Some temporary insights on free-software music

Not there yet, but approaching what I'd like to use.

KXstudio on top of ubuntustudio 12.10 very much does the trick for me. I can either use Ardour 2, recording acoustic tracks only, maybe with the metronome, and leaving drum integration for whenever; or I can use MusE, which gives me internal MIDI instruments (something I'd like to use a little, even though I'm basically a guitar player without a MIDI guitar), and maybe (if I can get SimpleDrums, the internal percussion thingie, to work) even rhythm.

I'll want to use just one piece of software. Used MusE today and upon reentry the connection with ZynAppSubFX (or whatever it's called) was lost. I want to sit down an play if I can.

That said, it looks like the layer of integration provided by KXstudio is a good model. I read somewhere that Debian will have a saner sound infrastructure soonish. We might yet get to the point in which you can download an .iso image, burn it into a DVD, install it into your hard drive, and just use one piece of software for the basic frequent activities.

We've come a long way since, say, 27 years ago, when I used our Apple IIe to write 394 lines of assembly code (that's as close as machine language as you can normally get) which accepted keypresses on the numbers and returned a list of "note, duration" pairs.

I just want the flow I get from playing alone, then playing against my own previous track(s), then maybe redoing the pieces with greater care so as to show what I hear inside, and finally maybe even playing with others if they want to.

Not much of a request, I think.

And it does look like we, free software zealots/fans/enthusiasts, are getting there.

Yay!

Guitar to piano, then choir

I use Linux. Browser, libreoffice-writer, freemind, pdf-reader, and generally not much else. I like to think my system is as free as I can make it, but of course I currently have to use proprietary gear: a computer (acer aspire 5742g), a usb sound card (edirol ua25ex), headphones and an electric guitar.

So I installed ubuntustudio 12.04, carefully looked at the ua25ex manual and adjusted the switches (also checked the headphones, badly tightened cable!), told the "sound configuration" that I didn't want to use the computer's sound system, fired up qjackctl and told it to use the ua25ex card, and then fired up rakarrack (fx on, reverb, tell qjackctl as in the picture), then zynaddsubfx (instrument piano, tell qjackctl as in the picture), then tell rakarrack (midi) ... even ardour 2.8x.

Mostly, I had to discipline myself to check every detail, not accepting that a connection was good until I disconnected it to see if there was no sound, and reconnected it again to hear it come back. I hadn't done this in the previous _years_, and was lost all that time. (Yes, you read that well. Years. I had managed some things, but never this full system.)

My conclusion is: it's possible (tho' the midi is experimental, slow and delayed), I need to make it automatic (drill, baby, drill), and all this could use some usability (not the last mile, but rather the last inch: explain every tag rather on the verbosity side).

More when I've processed the pictures, reproduced the process, uploaded some audio, etc. I'd really like to document this. We users need to document successes, and I know many others are doing that. I mean we need to document whole systems, explained for seven-year-olds. This might help developers, right?

The sound-to-midi feature of rakarrack is experimental. I hope it grows to become something really useful! (Excuse the enthusiasm: I'm 50 years old and I've been waiting for this since I was 15, when I kindly "stole" a family member's recorder so I would have two identical recorders - both battery operated, I remember well - and be able to record a second guitar while the one I had recorded first played out loud.)

Also, I want to document my thinking on how to do, erm, a little bit of song-writing. I'd like to write a song a day for a month, and publish at least one in three. This will take everything from tuning and making backups to designing to recording to publishing. I need to get ready for that, and document it, and feel at ease with the process before I jump in.

It'll be crap, but it will be my crap. And yours, cos over the years a few kind souls created open licenses, software, gear and what not.

More soon, I hope!

2012

A quick entry before being pulled into family gathering to watch 2012 melt into 2013.

2012 was the year of:

Yet more family surgery. All's well now, but was recovery slow & bumpy!

FluSCIM. Heavy, tough, almost toxic weight-lifting. Thanks to a few friends, it's well on its way to being "done and out", so that real business (brutal peer and non-peer review, if I'm lucky) may begin, possibly by the end of Jan 2013.

Edgeryders. Living On The Edge 1, not 2. There's some very good people, of all ages, in Europe and beyond. 2013 should see more of that. Not that I have huge hopes, but if not us (all, or at least many) then who?

3D printing and hackerspacing. Cool. Nice projects in the oven around here.

Music. I've seen beautiful growth, & admitted personal limits. I know where to focus. My own solitary craft. More soon.

I've been looking at the world til it hurts, and focused on not doing stuff.

Helped a bit with the hexayurt project, lended a happy hand to SCIM Greek translation, and taught mindmapping to a fair number.

Open Source Ecology has been good to watch, but what could I actually do?

