dxk志豪 @mrufrufin@post.lurk.org

#introduction #reintroduction

i'm derek, he/him. currently in central california and have lived in new york for a bit too

originally went through #music school up through #dma (lol i'd be surprised if that hashtag actually worked and referred to doctor of musical arts) studying #percussion with aspirations of being a "new music" percussionist but didn't stick the landing in music academia. i got a #math degree somewhere along the way and had been getting heavily into #computermusic and #creativecoding sorts of things working at a media lab during the dma so when covid, hit decided to go back to (online) grad school studying computer science. things i'm really into studying cs-wise are #ai/#ml things (more leaning on the ai-side but we'll see) and "soft-cs"/"extra-cs" sorta intersectional things like #hci and #education and starting to read about #computationalcreativity and other things. not sure where my cs studies will go yet but it'd be nice be able to research ai things more. also, i'm really into #foss / #linux sorta things.

other things i'm into are anime and manga (mostly iyashikei, mecha, and ikuhara things), video games, riichi mahjong, animals (mostly cats, sea otters and puffins), stars are cool, and also vast desolate expanses.

think my website better sums up things: https://derekxkwan.com/

took a research-heavy class for this cs degree this summer and rhythm olmits is what came out of it: a beat-centric intelligent tutoring system teaching playing rhythm from music notation with an open learner model supporting learner #metacognition : https://github.com/derekxkwan/rhythm_olmits . it's built as an electron app using react for the gui and libpd for the audio engine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AkIFa_wvwU

just listen to this and count the phrase lengths (5 bars!) and then try to keep track of time in the bridge (there's 2/4 bars thrown in there) and then just listen in awe at the bass line for the rest of the times (oh i guess marvin gaye and tammi terrell are great too but still). and there's that weird syncopated bit where most of the instruments drop out too and it's a keys interlude right when we're leaving the intro

james jamerson bass lines are so fun to play. like the ones on stevie wonder's "for once in my life" or marvin gaye and tammi terrell's "ain't nothing but the real thing". he fills up so much of the space with notes but they groove so hard at the same time. plus there's all those weird phrase lengths and extra beats thrown into "ain't nothing but the real thing"

been listening to a lot of makaya mccraven and it's been a good time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p52hzsrpq9E

anyways, half of my original plans too was to try to rip out the cd drive out of an even older macbook pro, i forget what year, i think when intel macs first came out,.. 2006 ish? and it turns out trying to open those things is kinda hard and i don't think i can put it back together again (and also the dimensions of the cd drive didn't really match) but that thing had trouble booting anyways so i guess it's e-waste now, maybe i could still make use of the spare parts somehow though

i think i used that computer around,.. 2013ish? at a performance at the naumberg bandshell in central park for make music ny and i was running a max patch for stockhausen's musik im bauch and i remember all of my electronics were overheating, like my phone completely shut down and my computer wasn't doing so well either. i don't think that killed the cd drive but it probably didn't make my computer any better.

i guess i got that computer when i was working on my masters and now in 2022 i am,... working on a masters. clearly i have made a lot of progress in life.

remade my 2010 macbook pro into a macos-running machine (previously had ubuntu running on it) for project needs and high sierra was surprisingly easy to get running (original plans were ripping my snow leopard dvd to iso and putting it on an usb because i somehow borked the cd drive like 7 years ago). seems like trying to install things comes with gotchas because everything expects at least macos catalina, hopefully at least what i build on it is forward compatible to catalina on intel macs... hopefully...

the more i think about it, the more interesting #metacognition is to me (which i guess is kind of meta in its own way). how are we to grow in our own thinking if we don't reflect on our own thinking? how are we to learn better if we don't take time to reflect on how we learn? to adapt an overused adage, how do we even begin to approach growing or even sustaining a forest if we can't see the forest for the trees?

there's a character named vim jeturk in the upcoming gundam series, my interests are colliding.

i've finally even mapped a leader key after i dunno how many years. really going places today.

the codebase for this project is getting big enough that i'm finally learning how to use buffers without relying on tabs in #vim. think at this point i've invested enough time into learning vim things that it's gonna take a lot of convincing for me to switch away from it. this is my substantive thought for today thank u.

oh yeah, i forgot that dealing with rational number sorts of things like note durations is kinda tricky in programming languages that don't explicitly deal with rational numbers. there's probably papers out there on this...... but maybe i'll do a hacky way for now and quan/kwantize everything

spending the afternoon with this electron project trying to serve client-side js/ts libraries installed as node modules and struggling with this whole (inabilty to use client-side) "bare module imports" (not being able to do import * from "vexflow" client-side because it needs to be "./vexflow" or "../vexflow" or something) thing which apparently means i have to bundle everything and then i was struggling with webpack and tsconfigs and everything and this is making me remember why i don't like webdev, why are computers a thing

also managed to get bindings on the linux desktop (x64) working for the nodejs bindings to libpd so now it can be used on mac, linux desktop (x64), and raspberry pis yay: https://github.com/ircam-ismm/node-libpd . kinda want to figure out how to get it working on windows but i know next to nothing about windows in general so it seems like a significantly harder goal to reach

decided to implement my project for this edtech class in electron and typescript so finally getting around to learning both. seemed like the less painful way to get things kinda sorta distributable cross-platform-ish and the only music engraving library i've found that doesn't just export to pdf or png is has been vexflow ( https://github.com/0xfe/vexflow ) so that kinda locked me into having the frontend be html/js

speaking of which, "michelle ii" reminds me of berio's take on "loosin yelav" in particular, mostly in the woodwind work (probably because i've listened to "folk songs" so many times). i first heard "folk songs" with dawn upshaw singing them? but anyways yeah "folk songs" and in particular "loosin yelav" are gorgeous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkTe06UnHvc

til luciano berio did beatles arrangements, i guess a bunch of composers did in the 60s and 70s (toru takemitsu for guitar, cathy berberian commissioned louis andriessen for a few). berio's "michelle ii" sounds the most like usual berio (kinda reminds me of his "folk songs") but i think "ticket to ride" stands out the most, orchestrationally kinda reminds me of bach brandenburg cto 2 bc of the trumpet (although the instruments def don't operate the same way here) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHywqI69Ej8

rei harakami had a duo with the pianist akiko yano called yanokami (which I should listen to more of) and one of my fav albums of hers is "futaribocchi de ikou" and this tune "tadaima no uta" with u-zhaan is particularly great https://youtu.be/L5miFcCjbW8 (but the whole album is fantastic and i had it on repeat for so long when i first heard it)

was planning on reading more for class today, ended up figuring out how to save all the filenames of the pdfs i have open to a file and then using the file to re-open the pdfs later instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