, like the one for 'Forever Autumn' as played on the Kenny Everett show, and 'Ashes to Ashes' (both were probably directly related, as director David Mallet connect all of these).

Easily an hour or two of today was spent singing, my voice better than ever before.

The Paper King and How Lonely Work

A bad night of constant stomach pain and poor sleep. Today has flown. First, finalising and filing 'From Eye To Hand To Paper', adding more bass. This was almost absent from the first version, it was so very subtle and gentle as a track. Only my EQ report alerted me to the frequency gap, so I boosted the bass. I also adjusted the sheet music to match the recording better (only the odd grace note differs between it and the live version we performed). I'm now using MuseScore 4, which is more buggy than MuseScore 3, and generally worse to use in most ways, but some formatting aspects are better, simpler, and it's generally a better idea to use the latest version of software.

Then compiled a test cover for Deb's new book.

Then, work on 'The Paper King' and 'How Lonely'. Only when I checked the global track for possible tempo changes did I notice that both tracks had a '-4' semitone pitch engine applied! This must have been done to adjust for my singing range of the day but I'd never do this now. I want to know what that actual notes are. Even when playing live I transpose live.

This led to new adjustments for key. 'The Paper King' is now in F-minor (the key it actually sounded in), and 'How Lonely' is now in C-minor. This is a lovely song, hugely reminiscent of Alphaville because it has a vocal range from mid-low to high; not quite as bold as in 'Victory of Love', but I rarely use low-ranged vocals.

Once the actual notes were established I could record a bit, and have recorded a couple of vocoder parts for both songs.

How the day is flying, I'd like to have recorded some vocals today, but cannot.

Looking at 'The Paper King' lyrics, they seem to be more depth than I'd thought. There are echoes of President Trump's orders, but perhaps more-so a psychological dimension; orders and commands ever being written by an insane but ever-active commander, our desperate mind ever finding things to do, never resting, even if self-destructive. I've made slight changes to the words today, to the last chorus, made the cows into birds, and changed the line 'Tastrophe in fernal guise' (?!) to the much more coherent 'Infernal catastrophe!'

The Paper King

Paper stretches eye to eye
Paper people paper trees
White as dwarves and thin as paper words
Ruler of this paper world
A literate and learned king
He the only pencil holds and wields

Write another paper rule
Write another constitution
Write another history
Write another me

All the peasants, all the lords
Held the words in great esteem
Everybody knew the king was just
Every paper person read
Noble deeds and noble laws
From the castle orders came and went

Write another paper rule
Write another constitution
Write another history
Write another me

Burn the rot the orders said
Burn the cardboard hermit men
Burn the old and build a better world
Burn the tissue paper birds
Burn all houses facing west
People set to burn as they were bid

Infernal catastrophe!
Storms of flame consumed the world
Every beast and every person fled
In the castle still it wrote
On the body of the king
Frantic pencil, terrified alive

Dancing like a hurricane
Frenzied like a revolution
Writing chaos in a torrent
Writing all alone

Mad as any paper king
Sane as any revolution
Never reading, never stopping
Writing every day

Eye To Hand To Paper, Tambourine, Spoon Filing

A full day. Started by editing and adding the 'Eye To Hand To Paper' vocals to the track. The sibilants were notably stronger, the frequencies squeakingly high, due to the new NT1. I thought that I needed a 12dB/oct low pass filter to fix this, so quickly programmed one for Prometheus. It was ideal! I then adjusted some default values for the Prometheus reverbs, a planned upgrade.

Then, work on the 'Mr Tambourine Man' vocals, which certainly sound better than the first take, primarily because of better timing accuracy due to a metronome in the guide track. This needs new tambourines I think. We have no plans for this track, merely to complete it and store it for the future.

In between this I've been polishing a metal sweet tin, cleaning it of paint. I tried paint remover, but it barely touched the paint, so decided to burn the paint off with a blowtorch, then use wire wool to clean its charred shell. This worked well, but there are a few recesses and tiny areas which are difficult to access.

After that, filing the new Fall in Green album which is now complete. The PRS codes were finalised today, so I had to update the sheet music and my records, then burn the archive CD master, and file other materials (and delete others). I've also burned archive copies of the other Fall in Green albums for Deborah, and prepared digital copies of everything too.

One other job was resetting some of yesterday's programming. The Band Distortion changes were perhaps not so useful or intuitive, so I reversed those.

A full and efficient day overall, partly due to focusing on strict jobs in turn. I must try to complete new vocals and new songs next. I've a few other goals this month, but I'd need to firmly commit to them, and when to do them, to make progress.

Onwards we march.

Good Vibrations, Legato Engine

We performed at the Good Vibrations event yesterday, which was as lovely as ever. I took my Microkorg and spent too long staring at the chords. We are handed lyrics notated with some chords, with a guitar in mind so the 'capo' is sometimes specified. On keyboard I need to mentally transpose up by that number. In practice, it seems to work best me playing a lead or bass than chords. Songs tend to start simple, with two chords, and them build up. The last songs, 'Babyface' and 'Daydream Believer' have lots of chords. It's all good training.

The day was exhausting to me, however. I feel I'm still recovering from my cold. We stopped off in Sandbach on the way back, and when home Deb recorded some Fall in Green vocals. I had time to eat, followed by a reasonably late night watching the last part of 2001: A Space Odyssey; a wonderful work of brilliance. The film isn't a story as much as overall spectacle, an artform to be felt and experienced in an indescribable way. It's cinema at its best.

