Paul has a Vive VR rig and he’s starting to make environments for it! He posted a really good classic Doctor Who TARDIS room environment this weekend. It’s Version 1 and the controls are all static, but despite that it’s lots of fun because it’s a full environment otherwise and the display panels work and there’s even a sonic screwdriver, and a Dalek, and some other things.

I, of course, filled it with beach balls because that’s the kind of thing I do.

Also the Dalek needed a Gene wig and a monocle because it is CLEARLY a Special Monocle Dalek.

Anyway, it’s good, and you can subscribe to it and he’ll post updates. He’s working on a more kinetic version now where you can do things like operate console controls and have them do things. That’s apparently a lot more work, But he made a lot of progress yesterday on getting levers to move and such, so I expect he’ll have a version two out in a few weeks.

Me, I mostly found out that something which shouldn’t affect network behaviour at all affected it a lot and now I’ve broken through the 1800 level in Overwatch competitive, with 2000 finally in distant sight.

(I don’t know if I posted about that here, but when I went through rank evaluations, people on my team dropped halfway through in four out of five games, which meant I started in the depths of bronze, and while that’s kind of terrible, it also means I get to be THE WOLF IN THE FOLD and rain death from above. Raining death from above is always fun, but then the network started acting up on me so I had to fix that, then door – network infrastructure here in the Lair – exploded and I had to fix that, and and and and and. Then every so often everything is fixed and I climb 100 levels in a day. Which is what I just did again.)

But, yeah. Working my way up the ranks via the slow road. But I’ll show them. I’ll show them all.

So what’d you do this weekend?

I’ve been trying to catch up to a lot of things this week, and I’m still pretty far behind, but: Norwescon went well! Glad to see so many people again, even if I didn’t get to see everyone, and didn’t get to see those I did see half as much as would’ve been best! But that is how things go sometimes.

The big news is that the other band I’m in, Leannan Sidhe, is starting to get moving again and there may be some news coming out of that soon. I hope so, anyway!

The Otamatone and my electric zouk were both big hits at the show, so enjoy this, I did:

Please enjoy “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” on guitar and unbalanced washing machine, by Aaron McAvoy.

h/t to @gfish on Twitter

I wanted to post about the cool second-generation crystal microphone today BUT NO IT’S ALL STUPID AND NOISY AND I DON’T KNOW WHY but it sounds like either a really bad cold solder joint (please be that) or a bad transistor (@&*$&!!! special orders please don’t be that) and I don’t know which.

It’s too bad because I came up with a nice little jury-rig jig (say that five times fast) and so the backplate of the housing came out really well and I was looking forward to showing that off. Fingers crossed this is some sort of Surprise It’s Easy! fix – that would indeed be a surprise, to be honest about it, but a pleasant one.

In the meantime, enjoy this video of Overwatch players in custom game mode making some genuinely gorgeous Genji Beams. These are effects created by lining up opposing teams of Genji players opposite each other, in continuous-shot-deflection mode, and hitting them with various weapons. The shots bounce back and forth between the teams, and you get some really neat graphics interactions. It’s pretty cool and occasionally hilarious. Enjoy:

Anna and I have been in arguments with Y U MAD SIS Trump voters about why we’re, shall we say, unhappy with the election results. Here’s a good post from her about that:

So about that call for unity, then
angelahighland.com – November 12^th, 2016

Ever wanted to hang out in the Slytherin common room, or Gryffindor’s, or any of the other houses? Or, maybe, on a balcony in Rivendell? Madam Vastra’s arboretum, perhaps? Or maybe a snowy day in Skyrim?

Well, y’can’t. But I did just stumble across an ambient sounds site that will let you make the room you’re in feel a bit like those places might, by creating the right audio environment. It’s called Ambient Mixer, and it lets you set up your own environmental soundtrack, as well as both play and modify those set up by others.

It’s pretty neat – it works by playing public domain sound samples that you can set up to loop, with things like placement and randomisation so it’s not just the same 120 seconds or whatever over and over again. So occasionally you’ll hear someone through the room, or pages in a book might turn, or the fire might make occasional other noises, the wind will pick up outside, or you’ll hear a hawk – and so on.

In some cases, it works really well to turn off any of the specific instruments if present (like the ‘spirit cello’ in Skyrim) and play it along to the soundtrack album, if one is available. I’m doing that right now, combining the Skyrim snowy day ambient audio with the OST, and it’s astonishingly effective.

It’s fun to play with, and certainly soothing. Also, it’s reminding me real hard right now about how much I miss Skyrim and am looking forward to the PS4 remastered version coming out soon. Because damn, that was a great game.

Several months ago, I saw online a prototype of a sampling synth with waveform editing and a uniquely cool physical user interface. I don’t remember whether I blogged about it at the time or not, but I certainly talked about it on social media and such.

It’s not so much that it does anything you can’t already do; you can do everything it’s doing with a modern digital audio workstation, for example. But the physicality of the interface looked delightful, and that sort of thing really, really matters in instruments. Including synths. It made sample synths look fun to play in a new dimension – one far more instrument-like than I’d seen before.

Collidoscpe v2

I wondered at the time if they were looking for a commercial application, to build them to sell. But if they were, they’ve ditched that: it’s gone open-source. Not just source code for the software, but instructions and 3D CAD files if you want to build one yourself to their physical specs.

