Starthief

it happens every year

It seems like every summer we have an extended power failure. The last two years it’s been right around July 4 weekend, when hot weather with no AC becomes an issue. Hopefully we have gotten this year’s out of the way now…

The outage from the storms lasted a total of 16 hours, and there were no updates at all from the power company during the whole process. In fact the last “update” (with no changed information) was at 3 AM, only 6 hours into the mess.

So Monday night we went to retrieve our rescued dairy products from my parents’ fridge… only to have the power go out again Tuesday as my lunch break from work was wrapping up. This time, instead of small clusters of 10 homes without power here, 50 there, 1 elsewhere, it was one big batch of 1400. My UPS estimated 38 minutes of usage, but it seemed to actually give about half that or less. I waited a little while to see if the power would come back, then dragged myself to the office to finish the workday, figuring that we’d have to shuffle our groceries again. Naturally as soon as I arrived I got a text from my spouse saying the power was back. Then the power company said it was restored.

I started getting a little more used to the sound of those Space 2 headphones, but I found I really didn’t like them for walking around even just for a short while at work. They’d have been completely unsuitable for a longer walk in warmer weather. So I gave them to my spouse (who’s a bit less picky about sound, and just wanted some wired headphones to use for her computer… they do wired as well as Bluetooth) and researched open earbuds.

There are a few categories of designs for them, but the generally favored style now seems to be one where there’s a little speaker blob that sits in front of your ear canal, attached via flexible band to a battery blob that sits behind your ear. It doesn’t pinch but remains both secure and comfortable. Eliminating the most expensive options, almost every reviewer gives top marks to the Soundcore Aeroclip. But a strong second, among those that reviewed it, is the Tozo Open EarRing… nearly as good in sound quality and 1/3 the price (or less!) I opted for those…

…and I’m not at all disappointed. I was listening to Heilung and Client_03 on them at my home office today and didn’t feel tempted to switch back to my studio headphones; after work I gave Stärker’s Spectral (a Bandcamp Friday pick) a first listen while walking around the park. Super comfortable. Decent but not perfect sound — open earbuds can’t deliver much sub-bass. But what’s there is clear and pretty well balanced and doesn’t feel “wrong.” There’s no sound isolation, nor active noise cancellation… but there’s no air isolation either which feels great. The charging case even has a nice LED screen to show its charge level and that of the two buds. I wouldn’t mix or master an album on them, but for a day at the office or some exercise, at this price I could hardly be happier with them. Maybe eventually I’ll upgrade to the Aeroclip (perhaps when there’s an updated version) or even Bose or something.

Speaking of Bandcamp Friday, I really focused on dark ambient this time. In addition to the aforementioned Stärker, I went for Schloss Tegal, TROUM & Raison d’Etre, Kloob. One from Muied Lumens and a live album from Kristoffer Liselgaard rounded it out, and while not strictly dark ambient they’re not all that far off from it either. I guess this kind of goes with my inclination toward a more droney form in my own recording project, but I also turned away a bit from more typical ambient stuff (stringlike pads playing calm major chords, you know the sort of thing).

in the dark

Yesterday I woke up, felt only a little bit blah but sleepy enough to burn a sick day. We had severe thunderstorms morning, afternoon and evening. Our house was within a tornado warning zone once, and my parents’ place was in one three times. That third time we got a lot more wind, some hail and heavy rain, and then the power went out at about 7:20.

About an hour later we rescued some groceries from the fridge and brought it to my parents’ place, since they still had power (and a generator besides). We were joking about how the notification that power was restored would come right as we pulled into their driveway. Nope — 11 hours later and we have no power and no estimate.

I didn’t sleep very well, and wound up going in to the office 45 minutes early for the comfort, phone recharge, and blogging.

I recorded my first track for the new album, and had planned to do a second one yesterday but the weather killed that. I feel like getting back to more of a drone style with this one, since I strayed so far from it with XQSTCRPS.

