:laughing: Fortunately, that's a liberty one has when writing for 33 1/3. But I'm a sucker for the stringing of seemingly unrelated things into an intricate network of organization and creating (a semblance of) order from chaos, so this was right up my alley.

He's certainly demonstrated his proficiency on the subject of nonsense. (And that's actually a compliment in this circumstance.)

The old meme applies to both the author and to myself.

https://i.imgur.com/sXdXD0ul.png

You know that I love organizing data. In fact I spent my day off yesterday digging up a 2010 proprietary music database system, recovered an old process guide I'd authored to force it to work in a Linux environment, grappled with several years of software evolution and virtualization, and rebuilt the DB from scratch with my current dataset.

It was a purely nostalgic exercise - I'd have to dust off an old :CueCat barcode scanner to enter all the LPs I've purchased in the last four years if I wanted to include my physical media, but the antique system is a simple DB ill-suited to collections over 100,000 entries and really doesn't meet the needs I've developed to represent the data relationally. I just enjoy a challenge.

I'm still working on the better 3D visualization effort I mentioned recently, but am having some trouble putting together the right syntax for a shell script that will compile a CSV of all track metadata including semicolon-delimited multi-genre values and complete file paths. That's what I'll need to import into Gephi and really make this happen.

https://i.imgur.com/buQITsw.jpg

(I suppose that, in a way, Hayden and I are quite alike!) :)

Thanks so much for reading my ramblings month after month.

Amazing!

In the pre-Christian religion of the Irish Celts, the goddess Brigit is patroness of
poets and prophets. Brigit has traded physical eyesight for poetic insight; she is
typically portrayed as partially blind or possessing only one eye. Brigit is the
bestower of poetic gifts: the fire in the head (that is at once perspicacity,
acuity, and "associative mania"), mnemonic skills, the knowledge of mythology,
and the ability of Dark Tongue. Her feast day, Imbolc (forty days after the
winter solstice), celebrates gestation and birth, her poetic gifts, and a return of
light and vision.

The prophets and priests of the pagan Irish were thus associated with Brigit,
who shared with her votaries the gifts in her possession. Occasionally Brigit
selected a special emissary, marking him through the same sacrifice she
underwent: eyesight for inner vision. Brigit's chosen prophet is mystically
identified with her and with the rites of gestation and birth performed on her
feast day. James Joyce, mythographer extraordinaire, exhibitor of astounding
mnemonic skills, speaker of the Dark Tongue, possessor of associative mania,
became partially blind from the years of sacrifice required for Finnegans Wake.
Brigit's holy day of birth, Imbolc, is February 2—the birthday of James Joyce
himself. James Joyce sincerely believed he was a prophet and priest assigned
the enormous task of introducing a new religion to the West. According to Joyce,
Finnegans Wake, in its most fundamental sense, is the sacred canon of this religion.

from: Wake Rites: the Ancient Irish Rituals of Finnegans Wake, by George Cinclair Gibson

I seriously cannot love this post enough. Thank you so much for sharing this juicy knowledge with me!

“His Master's Voice”: Celebrating My Father's Memory and My Love of Music
 

I'm so, so excited to share a new addition to my home! I had a fun idea, did some research, and had great success.

I’ve always had a warm fondness for the “His Master’s Voice” Nipper painting and RCA logo. My late father had a tiny shadow box ceramic dog paired with a vintage 1:12 scale miniature gramophone authentically modeled after the Victor M phonograph. I've kept them front and center at my music workstation for all the years since his passing.

I got curious and started looking around at full sized 1:1 scale antique Nipper statues. They were produced between 1911 and the early 1930s and I found one I absolutely fell in love with for sale online. Here is a century-old large chalkware official RCA Victor “Nipper” based upon the legendary painting, for which I was able to find a complementary full-scale replica of the 1911 His Master's Voice Monarch Model V gramophone bearing the original RCA Nipper emblem.

I purchased a Thomasville writing desk so Nipper can listen intently on display in my dining room front and center of my tasseled stage curtains which frame him handsomely. This iconic figure is a celebration of my love of music and recording history and will bring me great joy every time I look at his adorably inquisitive little face. <3

https://i.imgur.com/j5gbzE0l.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/tK9b8O0l.jpg

Here’s the 1:12 scale miniature of my father’s which inspired the project.

https://i.imgur.com/sa2AJrGl.jpg

Love it, it turned out beautifully!

Thanks so much! It was indeed a labor of love. Simple pleasures!

Drone Adventures in PaulStretch - Music for Airports Reconstructed
 

OpenCulture recently posted a feature on a SlowMotionRadio's stretched and slowed interpretation of Brian Eno's seminal ambient album, Music for Airports transforming it into a 6-hour meditative drone. But as the track was a YouTube link, it was pretty much useless if the listener wanted to be able to do anything on their device during the 6-hours of playback. Ripping audio from YouTube results in low-bitrate audio so I reconstructed the 6-hour drone myself in Audacity. I figured if I was going to reproduce it from scratch I may as well use the highest quality source so I opted for the lossless DSD 2004/2009 remastered edition by Simon Heyworth of Super Audio Mastering of the original 1978 album and stretched it to the same target duration of the 6-hour video.

The result was vastly different from the YouTube version, due to both the lossless quality and my opting for the remastered source. The attack and decay of each note are vastly more dynamic and nuanced whereas the low-bitrate YouTube video is more of an auditory haze. Perhaps some will prefer it that way, but I was keen to try my hand at the task and am pleased with the results.

I've exported it as both archival FLAC and as a high-bitrate 320CBR MP3.

Here’s the YouTube version which inspired the project tonight.

There used to be a super slow version of Miley Cyrus Party in the USA on youtube

so slow there was no way to tell it was human vocals just walls of wailing tones

I love that song as a pop song but stretched like that so it became a long atmospheric ambient composition that worked very well

I felt like it was the beauty of the song expressed in a different way

the spirit was the same but transformed into a ghost

but they took it down - I can’t understand why they would take it down


What harm could it do?

There's basically a new industry of copyright snitching where people or companies will partner with labels to report and take down harmless videos that the labels weren't hunting for to begin with.