At the end of the day, I ordered a muffler for the microphone. Life is about making tiny steps forwards, or preserving previous forward steps. We can't really tell if a step forwards is forwards or not, so we must also boldly experiment and try new things. Buying the muffler might be one such positive step, a small step forwards. It may improve audio recording by 1%, it may not. That may be the only positive step of the day.

I slept badly and have struggled to do anything well today. I decided to program two audio effects, initially to settle my mind and body, but it's taken all day. The first effect was a boost to a specific frequency; like a band-pass filter with amplifier. A new element here is that the key frequency is removed from the source, so I can turn the frequency down as well as distort it. That might make it useful as a de-esser.

The second effect was a legato effect that engages with the sequencer to automatically fade the volume between notes. Here it fades between 'tones', which are events which change the pitch but don't re-trigger the sound, as in samples. This particularly applies to strings, and some woodwind instruments which have an attack, but a tail which can be bent. The effect is common in scoring (a slur), but it can be hard to make it sound natural in a sample, it tends to warble in an odd way, so this effect fades it out a bit, then in again when the pitch changes. It doesn't fade the start of the note (the attack), only the changes.

I spent a long time striving for the option to fade in at one rate, and out at another, but it was futile, and perhaps not very useful. Then I added a setting to attenuate the power of the effect, as a subtle fade often sounds better than in the dramatic example pictured.

Well, that effect is all I've done today. Two days of work for tiny, tiny steps.

Too Lonely Composition and Production

A full day of work in one new song. 'The Paper King' can't really be adapted to another song easily, so I decided to rework many parts and the broad chord arrangement, but change a lot, including shifting the entire song up 5 semitones. For lyrics, I chose my most recently written song, 'She Held My Hand Under The Desk'. As with all of my songs now, I write the words only, then later fit music to them. To think up a tune and words tends to lead to writing the same song over and over, but this poetic method creates better lyrics and is more challenging.

In this case the original words were:

She held my hand
Under the desk
I was too shy
But I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of her love

If only I'd known
How lonely I'd be
The love I could give
The love I should have given.

Years later I discovered
She killed herself
Perhaps too lonely
As I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of her love

If only she'd known
If only she knew
the love we could have shared.

Only I know
the love we could have shared.

I started to fit them into the chord arrangement, and it worked surprisingly well. I had to move some lines into other lines to make everything fit, and change the odd word for scansion. The words are now:

She held my hand
Under the desk
I was too shy
But I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of her love

If only I'd known
How lonely
I'd be, the love
I could have given
I should have made

In passing years
I found out
Took her own life
Perhaps too lonely
As I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of our love

If only she'd known
If only
She knew, the love
We could have shared
We could have made

And only I know
I only
The loss and the love
We could have shared
We could have made

We could have made
We could have made

The only real accompaniment is an analogue-saw based bassline, which was crafted to fit the melody and give it some rhythm, and a lead synth instrument which acts like a sub-melody. There are some stabbing chords, and a gentle pad sound for the chorus. Unlike 'The Paper King', the melodic lines are adjusted for the circumstance. One thing that's recently grown in my music is the use of standard, staccato, and long sustain versions of each instrument to convey feeling. This is partly the result of my scoring and study of scores. Staccato and sustain can really transform a feeling, and here the bass and main lead have those three versions of each instrument to convey rhythm. The drum pattern, by comparison, is ultra-simple and has almost no bearing on the song rhythm. Rhythm is conveyed by the melodic lines; the whole song sings and dances.

In style and substance, it sounds, as I've said, something like a Yazoo or Alphaville track; perhaps closest to my songs like 'House of Glass'.

I'll complete and record 'The Paper King' too, even though the words and music are silly, and ancient, and simple. 90% of that song is complete, so it won't be much work, and it's very much of its time compositionally, so it can be (like 'Written on Rice') a reflection of those times.

Music Work

Lots of music work today. Completed the string arrangement, flutes and distorted mock-guitars for 'Written On Rice'. Apart from vocals and a lead (live) guitar part, this is largely done.

Then, started work on lots of little tunes, and worked on fragments and older songs. I've revisited a song from that time (2002) called 'The Paper King'. The lyrics area piece of silliness about a paper world where the king is the only person with a pencil (inspired by the old proverb that in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king). The tune though, however simple, is catchy and bouncy and fun. The song 'Robot', added to We Robot, wasn't that far off in date terms to the origin of this one. This too has a simple up-down-up bass, and lots of analogue sounds, so it sounds a bit like a Yazoo track (and indeed my other music from that time, like those on The End And The Beginning). I need new words for it I think, though this is a backwards way of working for me; I prefer to start with an image and create music and words from that. Still, variety of style and content is important. We can only push ourselves by doing things that we don't usually do, and we can only improve by pushing.

I've also started a basic sequence for the first Light Bulb song, and a second idea, a nice rock beat to build a feeling from; plus lots of work on a song called 'Bye Bye Spotify', though the mood is light and whimsical, a bit like The Beatles' 'Her Majesty'.

Written On Rice

I've plunged into music. I'm full of musical ideas; this is now my default method of artistic expression, and I'm enthused about studying scores, and about becoming a better piano player. The downside is that visual art would perhaps be easier to promote, and that a need to write a book too. Music, at this moment in global culture, is ubiquitous, somewhat underrated as an artform as a result, and extremely difficult (or impossible) to succeed at commercially. There are a thousand other reasons why I shouldn't spent all of my time on music; yet, at this moment, it is my passion.

Still, this month I have some paintings to paint (it's still a little dark and cold for this), and ideally a book to write.

I've written some musical notes for a piece called 'The Light Bulb 1', a series of three poems/texts about a doomed relationship and heartbreak. The subject, and style is utterly uncommercial, and perhaps close (in my mind) to some of Björk's avant-garde works. Still, the words are written and I really should do something with them.

