Tuesday, February 11, 2014

"Off the Wall" - Silas Scarborough (audio podcast)

Probably you think I'm a good distance off the wall already so anything I consider "Off the Wall" will probably be expected to be a little strange.  So it goes with this one.  The chords / structure / beat are simple and are very similar to "For Shan Chard" from some weeks ago but that aspect of it doesn't, at the moment, interest me that much.  The object is to get through the gateway and stay there as long as possible.  If we do it right, maybe we don't have to come back.

I'm not interested in lyrics to tell you where we're going as you've been around, you already know.  I'm not interested in some clever chord changes to bring you up to this anthem bit in the middle.  I don't care about posterity or MTV.  This is about getting there now and being there with you.  What happens tomorrow is irrelevant.

I want to know every color a note can possibly be and there will be difficulties doing that as, well, amplifiers will blow up, etc.  I'm not exaggerating as I couldn't even count the number of amplifiers I've destroyed in my life.

"Off the Wall" is very much an attempt to find all the colors but the trick is that adding them all together just makes white and then you've got "The Partridge Family" with the music that killed David Cassidy.  (He isn't really dead but he's a lost drunk.  He flipped when a girl died at one of his concerts and it wasn't at all his fault but the fact that it happened really hammered him.)

(Ed:  can we fast forward to the part where you say the audio sucked?)

Quite so.  Yes, the audio sucked but it's for me a tolerable level of suckage so I put it up on the Ride the Dragon podcast.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to know what music looks like.  At different points in my life I've tried devising systems that would work toward this but all would have been so violently expensive that there was no sense in continuing.  I do believe it is possible to see music and I will keep trying to find the best way to do it.


Geeks only beyond this point

There are many music visualizers but the ones I've seen, for the most part, are simple waveform analyzers that typically generate some type of kaleidoscopic color pattern.  That's pretty but there's no intelligence.  Even if each 'music image' generator is driven only by one instrument, it still won't know what note was played.  (If you're an ultra-geek with a lot of money and want to contest that last, there's room for discussion but it's not the point.)

If you capture the MIDI traffic from any MIDI-compatible instrument, you'll get as close as possible to a definitive, machine-readable definition of the note.  With this information, you can compare what has been played previously to whatever depth you think is musically useful and then you can make a 'judgment' on the 'quality' of this note.  This drives the decision logic as to what type of display will be presented next.  Almost all instruments have MIDI counterparts so this means the entire band could be represented through independent graphics processors which, for the huge investor, could be fed to a common graphics processor for the overall 'view' of the music.

Unless you're ready to put at least a million bucks on the table, there wouldn't be any point in even dealing the cards.  I'm dead serious and I can do it.  I have decades experience as a large-scale project manager.  Although I have no intention of doing any programming, I've written machine code for multiple platforms up to IBM z/OS.

So, you don't think there's a market.

Let's review:  every old geezer rock'n'roller who can still stagger onto a cruise ship is going off to the Caribbean with the Baltimore Bridge Club or whatever to do those rock the islands cruises.  They spend more money on those boats than the first Pope spent on the Vatican so do believe they can afford to put high-tech visuals around them.  When the other boat just has big-screen videos of the stage and your boat has the ultra-video from Music You Can See, who are you going to call.

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