Grey Patterson
Watch on YouTube
Hannah Terrell, alto; Koa Tomich, bassoon
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson, 1755
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Project Happy Days
Sophia Reinhardt
Project Happy Days for Two-Channel Fixed Media (2017) emerges from a creepy texture that develops into a peppy exploration of recorded audio, distortion effects, spatialization, and several software synthesizers native to Logic Pro X. The title is a bit of a misnomer: upon reading it before hearing the piece, one would expect a happy tune; instead the piece opens with the distressed wailing of sirens. However, a happy little melody does emerge eventually, playing over the sirens and pushing them to the background. This interplay stands as a metaphor for the way in which happiness can be achieved despite not-so-happy situations.
This piece was created in the Composers’ Studio at Linfield College using Logic Pro X software synthesizers and pre-recorded audio.
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bioluminescence
Grey Patterson
Watch on YouTube
Kristen Huth, vibraphone; Pedro Graterol, viola; Hannah Terrell, cello; Keelan Wells, mixed percussion; Sophia Reinhardt, conductor
Bioluminescence is inspired by the experience of diving in Puget Sound after sunset. The water swells to life with bioluminescent microorganisms – every move you make is trailed by a swarm of glowing blue lights.
The piece follows the course of a dive – walking from the shore to the water, swimming out to the dive site, and then the descent. Underwater is a very different world compared to our normal lives; you can see your own breaths drifting away, or get a taste of what it’s like to walk on the moon. But in the end, returning to the surface is a must; accordingly, the piece comes to a close with a mirroring of the opening motions.
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GSV Empiricist
Grey Patterson
The GSV Empiricist, or General Systems Vehicle Empiricist is a ship in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series of novels. In its first physical appearance, the Empiricist is described as having “no single outer hull surrounding [its] hundreds of individual components, just colossal bubbles of air held in place by field enclosures.” And it’s enormous:
Comfortably over two hundred kilometres long even by the most conservative of measurement regimes, fabulously, ellipsoidally rotund, dazzling with multiple sun-lines and tiny artificial stars providing illumination for motley steps and levels and layers of riotous vegetation – belonging, strictly speaking, on thousands of different worlds spread across the galaxy – boasting hundreds of contrasting landscapes from the most mathematically manicured to the most (seemingly) pristinely, savagely wild, all contained on slab-storeys of components generally kilometres high.
In short, it’s a mobile city with a population of ten billion, and I wanted to try to capture a little bit of that scene here. In truth, exploring a space this vast would take hours, even moving incredibly quickly, so I composed the work from the perspective of a static drone, observing the passage of this behemoth. The piece moves throughout the ship, bringing forth several novel acoustic spaces.
(Both quotations are from Iain M. Banks’ The Hydrogen Sonata.)
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The Capstone Series
As I’ve mentioned, I’m in the process of wrapping up a four-year pair of degrees: a BS in computer science, for which I built and released an iOS Application, and a BA in music with a focus on composition. My capstone project for the latter was to put together a concert of pieces that I’d composed; rather than do that alone, I joined forces with one of my fellow composition students, Sophia Reinhardt.
Between the two of us, we managed to do it, creating enough music for an entire concert. I’m still a little amazed, to be honest; putting together a concert is a lot of work!
It’s done, now, and after taking a bit of time to catch my breath, I’m following it up by creating a digital version that I can share with the folks who couldn’t make it in person.1
Since the majority of the pieces were done as digital audio, this actually isn’t all too hard to do, just a matter of putting together information about them and getting the files compressed into MP3 format and whatnot. For the pieces that were performed live, we were able to get video and audio recordings, and I’ve done my best to put them together in a nice way.2
This post will serve as the index; I’ll be releasing the rest one a day for the next ten days. Each post will include some information about the piece, including which of the two of us composed it, who performed the live pieces, and what the program notes for it were.