Today, however, I've revisited an early song called 'Written On Rice'. It's a long and complex pop song in the style of The Beatles' 'I Am The Walrus', and was originally going to be part of a broadly anti-Christian EP. Ultimately I only sketched an intro called 'One Dream Is All it Takes' (I've lost this, I think I sketched it in Noise Station 1); and this song. All of this was begun in Nov 2002; 23 years ago.

Today I've revisted the song and have worked solidly on it for 8 hours. I've added new drum, bass, and piano sounds, and re-sequenced (composed, that is) all of those. Back then I used one note for the bass, a super-simple drum pattern that was as good as a loop, and a very basic piano. Now, I make each voice play along with the melody, and interact with each other, so the composition is much more complex. My voice, and my understanding of vocals, is utterly different from 2002 too. This version is that is raised by 5 semitones as a result of this knowledge, and is now in F rather than C.

Those three parts have taken all day so far. This is one problem with charging into music. It all takes me such a long time now. It takes a long time because the work is harder, more complex, more involved.

In 2002, Prometheus couldn't play this tune at full speed, even when dramatically cut down with external pre-renders. This, at least, has changed, although this project is one of my biggest songs in terms of number of tracks and instruments.

The Light Bulb project can, for now, wait too, but I plan on working on many projects at once. I work best when doing that.

Illustrations

Completed the illustrations for Deb's new book today. A few works needed reworking a little, and two redrawing. They vary in size and style, from small objects which can be used several times, to full-page drawings. There are about 20 of the latter, there are a lot here.

The lower one is a complex portrait of Sartre and (and somewhat unflattering fragment of) Simone, with bees and honey too...

At the end, the very last act, I managed to spill my entire new and full bottle of Quink ink! These are flat heavy bottles, I still don't know how I did it, but I was at least lucky to have no drawings nearby. This was a blow though. The paper and the ink bought for this project nearly come to £40. I've ordered new ink, a different make this time, to see if it will be better than Quink.

The afternoon was spent scanning, preparing and cataloguing the work. I began at 1pm and it took until 5pm to complete this, almost as long as all of the drawing itself (and I numbered and documented them yesterday). The scans need storing twice, once in normal neutral format, and once cropped, sized and balanced for inclusion in the book. I also need to resize and convert everything for my website, but that can be for a future day.

A final act of the day was to install and test MuseScore4, which it probably better than version 3. There is very little difference, and 4 is certainly worse for a non-widescreen monitor, but it's generally good practice to use the latest version of any software.

Monthly backups tomorrow. I feel tired and need a new project to attack.

Go Sprout Illustrations

A slower day yesterday. I researched art postage costs (nearly £700 to post a crated painting to the USA), attended to finances and practiced piano for 30 short minutes (and researched and mentally practiced sight reading for longer); plus preparations for the illustrations for Deb's new book, including (at last) a comprehensive comparison of the different scanner settings.

Today I charged into those illustrations, and have completed 28 ink drawings, plus 5 or 6 failed attempts that were discarded as I went. Some are better than others, as ever, and I always try to have a mix of styles, scales, subjects. The work of cataloguing and scanning them will take at least a day, maybe longer as there are so many. I'll do that tomorrow, before Deb sees them, as it will save time to do so. All were drawn, as ever, with a Leonardt Hiro No. 41 nib and Quink Ink. I used an SY-85 brush at times for bigger areas of black. I bought this very SY-85 from Alexander Paper Supplies many year ago (well over a decade) only because it had the same name as my Yamaha synthesizer(!) but it's been a brilliant brush, and still as good now as when new. I've bought lots of other sizes of SY-85 since.

Also yesterday and today, launches of two Steam products; a new Sound Pack for SFXEngine, and a new Expansion Pack for Radioactive.

Book Cover, Card, Beethoven's 1st

I slept badly with worries about geopolitics and my sore mouth, which erupted with a (sadly common) huge blood-blister last evening. In the waking hours, in my dark bed I mentally practised some of the rhythms in the piano score. The triplets were interesting: X-X-xxx in a measure. There is a slight 'panic' to them, as though they are catching up. Chained together, that beat makes a 4-in-a-row and I suddenly thought that Beethoven's 5th Symphony was inspired not by four normal beats, but a triplet exactly like this; 4 beats played as 1-gap-3 because it has an unusual urgency like the churn of a bicycle pedal.

The day started with work on the cover for Deb's next book. First, I checked the sizes and standards. The drawings for her last book, Tolstoy, were scanned with a near-white background, rather than grey, so I tested the scanner with various colour settings and worked out the correct ones, making a note. The grey looked better. I still have all of those drawings so could re-scan them, but the old scans are the ones in the book (all drawings are on white for the books so none of this matters regarding the final results).

Anyway, I created a generic template for this and future covers, then took some source photographs in the garden. A first draft of the cover was complete by lunch. I watched the end of The Card, old old film starring Alex Guinness. It's set in The Potteries but everyone had Yorkshire or upper class English accents. I can't recall a Birmingham accent in any old film, and Stoke accents are almost completely absent in culture.

Then, time for drawings, but I realised that I had no white card myself. I messaged Deb and we went to Alexander's to get some, myself wearing a mask in the car with window-open, as I'm still at the tail-end of my cold. Card purchased, we took a short walk in the park, then I returned home.

I calculated the correct sizes, and noted the card sales etc. By this time, it was too late to start drawing.

