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"However, the most important factor for me at this point is that I have heard “Tom’s Diner” so many times that *I no longer hear it*. Like frog vision, I no longer notice what remains the same, only what has changed. I don’t hear the song anymore, just the different ways that my DSP algorithms respond to it."
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I always love developers showing their working, and none more so than Valve. Here are ten dense minutes on the teleportation mechanics in Half-Life: Alyx. I like this because you're not just seeing some opinions; they're showing glimpses of the research and testing that informed those opinions, as well as early prototypes, coupled with being a studio with some really deep time invested in VR; it's fascinating seeing them come to their conclusions. Also, as ever, I love seeing how bit a role sound is in presence.
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Everest Pipkin's vast list of free tools and tool-likes for making games, interactive things, art, and so on. Comprehensive, worth diving into several times.
Peter Hoving on 16mm film
11 September 2019
I loved this ~45m documentary from Peter Hoving on shooting 16mm on a wind-up Bolex.
It delicately combines a technical overview of the Bolex camera (and, later, the editing process and sound sync systems)… with a look back at Hoving’s own first films from the sixties on it, the story of a life shooting moving images, a brief glimpse into social history of America.
All at a delicate, leisurely pace, with time for the images to breathe. No rushed cuts, no heavy edits; quite a lot of Milt Jackson on the soundtrack. Practically no attention paid to the conventions of the Youtube era.
Just a gentle, thoughtful film about making moving images.
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Marvellous work from Yann Seznec: impractical, deeply personal musical instruments, beautifully explained.
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Nice interview with Tim, largely on _Infinite Detail_, for which there are some spoilers. And I liked this, on how important sound is to the book, and why:
" It comes from a bunch of places. Mainly wanting to always write a book that addressed the science fictionality of Black electronic music. And to me it’s impossible to separate the music I’m writing about – and love – from the heard environment, the two are entwined."
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Web-based port of Laurie Spiegel's _Music Mouse_. Instant composition; just wonderful to fiddle with. Suddenly thinking about interfaces for this.
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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.
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Impressive, fun, immediate.
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A good list of ways to protect any MCU circuit – not just an Arduino.
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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.
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Beautiful. Poppy Ackroyd soundtrack, too.
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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.
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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.
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Quite like the look of Stimulus for really simple interactions without too much cruft.
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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.
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"You are a traffic engineer. Draw freeway interchanges. Optimize for efficency and avoid traffic jams." Lovely.
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Useful, this stuff is not nearly as easy as it should be in ES.
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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.
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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.
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A superb interactive explainer. I've long believed the best way to understand this stuff – how sound works – is by seeing and hearing it simultaneously. This page does just that. Brilliant.
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Yes, it's marketing spiel for Audient, but it's a cracking film of a modern foley artist at work.
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Rich Vreeland and Akash Thakkar on the sound design and composition for Hyper Light Drifter. Really good, straightforward talk about building a world through sound.