A lovely morning yesterday at an outdoor gathering with poet friends at the Bridestones. The area is very small, little more than a few boulders in a very wooded area. There's little indication of its historical significance. The day was tainted by the sad absence of Deborah who remains ill.
I returned in the afternoon, but it was too hot work work. The album needs a new track I feel, between 'All Controlled' and 'More'. The latter ends in C-minor, more starts in A-minor. Both a a little too similar in audio mood (not in theme) to tie together, so a slower intermediate track is needed. I started with those chords and played something small on the piano. I then came up with some words that play on the themes of the album generally, and act as a prelude to the satire of 'More'.
What You Could Have Won
Here's what you could have won
Here's what you could have taken home
Here's what you'll never have
Here's what your life could have been like
If you'd done what you're supposed to do
I spent yesterday playing it on piano, the backing is simple.
Today has been a little frustrating. I started with adding (well, enhancing) a useful feature in Prometheus: quantise to group mean time. Most quantisation of notes do so to a fixed rhythm, the main tempo, well, ALL quantisation does this, except mine. The problem with this is that most of the time you don't want a fixed 'perfect' beat in any song ever. The strongest case is in electronic dance music, but perhaps even then the tempo could be slightly changed for dramatic effect.
Anyway, all rhythms since 1984 and the invention of the sequencer have been robotically fixed, compared to all prior music. My feature quantises notes not to the nearest beat but to the average of a bunch of notes. It has the effect of unifying nearby-notes (like chords, like the bass with the drum etc.) but not changing the (human) pace of the music. Here's an extreme example of averaging in action:
The lines are notes. The upper track is unquantised, the bottom one the averaged notes. You can set the width of the effect window. This is an extreme example, but even here it can be useful to simplify a MIDI track for example.
After this I discovered a bug in the MIDI import. At tick 129000 or so, the MIDI import stopped. It was because that multiplied with the wave frequency of 44100 caused an overflow. I needed to multiply it because it's not a normal import, it imports to the exact speed of the sequencer, so backwards calculates the final rendered song in samples, then works out where to place the note! The problem was fixed by using a long long, my first use of a 64-bit variable.
These things have taken all day. I must makde more progress.
How I miss my darling Deborah. One of my happier jobs of the day was going shopping for her on this much cooler day.