Without further ado:
1. GSV Empiricist
2. bioluminescence
3. Project Happy Days
4. A Prairie
5. One Giant Leap
6. flight,
7. somnus
8. Halcyon
9. Five After Six
10. Variations on the Theme of Life
- Friends and family that live in other states, for example; turns out plane tickets are still expensive, and science still hasn’t figured out how to build teleporters. Somebody should get on that. ↩
- For reference, I’m writing this post before I’ve actually done that bit of video editing, so hopefully Future Grey will have done a good job. ↩
Diane Duane
I don’t think I’ve done a review of one of Diane Duane’s books on here before, but that’s not for lack of reading them — it’s just that I’ve been reading them since significantly before I had a habit of writing book reviews, or even a blog at all. The Young Wizards series is something I’ve read and reread and reread again; I’ll pick up one of the books for a reread almost as often as I reread Tamora Pierce.
A quick bit of context, then: the Young Wizards series is set in a universe1 where wizardry is real, and has a very distinctive purpose: slowing down entropy. Wizardry is based on language; wizards learn a special language, the Speech, that was used by the gods to create the universe. With those abilities, they fight the good fight, acknowledging that, yes, one day entropy will win, the universe will die… but they’re not going to let that happen any earlier than it absolutely has to.
The Big Meow is the third in a spin-off trilogy of sorts, following the team of feline wizards that maintain the worldgates at Grand Central Station.2 As in the second book, though, they don’t spend much time on their home turf; most of the book is set in Los Angeles, and there’s some fun to be had as they try to get used to the West Coast style.
Perhaps my favorite thing about the book, though, is how well it handled a certain issue: representation. The protagonist is a cat, and Duane does an excellent job of guiding the reader through that mindspace, through the different perspective given by an interspecies difference. The part that stood out to me, though, was how this, as a side effect, made for a surprising bit of queer representation. Rhiow, the protagonist, was fixed; as a result, this book, written before the word ‘asexual’ had even begun to enter into the public sphere with ‘gay’ and ‘bisexual’ and everything else under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, has an asexual protagonist. The first two books did too, and it feels entirely natural; Rhiow just has a different perspective on certain things, and cracks a few jokes about it with her coworkers. It’s not treated as a big deal at all.
In this book, it becomes a bit more of a focus, as we get a bit of a love interest subplot. And it’s handled quite well: there’s a bit of angst about the whole “I’m fixed and that makes me broken” thing, but her friends are quick to give her a loving whack upside the head, and help her stop seeing that difference as a negative and instead as just a difference. It is, possibly, the best bit of asexual representation I’ve ever read, and it’s quite touching.
Plot-wise, I think I enjoyed this one more than either of the others in the trilogy; the first goes a bit weird in places, and the second has a very cool setting that gets a bit confusing. This, though, doesn’t get lost at all, and the storyline is fun and beautifully creepy. It’s a bit fitting that this book, the one set in and around Hollywood, feels absolutely the most cinematic of the three. I’d totally recommend giving it a read.3
(And, while you’re at it, go read the rest of the series — the Young Wizards books are amazing. Pick up the New Millenium Edition box set, it’s totally worth it.)
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Playlist of the Month: April 2018
This month’s playlist is pretty short, which is possibly related to the fact that I’ve listened to something like 150 episodes of a new podcast’s backlog in the past couple of weeks.
Coming Down – Bon Iver
Silence (feat. Khalid) – Marshmello
Lost In the World (feat. Bon Iver) – Kanye West
Punching in a Dream (Stripped) – The Naked and Famous
Free – Kidswaste1
In The Flames – DJDS
I Like Me Better – Lauv
Opps – Vince Staples, Yugen Blakrok
No Church in the Wild (feat. Frank Ocean & The-Dream) – JAY Z & Kanye West
Seaside – Haux
Caves – Haux
Homegrown – Haux
The War – Haux
Friends (Under the Influence) – Majik
27 – Majik
Love Lies – Khalid & Normani
Talk to Me – Majik
Save Me – Majik
How It Is – Majik
Paralysed (Skeleton Mix) – Majik
It’s Alright – Majik
Kings and Queens and Vagabonds – Ellem
The Weight – Amber Run2
Beretta Lake (Listen2Liri Remix) [feat. SAINt JHN] – Teflon Sega3
Bloodsport – Raleigh Ritchie
Praying – Pentatonix4
- Proud moment this month: had this song playing on the speakers, overheard my roommate asking Siri what song this was. ↩
- I haven’t actually listened to the rest of this EP yet, and I need to get around to it, but iTunes is having Issues with it and I haven’t had the time to fix that yet. ↩
- I’ll take “songs I found because I somehow followed an EDM Bro(TM) on Instagram and he posts stuff to his story” for $500, Alex ↩
- It took me… longer than I’d like to admit to figure out why this was familiar. I’m mad at myself for disrespecting Kesha like that. ↩
David Eagleman
I believe I added this book to my wish list back when CGP Grey talked about it, either on Hello Internet or Cortex. It’s an interesting concept, explained succinctly in the title: a collection of (very) short stories about what happens after you die. I’d actually read one before, way back when it was published as the one-page science fiction short in the back of Science magazine.