Admittedly, the case-build instructions are… a tad sparse. But that’s half the fun, right? Component-wise, it’s basically a cakewalk. (Silly me thought the waveform display was some fancy custom thing HAHAHAHAHAHA NO IT’S A STANDARD LCD MONITOR BEHIND A FRAME HAHAHAHAHA etc. But that’s the smart way, so.)

Anyway, yeah! Project!

h/t: Klopfenpop for the link

Well, that was neat – the “warmup” storm was the big one, the big one swerved north at the last minute and weakened, mostly missing us, and then surprise-collapsing over Victoria. Still, we did lose power and were offline most of a day, so if you missed Friday’s post about recovering damaged recordings – a bit of a geek-out, really – that’s what happened.

I took advantage of the unexpected uptime to finish up that project, by the way. It was interesting, and I learned stuff, like usual. The condition of the tape (and damage in the recording) varied all over the place, and arguably too much even to try to split it up into a million shards. Though there was a lot of this kind of crap:

This is one phrase of lyrics

That’s a combined automation of level and compression ratio. Here’s what it looked like over a larger area, about 3/4 of the way through. Yes, meaningfully more got added to this:

And the sad thing is, that’s just me trying to attain listenability throughout. I’m not trying for “good” – that isn’t attainable, but less noise and less distortion and fixing dynamics over time, that I can do.

Some of the tape wasn’t really that bad! I mean, it’s a 23-year-old cassette recording made on some sort of portable device set on what sounds like two different autolevelling schemes – it changes once when the recording was stopped briefly, I suspect the operator changed modes and I really wish they hadn’t – so “not really that bad” comes with a lot of caveats. But still, not that bad. Lots of hiss, lots of tape rumble, small dropouts, and so on, but not unintelligible. Fatiguing to listen to over time.

Here’s a short sample of “The Crawl,” early on, direct from the tape. Hissy, some sort of mid-band distortion that isn’t too bad in short doses (but really gets annoying over time), off-centre sound placement. But otherwise not that bad. You can hear stuff.

So I ripped the hiss off, did some work to improve dynamics, pulled out what I could of the distortion, threw on EQ to bring back out the low end, re-centred and smoothed it a bit, and here y’are.

Then there are other sections. After that mode switch got thrown, the whole recording got weirder. “The Profiteers” was particularly bad. Here’s the original. I know the lyrics and I still can’t make them all out here. But I can in the restoration. It’s not good, but you can make things out. This is where I needed that whole stack of plugins I talked about on Friday.

And just as importantly – and something short samples like the above won’t give you – it’s listenable over time. Some of these problems are really hard to tolerate over the two hours of this recording. They’re not bad in short doses, but they grate.

Like, the original seems to have more high end, right? But it’s not real. Eventually your brain figures out it’s just hiss, with your audio centre filling shapes into it, and it’s wearying. In short comparisons, the brightness is attractive, and the restored version sounds kind of dull in contrast at first – but as with light, your ears adjust to recordings, and that goes away with listening.

Similar are all the damn-autolevel-to-hell level changes. They’re not necessarily so bad in short doses – some of those are like punches to the face, but most aren’t. But even with that, EVERYTHING REALLY LOUD PUNCTUATED BY surprise underlevelling is also wearying.

So the restoration maybe doesn’t sound good, on any kind of normal scale – but I got it to the point where, particularly on laptop speakers, it sounds pretty okay. I can listen to it. Occasionally – just occasionally – it even sounds musical. And there’s enough there there to remind me how much I miss this Great Big Sea.

There was one thing I couldn’t fix though, no matter how I tried. And that’s during “Excursion Around the Bay,” wherein early in the song, some fucker orders espresso at a George Street bar. And so you get that espresso machine foam blast noise right in the middle of a verse.

WHAT. THE. FUCK. YOU WANT COFFEE, GO TO STARBUCKS.

Gods damn you, espresso man – gods damn you.

Watch this. No, seriously, watch this, the transition masking alone will blow your mind. It’s a Disney fan AMV, and it’s got something from pretty much every Disney animated picture since 1989, plus a few others, and it’s great. You will feel happier after watching it.

Friday night, a bunch of the Lair went out to see the Seattle Symphony and Chorale do Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, and 1) holy crow, what a marathon for the performers, I mean damn, and 2) that worked surprisingly well as an art form. Also, the soloists were great.

I know that soundtrack better than I realised, too – I kept picking up small differences in performance, mostly breathing points with winds. There’s a bit towards the end with tin whistle that I don’t know how you do without a breath, and my suspicion now is “you don’t, you do it in post.”

Of course, as soon as we got to Boromir at the Council of Elrond, the entire room exploded in laughter, as was inevitable. DAMN YOU INTERNETS

I also picked up this monster in the gift shop:

And posted on Twitter, “YAY! I’ve found a whole way to be annoying!” and then played bits from Lord of the Rings all the way home. But after playing around with it a while – really, it’s not so much an annoyatron. It’s more a harmonica with a keyboard. That maybe could still be super annoying, but it will, nonetheless, be musical.

Sadly, it’s not chromatic – it’s C-major only – but it’s more flexible than you’d expect, and you can get a bit of vibrato out of it. I have no idea what if anything I’ll ever do with it, but it’s a legit addition to the noisemaker collection.

George (the cat), though, really hates it. So I guess it’s still an annoyatron for some of us. Poor kitty. 😀