Those replacement ear tips I ordered were WORSE than the stock ones for getting stuck in my ear — it happened pretty much on the first try and the stuck one was more difficult to remove. So that’s a no. Poking around online I saw several other complaints about the Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro having that issue. I decided to retire them, though I liked them a lot aside from this (serious) problem. Figured I’d try over-the-ear wireless headphones, and settled on the new Anker Space 2. They are super comfortable — I fell asleep with them on yesterday morning — and the sound isolation and active noise cancelling is extremely effective. The battery life also goes way beyond wireless earbuds, but that’s to be expected. What I don’t like as much is the actual sound quality — it’s a bit meh, and though the Soundcore software offers more options than Samsung’s (*), no amount of monkeying with the EQ quite fixes it. Also, like their Bluetooth speaker, I feel like the max volume is way too much and so the volume control at the range I want (handled entirely on the phone) has steps that are too big. But I’ll stick with them a while and see if this is just a “get used to it” thing — and how I feel about them when going on a brisk walk. I might end up springing for some open earbuds (the kind where you don’t stick a silicone or foam tip in your ear canal at all). On the whole, those tend to be less good at noise cancellation and bass response though, so I don’t know whether I would be happier with the sound or not.

(*) it also has more notifications and feels more “in the way” than Samsung’s. They’re very obviously trying to build up brand loyalty and sort of gamify the whole thing and I don’t like that.

Something my spouse observed is that the in-between-size, on-ear rather than over-ear, wired headphones that were super common with the Walkman, Discman etc. and their clones just seem to not exist anymore. I wonder why that is — I think a lot of people would prefer them for everyday use rather than over-ear cans or in-the-ear buds. Isolation isn’t great but sound really wasn’t bad, and they’re light, cheap, and can be fairly comfortable.

After bailing out on that last book, now I’m reading Claire North’s Slow Gods, which is a strong candidate for favorite fiction of the year. I’m reminded of Ian Banks (especially The Hydrogen Sonata, which is my favorite of his) and Anne Leckie. They say science fiction is almost always a critique of the present — but in some stories it’s much more intentional and pointed and obvious, and this is one of those stories. The Shine is very much an unflattering but brutally honest mirror of the modern USA.

I’m listening to Wendy Carlos’ Digital Moonscapes this morning and realized… the appeal of her music to me, especially on this album and somewhat on the TRON score, is the kitsch. The Bach covers? Also kitsch, but I feel like there’s something about the way she composes that just can’t get away from it. There’s some appeal there and a personal style but… the kitsch is very strong here. The way the brass lines so often have that cartoonishly stereotypical dun-da-da-dunnnn fanfare, the overuse of whole tone scales, the way that melodic lines are passed between instruments including tympani that are played like a bass guitar and have extremely robotic 32nd-note rolls, the 1984-era General-MIDI-ass synthesized orchestra instruments. (*) I’d be curious to hear a real orchestra perform it to see how it changes the experience.

With Tomita… I grew up loving his stuff and I can still very much appreciate some of his sound design work and the overall, get-lost-in-the-music vibe he has sometimes. But the more kitschy aspects are somehow more cringey and less fun than with Carlos.

While I’m name-dropping electronic music pioneers, Jean-Michel Jarre has become a shill for AI. For me that’s an instant ticket to dismissing them as an artist (aided by my not really caring much for anything he’s done in the past 40 years). Equinoxe, Oxygene, and Rendez-vous had their enjoyable bits and Zoolook, which primarily was powered by abstract vocal samples and Marcus Miller’s slap bass with some help from Laurie Anderson chewing scenery in a fake language, is still kind of fascinating. Kitsch was certainly an element in those too.

Tangerine Dream though? I don’t feel like they were particularly kitschy until they went full stride into their digital age with Optical Race. (Another album I appreciate for its goofy earnestness.) Hmm.