2013 scares me. Which is why I've been resting. And why I won't be the one to say "let the show begin".

See ya all!

Maps to change the territory

We all know the map is not the territory, and yet we also know changing our minds helps us change the world ... Not all the world, mind you, but just the part within our sphere of actionability: from the edge of your finger-nails towards the center. Yeah, that's where your keys, notepad, screwdriver and phone are.

Maps ... Over the past few weeks I've been talking to people about mindmaps, which has forced me to learn a few things about them (maps and people). Specifically when someone who's tried teaching her kids told me she didn't know what to do when they started growing very large branches, with ideas connected to ideas in an outward spiral, with no end in sight ...

Mindmaps are about self-control and balance. It's (apparently) not the kind of thinking you do when meditating, in which (I've been told) you stick to the center (your breathing, your mantra, whatever) until (again apparently) you're concious of conciousness itself (or something of the sort). It's also not the kind of thinking you do when you explore further and further away, like this lady's kids did, going from content to content to where external stimuli (aka "distractions") will take you. With mindmaps you grow a few central branches, you grab them, and you sort-of fish from them: you stay in place and throw the line, grab the fish, pull the line, throw the line again.

Mindmaps are also about reusable templates - where each template is defined by its main branches. You want recipies? Use the ingredients-tools-procedure-presentation template - useful for any recipe. You want to describe a novel? Use the location-time-characters-plot-style template - useful for any novel. You want to look at people opinions? Use the each-person-their-opinions template (issue as the center, main branches one for each person, secondary branches for each person's real views) - useful for individuals and even countries.

Mindmaps can also help with creative thinking, maybe using two simple questions: what's this an example of? What's another example of this? (I've seen this refered to as "chunking up" and "chunking down".) The simplest example is the car: it's an example of transport, and other examples of transport are bikes and shoes and airplanes. So, sometimes, in a mindmap - or at least in a corner of a mindmap - you start with the leaves (specific ideas) and work your way up to the branches (general concepts), and down again to more leaves (more specific ideas).

So, what's my currently favourite template? My "reusable template for changing the world" (a bit)? Simple: area-wants-haves-cans-first steps.

1. Let's say we pick a small area of interest, like (this was talking with my friend) we want to improve education in our geographical area. We put that as the center of this specific map. (Have other areas of interests? Do other maps, later!) (Please note: not "(narrow) goals", but "areas of interest". Narrow goals are bad for you: you end up killing for money, etc.)
2. What would we want to see, our wants? Maybe we want to see more people learning general future-proof skills, or people teaching what they know to others, or people learning faster and with less effort whatever it is that they must learn to pass their compulsory tests. And we certainly want to enjoy the ride itself, too.
3. So what is it that we have? We know some teachers and some students, and other people who might have resources. We have some links to places students might use to get information from. We know how to use mindmaps, even with software. We may have some room (or, again, know someone who does have room).
4. Next is, what are some things we can do? Maybe we can grow a business (wild idea), or write a blog entry (nice and simple), or create a group of people who might be interested in exploring this kind of interest (I started with one person, and then a few more). We might start from our own learning needs, or from stuff we can teach, or from people's needs if we see a mismatch between what is needed and what people do know.
5. Finally, we look at first steps. All those possibilities - we really don't have time for all of that, do we? So what would we actually do, that's within our sphere of actionability? One or two things at most. Doable soon? We go for that, because - to be honest - all we wanted is to gain a slightly better understanding and then actually do something - and do another map at some other date in the future.

I'd like to do this big time. Maybe with 20 people and a 10 meter x 10 meter mindmap or, ok, maybe a smaller surface. For, you know, some area of interest: one of us invites, a number of us join in, there may be several maps/invitations. In ... 2013? So ... my first step was to write this blog entry. ;-) Then, maybe we can show how this is done in, say, some EdgeRyders' (or "Friends of EdgeRyders") meeting? Or should I start smaller and document that? I'll keep you informed!

Of course, none of this is doable unless enough people (one or more) want to. And if enough people want to, the specific tool may not matter much. But, if enough people want to, then the simpler the tool, the better. What do you think?

I'm not my phone

lyrics etc

Alternatives to the dead mule

I've briefly looked at the "fuck'em" issue.

You know, the possibly ephemeral piece of news about the elected president of a European country outlining the cuts, and how a lady, parliamentary representative of the same party, said "fuck'em" on camera.

She said it while the president was mentioning measures to be taken about long-term unemployed people. (That's the context.) Later, apparently, she said her statement was directed not at the unemployed but at the opposition party. (That's what she said.)

Personally, I've never understood politics too well, and I don't like the part I do understand.