I practised playing the first 13 bars of Concerto #1, playing it about 40 times. I can now play it at nearly full speed, though rarely perfectly, full of haphazard mistakes, and no expression, a mere clatter. The expressiveness is the last step, possible only when the basics of note and timing and technique are perfected. These 13 bars are wonderful practice. They have everything; a nice mix of left and right hand, some different dynamics, a grace note, some staccato and some legato, triplets and a fast scale. I love it for the technical aspect.

The next bars, for a page or two, are fast arpeggios, difficult for me at my level, but it will be fun to try one day. Tomorrow I'll attack those illustrations.

Prometheus v3.56, First Piano Plays

A slow day of tiredness, perhaps due to my cold, perhaps a necessary time to recharge after several busy days. I updated Prometheus a little, to v3.56. The few changes included adding a feature to automatically extend the maximum song size if loading a song that needed more room; and I switched off error messages during batch conversion.

Then, a first walk outside in a few days, to meet Deborah in the park. It was nice to see the sun after what seems like an endless winter, but nicer to see my beloved.

When I got back I painstakingly slowly played the first 13 piano bars of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. This is my first ever play of Beethoven's actual sheet music. If something like this can be played slowly but correctly, then it's a simply matter of doing it again and again to play it quickly and correctly. The process took about 3 hours and I can still barely do it. I will keep practising, just these 13 bars, for fun, and to learn.

These bars are not that complex. If it were my own music, I could do it in a blink, but it is more complex than mine. I can match it, I can see what he's doing with every note, and why. Until this year I've never thought about composing like that before. This is what all of this scoring, and this sheet music, has given me. Matching it and playing live - that would be a challenge. Oh for the time, the money, the incentive to compose such a thing.

Then I updated all of the Prometheus sequences which used the Bounce Arpeggiator, 23 or so. Perhaps tomorrow I can work on something new. My throat and chest still feel rather raw and tickly, and I feel a tad tired; that's the extent of this annoying cold.

Prometheus Effect Upgrades

A feverish night, but my cold appear to be relatively mild. I'm sore inside and a little itchy rather than congested.

I decided to do some long-planned upgrades to the Prometheus effects. There are three old effects which date back to the earliest versions of the program: Basic Distortion, Maximized Clip, and Reflective Clip. Each is very simple. Basic Distortion boosts then clips the signal, Maximized Clip simply clips at a certain threshold then increases the volume to maximum, and Reflective Clip 'folds' the wave above a threshold, then 'maximizes' the result.

I've long thought that it would be better to merge all three effects into one, so I did this today. The result is faster and more elegant than before (well, it's not faster code than, say, Basic Distortion, but certainly faster than two effects in a row). I've added a few more features too. The sound can be boosted by an exponent, which has the effect of 'bending' it towards the top; a sine wave would become gradually more and more square here. This is most useful on simple waves like that. I've also added a general post-effect Amplitude parameter, as the pure clip of the Basic Distortion, by far the most used effect, is naturally quieter than it can be. I merged some of the code from the Maximizer, and allowed everything to be turned up or down at the end without affecting the distortion.

I also added a new 12-part Arpeggiator, which can now perform scales (yay!), replacing the 6-part first version, and upgraded the High Pass Filter with it's new Q.

The hard and crucial part is updating the many hundred extant sequences (about 500) that use one of these effects. This process can be automated, so I've done that too, thus saving lots of plugins AND adding more functionality. There is a 'Bounce Arpeggiator' which goes up and down. The new 12-part Arpeggiator could replace that too but I'd have to edit each sequence by hand.

Now it's late and I'm weary. My insides are still sore. I hope I can conquer this virus soon.

Scores Updated

The mammoth job of updating all of the published music scores is complete. Some took a lot longer than others. There are still a few inconsistencies. For example, I decided to name 'Saw Synthesizer' instruments 'Synth Saw', with 'Saw.' as the short name, but the short name is sometimes 'Ssw.'. Before now, there was little consistency, such that you'd really need to know the music to know what timbre to pick. The new versions are better in that way any many more.

After all of the changes, and new text descriptions formatted in HTML for itch pages, and new 'screenshots'; there was still a lot of admin to do. I had to ensure that all versions were the same, both filed with the album and in the master score archive. I have an xcopy command which runs via a spreadsheet which will auto-update the albums from that archive, but in this case I've been working on the album copies, because I list them album by album, not all in one lump. Well, all I can say is that it was a lot of work.

In most cases, prior to this update, not a single person downloaded any of the scores. I've made these $10 now. Perhaps if someone wanted a copy, they may pay $10, and it's certainly a little sum if an ensemble ever wanted to perform any, which I'm sure will happen one day, though perhaps in centuries, perhaps beyond my life and the life of itch.io. Well, either way, these are too important, and too much work, to be free.

I've now scored 21 of the 40 albums. I hope to write more new music though, scoring at least one old album for each new one, so it's perhaps not halfway yet.

My throat has been very sore all day, and now, as evening hits, it is less-so but I'm starting to feel weary and feverish; but this virus seems to be very mild. The worst aspect is that it stops me from seeing dear Deborah.

Score Refreshments, and a Cold

Exhausted last night. I felt so sleepy at 10pm that I had to aim for bed, then collapsed and slept solidly for 9 hours. I woke and charged into updating all of the music scores I've published online so far. Most of the time, a new change or standard evolves as I discover different issues or problems. For example, a 'Piano Version' of a song has a lead vocal or lead melody plus a one, or usually two, staves for an extra piano to accompany it; but a 'Piano Melody' has the lead music played by the piano. Many different standards and guidelines evolve for properly presenting scores.