(*) Actually the Crumar GDS, a rare additive/FM synth similar to the Synclavier but with no sampling, and the almost equally obscure Digital Keyboards Synergy which was a cheaper version of the GDS. Not awful machines for their age, just… they sound like a Sound Blaster card or a Playstation 1 when you try to recreate most acoustic instruments with them.

the stupidity is painful

I just said in my last post I wasn’t recommending The Vagus Nerve Reset, but now I super extra don’t recommend it. I encountered this last night:

It’s a tuning reference value. If you listened to music at 432Hz, it would be a sine wave drone. I like drone music, but I and most other people would be quite irritated by it after a few seconds.
The whole 432Hz tuning thing was based on a really flawed, small study that claimed that participants who listened to music where the instruments tuned to an A432 reference pitch, instead of the international standard of A440, had lower heart rates afterward. This hasn’t been replicated by larger, more rigorous studies.

Also, Verdi wrote that he would rather go with 432Hz because it was slightly easier for singers to reach high notes if the overall tuning is a little lower. But for most of the history of Western music there was no standard, or different orchestras/halls/composers used different standards probably due to variances in the tuning of pitchforks / pitch pipes. Mozart reportedly expected A=421 Hz. 440 was chosen because it matched a couple of cities and was close to others and because it’s a number easily divisible by a lot of stuff — it’s completely arbitrary, as is 432.

And why does tuning refer to A above middle C, specifically? Because the four stringed instruments in a Western orchestra all have open A strings. The oboe tunes with a fork, pipe or electronic tuner and everyone else tunes to the oboe. Why the oboe? There are lots of wrong reasons people give, but the real reason is tradition. Something I encountered as a student violinist is, after a few years of that, I could hear that A440 (or close to it) in my head as an oboe tone, and I don’t even have perfect pitch.

But as with many other things, some people latched onto that flawed study, broke out the numerology and astrology and whatever else they could get their imaginations around, and decided that 432Hz is “the frequency of the universe” or especially favored by Pythagoras etc. (*) And furthermore, because 440 was a German standard, it must have been a secret Nazi plot to demoralize their enemies with anxiety and depression.

* (Pythagoras lived 1500 years before a Persian scholar invented the second. 600 years later, an astronomer came up with a standard way to measure a second. In 1950 and 1967, the standard was updated to remove references to the length of the year, because that’s not constant. The scientific standard is based on “the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium-133 atom” which is 9,192,631,770 Hz.)
Hz (Hertz, after physicist Heinrich Hertz) is cycles per second. 432Hz is… 8Hz lower than 440Hz, not 100. Frequency in Hertz is exponential compared to pitch — to go up an octave you double the frequency. You could extend that 8 Hz difference to 100 Hz by multiplying the frequency by 12.5. 440 * 12.5 = 5500, 432 * 12.5 = 5400. 5500 Hz is a rather flat F8, a bit above the range of a piccolo. There’s not a lot of music written for that range.

I have to wonder how much the author used AI to write the book — either directly, or for “research”. Or maybe it was just human ignorance and failure to do decent research. Given that the book explains polyvagal theory (and doesn’t mention that it’s not at all on firm scientific ground) I’m now questioning pretty much everything in the book. I suppose I’ll keep reading, skeptical of all of it, in case there’s something practically useful in it. It did introduce me to “glimmers” which are sort of a positive version of “triggers”, anyway.

While I’m quoting stupid things…

Brianna Wu is a trans woman who is very much a transmedicalist gatekeeper and a “fuck you I’ve got mine” sort. She is not an ally, any more than Caitlin “wah my passport now says I’m male but I still love Trump” Jenner is an ally. And now Wu has descended into advocating genocide by eugenics:

Thought experiment #1: if you replaced the word “transsexual” in the first sentence with “autistic”, “deaf”, “Black”, “Jewish”, “left-handed”, “short”, “unattractive”, “nerdy” etc. how does it sound? Exactly as Nazi as it sounds now, right?

I had an emotionally rocky childhood and that was as a white, ostensibly male kid with great parents, who didn’t even know what “trans” was. I was fat and nerdy and sensitive and anxious and not into much mainstream stuff. Kids can be cruel, and the pressure to punish nonconformity of any kind is strong. My answer to that certainly isn’t “abort all the weird kids before other kids have a chance to be mean.”

