1. In lieu of being able to sing together with people this winter, I transcribed Thomas Ravenscroft’s “Remember, O Thou Man” carol (from Melismata, 1611) into 4-shape notation.

    I left in most of the notational oddities and old spelling, although I did fill in the missing bar in the alto part with what seems to be the generally accepted version. The empty bar at the beginning is necessary to persuade Musescore to let me notate a dorian piece in 4-shape notation — that’s also why the second system has the wrong key signature (it doesn’t look like that in the editor, only the export.) Hopefully they will either fix that soon, or I’ll find a good way of getting ABC notation typeset in shapes.

    Anyway, here’s the score. Enjoy!

    Remember, O Thou Man.pdf

  2. Experimenting with some computational musicology on a vast corpus of traditional music compiled by a friend. Extrapolating from the last few hours, I anticipate the first complete analysis will take 2.5 days to complete on my macbook. Plenty of time to research how to build a raspberry pi parallel computing cluster…

  3. I engraved a rat on my DIY rat pedal, first time laser engraving aluminium. Filling the engraving with paint makes a huge difference, definitely worth the extra step.

  4. Sacred Harp is some of the most exciting music I’ve come across in years, but, being polyphony, you need a group of people to properly enjoy it. Sometimes, once a week really isn’t enough, and an evening in front of a multitrack recorder has to suffice…

    EDIT: I couldn’t resist also recording this parody version. 50% of Sacred Harp is a bunch of biblical and religious stuff but most of the rest, including 209, is pure, unadultered memento mori.

  5. Found this nice ISMLP category page while starting research for a new project, containing enough baroque French gurdy scores to keep anyone busy for a while imslp.org/wiki/Category:Scores_featuring_the_vielle

    There’s all sorts of interesting stuff if you poke around a bit — for example, in Bordet’s Méthode raisonnée pour apprendre la musique there’s a summary of the hurdy gurdy which suggests that extended keyboards beyond the usual two-octaves-minus-high-F# existed, but were “extraordinaire, et peu usité:”

  6. After missing the crowdfunding campaign, I was happy to finally be able to buy a copy of Tobie Miller’s excellent Bach solo hurdy gurdy CD at Chateau d’Ars last week. I couldn’t find any official album artwork on the web yet, so here is a quick scan of the cover, for anyone else who got a copy already.

  7. It is possible, if somewhat awkward, to update the Mooer Ocean Machine firmware on a mac using Wine and a cheap USB MIDI cable.

    WARNING: if the firmware update doesn’t complete successfully, it will not permanently brick your unit (as the update can always be attempted again) but the pedal will not work until a firmware is successfully installed! Attempt at your own risk, and definitely not 10 minutes before a gig.

    First, download the update from the Mooer website. The update and update software comes in a .rar archive, so you’ll need something like The Unarchiver to unpack it.

    You’ll need the latest version of Wine for Mac from winehq.org. I successfully installed the firmware update using 3.0.2. Using version 2.0 consistently failed.

    Power on the Ocean Machine in firmware update mode and plug in your USB MIDI cable as specified by the update readme. Check in Audio MIDI Setup that it’s working and recognised. Then, launch the updater using Wine. Select the firmware update file, then click “Update”. You might get a popup window helpfully saying “MIDI Device Error!!”. Try pressing Update again, if you’re lucky it will work. If not, open Terminal and try the following solution.

    The problem with (old versions of) Windows, Wine and this updater program is that they rely on the “MIDI device mapper” utility to decide which MIDI device to use. This would be fine, but under Wine for Mac there’s no easy way of seeing a list of devices or configuring which device to use.

    It is possible to change the default MIDI device used by the MIDI mapper, by creating a text file with the following code:

    REGEDIT4
    
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\MIDIMap]
    "CurrentInstrument"="#1"
    

    #0 is the default device, so start at #1.

    I saved mine in MMap.ini. Then, run the following command:

    wine regedit MMap.ini
    

    and re-open the update app. If after two presses of Update you still get “MIDI Device Error!!”, then quit the updater, change #1 to #2, run wine regedit MMap.ini and try again. Repeat until successful. Yes, the update process sucks.

  8. Recently scanned some album covers I couldn’t find on the web. Here they are, to save the work for any other fans of similarly obscure music:

    Seitti, Brelo

    Tanz', Duo Haertel Wascher

    Eetu Klemetti - Kampi-Klemetin nuottikirja

    Gregory Jolivet - Alt'o solo

    Marylin Tucker & Paul Wilson - On The Tide

    Marylin Tucker & Paul Wilson and friends - Dead Maid’s Land

    The Cornwall Songwriters - The Cry of Tin

  9. I built an Ambika to join my family of Walnut Mutables!

    I messed up the LED holes in this one, but the laser engraved front panel graphics and text came out really well. The back panel is acrylic so I can admire my electronics handiwork and Emilie’s amazing design any time.

    I took the opportunity to give my Shruthi a knob upgrade, too.

