If the minibatch feels like a whirlwind of all the feelings of my first go round of RC, day four is the “it’s almost over, I haven’t done anything, panic!” period of the batch. Today’s song is called Music of One’s Own, referencing Virginia Woolf, inspired by the reference a current batchmate made in her blog post yesterday.
I composed today’s song as background music to my own putterings to think about what to work on, because I was feeling like I wanted to ship something (because clearly, only software counts, not these songs and writings every day </sarcasm but also real feelings yeah>).
I worked with only 808 samples, and am thinking about the idea of applying constraints in live code composition. The other day Aaron and I were talking about how it would be neat to have a live code event where people played sets using other people’s files as the base; I think it’d make for a cool session at a live code gathering.
While this was in process, I puttered online, thinking, maybe I want to cobble together a browser extension? Do some generative art in Golang or something? (I went ahead and fixed up my personal machine’s Golang setup). In the end, I went ahead and recorded my song, updated the DNS so that beats.thewebivore.com points to my music S3 bucket, lots of drama about my Python install, and then realized I was half an hour late to a gathering about reading a paper about an ML model for generating raw audio.
Now, I hadn’t read the paper, which turned out to have been a good idea for going to that gathering (this seems obvious in retrospect). I also got to hear more about this “100 papers in 7 hours” idea, which sounds wild. Someone’s running a session like this at RC soon and it sounds so interesting.
I took a real break for lunch (DeKalb Market! noodles!) and then joined my cool web audio/midi group again for some more progress, working on other people’s machines/unblocking people because I decided to update my OS to the next (not latest) version to try and poke at my Python problem (it didn’t help it, but I some how detangled things enough to get AWS CLI? But not enough to run a virtualenv properly).
During the working session, a couple of us took a break to go to the feelings check-in, which is something new to me about RC — it was pretty lovely? Really nice to hold space for other people as well.
Then, it’s Thursday, so Thursday presentations! There were only a few, I am looking forward to more tomorrow because of the minibatch presentations (including our audio project, likely!!). I did learn about this game where you program elevator algorithms, which I find really amusing.