612 entries from "Toronto"

Jazz Pianist Reacts to SKATE by Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars

I was once fascinated by the feeling of being moved nearly to tears by a series of chords, yet not able to explain what that means to people without lots of experience making music… Charles Cornell gets at some of this, albeit still talking to musicians, but with more heart-warming enthusiasm than I might display publicly (for something that can seem so technical): it’s clear that he has a strong personal and emotional connection to what he’s hearing, and that this is enriched by a deeper understanding of the materials. As he mentions, there are different ways to interpret musical harmony, but this might be a good way to get a glimpse at how music nerds (like me) hear songs. You might also learn a thing or two about theory, and share his excitement at how this song brings complex techniques into mainstream music.

[People avoid awareness by creating structures and discipline—something that takes care of you whether you are aware or not.]

Let's talk about disaster relief being transformative....

[Disaster relief is like a PhD course in activism: after you've done it, nothing phases you because you have done it underthe worst possible conditions.]

Alvin Lucier: The Duke of York

From Bird and Person Dyning (1972–1973). I skipped the Latin recitation in the beginning, but feel free to hear from the start—either way, try to stick with it for the whole experience. Simple processes and simple inputs over time transform your perception; instead of proposing ‘what’ to listen, the composer guides us 'how’ to listen. The use of stereo is for guiding your attention (if you allow it). As it develops, it feels like being inside of someone else’s trip: notice how provocations create a chain of effects in sound, how it still feels 'organic’ despite being heavily electronic; observe the unfolding of a process, someone playing with their own perception and yours, often leading to surprise without shock.

Let's talk about the thing we missed in Crenshaw's speech....

[Education destroys fear.]

Alvin Lucier: I Am Sitting In A Room (1981)

Speaking seamlessly morphs into ‘room’, sounding ethereal like a vortex has opened, alive and shimmering. Simple production technique on a simple text to create something profound. It takes a magician to create something out of nothing, or maybe just perception… We can always listen more.

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves, so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room, articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

The Noguchi filing system

Paper filing system, where frequently used documents automatically end up together—one can safely archive what hasn’t come up after a long period. Similar to that ‘touching moves it to the top of the list’ paradigm common in messaging and note-taking apps. I love learning about simple systems that are built with the right incentives to encourage what’s natural, without impeding flow. Organization can bring peace of mind and increase cognitive bandwidth, so it’s powerful to achieve this automatically.

Tkay Maidza: 24k

From Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2 (2020). Velvet smooth electronic dance grove, lyrics and breathing slotted into the beat perfectly. Nothing to do here except ride along.

Ayyuka: Maslak Halayı (2020)

Unapologetic and seamless weaving of psychedelic rock, Turkish scales and melodies, prepared electronic ambience and live instruments. Pay attention to the effects, the intensity without ‘loudness’, the microtonal inflections played on seemingly ordinary electric guitar. Tight drumming and a badass vibe throughout the album. My favourites: Maslak Halayı fills me with power; Yukadans is alive, helps body move, cool harmonizing between the two leads near the end; Komalı’s got that pitch bending that I love from some kinds of Arab music; Ah Be Baba is an adventure filled with sudden turns and odd meters.

[They might not be taking into account that natural remedies likely work better in the original environment, not as well in Canada.]

[Only what happens to you is real. Avoid borrowed knowledge.]

[Knowledge, like a drug, gives you a hallucination of knowing.]

[Logic has never led anyone to truth.]

[People are scared of meditation because it is a death of the self through non-being.]

[Nothingness exists without support or creator.]

[Your memories are your notes.]

[My book is in my body.]

[If you don't know how to explain something, emotion can be an entry point.]

Ghar ki Mehfil: Chaap Tilak Sab Chheeni (2014)

Great example of music as communal experience: the lead singers invite people in the ‘audience’ (using words, or music and movement itself) to participate—at times it feels like a salon discussion even though it’s mostly musical throughout. I’m not familiar with this style of music, but it’s wonderful to observe singing with devotion intense ornamentation. Fun to see others enjoying music not just in the mind but with hands and much of the upper body. I linked to a part that skips the introduction with many individuals in the room 'taking the spotlight’ to sing, which is beautiful to watch (start from the beginning if you want to check that out). As asides: 1) bonus points that this occurred in Montreal; and 2) refreshing and nostalgic to hear this pre-pandemic performance with people coughing loudly without masks or stigma.

The Halluci Nation: Electric Pow Wow Drum

From A Tribe Called Red (2013). There’s already so much power in traditional indigenous chanting, to add blasting electronic synths and amplification gives it just a little more oomph. Possible to tastefully connect such far away aesthetics. Super simple form, but interesting timbres from metal shakers and leather-skinned drums.

Lyra Pramuk: Tendril

From Fountain (2020). The celestial feeling evoked without words shows what is possible with the simplest of materials: only voice, no other instruments, minimal effects (mostly reverb and echo); the layering of parts to create rich harmonies; a variety of vocal textures, syllables, sounds. There is a kind of static rhythm throughout the whole work, but contrast in the form keeps it interesting. A sublime creation.

The roads to understanding misinformation....

[If a headline provokes an emotional reaction, be on guard. They should pique your curiosity more than convince you to form an opinion. Inform over inflame.]

[Name-dropping like 'ex-Clinton staffer' might be pulling things out of context to create a first question.]

[Quoting a figure like Trump in the headline is a way to defer attention.]

[The context of a poll, how it was collected, is as important as the findings.]

[Meme images are often presented out of context. Use reverse image search to find other places where it's displayed. Some people rotate it to make tracking sources more difficult, so if you also rotate it and find results, you know it was intentional.]

[The words 'seems', 'appears', 'apparently' is an indication of opinion about intent.]

[If the outlet has something new for you to be outraged every day and cut yourself off from society, be on guard.]

LN 005: Associated items

I often find myself glazing over conceptual interfaces for computing because I usually just want to use the thing to see how it feels, but the nice demos on this one stopped me.

The promise of digital systems for me has always had something to do with ‘surfacing the right amount of meaningful things at the right time’. I have approximated this in my apps by requiring explicit actions to surface things because it’s beyond my capacity to imagine how to do this more automatically, and also generally distrust machines to automate this well. So how nice it is to see a vision for creating structures and associations with little friction, more or less by directing your attention. Computers should be good at this while allowing us to tweak things, to avoid relying completely on a black box:

The system can handle most of the heavy lifting by simply paying attention to how we move through our items within different contexts, but we can further manage the associations manually as we like.

Bringing things to view in the way presented here is so much more compelling than clicking around through filesystems or apps. The closest that I’ve seen and used is Quicksilver’s way of 'knowing’ by key combinations and their frequency, but this requires explicit association. Successfully capturing intent passively instead of explicitly makes it so that being a programmer is not necessary.

It’s important to have higher-level primitives baked into lower levels, rather than reconstructing them in each app–this can mean schemas, file formats, or an operating system itself. Your trail or history is valuable and shouldn’t be siloed in or built bespoke for certain apps. How can this be constructed without a universal app for all the things? (or is that just another operating system?) How can this be done in a way where the data is not siloed within this system (even though it seems to afford great flexibility across app boundaries)?