To be honest, the book was an enjoyable read, but a very quick one; for the price, I think I’d recommend checking it out from your local library.1
- Also, y’know, I recommend supporting your local library in general. They’re a wonderful resource. ↩
Edited by Randall Packer & Ken Jordan, with a foreword by William Gibson
As a well-documented computer nerd, I’m honestly kinda amazed I’d never stumbled across this book before. It’s an impressive collection of titans of the field — Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, Vannevar Bush, Tim Berners-Lee, and so on.1 Other than the foreword, there’s nothing truly new in this book,2 but the essays are downright formative. Bush’s essay, written in the wake of the Second World War, describes what is recognizably a smartphone; Berners-Lee’s describes the foundation of what would become the internet. Looking back, it’s a fascinating read — hindsight is 20/20, and all that. It’s a cool book, give it a read.
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“Personalized Hey Siri”
Apple Machine Learning Journal:
In addition to the speaker vectors, we also store on the phone the “Hey Siri” portion of their corresponding utterance waveforms. When improved transforms are deployed via an over-the-air update, each user profile can then be rebuilt using the stored audio.
The most Apple-like way to continuously improve that I can think of. More interesting, though, is this bit later on:
The network is trained using the speech vector as an input and the corresponding 1-hot vector for each speaker as a target.
To date, ‘personalized Hey Siri’ has meant “the system is trained to recognize only one voice.” That quote, though, sounds like they’re working on multiple-user support; which, with the HomePod, they really should be.
Annejet van der Zijl
I’m not a big history person; if you haven’t noticed from the sort of things I tend to review, I like my books distinctly fiction. This one was a bit of an accident — as a Prime subscriber, I get a free Kindle book a month, and this seemed the most interesting of the available choices. Which, to put it lightly, was pretty accurate.
Since it’s a biography, it’s a bit weird to try to summarize at all, because anything interesting feels like it’d be spoiling a surprise. Rather than doing that, I think I’ll just leave you with the title of this post, the title of the book, and a note that I can happily recommend it, because it was a heck of a read. She had a wild life.
Tap here to download the app on the App Store!
I have always been fascinated by the emergent properties of mathematics: simple rules create complex structures. When you get down to it, this is how all of our modern technology works. Variations is based on that concept and was composed for performance through an application written for the iOS® operating system.
At the core of the application are cellular automata based on Conway’s Game of Life (1970), which is a grid where each square is either ‘on’ or ‘off’ and follows a strict set of rules. A square that is off (‘dead’) can become alive (be ‘born’) if it has the right number of living neighbors. A square that is alive can die if it has too few (loneliness) or too many (starvation) living neighbors. The rules are simple, yet they can create astonishingly complex patterns; there is an entire field of mathematics devoted to studying these patterns, Automata Theory.
Variations allows these patterns to play out both visually and aurally. Tap the screen to allow the grid to move through another cycle of living and dying, or just listen to the music created by a single frozen moment. No two people will ever hear the same set of sounds: the starting point for the patterns, as well as their evolution, are uniquely generated every time the Variations application is run.
Christopher Steiner
At some point, I’ve probably mentioned that I’m a computer guy. If not, hopefully you’ve been able to figure it out just by reading along; it’s probably a safe bet that only a computer nerd would make an app.1
Fairly often, this means I get to explain things to people in a less incensing way than they’d first heard about it.2 This book… did not do that. It was intended to be calming, but as a person who lives in a capitalist society, it’s a bit unnerving to see how quickly things that used to be jobs are being eaten by computers.3
That said, it was a fascinating read — I’d never heard of some of the things being talked about, not because they failed and disappeared, but because they succeeded but are borderline invisible.4
And, of course, it’s an interesting history of how the finance industry made themselves entirely redundant, all while arguably slowing the pace of human progress. Ah, banks.