I believe that - not just referred to visible politics, but to power in general, including economical power - there has been an inevitable process. 1) It starts with the accumulation of surpluses, specially the centralised accumulation of huge surpluses. 2) Quite naturally, rodents come around in large numbers. 3) From the rodents, the more aggressive predators are selected. I believe there's no way to avoid that - let me put it kindly - part of the powerful ones will have less ethical restraint than the average citizen. (Which, if you're a cynical, you'll say it's not much.)

To that you add that politics stinks so strongly that average citizens stay away from it. Have you tried saying, even as a joke, that you're thinking about entering politics? Try it in three places, as a sample, and I believe in one or two places you'll be frowned upon in disgust. But don't just believe me, and try it out.

I think entering the politics arena can be needed if done in certain ways, as a group and with clear ways to function. But entering politics through the well stablished ways is quite similar to kicking a dead mule.

Furthermore, to be honest, for certain issues I believe there's no time to see any meaningful results. So, given that each of us does what we feel like from among what we can do, I personally don't see me devoting energies to that kind of stuff in any predictable time frame.

So, then, what?

I think there are three things to do, and I was surprised when one of the people who initiated EdgeRyders immediately agreed, and said she would write her personal reflections about it.

The three things I wrote were: "resilience, networks and ethics". Those are my alternatives to the "dead mule", they are what I'm doing and what I want to do.

The part about "resilience" is crystal clear. I believe there are buildings that are falling and there's really nothing we can do about it. Whether we participate or not in their destruction, they are rapidly reaching the end of their time. We need to protect our heads and those of other people, as much as we can.

The part about (human) "networks" is a more recent interest. For a long time I've felt more at ease with abstractions than with mobilising myself together with other people. But at least I want to understand how human networks work, because they are going to play a very important role.

The part about "ethics" is something that, I just realised today, is among what will survive - together with our vital needs - to the changes that are already underway. Meaning that, if there are "abrupt changes" (and don't ask me to be more specific than that) it may be good to keep a concious - personal and maybe flexible - idea about what's good and what's evil.

My ethics, I believe, is quite similar to hacker ethics: contribute, don't wait, recognise other people's work, respect people even if their ideas look silly to you, focus on solving problems (and creating oportunities) in ways others can use, don't surrender (we haven't even started yet), and try not to be too much of a fool or, by Toutatis, too serious.

Of course, "these are my principles and if you don't like them I have others". :-)

The Acceptable Fairies Observation

I went to EdgeRyders' "Living On The Edge" #LOTE conference, and then the #EdgeCamp unconference.

Just a few days have passed, and I can't properly even think of writing about the whole event, because there's so much to digest. [Some would say there's some humanity to digest, but I'll leave the inside joke for another day. ;-)]

For now, I can only focus on one small piece of thinking we came up with, while we were sitting in a quiet corner of the unconference venue.

The conversation was about "truth". Apparently, we can all see that some things are clearly lies: attempts at deception, even self-deception, good old common bullshit. But "truth"?

I tend to look at this from the point of view of evolutionary neurology. We have brains, our ancestors had brains, and only some of our ancestors survived and had kids. So maybe how our brains work has something to do with our survival?

When thinking about "truth", my current belief is we don't know what's out there, and we just have models, reflections of the immediate world, a picture and not the real object. For example, when there's edible food out there, inside my brain the happiness neurons light up: "that food is good".

But is it?


If my senses work well, the "that food is good" inner light will be correlated to the real presence of calories, vitamins, etc, plus the equally vital absence of toxins and germs. Whereas, if my senses don't work well, I'll eat bad food often, and I'll die before having kids. So my senses, in evolutionary terms, are selected to build pictures that somehow match reality.


Now, that's probably true for immediate, vital stuff: we're wired to see the world "well" if not seeing it "well" can kill us soon enough.


Then, why don't we all see that we're killing the world and each other? Why do we even seem to want to believe certain things?

Looking at it through the evolutionary neurology frame, it looks like we're wired to accept each other's fairies.


Why? I guess because accepting the groups' fairies lets me live within a group, and that maximises my chances of survival. I get my calories from our religion. (Which may be "right" or not.)


When looking at what we seem to be doing to the biosphere, my guess is we'll eventually learn that certain fairies are indeed fairies, but it will be too late. (Or maybe not.)

Now, how do you deal with that? Some times it's easy to see other people's fairies for what they are. We can say "this is a case of fairies' acceptance". Some times, it will be our fairies who get in the way.

The problem now becomes, just how much skepticism do we need, and how do we go about it?


I try to keep myself sceptical of other people's fairies by making sure 2% of the people I follow in twitter are, let's say, people I strongly disagree with. That way I get my daily dose of bullshit, and hopefully that keeps my immunity awake.


Except it doesn't quite work, so I'd appreciate knowing your own tricks. How do we not accept our own and each other's fairies?