Thought experiment #2: what if, and I know this sounds crazy, people just stop inflicting needless suffering and abuse on trans kids (and adults)? Stop obsessing over what’s in other peoples’ pants and just treat them like human beings? Maybe follow the WPATH guidance and all the other medical science instead of the transphobic agenda?

RNG

I didn’t mention it before, but I’ve given up on the Zenowell Luna. I just can’t consistently find the right positioning and combination of water and gel to get it to conduct well and give me the right sensation… usually it’s nothing, sometimes it’s an irritating prickle. And I have no real evidence it was relaxing me.

I tried a “bee breathing” (Bhramari Pranayama) meditation and it was kind of weird, but that night I got some excellent sleep and my HRV was a little bit higher (21 instead of more like 16). The next morning I did it more, and my average HRV was a whopping 56! So I thought, maybe I’ve got something here. But I haven’t been able to replicate it. One important difference is the temperature in the house was fairly chilly — we hadn’t switched from AC back to heat because we weren’t expecting that much of a drop in temps. So maybe that was the entire difference. Cooler temps (down to some point) are supposed to be better for sleeping, after all.

I’ve seen that meditation before, but tried it because it’s in The Vagus Nerve Reset. But I’m not ready to recommend that book, because it goes along with polyvagal theory (which involves some not very good science; yes the vagus nerve is important in regulating stress/calm but there’s no evidence for some of the claims in the theory) and because the wording of the exercise was vague; to really understand how to do it I had to resort to YouTube videos. The book is also more focused on trauma than general anxiety etc.

Yesterday as I was leaving work, the silicone tip for my earbuds came off in my right ear and got good and stuck. I had to drive home so my spouse could help me get it out with a pair of tweezers. Not a pleasant experience. This isn’t the first time the earbud came out and the tip didn’t, but it was already partway out before and not nearly so troublesome. I decided to go for some replacement tips, and chose Symbio W for its silicone-coated foam, which apparently some people favor both for comfort and sound. I’ll find out soon enough.

I don’t know what got me thinking of this the other day, but I think I’ve realized why the internet isn’t “the information superhighway” anymore. Okay, four reasons: 1) it was never a good metaphor, 2) it’s unnecessarily long, 3) everyone was tired of hearing it, and 4) the internet stopped primarily being about information.

The internet really is about different things depending on who you are — it’s primarily about vacuuming up data and selling it to advertisers and governments, for the big tech types. But for the most part “content” has replaced “information.” There is probably more misinformation, disinformation, and non-information than information out there now.

And I had a flashback to how school libraries, in the age when they were relevant to me, had been rebranded “media centers” because apparently books just weren’t the future. It was all going to be microfilm/microfiche and films and recordings and maybe even involve computers someday somehow. 🙂 But “library” has the Latin word “liber” at its core, which is perfectly both “book” and “freedom”…

The long-awaited u-he Zebra 3 was released yesterday and… I’m not even looking at it. I made that decision at the end of last year and I’m sticking to it. I have enough stuff to work with, some of it’s pretty new to me still, and Zebra is a Very Big Deal that one could go really deep with, and I just don’t need that in my life. Maybe another time. I’m reserving my one synth plugin slot for the year for something smaller and more specialized, along the lines of Sine Machine.

I did wind up going for AudioThing Octaves, as one of the three FX plugins I’m allowing myself. It’s an emulation of a specific old-school passive bandpass filter than Hainbach likes, plus some extra features to turn it into a resonant filterbank. It sounded gorgeous in my testing, and it’s cheap.

I finally have the beginnings of work on the next album. Not a recording yet but a software patch and a plan to add some stuff to it. I just need to put in the time, when the focus and energy for it are there and I’m not lured away by walking in nice weather, playing Guild Wars 2, or a birthday dinner for a family member.

