Tutorial / How-to
Bad Pipewire! Bad KDE Linux!
It’s the end of May, Spring is slowly giving way to Summer as the bees buzz around flowering trees and Pipewire is broken on KDE Linux again. It’s a poetic tale as old as time, well, at least as old as Pipewire. Or KDE Neon. Or both. (or maybe it’s just my janky old system…
Read MorePipewire and JACK on Arch Linux
This is a quick post to talk about my recent experience configuring Pipewire and JACK on Arch Linux. Now, I’m not an Arch adherent and maybe you aren’t either. That’s fine because I’ll talk about the minimal install and the packages that are required to get Pipewire and JACK working. This will not cover moving…
Read MoreRunning A University Linux-based Audio Lab: Part 4 — Updates and Brokenness
Part 1: Hosing Down your Computers In an earlier post about setting up and maintaining a Linux audio lab I wrote: Above I mentioned that cron-apt is used to check package status (daily) and use the email packages to email package status to the system admin (me). This, however, is not configured to auto update…
Read MoreSculpting Gestural Space with Envelopes Part 1
Introduction Use of voltage control amplitude envelopes became standard in the 1960s after they were implemented by Moog on the evolving Moog Synthesizer (1964-1965). In the digital domain the envelope realizes its true potential as a variable function of change over time more akin to the use of lines (stochastic calculus, probability curves, ruled surface)…
Read MoreCreate Spectrograms of SuperCollider Code using Sox
This first installment of my algorithms project has one primary goal, to automate as much as possible the creation of spectrogram files for use online and in teaching materials. For this and for all future posts I will upload the source files (only my original code and none of the artifacts of running said code)…
Read MoreWebdev, fix thine own functions.php
Okay – 1) I’m no webdev and 2) the title is a bad attempt to change the old “physician, heal thyself!” to fit my purposes. Mea culpa. Mea máxima culpa. Still, here I am with a working login to my wordpress install, previously unreachable. Here’s the story nice and short because zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Read MoreAudio Fun with Inductor Coils
As Ethan and I await the arrival of components necessary to embark on our spring reverberation tests, we pass the time by winding inductor coils and playing with magnetic fields.
Read MoreFun with the Wien Bridge Oscillator
To the fledgling electronics enthusiast who has just enough knowledge of electronic music theory to be dangerous, it makes sense that the simplest tone, the sine tone, should be the simplest/easiest to construct in the analog electronics domain. Of course, this is not the case. While geometrically simple to describe, the sine tone is not…
Read MoreModular Synth Components
Last night El MuCo (The Mutagenic Cooptoraptors) accomplished a feat heretofore unimaginable: three circuit projects were undertaken and three projects were completed successfully. While you may be tempted to think that, with the assistance of a book (Ray Wilson’s Analog Synthesizers) and the vast power of the internet this is not a big deal, you…
Read MoreMusic V: Back to the Future
In 1969 Max Mathews published The Technology of Computer Music in which he provides a primer to digital sound and synthesis, describes the function of a computer music program, and provides a manual to the language he was describing, namely MUSIC V. It was to be the last MUSIC-N language he would write, and was…
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