The new changes to instrument order, and more knowledge about the division of instruments has led to a big upgrade in these standards, and I'm at about 50% of the way though my multi-year plan of scoring all of my published (ie. recorded and released) music, so it seems like a good time to go back and update every score so far (nearly all 420 of them) with the latest standards. The oldest ones will need the most work.

Today I've charged into the existing albums on itch and made changes as I went. Scores will now include screenshots, and a list of the instruments that each score is for; so the admin burden of listing them (and updating them) has increased. It will increase again if and when I publish them in print, but I must remind myself that I must focus on making new music as much as updating my back catalogue.

It was early, before noon, that I noticed a raw soreness in the back of my nose, which crept into my throat. I'm certainly coming down with a cold. I think I picked it up on Wednesday.

It shouldn't affect my scoring work, except to add a romanticism to it, evoking Beethoven in his days of illness.

Good Vibrations and Scoring

A full day yesterday. We set off early for the fortnightly Good Vibrations event in Congleton Library. I brought my little theremin, which though not very musical (it has a small range and is never in tune) was a real showstopper in terms of attracting attention and awe. It was a lovely day, as ever, there.

Later in the day I worked on standardising my new scores. The Love Symphony, being my most symphonic of scores pushed me with a few more lessons in the art and craft of scoring, and many of these need applying to older scores. I learn something new when scoring each album. Recent lessons include the divisions of instruments, pitch ranges (rules like basses having C3 as middle C; this is C4 on a piano and most other instruments), and the strict instrument order.

The latter is something I've neglected. Now, when I sequence, I put basses at the bottom, leads at the top, and generally ordering high to low, with drums at the bottom. This order is a consequence of my scoring over the past few years. Older sequences have parts all over the place, generally the more interesting or busy parts near the top. Printed music scores have a strict order to the instruments, with woodwinds at the top and strings at the bottom (for example), and high to low in each group. I've put a 'lead' (normally the vocal) at the very top for songs. Vocals are (in orchestral scores) below percussion instruments and the piano, but most pop songs, many of which are vocal and piano, or vocal and guitar, need to highlight the vocals.

These standardisations are things that have changed and grown over the years I've been scoring my work. I will also need to distinguish between a plucked and bowed bass. Most bass instruments are plucked, even synth basses emphasise the attack, but some, like the bass in 'The Cabinet Of Dr Eckelmann', and 'Challenger', are constant, drone-type, basses. My scores typically say 'Bass' and leave it at that.

All of this will take a lot of work; updating each old score. I've no doubt that, when I complete all of the albums, I'll need to update everything again too. The task seems Sisyphean.

I've spent today applying these rules to The Love Symphony, The Dusty Mirror, and the new Square Spoon scores. For the first time, these will be on sale rather than free, so I also need to provide some images of what people actually get, and detail the instruments and each document. I have 20 albums of scores now. Updating these will be a lot of work, even for relatively small changes. Each album may take an hour, but 20 hours is half a working week. This is an expected part of the long term job of publishing things as best I can, for no money, but because I think it's artistically important and artistically useful to do so.

I also need to start work on Deb's new book illustrations.

Scores Complete

A full day out yesterday, and today completed The Love Symphony scores. Tomorrow, Deb and I will go to Congleton Library's 'Good Vibrations' session. I'm considering taking a guitar rather than keyboard, for reasons of practice.

There Is No Love Score

More long, long tedious work on the scores today. In the afternoon, after completing the last 'Encounter With the Believers', 'Stroking The Harp' and the Awakening Sonata, I thought I'd completed all 9 tracks in draft, but realised that the first one, 'There Is No Love...', was a first, unused version. I wrote that piece first, but later made a second edit and dramatically changed the structure, and ultimately used that version. If only I'd checked that first!

All of this music is difficult and complex to score. It feels like a student exercise and I feel a little overwhelmed with it, spotting errors and things to fix - this is good, it shows progress, but it does mean that things are taking far longer than I'd hoped. Still, my only major task for the month is this, as planned. The program changes to Prometheus are brilliant.

Mr Tarplee commented that I could perhaps use AI for these. It would be a long time before AI was sophisticated enough to do this. Take the arpeggios for example. These are best played as a root note on a synthesiser with the arpeggio programmed. No way would an AI think of that, it would perhaps score each note, but in this case that's not as useful. For this reason, my main score to 'Loneliness And Divine Love' has just the root note, and a separate score with the arpeggios to program. I have, however, also made a full score with each note.

I hope I don't waste too much time on this, but for me it is partly a matter of growth into a new skill too. One day, these scores might be all that remains of the music. On that day, this work becomes priceless.

Valentines and Arpeggio Scoring

A very busy Valentines Day yesterday, starting with a trip to Wrexham to collect my painting from Ty Pawb, plus a walk around the town. It's a larger than Crewe, though about as desolate; somewhat similar in many ways. The Primark shop was the most deserted of any I've been in, a nice thing for a shopper. The mass and tangle of the Chester store is an unpleasant contrast.

After that, a brief attempt at scoring 'Loneliness And Divine Love'. It has many automatic arpeggios which are a pain to transcribe. The simple arpeggio in 'The Dream' was bad enough. The primary saw-wave lead, audible from the start, has two arpeggios: 0-3-7, and 0-12-0-7 and half that speed. So I calculated the note offsets:

So, it's a sequence of 24 notes. The root note changes per chord, so calculating the actual note from a certian root would be nightmarish and tedious. This shows the power of electronic composition to some extent. Nobody (Schoenberg?) would score this complex sequence of semitone offsets, yet it's simple in its core. Complex though this is, it is simpler than the sequence for the bass, which also shifts in timing. It is 0-0-12 in semitone pattern (3/4) but the timing shifts between half-beats and whole beats every two beats. When running it does strange things that I can't exactly score, perhaps due to electronic nuance and the way the timing is calculated. I'll try.