Speaking of GW2: I released my second Ranger from service, and finally got around to starting a Mechanist… which I’ve been avoiding because of the large numbers of weird green mecha-leading folks in the game. But now I understand the appeal. While some characters are really good at, say, heavy single target damage, cleaning up trash mobs rapidly, or sheer survival, these have it all while also being ridiculously easy to play the entire time. The big green thing zooming rudely through the camera’s near plane on a regular basis and standing in the way of things when doing “town stuff” with NPCs is still pretty obnoxious though.

calibrating…

After having about three frustrating days with higher blood sugar, I decided to go for the Dexcom Stelo. It’s an over-the-counter version of their continuous blood glucose monitor, a “patch” (with a small needle) that lasts for 15 days and transmits readings to a phone app. I’m told that hardware-wise it is identical to their G7, which is a prescription-only version, but for regulatory reasons the Stelo is “not intended for diabetics on insulin.” Okay whatever.

What I’ve been doing recently is checking my blood sugar before each meal, and deciding based on the reading and what I’m about to eat whether to take fast-acting insulin, and how much. So, three data points per day, with a process that can be awkward and sometimes a bit painful.

From Stelo, I get updated readings every few minutes. I can see when and how much my blood sugar dips in mid-morning. I can get a notification if it starts to spike because I’ve had too many carbs and not enough insulin — information I might otherwise miss because it might normalize before the next meal. I can see what it does while I’m sleeping, and how it responds to activity. I can make more informed decisions.

Integration with Oura (which was pretty much why I thought of trying this) is seamless and lets me correlate glucose with the other health data.

(None of this is useful to people without diabetes or prediabetes, according to dieticians and endocrinologists, despite claims from Dexcom and Oura and influencers. But it’s stuff I wish I knew years ago. For a diabetic, the two goals are to keep the overall average from being too high, and to keep things as even as possible without extreme highs and lows. A1C only measures the first… and managing the second can also help with the first as well as reducing hunger and keeping up a good energy level.)

I got a 2-pack, figuring that a month would be enough to either:

stop using it when those are done, having learned some things I can use in the future.
~~decide that it’s not that useful, but with a relatively small investment.~~ (It’s already proven itself useful.)
get a subscription and keep using it, hopefully reducing my need for finger stick tests.

Accuracy wasn’t amazing yesterday, reading about 20 points higher than finger sticks (except during a spike) — but still good for showing overall trends. Dexcom does say that’s expected on the first day. But this morning it was within 1 point of a finger stick, which is pretty great.

I finished reading that massive, weighty tome Full Catastrophe Living. Overall… I think I would recommend Fully Present over it, because it’s a much more reasonable size. If you want to read FCL, I think the first 40-50% or so that outlines the various meditation/yoga practices is best, and then any chapters from the rest of the book which might specifically apply to or interest you. The meditation techniques and overall theory are certainly covered elsewhere, though perhaps in less detail.

And I started but didn’t finish How We’d Talk if the English Had Won in 1066. I was expecting more humor and general geeky fun. Instead, it was extremely tedious. This is the third book I’ve set aside unfinished this year.

Now I’m reading T. Kingfisher’s Hemlock and Silver, which is WAY more entertaining. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read from this author, though this might be the funniest one yet. I’m going to have to grab the rest of her works, I think.

troubles

I haven’t gotten back to music-making mode yet or in-depth exploration of the new stuff. I did try out a couple of plugins, haven’t committed to anything yet though.

Audiority released free Pyros Versio firmware, based on its Pyros plugin. I was all excited to give it a try, thinking it might be competition for Lacrima Versio. But then I checked out the original plugin, which is an older one that escaped my notice, and… it’s quite good. I like the additional options and potential subtlety/control of the plugin more than the idea of heavier modulation or hardware location (*) in the firmware. But I think I might wait for a sale and to see if I change my mind.

