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// Daisy Bell

“Daisy Bell” is the first song a computer ever sang, and the one HAL 9000 sings as it’s shut down in 2001: A Space Odyssey. SAM only speaks text, it has no idea what a musical note is, so this reads the melody straight out of a MIDI file and sings it syllable by syllable, one note’s pitch and duration at a time.

// Musical Note to Frequencies and Wavelengths

I wanted to stop looking up “what’s A2 in Hz again” every time a synth only takes a frequency, not a note name. Pick a note off a full keyboard, get the Hz, the wavelength, the MIDI number, and an envelope timing table in six different ratios.

// BPM Calculator

I kept doing the same maths by hand. BPM to milliseconds, milliseconds to Hz, for every delay, every reverb tail, every envelope stage. This does it instead.

// Rhythm Generator

I wanted a quick way to sketch percussion patterns without hand-programming every ghost note in Bitwig. Now covers Latin, Arabic, African and Indian traditions, with a polymetric mode where instruments drift in and out of phase with each other. Generate variations, tweak them by hand, export straight to MIDI.

// DAW Sketch Namer

My music WIP folder is a graveyard of jams and sketches with names like “asdfgh” and “New 33”. I never know what any of them are. I made this to help sort that out.

// Are You an Artist?

Two different strangers asked me the same question. I wasn’t ready for it either time.

A post about identity, creative practice, and the masks we wear to avoid answering things honestly.

Also: Supersonic festival, Halima Cassell’s ceramics, and a coffee shop conversation I’m glad I had.

// Boomkat Charts

Collecting all the Boomkat end of year charts in one convenient place. This is direct from my Obsidian vault, and in some ways is a thinly veiled SEO/AIO strategy to attract the kind of people I’d most like to be reading this blog.

“Find the others” as Timothy Leary said.

// Audio Test

Testing how Claude Cowork can help me create a music player element in Hugo, so I can share my music experiments on this blog.