All of this is near impossible to manually score note-by-note, so I started to program a feature into Prometheus which would generate the correct note from a sequence of arpeggio offsets. So, I can feed it 0-3-7 plus a timing of half-a-beat, and it would run through a track, and finding a C would generate C-E-G-C-E-G and so on, until it hits the next note. This works, and will allow me to transcribe these complex arpeggios. I've no idea how anyone else does this, or if anyone else does this. I'm doing it because nobody else does, or can.

I started programming yesterday, but had to dash out to the launch of the Crewe Art Trail, a town event for the next few months of which my mural is a part. It was at the new Crewe Create Hub, and was a nice social event, although we couldn't stay for more than 45 minutes or so.

Then, a nice meal and evening with Deb, and completion of the programming today. I can choose to cycle the arpeggio sequence (note and timing) or choose either at random, so this can be used for interesting and unexpected types of music generation.

Now to score that most difficult of tunes.

The Love Symphony Score Day 2

An unusually lovely sleep. I dreamt of writing a book about sleep, and composed several chapters, only to annoyingly wake up and realised I'd merely dreamt it! One of the chapters was a rhyme about counting sheep. I must write this book!

Today has been a long and hard, but satisfying, day scoring The Love Symphony music. I've now completed four tracks in draft: 'There Is No Love', 'Sunset', 'The Dream', and the last, 'The Eventual Attainment Of Love'. There's a lot to do, and sometimes compromise. There are always parts that can't be scored, or are complex to score.

Most of today was spent working on 'The Dream'. One part is an arpeggio melody with a tinkly timbre. This plays notes at fixed semitone intervals: 0, 0, 7, 0, -12, 12, 7, -12, 0, 12, -5, 0; always in cycle, changing once per 500ms irrespective of the song tempo, but the root note (and reset to the timing) changes regularly. Rather than scoring that, I've scored a simpler arpeggio in glockenspiel of 0, 0, 7 ,0. For timbre, I'm unsure if this compromise is necessary or a good idea, but it does sound closer to the original - my question: should I be matching that, or writing something new and ideal for this new format? I'll make note about the 'actual' recorded notes. There is also a mock-choral part, synthesized 'Aah' choirs. I've notated the notes of these 3 and 4-note chords painstakingly, listing this as a synth part. Again, these are not exactly necessary for playing the well orchestrally; it sounds fine without them. Should I be making something to play, or as an exact record of what the recording's notes are? I'm trying to do both, placing notes in different instruments if needed, so that they are there in some form.

The day started by finishing the last track 'The Eventual Attainment Of Love'. A synth part which plays 7ths (ahem, 5ths that is, to you proper musicians) was redirected into horns (low note) and strings (upper note). The cello had little to do and I felt sorry for it, so I made much of the main melody alternate between cello and viola; the pair pass the music back and forth throughout the tune, a melodic friendship which was a joy to put together. This is beyond what's in the recording, but matches its spirit. Is that my ideal?

The next track is the 'sonata'; though technically it's more like a concerto for piano and harp. This too is a complex piece. Every one takes hours and hours, though joyful ones. I'm reminded why I've decided to notate my albums over the next decade. I could easily take a full-time year to notate them all; if I did nothing else.

Love Symphony Scoring

Charged into scoring The Love Symphony today. It's a tedious and time consuming process, but absorbing. The fact it's evenly sequenced in Prometheus means I can export a MIDI file and work from that. The first and last tracks are the largest; around 10 minutes each, and big enough for full orchestra.

My 'strings' sounds range from low to high, so I must split them between instruments to fit. For 'There Is No Love, and the More I Search the Less I Find' this means 3 violin parts, 1 viola, 1 violoncello, and a bass. The 'brass' is split between a horn and trumpet, which is close though not quite ideal. The brass in the recording is a little like a mix of the two, it's more horn, not so squeaky as a trumpet, but the pitch is rather high. The high notes for the horn and for the flute are right at the limit.

But it fits, it works, it sounds good in preview. I'm scoring with sadness that this is unlikely to ever be performed, and even less so in my lifetime, but a first step is to do this. As with everything I score, it's given me a new appreciation of the music. The end track 'The Eventual Attainment of Love' is much more efficient in composition, so compact by comparison, and loaded with joy. I remember it flying from my virtual pen, writing it's big, chunky sections in no time at all.

Argus v1.52, 20x20, New Paths

Today, updated Argus to v1.52, adding some simple logic to resize the screen with a dynamic quantity of tracks, and markers for sections.

Then entered the 20x20 exhibition at Castle Park Arts Centre. I wanted to take part, so looked for surfaces and registered. When registering I found that I had to enter the titles of the works, so used 'Wikiquote' and the Random feature to find 4 random titles: 'The Magic Of Drama', 'So Many Profound Ways', 'Repercussions Of The Decline', and 'The Days Of Kronos'. This was useful and unexpected. After that, I toned and cut a 40x50cm canvas into four 20x20cm squares, ready for painting. I felt like painting there and then, but was was too dark and too late to start.

I completed the writing about black holes, and considered future goals. I've completed about half of my 2025 goals already. I need more ambition. One key element in art is the love of it. If I create an artwork that gives me comfort and relief from the troubling world; it will do the same for the viewer. Similarly with joy, wonder, or any other feeling; so what we do in life must be done with joy. For me, my joy often follows my actions, I don't follow it; I'm a master of becoming enthusiastic, and I can find anything and everything interesting.