Node Audio has a new microtuning plugin, Pitch Grid. More structured than Entonal Studio, it’s all about the 2D lattice, which is a part of the theory I still don’t quite grasp but it’s helping me appreciate it a bit more. You can stretch the octave/equave with one knob, and skew the tuning with another, using it to align your scale with markers on a pitch ruler that are calibrated to JI, the harmonic series or an EDO scale. There’s a button to optimize the stretch and skew to make selected intervals as in tune as possible, which quickly generates compromises such as meantone scales, perfect triads but stretched octaves, etc. It’s also helping me understand how limits work in Just Intonation on a more practical level. It emphasizes mapping a piano keyboard (or arbitrary number of notes per octave/equave) to a tuning, with a knob for a mode offset. Very nice. But there’s a bug where it destroys MPE pressure data, which is super important to me… so I’m holding out for that to be fixed.

The other stuff I’ve tried has been easy to say “meh” to.

My mother-in-law had a serious health issue last week and had to spend a few days in the hospital. Now her mother in a tiny town in northern Missouri is in the hospital, with a heart issue and complications, and she’s in no condition to drive up from Louisiana for a visit. My spouse might go down and pick her up, but is waiting for the word. (Update: she’s been discharged and is at home now.)

We got the official diagnosis on my dad. He’s got frontotemporal dementia (FTD), from a buildup of the tau protein in the brain. Like Alzheimer’s and most kinds of dementia, there is not currently any cure, though there are meds that may slow the progression, and he’s on one.

FTD is more of a group of diseases, rather than a specific one with a single fixed set of symptoms. Information about it often talks about trouble with language, behavior changes, lack of empathy, and inappropriate behavior. But the main symptoms my dad has is trouble with memory (both failure to remember, and “remembering” events that never happened), general confusion, and making even simple decisions. He also has trouble with writing, though reading is okay and speaking/understanding people is fine. He seems generally happy and makes goofy jokes just like he always did, and if he’s had any change in his personality, he’s mellowed a bit and gotten a bit less inappropriate. He does sometimes notice some detail and then fixate on it, and sometimes false memories form around them — like a recent story about “black blobs of tar” left on a neighbor’s roof from some dispute between two roofing companies, which were just normal attic vents. He’s definitely reliant on my mom for a lot of daily life stuff, and that does put a lot of pressure on her.

As for my own health recently… blood sugar is going okay, with some days where all three pre-meal readings are below 100 or at least below 120, and some days where a couple of them might reach the low 130s. Taking less insulin makes my appetite easier to manage. Also, small quantities of nuts (peanuts, walnuts, occasionally pistachios) are a good, satisfying snack, as are small tomatoes or boiled eggs. Belvita cookies (not to be confused with Velveeta) for breakfast don’t spike blood sugar and do tend to be satisfying, although homemade bread seems OK too in moderation.

On the mental side, my calm certainly has been challenged by Trump and his threats of war crimes and genocide that hinted at a nuclear strike. It was another TACO Tuesday (Trump Always Chickens Out)… or was it all meant to manipulate the market, so he and his cronies could buy low during a bullshit panic and then sell after the stock market recovered on the news of a bullshit ceasefire? Regardless, I’m at least glad the doomsday devices are still sitting in their silos. But there isn’t exactly peace or stability either.

Trump started a needless, useless war with no goals, then seemed to set the goal of fixing the trouble that he started and he isn’t even getting that right. He’s succeeded in bombing a girl’s school, a “double-tap” strike on a bridge to kill the rescue crews who came to aid wounded civilians, the deaths of several US soldiers and severe damage to US military bases and allied bases, losing a whole bunch of aircraft, depleting US munitions, withdrawing some of the watch on North Korea, destroying a whole bunch of oil and infrastructure, disrupting global trade, ending sanctions on Russia, Iran charging new fees on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and showing everyone (who didn’t realize it already) just how low he is willing to go and how crazy he is. There are Republicans calling for his impeachment… although of course not the ones currently in office. A lot of former MAGA types and right-wing talking anuses have turned against him over this. There are articles of impeachment out for Hegseth too.

