I've been busy again

I haven’t posted anything in a few months. The summer has been a little crazy, again. I moved, served a wacky first year in my local school council (LSC), and started a new job as a manager of an analytics team at a large digital advertising firm in the Loop. Unlike the end of last summer, not all of these things deserves its own blog post.

I’m excited about my first in-unit dishwasher/washer/dryer in 15 years, but you probably aren’t. My work entertains me, but no one needs another ‘big data’ blog post. My LSC experience started out a little frustrating, and has only gotten more crazy. I wish someone would’ve pointed me towards this ridiculous news story when I joined. It definitely deserves it’s own post, but not today.

I could talk about a bunch of things and have been meaning to, but between the volunteering, the new job, and wedding/concert season, I haven’t been doing much else. So I’m going to start off again slowly and kick it old school.

The Endlessly Rising Canon

9 years ago I read a book titled Gödel, Escher, Bach and started learning an obscure programming language named R. I was midst of my music career and starting my machine learning career and came up with the idea of exploiting the audio-timescale/pitch-modification connection and applying it to one of Bach’s canons. 3 years ago I finally got around to recording the idea using Pro-Tools and Reason software.

[soundcloud url=“https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/31660614” params=“auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=“100%” height=“250” iframe=“true” /]

While I was and continue to be super excited with how it turned out, my only problem was that I had was that I had to manually cut and paste the track together in the audio software. You can hear at the end of the track the software hitting its limits. It was a little sloppy and my perfectionism has been nagging me that I could do better.

Luckily, last week the internet alerted me to the existence of an audio package for my favorite programming language. This should allow me push the limits of the idea a little further to see if there is, in fact, a ghost in the machine. So in the tradition of all great rockers, I’ll be re-recording old work giving it “a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost.” I’m sure it’ll be great. Stay tuned.