Passion must be stoked to grow.

A Shell Universe: Black Holes And The Big Bang

I had an insight about the universe and its expansion, even an idea about its origins, what happened before the Big Bang.

Black Holes

This stemmed from my belief, stated here before, that black holes are not what is normally considered to be a black hole. That is, not a dense core of mass, like a heavy planet or star, so dense that light cannot escape it’s gravity. My problem with this idea is that if light cannot escape, then nothing can, and if nothing can escape then nothing can fall in either, as that would create a one-way sink; a pit of permanent removal from the universe.

I also don’t accept that a gravitational singularity, or any infinity or point of infinity can exist in the universe; for if one infinite thing should exist, infinity would take hold and everything would become infinite; time space, light, energy, to the extent that nothing could exist except infinity. Atoms via quantum mechanics avoid this very problem elegantly by flickering between existence and non-existence at the correct rate. Any expectation of actual infinity is a flaw in any theory which should predict it, eg. General Relativity.

Stephen Hawking predicted a solution to my black hole anxieties here, at least, where Hawking Radiation emits from the black hole. We will set this aside for now.

For me, if space beyond the event horizon is not accessible, then it does not exist, it is simply a convex boundary to our space. Upon formation, all of the mass of a black hole is pushed outwards to just beyond its event horizon, and it remains there like a shell. The centre of gravity would remain central. From the perspective of this shell, it is a point that happens to be quite large; it has nothing ‘behind it’. The hole of the black hole is literally nothing, and an object falling towards it would be absorbed, crushed, deflected into the shell and never further.

I thought about the growth and shrinkage of this shell. I wondered how this might relate to the universe itself. What if the universe itself was a shell like this, expanding from a collapsed black hole?

Another dimension would be required, the universe would be shell shaped, objects on the surface of a sphere. Objects would move apart as the sphere expanded. One difference between this model and the conventional view is that looking far enough away, we would see our backs, akin to travelling around the surface of the Earth.

The relation of this to the origin of the Big Bang is that a collapsing black hole as big as the entire universe may cause this expansion. Being a collapsed real object, a former universe, perhaps in the style Roger Penrose conceived, would have pseudo-random elements, not be perfectly symmetrical. Different forces would be at play at different sizes, as they are for the boiling matter of stellar objects.

In terms of expansion, objects would move apart at the same relative rates, that is, if the universe doubled in expansion by either method, objects would be twice as far apart. What differences might we detect in a shell-universe?

First, the ultimate origin of the expansion force, and the force of gravitational attraction which applies to the whole universe to counteract the expansion would have a different origin, not in the universe itself but at the heart of the ‘null sphere’. This would mean that distant parts of the universe would be able to communicate gravitationally faster than they would normally appear to be able to, across the sphere rather than only around the sphere’s circumference. Thus the speed of light may appear to be faster; specifically and at most the difference between the diameter and half a circumference, that is pi/2-1, or 57.0796% faster, at most 470,912,891 m/s.

Second, there may be a thickness to the shell-universe. It can’t be infinitely thin, there can be no-more zero than infinity. It may be as thin as thin can be, the thickness of a Planck-length, or it may be thicker, cosmological. If thick, then how may this manifest itself? Some parts of the universe would appear to be expanding faster than others because the ‘outer’ objects would expand faster than the ‘inner’ ones. The speed differences can be predicted based on the ‘thickness’ of this shell. The objects on the outer edge would be moving faster than those on the inner, so the thickness would increase over time; this would be necessary because there would be more surface area on the outer edge to make up. We would see objects in one plane (sideways, along the circumference) distorted compared to looking at the slightly older objects in the lower, smaller edge.

Music Pack Filing, Curtain Cutting

When it comes to any form of success, no amount of brilliance can offset the downsides of social isolation, just as no amount of idiocy or incompetence can harm the popular.

A steady day of work. Before 12:30 I completed the Flatspace Music Pack, set up the store, compiled the tracks and tested them in game, uploaded the artwork and descriptions. After that, I cut the velvet cloth for the keyboard stand drape. It is, I predict, 50mm or so too long because I forgot to account for the gap between the keyboard stand's top and the location of the curtain rod. My mother is adamant that there's no need to re-cut, though it's not difficult. I'm resigned to fate regarding correcting it. My life experience is having no control over anything. Perhaps this is why fate and determinism is my obsession.

The curtain might never be used anyway, and is only a small part of our performances which number one or two per year, usually unpaid and to minuscule audiences; brilliant though we think our performances are. Who would be there to comment on the beauty and perfection of the violet velvet curtain? We must try our best, stoic and careful, each a tiny bit better than before. What more can we do but our best?

A life of performing is hardly satisfying; a life gone in the poof that is human memory. Even so few as one per month would soon drive me mad. Some aritsts like the applause of an audience of strangers but it means nothing to me at all, my only goal is self-improvement.

The day has flown, and on the 10th I've nearly completed all of my monthly goals. I must manifest new ones. Every day my feelings weep and I battle to soothe and reassure them. Making any sort of progress as a human is about the conquest of feelings. We are social in ourselves because we are a collective of cells. When we are alone, we are not alone.

Grosvenor Opening, Keyboard Drapery

A trip to Chester yesterday for the launch event for the 15th Grosvenor Open. The exhibition is unusually starting in February, it was historically April or May. It was different from former Grosvenor Opens in many ways, still reeling from the departure of dear Peter Boughton; the exhibition was his child. It was the first in four years. The artists were crowded like cattle into the Roman Gallery, where the self-gratifying speeches by the council (these sort of speeches are always about politicians patting themselves on the back, if they actually cared about art, perhaps they could increase the prize from £1,000 to £10,000 or £100,000, or perhaps show some art that might disturb the status-quo; of course no government of our times would do either). The awards were read out like the minutes to a meeting with no handing out awards or glimpses of winners, no applause or speeches; and all in the cramped and cold gallery, where the artists in their winter coats huddled.