Maybe this will finally be the thing that ends his career and that of his flunkies. One can only hope it does so before even worse war crimes, tragedies and self-owns happen. He still has the nuclear codes. But how often have we heard “Republicans in disarray!” and “Trump is losing his support” and “rats fleeing the sinking ship” and all of that, and yet they’re back kissing his ass, covering for his crimes and blunders, and supporting his lies 48 hours later?

Anyway, this was supposed to be about my anxiety… I held on. I was worried but didn’t panic, I was a bit stressed but didn’t lose it, I got mad but I didn’t freak out. I’d really rather not face real-world existential threats as a test of my coping skills though.

released: XQSTCRPS

The new album is released!

Notes are here.

Something I haven’t thought about in a while is adding tags to my posts here… I stopped bothering quite some time ago, so if you try it you get very incomplete results. I really don’t want to go back and re-tag everything, so… if there’s some way to remove tags from WordPress entirely I might do that, when I get around to it.

Honestly the way I often talk about multiple subjects per post I’m not sure tags would have been that helpful anyway. Low encapsulation here. 🙂

easier than expected

GTE was delivered yesterday, and is pretty fun. I’m not entirely in modular experimentation mode because I’m wrapping up mastering of XQSTCRPS, but I gave it a whirl and did some crazy PWM stuff, the expected gate extraction from LFOs, and a bit of recombination of gates to alter sequences. It’ll get more of a play soon since I’m done with mastering and art and on to writing up the notes — I have a list of ideas and experiments.

Yesterday I did two interviews for potential new developers at work. It was the first time I was the (primary) interviewer rather than interviewee, and I had a sort of second-order concern that I was going to be nervous — either several days in advance, the night before, the morning before, or during. As it turns out, I faced it all with calm and had a fairly chill day. The only thing that went wrong was I forgot to take my meds in the morning, and found that Lexapro at 4 PM does indeed contribute to insomnia.

(This, after having a fairly bad time of it for several days when the previous team lead announced she was leaving and I’d be taking over. This work on dealing with my anxiety has really gotten somewhere.)

(Both of the interviewees did well, and I think either of them would likely be a good addition to the team. Choosing one over the other is a challenge; I have my opinion but it could be swayed in the meeting we’re about to have to discuss them.)

done and done

I went ahead and bought Make Noise GTE. This means, if I stick to my No New Gear Year pledge, there will be no more changes to my modular setup (aside maybe rearranging) for at least 280 days.

Honestly, that feels good. I hope it will continue to feel good later in the year if there’s something else really cool that I could use. But I repeat:

I definitely do not need another oscillator.
I don’t need another filter.
I don’t need another modulation source.
I don’t need another effect.
I don’t need another controller.
I don’t need more stuff to explore, to provide inspiration, or to get music made.
🎵 We don’t need another hero… (sorry)

I have also finished the recording phase of the next album, XQSTCRPS.

I’m not generally that big a fan of disemvoweled album names, and my process differed from the the surrealist game. But I did want album titles for every letter of the alphabet. 😉 Also I hope the album title makes more sense if you catch how the song titles work.

First I recorded something. Then I took that something and sampled it, borrowed bits of its rhythm, melody, and sound design, and made something new (in the same tempo and key). Then I took parts from those two somethings to make the third something, and so on. I started seeing it as imposed continuity, as the encrustation of momentary improvised phrases into a kind of norm or tradition, and also as a process of decay and evolution… plants growing in the mulch of their ancestors.

“Gee! No, GTE.”

My almost-no-new-gear pledge has been going great, and I haven’t been tempted by any new or old hardware or software… until now.

Yesterday, I had the thought that Walk 4, and to a lesser extent Nibbler and Clep Diaz, might benefit from a clock multiplier. Each of those modules takes an incoming clock, and uses it for partial steps toward a slower whole. Walk 4 divides the frequency by several octaves (or non-octave intervals) if you want more detailed, less steppy outputs… it’d be nice to generate harmonics and subharmonics rather than sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-subharmonics.

