In the morning, while I wait for my ADHD meds to kick in, I like to play around a bit with technology to see what kinds of bizarre and improbable things I can make it do. In case you hadn’t noticed…
Here’s one I made earlier:
Disclaimer: I’ll be the first to acknowledge that at this point in time it’s entirely rational for anyone involved in tech to set it all on fire and then decamp to a log cabin in the woods.
However, tech can still be fun and exciting, and do weird and interesting things. I’m particularly interested in generative (algorithmic, not the other generative) music and visuals, devices that you can poke and prod (like the RP2040, RP2350 and ESP32 family of microcontrollers), and run whatever code you want to on - without having to get permission from tech billionaires or government agencies.
Basically,
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A while ago I came across Matt Eason’s Ambient ScotRail Beats, which mashes up randomly generated ScotRail railway announcements with “lo fi beats” sourced from Teh Interwebs. I was curious about how this worked, and discovered that the announcements you hear at the train station are constructed from lots of little bits like We apologise for and Kidderminster. There’s no need to apologise for Kidderminster, by the way. It’s all grown up now and needs to start taking responsibility for its own actions.
On further investigation, it turned out that the audio clips had been made available from ScotRail themselves and could be accessed via a popular LLM training platform. The clips had been catalogued by a cast of thousands (potentially!) via crowdsourcing on a formerly well-liked social network for bird-fanciers, with a nice web-based search interface created by the inevitable Simon Willison as part of the Datasette project.
In the past I’ve posted about attending my first algorave, and since then I’ve been dabbling from time to time with making little tunes using the Strudel live coding platform, and visuals with the Hydra video synthesizer. You can get amazing results with these tools on even the most modest hardware - basically anything that will run a reasonably modern web browser.
Most people using tools like this are probably just messing around and having fun, but it’s starting to feel increasingly like something that could go mainstream. I mean, check out this song by DJ_Dave:
From my perspective part of the beauty of the live coding and algorave culture is that people routinely share their noodlings and remix things that other people have created. It feels like an open by default culture, although key tools like Strudel and Hydra are open source, and you could host them yourself without having to share anything with anyone.
Perhaps the apotheosis of this is Nudel, the collaborative livecoding environment. Anyone can plonk themselves down in Nudel and start making noises and/or visuals by editing or writing new code - it’s like a perpetual jam session, potentially involving Raspberry (Pi). And by default, everyone is a member of virtual supergroup pastagang. I am pastagang. You are pastagang. We are all pastagang. Except some of us just don’t know it yet…
It can be a bit overwhelming to begin with, but thankfully there are lots of tutorials and examples to work, and my personal favourite - really enthusiastic people like Strudel contributor Switch Angel who love to share what they have learned and built. Even if you never write a line of code, it’s hard not to get swept away by their energy and excitement…
But let’s get back to ScotRail. What if we could snarf a few samples from the public collection and use them in a tune? Maybe we could speed them up and slow them down, and “scrub” snippets from the samples rather than playing the whole thing. And this is how Shepherd’s Bush was Cancelled…