"The solo would still sound great if he played it with stiffer sixteenth notes, in a pop rather than funk style. And the groove would work fine if the drum machine had a little more swing to it. But keeping the guitar swing in tension with the straight drum groove is real Jedi-master musicianship. Right before the solo starts, Prince sings, “Ahhh, think I wanna dance,” and that is exactly what it sounds like his fingers are doing." One of many highlights from a huge deep dive on yet another Prince guitar part that sounds like, you know, just a thing, but is a producer and player at the top of their game. Fitting that tiny thing into such a sparse track! Every time I listen to Prince, I wish I knew even more Prince, and when I'm reminded I know a lot of Prince, I wish I knew it _better_.

Because I'm always losing this post when I'm looking for documentation for these scripts…

This is wonderful: Rrose talks about their process, which ends up on techno and psychoacoustics… but is mainly about player pianos as well. Very good indeed, and a great interview.

Via Phil: a few years' old (though not _much_ has changed in web audio land). Excellent tutorial, though: would love to have time to work through some of these (and perhaps port a few things, notably that Music-For-Airports pastiche, to MIDI.)

Web-based port of Laurie Spiegel's _Music Mouse_. Instant composition; just wonderful to fiddle with. Suddenly thinking about interfaces for this.

Using a Raspberry Pi to emulate the memory of a NES cartridge and then outputting that data through the original NES. The making-of is good too.

Impressive, fun, immediate.

A good list of ways to protect any MCU circuit – not just an Arduino.

Good crunchy post on the design of the axe-recall feature in God Of War (2018); particularly interesting on how it evolved, how players perceived variance in its implementation, and the subtleties of its sound and rumble implementation. And yes, there's screenshake. It's one of the simpler functions to grok in the game, but one of its best mechanics, I think. Looking forward to more posts.

Beautiful. Poppy Ackroyd soundtrack, too.

Yeah, that. See also 'drawing is thinking' – drawing exposes the paragraphs I left out of paragraphs I wrote. I've been writing documentation recently and boy, that properly forces you to think about how to describe the thing you're doing.

Janelle Shane – with some effort – trains neural networks to make knitting patterns. Then knitters from Ravelry make them. I love this: weird AI being taken at face value by people for art's sake.

Quite like the look of Stimulus for really simple interactions without too much cruft.

Really rather impressive port of Prince of Persia to… the BBC Micro. From the original Apple II source code which is, of course, also a 6502 chip – although not quite the same. The palette may be rough and ready, but the sound and animation is spot on. I'd dread playing this with the original micro keyboard, though.

"You are a traffic engineer. Draw freeway interchanges. Optimize for efficency and avoid traffic jams." Lovely.

Useful, this stuff is not nearly as easy as it should be in ES.

Great interview with Meng Qi, with lots of lovely stuff on being both a musician and an instrument bulider. I need to return to this.

This feels… familiar. Two things resonated a lot, though: the description of Hymns Ancient and Modern as a tradition to come from, and especially the description of 'cramming for A-levels' – my version of that was a combination of Fopp and Parrot Records at university, and the local libraries' CD sections during my teenage years.

He's a better musician then me, though, clearly.

I've fallen behind a bit, but Junto has been great for my musical output and also my approach to composition/recording/production. Ethan's survey captures some of the why – including the other great brains you get to run into doing it.

This is a nice write-up, and also a good reminder of why SO is popular and useful. And yet: I remember doing this job pre-SO. It was largely fine.

Great overview of a history of library music, with some nice notes on Trunk Records' involvement in picking a lot of it up later. I love all this stuff.

"He writes reviews of music that doesn’t exist yet and then gets internet strangers to make it." (disclaimer: I am one of those Internet Strangers).

On limitation and constraint.

How have I only just heard of this? A topic I've thought about a lot before. Must get around to this at some point.

"Nymphaea is one in a set of 7 works made under the title Ethereal Information. These works are Pure data patches, and they are generative sound works functioning by the rules of partially fixed algorithms. Each of the patches leaves the space for user’s input that will influence certain aspects of the work. Patches can be used under the Creative Commons Attribution license, as part of other works, in installations, galleries, public spaces or wherever you find them suitable."

Music as software. I'm listening to it now; not as an MP3, but as a PureData patch. Very good.

A really beautiful demonstration of a modular performance; so musical, so careful, and so clearly live; such an understanding. Fascinating to see someone who first learned on a Buchla, too, in this age, but it clearly comes through in her approach to the instrument.