I started thinking maybe 4ms SCM (Shuffling Clock Multiplier) would be a good candidate for my one (not preordered in 2025) module acquisition of the year. With multiple rate outputs, and CV inputs to both mess with the rhythm and to rotate the multipliers around some of the outputs, it could be a little extra fun. But I thought: first I’m going to experiment with what I have, because I know some of my modules have a limited ability to multiply clock timing…

Today, Make Noise announced a new module in the NUSS line. GTE (Gestural Time Extractor, or GaTE) is an analog module that takes an input CV and switches on one of 8 gates depending on the level; it also generates a couple of extra outputs that can detect level changes, and has an optional clock input so the gates only change on a clock pulse. The Space knob changes the ranges of the 8 levels, so you can have it rapidly fire off some triggers and then go silent… lots of rhythmic control is possible. There isn’t any single prescribed usage for it, but there are a lot of possibilities. One of those happens to be clock multiplication, but only assuming your input is a linear saw or triangle wave. (Like the Triggers module in Bitwig Grid: a “phase” input is subdivided into trigger outs.) It’s also perfect for the NUSS index CVs, such as the one that Multimod generates.

(The name reminds me of the old telephone company. Apparently through a couple of steps it was absorbed into Verizon.)

The more I thought about it, the more fun I started to think this could be. Not necessarily to use with Multimod’s index output, but for all manner of other things.

I tried that clock multiplication experiment. Stages was my best bet, and it operated okay but can only multiply by 4, and only if the input frequency isn’t much more than 1KHz. Marbles had a lower maximum and seemed less stable. Mimeophon also wasn’t too good at multiplying clocks, even though it’s capable of short enough delay times to generate nice audio itself. But K-Accumulator…

Yes, it’s overkill to use a mega-flagship oscillator as a clock multiplier. But its tracking mode is adept at keeping up with audio rate input and responding a few octaves higher. And then you can do some extra tricks with the patch anyway. So I think for no more often than I would want to use multiplication, I’ll stick with that.

Giving serious thought to declaring GTE as my 2026 module though. On the one hand, maybe I should wait to make sure there isn’t something even more amazing that I will want. On the other, isn’t that just another kind of FOMO? Hmm. I really don’t need other oscillators, filters, modulation sources, controllers etc., and this is exactly the kind of interesting, multi-purpose/no-purpose experimental semi-utility module that is probably the only kind I should even be looking at.

Speaking of music, I now have about 42 minutes recorded, a plan and material to record the final track, a nice progression of track names that fits the theme, and some general ideas about artwork. If I didn’t have to sleep last night and work today I might have recorded two tracks in a single night and had it finished. But there is no rush other than a creative rush 🙂

On the diabetes front, I am not quite as liberated from insulin as I hoped I might be. What I’ve settled into is checking my blood before each meal (or before we go somewhere for dinner) and making a decision based on that number vs. what I’m probably about to eat. Sometimes my fasting or pre-meal number looks great, and if unless I’m going for something very carby, I can skip the shot. I might take less than my old dosage if things seem intermediate, or make a different decision about what to eat.

This has the side effect of keeping me more aware of what I’m eating and what it does to me. Ideally, I’d count carbs, and either use a continuous glucose monitor for a while, or measure at intervals after eating as well as before, and use a formula to determine dosage the way folks with Type 1 do. But I think this is going to work out fine.

I’ve now had my Oura ring for a month, and the first subscription payment went through. I’m actually OK with the subscription fee, though of course I’d love to not pay it and still get all the features 😉 There are minor software updates approximately weekly. While sometimes advice/insights conflict a bit, I feel like it does a pretty great job with the data it can get just by shining some lights at a small amount of skin. The sleep tracking is especially good, and is leading to better habits that have led to better sleep. The heart data it gives me has turned out to be more reassuring than not, once I got used to a few surprises. And it confirmed that yes, I absolutely was overdoing it the other day when I cut down the remaining unhealthy bit of tree in my parents’ back yard and helped break it down to put in yard waste bags.

I’ve noticed a couple of other people wearing them now that I have one. They’re a little discreet but not that discreet. My doctor was one of those people, which is kind of encouraging.