The exhibition was an usual mix of good and bad. About 25% of the 425(?) submitted works were hung. The walls were painted in midnight blue, not as good as the crimson or green of a traditional art museum. The space felt cramped, but the hanging and catalogue design good . I wore my white 'Arazmax Kane' wig for the day.

We spoke to no-one. I recognised a few names but saw no friends. Prices were unchanged since pre-Covid; which for me shows a lack of touch with the contemporary art world.

I ate on the way home. For me, a highlight of the day was popping in to Abakhan and buying some lovely violet velvet to drape over the keyboard stand for Fall in Green performances. I wanted to make a fixing that I could put over the stand ends that would hold the curtain on a rail; thus allowing me to change the curtain. I also wanted the hole placement to be changeable so that I could make or fit different ones for different stands, because each stand is a different size.

I have three X-Frame keyboard stands: A light Duronic, a heavy Adam Hall stand, and a heavy Rock-Jam stand. The latter two are similar in spec and design, although the Adam Hall allows a top tier. All have similar settings and angles, but not exactly the same. Each has a different diameter of tubing. So, my first job was to measure each one in my normal 'sitting' and 'standing' configurations, and work out the spacing of the corners, and height for the drapery. I did this first.

Then a simple design; a board with holes. I also needed a curtan rod (I had a spare 10mm metal tube), and to make little holders for the rod. I made the latter by drilling into a wooden cube and sawing the hole half way, to make two semi-circular recesses.

Here's the board so far:

I'll need to paint it black, then cut the material for the curtain. My mother has volunteered to sew it, how nice.

Radioactive Release, Tunnicliffe Tune, Music Pack 4 and Superhighway

A day of running in a year of running. Running is my normal speed. Charging ahead. I must remember that what is new is the most important thing.

The day started with a check on Radioactive. The new DLC store was activated, but the servers seemed very slow when I considered activating the main game. I tested the game briefly in Steam, and thought of a small improvement to make. I thought, perhaps, I should slow down the 'victory' screen, as it tends to shoot by, when this is very important. It would probably be a good idea to show results, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, as this sort of thing adds a lot when playing with many players.

I found a small bug, that the USA and Soviet Union messages were swapped around for the victory message, so I fixed that. The Steam servers remained too slow for me to test the game, so I put everything on hold. I then made some changed to Prometheus, refining the look of the new Events List. This has been neatened, with a new colour to highlight notes, making them easier to read at a glance. Here's a screenshot of the v3.53, and the new, neater, event list:

Then, more work on the 'Tunnicliffe' tune, adding some synth instruments, and testing the timing for the vocals. I think it will work. Then I went out, desperately trying to get warm, and to buy food for tomorrow.

Upon return, I worked on the future Flatspace Music Pack 4. I decided to look at some of the old Noise Station sequences, and found a few from my second album, The Incredible Journey; as yet unreleased digitally, though REV Records had a hand-made CD or two back in the early 2000s. I loaded a tune called 'Superhighway', and adjusted the mix. For the first time, I found the lack of compressors to be a problem, so I found myself adding distortion to compensate, and making other balancing changes. Overall, the result is much better than the original. It's amazing how different Noise Station and Prometheus sound, even though the DSP code is very similar. Noise Station sounds more tinny and somehow 'zingy'. It sounds unique. I'll add the the full track to the music pack.

Many of The Incredible Journey tracks have seeped out over the years anyway, 'Downloading' (orignally known as 'Mariner') was used on the Flatspace II Soundtrack, as was 'Catacombs'. 'Challenger' was re-recorded and became part of The End And The Beginning, and 'Autumn' was used on The Twelve Seasons. I think 'Circle' may have been used somewhere too.

I also re-worked and extended a tune called 'Snake Club', made for Hayden's game I think, because that was the name of it.

In the evening, more testing and changes to Radioactive. The new version is now live.

World Disgruntlement, Eye To Hand, Prometheus v3.53

The world is in a strange situation where every country in the world is having the same sort of problems, and despite the many different types of government, the people are blaming their government. Of course, the problems are not the governments fault. Things in the 20th century were anachronistically easy for the common man, due to the efficient exploitation of natural resources. This has now proven unsustainable, so things will become tougher than a few generations have experiences, combined with problematical climate change as a result of the exploitation of natural resources. The ultimate reason for a disgruntled world is a global ignorance about the world and the way government works.

A slow day here. I started work on recording the 'Tunnicliffe' tune, 'From Eye To Hand To Paper'. I recorded the tune with a nice electric piano (the live version was used a flute sound, I wasn't sure which was best; the original concept was electric piano). I recorded separately some backing strings, hoping to fix the timing to match. This was a forlorn hope.

I made some changes to Prometheus. First, a switch to view Note/Tone events only in the Event List. This is because MIDI tracks can be full of Kill and Set Parameter events, which makes it hard to see a melody. This was a big and complex change, and probably not that useful. After making it, I didn't use the feature. I also added a much better one, where Sections are shown on the main time slider:

This is something I could add to Argus too. Sections are zones like 'Verse' 'Chorus' etc. or whatever; places in a song you can define to help with navigation.

I decided to sample the strings and sequence them note by note to the MIDI piano. As of 20:00, these two layers are mostly finished. I use very few music tracks compared to most recording artists, it seems.