Anyways, go read the book.
- Yes, I am still in shameless self-promotion mode, thank you for asking ↩
- Looking at you, “Apple is making your iPhone slower” thing ↩
- And yes, I say this as somebody whose entire career path is basically going to be “helping the computers eat more jobs, faster.” ↩
- Call center software that picks which agent to route you to based on your personality type so that you’ll be a happier customer at the end? I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t just read its origin story. ↩
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Playlist of the Month: March 2018
The other day I walked by the park and saw a man trying to play frisbee with himself, and I can’t tell if that’s more or less sad than the fact that I spent all of Spring Break at home doing homework.
Starboy (feat. Daft Punk) – The Weeknd
Coming Down – Bon Iver
Silence (feat. Khalid) – Marshmello
Lost In the World (feat. Bon Iver) – Kanye West
Say It First – Sam Smith
Punching in a Dream (Stripped) – The Naked and Famous
Free – Kidswaste
Down – Marian Hill
Cheap Thrills – Boyce Avenue
Daya – Lane 8
This Is What You Came For – Boyce Avenue
We Don’t Talk Anymore (feat. Selena Gomez) – Charlie Puth
In The Flames – DJDS
I Like Me Better – Lauv1
Move Along – The All-American Rejects2
Avril 14th – Aphex Twin
Redemption – Zacari, Babes Wodumo
Opps – Vince Staples, Yugen Blakrok3
Heads Will Roll (A-Trak Remix) – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Everyday, Everyday (feat. Nevve) – Manila Killa
Begin (feat. Wales) – Shallou
Breathe (feat. Ina Wroldsen) – Jax Jones
No Church in the Wild (feat. Frank Ocean & The-Dream) – JAY Z & Kanye West4
Seaside – Haux
Caves – Haux
Supernova – Ansel Elgort5
Savage 2.0 (feat. Nessly & Nyne) – Paces
Homegrown – Haux
Shape of You – Ed Sheeran
The War – Haux
By My Side (feat. Tedy) – MitiS
Final Song – MØ
Friends (Under the Influence) – Majik6
27 – Majik
Love Lies – Khalid & Normani
Talk to Me – Majik
Save Me – Majik
How It Is – Majik
Paralysed (Skeleton Mix) – Majik
It’s Alright – Majik
Kings and Queens and Vagabonds – Ellem7
- One day I’m going to look up the actual lyrics, but for now I’m quite happy with the ways I’m mishearing it, because it’s pretty funny. ↩
- #throwback ↩
- Fun fact: the version in the movie is just slightly faster than this one ↩
- I didn’t realize until I was putting this post together that this was on the Great Gatsby soundtrack. That was a good soundtrack. ↩
- Ansel Elgort is one of those people who I just cannot disassociate from a character he played, and I haven’t even seen the movie. ↩
- Can you tell that I just now remembered that I love Majik? File this under “me, suddenly remembering that I’ve got Apple Music now and can just download every song someone has ever made” ↩
- I found this because my friend was watching some Netflix show about a bunch of queens fighting about catholicism or something ↩
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Fluidics
I made an app! I’m quite excited about it; this is, after all, the sort of thing I want to spend my career doing.
The app is called Fluidics, and it’s for tracking the amount of water you drink. As I mentioned a while back, I like to do a lot of tracking of what I’m eating and how much I’m drinking. That first part wasn’t too hard; there’s a variety of apps on the App Store for logging food, and after a while I was able to find one that wasn’t too bad.1 For water, though, nothing quite worked – Workflow came closest, but using it to do the sort of goal calculations I wanted was on the line between clunky and painful, and it’s such a general-purpose app that it felt visually lacking.
Eventually I remembered that I’m a computer science major, and why am I sitting around complaining about the dearth of options when I’ve basically got a degree in making the dang thing. Months of sketching, programming, swearing, and repeating the whole thing eventually lead to this: what I hope is the easiest water-tracking app on the App Store to use.
