It’s not my personal style, so I haven’t visited it myself – The Underminer and I have… non-compliementary work ethe – but if you’re in the market for a well-appointed lair in the high desert, you could do far worse. Have a couple of sample pictures; the rest are at the link.

Hardened exterior and high vantage point

Interior design follows traditional mole-machine thematics

ht jwz

I put a few photos from yesterday’s 700,000-person Seahawks superbowl victory parade up on Flickr. That’s more people at the parade than live within city limits.

Here’s one photo as a preview:

More at the link.

The World’s Largest Bluetooth Speaker is a Dalek.

I thought this was going to be kind of weak and lame, but to my shock, it’s actually pretty well thought out, and kind of cool.

Forbes Magazine has noticed the return of the analogue synthesiser. I’ve seen a lot of people buying old and rebuilding; I wasn’t aware how many of the classics were back in or about to return to production.

Korg MS-20 (courtesy Wikipedia)

There seems to be some idea floating out there – and certainly in that Forbes article – that it’s a matter of rejecting digital, with it’s an implication that it’s some sort of Overdue Retreat From False Progress, and similar foolishness.

That’s not just wrong, it’s stupid. It’s the kind of derpitude written for people who don’t understand a subject and are wearing their late-middle-age everything-was-better-in-my-day nostalgia crap goggles.

Never wear those.

But something real is happening: a recognition that these were interesting and unique instruments in their own rights, and that new “versions” of the instrumental idea are not the instrumental idea. Just as the successors of the lute were not lute version 2.0, the successors of these synths are are not these instruments, version 2.0. They’re new instruments, with their own merits and flaws.

The technology model of continuous improvement doesn’t apply to everything, no matter how hard you try.

Similarly, just as MIDI violin doesn’t preempt real violin, emulations of the actual instrument – while useful, I’m a huge fan of the Animoog implementation on my iPad – do not always replace the actual instrument.

Particularly not with players. Not with the musicians. All of these things have their own physicalities, and for a lot of players – like me – that’s important. There are tens of thousands of bass guitars out there; there are a few I love. There are far fewer Irish Bouzoukis out there; and there are two, so far, I love. Part of that’s the sound; part of that is the physicality. It all matters.

I’m glad that’s finally being recognised for these classic analogue subtractive synths. The recognition that they are unique instruments, of a kind and a type, and of value not as a step to something else, but to themselves, and their unique sounds – it’s long overdue. Returning them to production is no more some kind of reactionary step backwards than is continuing to produce fiddles.

And I’m all for it. Welcome back to the fold, subtractive synths. We missed you.

First! That pro-bono recording-restoration project I mentioned a week or so ago? The one with the interview with Buck O’Neil, of the Kansas City Monarchs of the old Negro American League?

I heard back from James today:

For the record, Bob Kendrick with the NLBM [Negro League Baseball Museum] said the audio is outstanding.

Awesome. This makes me happy. I’m really pleased they found it potentially usable. It’s the first time I’ve done this sort of work, and I’m really glad they liked the result. I hope they find a use for it.

Second: the allergy testing went fine; I’m much less allergic to grass than I used to be. Thank you, allergy shots.

And finally, the latest follow-up appointment to have my eyes checked again as I continue to recover from two rounds of emergency eye surgery a couple of months ago also went well; they told me get out and don’t come back for eight weeks, and that my vision is up to 20/25 with lenses on.

I have to tell you, I’d’ve thought 20/25 would be a lot better than this. But apparently, it’s not. Wow.

I’d also talk about the meetings earlier this week, but I can’t. Yet. I can say that something very cool and exciting came out of them, I just can’t say what. Hopefully I’ll be able to say more in a couple of months.

But it’s cool, and exciting. Hee hee hee. 😀

I’ll be at the Welcome to Night Vale show at the Neptune tonight. Say hi, if you see me. Say hi, if you don’t see me. Say hi, to the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home. You won’t know for sure that she heard you. But she did. She did.

Or rather, Ultra Mad Men. G’wan, clickie, you know you wanna.