  10. ♫ Folded Peaks

    beneath every surface the gnarls of a
        biological
            geological
    lifetime, revealed in passing by passing surfaces
    sudden depths, a scream erupting
    unexpectedly, harmony

    Walnut Ambika + Colorsound Overdriver

  11. Put my Shruthi XT back together after the final missing piece for the 4PM filter board upgrade arrived, complete with its fancy new laser cut walnut panel! The whole case is now solid walnut.

  12. Noticed that, having learned to use the beating effect to tell when two pitches are slightly out of tune, I now can trick myself into thinking that in-tune sounds are out of tune by applying light sine-shaped tremolo to them. Wonder if this works for people who haven’t learned to tune using beats?

  13. ✅ improved gurdy MIDI system
    ✅ improved 3 channel gurdy preamplifier
    ✅ DIY hybrid digital+analogue synthesizer

    After a year of work on the hardware and software, finally all the pieces are in place to start composing!

  14. FREE: ATmega1284p TQFN to DIP adapter boards available for Shruthi/Ambika/open source work!

    TL, dr; I had a batch of adapter boards for the ATmega1284P (a pin-compatible upgrade to the ATmega644 used in the Mutable Instruments Shruthi and Ambika open source synthesizers) built which enable an SMD version of the chip to be inserted into the DIP socket on the MI boards. I now have loads of them and am giving these boards away for free to people who want to work on open source Shruthi/Ambika firmware! I’m also happy to assemble them for a few euros.

    For context:

    Why the ATmega1284P?

    This chip is a drop-in, pin-compatible upgrade to the ATmega644 used in the original Ambika and Shruthi designs, which provides twice the flash available in the 644p. This is particularly important for Ambika firmware development because the stock firmware, and YAM, uses up almost all the space.

    Why not just use a DIP ATmega1284p, if they’re pin-compatible?

    As previously discussed on the Mutable Instruments forums, the DIP ATmega1284p chips have a hardware fault related to the UART used for MIDI functionality which can cause the chip to crash. The SMD version of the chip apparently doesn’t have this fault, and therefore using the SMD chip via an adapter board should fix the problem and act as a drop-in replacement without having to totally redesign the synth.

    I designed this board last month and now have 44 of them. I’m sending some to the developer of the excellent YAM firmware, and will experiment with a few myself, but I have no need for so many.

    So, if anyone’s interested in doing firmware development work on Ambika or Shruthi, or using these for any other open-source purposes email me barnaby@waterpigs.co.uk your address, paypal me the shipping costs if it’s going to be more than a couple of euros, and I’ll send you some boards!

    I’m also happy to assemble the boards with headers and ATmega chip for €8 + P&P per board, if anyone wants.

    Disclaimer: the boards are untested, and I personally have not tested them with the shruthi hardware or firmware! I may not have time to do so but will post my experiences here when I get round to it. Point is, these boards are strictly experimental with no guarantee they actually work!

    Boards in stock as of 2017-11-18: 32

  15. Software upgrade for the MI Shruthi: Visual Sequencer

    One particularly cool feature of the Shruthi is being able to set the mixer mode to seqmix and have the control values in the step sequencer determine which sound sources are active on each step. The problem with this is (or, was!) that, even with the clever binary-based approach for determining how combinations of sound sources map to hexadecimal (0-15) values, it’s incredibly hard to remember the mappings.

    I spent an hour or so trawling through the synth code, and documentation for the LCD module, before managing to create a version of the software which, when the mixer operator is set to seqmix, replaces the 0-f step sequencer view with a two-line visual step sequencer, where the four lines from bottom to top represent osc2, osc1, sub and noise*

    The controls for the view are exactly the same as before, i.e. pretty unintuitive, but this visualisation of the sequence data makes designing patterns way easier than before.

    Here’s the software, as .hex and .syx for flashing or SYSEX dumping:

    shruthi1-102-b01.zip

    I originally wanted to have this view all on one line, by creating sixteen custom characters, one representing each combination of sound sources by a bar of pixels. Unfortunately, the HD44780 LCD module only supports eight custom characters, and the Shruthi already defines all of them. I got around this by spreading the display over two lines, reducing the number of characters needed to four, and taking advantage of the “=” default character as the “11” character, and the blank space as the “00” character. I then replaced the two decorative custom characters used on the Shruthi splash screen with single bar characters based on the “=” for “01” and “10”. Finally, in the Editor::DisplayStepSequencerPage function in editor.cc, I made a conditional block based on the state of part.patch().osc[0].option (the non-intuitive location of the mixer operator), displaying the two-line visual view if it’s set to OP_PING_PONG_SEQ.

    This is the first of several UI upgrades I plan on making to the Shruthi firmware, depending on how much I can tolerate working on old embedded code in a language I barely know!

    *according to the shruthi manual, osc1 and osc2 should be the other way round, but that’s how it ends up working so I accepted it as it is.