It’s been a fascinating process. (Here, by the way, is where I’m going to take advantage of the fact that this is my blog for rambling and start talking about what it was like making it; if you’d like to get more information on the app, I’ve put together a rudimentary website, or you can skip straight to the ‘it’s free on the App Store’ part and give it a whirl.) As it turns out, there’s a whole lot of work involved in making an app; my original sketch was the widget and two screens. Those came together pretty quickly, but I realized that probably nobody would feel comfortable using an app if the first time they opened it it just threw up a message saying “trust me!” and then asked for a bunch of health information, so I wrote up a privacy policy and started building an onboarding flow. Which then ballooned in complexity; looking at the design files, more than half of the app is screens for dealing with something having gone wrong.2
One of the most interesting debates I had with myself during the whole process was deciding what business model to use.3 The App Store has had an unfortunate tendency to be a race to the bottom; while there’s a bit of a market for pro apps, a minimalistic water-tracking app doesn’t fit into that category. There’s also no argument to be made for a subscription, so I’d narrowed it down to ‘free, because I’m turning it in as the capstone project for my computer science major’, ‘free with ads’, or ‘paid up-front’. The first one was the one I was most comfortable with; sure, ‘paid up-front’ would be nice, but I’d also get approximately zero people to download it what with all the free competitors out there. ‘Free with ads’ feels deeply gross, both because I hate online advertising in general, and because I’m doing a lot with health data, and I really don’t want to have any chance of that getting stolen. For a while, I thought it was going to be ‘free forever’, and I’d be justifying it as ‘building a portfolio’.
That wasn’t what I actually settled on, however; instead, I’m going with ‘free with in-app purchase.’ Instead of building in a paywall and locking some features behind it, though, I decided I’d go simpler; the app and all of its features are free. Starting in version 1.1, there’ll be a button in the Settings; a little tip jar.4 I probably won’t make much, but I’ll feel better about it overall, and what’s the harm?
Beyond that debate, most of the challenge of the project as a whole was just building it. I knew going in what I wanted it to look like; what I didn’t know was how to go about doing that. The way the background overlaps the text? That alone took a week of trying different things to get working right.5 A few things I wanted to include in the first version didn’t make it – the widget was originally going to be entirely different, but the way Apple has done the security on health data makes the original design significantly more difficult to do, so I switched it to the current design.6
It was definitely a learning experience, too – I’d done some iOS application design for classes before, but never gone all-in on making something that would be both functional and enjoyable for the end user. If you’re releasing something on the App Store, you can’t just include a note that says “on first run, it’ll ask for a bunch of permissions; just say yes” because nobody will read that. And getting something uploaded to the App Store is itself a whole process – the App Store page doesn’t fill itself out, after all, and copywriting definitely isn’t my strongest suit.7
But it’s done; I’ve made an app and released it to the world. 8 By the time you’re reading this, it should be available on the App Store; as I mentioned, it’s free to download, and I’d love it if you’d give it a try.
- That said, I’m also doing some design sketches for my own entry into the field; don’t get your hopes up, I make no promises. ↩
- I’m not talking “my code is full of bugs and something crashed” went wrong, either; it’s all “the user originally gave permission to do something, but then changed their mind and used the Health app to take it away” and other such nonsense. Computers may be finite-state machines, but “eleventy hojillion” is still a finite number. ↩
- I also talked about this a lot with my friend Chase, without whom I would’ve long ago given up on technology and disappeared into the woods to be a Bigfoot impersonator.. ↩
- Yes, I know, I’m just now releasing version 1.0, and I’m already mentioning plans for 1.1. Don’t worry, I’ve got versions 1.2 and 1.3 mapped out, feature-wise, as well, and have some rough ideas for 1.4. ↩
- For a while I thought I was going to have to write code to draw the numbers ‘by hand’; fortunately, I was able to get the drawing to work by taking advantage of layer masks, but good lord are the Interface Builder files a mess as a result. Behind The Scenes, everybody! ↩
- I do still want to get the original design working, probably as an option in the Settings page of the app; a future version is going to add watchOS support, and I believe that a lot of the work I’ll have to do for that will also apply to making the widget work like I intended, so those two will either be the same or subsequent updates. ↩
- Another shoutout to Chase, who wrote the App Store description and turned my pile of 100 disjointed screenshots into the four that’re currently on display. ↩
- Well, “done”; it’s functional and available to the public, but software, as the saying goes, is never finished, only abandoned. I’ve no plans to abandon this project anytime soon; I use it myself several times a day, so I’m pretty invested in keeping it working and making it better. ↩