Also, another day mostly out. This time not as cool; allergy re-testing, the kind where they put a grid of needles on your arm. YAY! By which I mean boo.

Paul found this and sent it to me. Basically, somebody made me a movie. Enjoy!

Over the last couple of days, Anna and I have been rebooting the online presence of the Emerald Forest Filk Society. They’re a Cascadian filk music (geek-folk) society that’s been around quite a while; we co-run a small co-op ISP as a hobby, and have the resources for this sort of thing. So when they came saying “HELP!”, we of course said yes.

We’re pretty pleased with ourselves, to be honest, particularly over the timeframe. They had a fairly simple static web page before, and a mailing list (with extensive archives). In a little over a day, we’ve ported the domain and the mailing list, and have repaired the archives and uploaded through 2007 already. The rest are a matter of another hour of work, tops; they’ve already been repaired.

Better, we’ve also built a completely new site for them, one that’s easier to maintain, because it’s WordPress. Two people have already volunteered to write things for it, so it actually gets updated with news and events. We’ve built presences on Twitter and Facebook that are automatically updated as the website’s multiple miniblogs are updated, and replies on those services go back to the website, so it’s tied together like it should be.

There are still details to manage, but all the heavy lifting is finished.

Web tools make this so easy now. In 2005, that would’ve been a month of work, possibly for a crew. Now two people can pull it off working part-time in a day.

The future is cool.

The Emerald Forest Filk Society has been on the same web and mail platform for a long time, and the administrator really wants to shut down that machine, so Anna and I have agreed to take on hosting. This URL will always work, if badly, despite being non-canonical. There’s also a Twitter feed and a Facebook account, because I am dragging this into five years ago, no matter what! XD

Anna found this WordPress plug-in called Social that I’m trying out with this post. The best thing about Social is that it transfers comments back and forth too, so, say, if you comment on a replication of an EFFS post on Facebook, the comment also goes back to the home website, and that is epic.

So this is mostly an excuse to see if it works. But also I’m publicising the EFFS’s new homes. LINK ALL THE THINGS! XD

The last few days, I’ve been working on recovering some recordings of a ten year old interview with Buck O’Neil, of the Kansas City Monarchs of the old Negro American League, during segregation. He lead the effort to establish the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and has several other firsts; Ken Burns used him quite a bit in his documentary on baseball.

The recordings were made on a pocket microcassette recorder, ten years ago. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of these things, but they were one of the smallest tape factors ever made, moved really slowly, and did not age well.

Even optimally, they could record about 50hz to 4000hz – less than a fifth the range of modern equipment – and are prone to noise, hiss, and other problems, all of which this recording had. Plus, the recording was made handheld, via a PA, which itself had feedback issues causing ringing on emphasised words, all at highly variable signal levels.

So it’s been quite a learning experience. Knowing much more about this from theory than practice, I was glad to get a chance to try out some of these tricks.

I used a repetitive-noise pattern-matching filter to etch out the worst of the repeating noise profile. Then a low pass filter to get rid of everything above 4000hz and a high-pass filter to get rid of everything below 50hz; since those are beyond the capability of the format, anything in those regions was playback harmonics or noise.

Then a collection of notch filters to get rid of primary feedback tone and two common harmonics of it, variable-band equalisation filters to duck out what I could of the recorder’s noise and some in-room sound, and some very careful but high-ratio compression to bring it all to a vaguely consistent level. In some areas, this exposed or exaggerated sibilants, which I filtered out. Then I threw on (in some places) a tiny touch of reverb to hide the worst of the tape-jitter distortion and make it all understandable, followed by a final equalisation round to try to throw a little life back into it, and another round of compression.

The result isn’t something I’d call good – you can’t get there from here – but it’s reasonably clear, has a lot less noise, and listenable, whereas the originals range between better than you’d expect and inaudible, with a deeply fatiguing feedback ring.

I may be able to link to the result, eventually. If you get a chance to hear a recording of Buck O’Neil at one of these sorts of events, you should; he’s got a million stories from segregation and baseball, and they’re all interesting.