Methods of music making

A friend and I were have a heated exchange on how to make music, basically I was shouting expletives–FUCK YOU MAN FUCK THAT..FUCK THIS, etc. You know I read up a little bit on music theory awhile back for a few days, so I know some theory about chord progressions, scales, etc. Basically my friends think since everything is digital now, none of that theory stuff matters–one can simply play patterns that sounds good. Well, I do agree with him that. However, he kept on dissing me and call my stuff the old way. This I just don’t get. It doesn’t matter. Why not combine both ways. He seems to think when I try to play something I have to structurally map out everything, which is BS because I “jam” but also know something about the scale and harmony (can’t say I know a lot though).

Part of the problem stem from the fact I can’t play very well within this theory framework, and plus I don’t have much experience with music. Right now, I’m finding it easier to “draw” the notes into a program (ala old-school demo scene tracker types) and arrange them in such a way to mimic actual playing. I’m making progress with the expectation that eventually I will be able to draw some nice sounding stuff.

If you look at what Ronald is doing (previous post)…I’m hearing his little chord progression, which is basically two bars on a chord, one bar on a 2nd chord, two more bars of first chord, then two more bars for a ending with some new chord. And over the “chord progression” one would simply play a scale. One then make sentences with the scale: comma, comma, period. The trick is to find the right chords and progression for a particular “style” or sound that you are going for and just play it.

This is what I’m trying to do. My friend thinks it’s all bullshit. Well, it is because I can’t PLAY IT properly. If I could then it would sound awesome! Trust me. It’s hard doing changes when you can’t hardly play the chords.

Oh yeah, he also thinks this is “old school” style of music making, for muscians. WHere digital music you don’t need to play. IMHO one doesn’t need to know how to play but one still can *mimic* what real musicians do. Except you are in this digital framework and you can do whatever. I don’t see them as being mutually exclusive. Why?

Compresssive sensing for high frequency lighting reconstruction?

You know I’ve been working on Spherical harmonics (I have the thing coded in blender, but that’s about as far as I got) which is a way to reconstruct low frequency lighting. Anyway, I remember reading about compressive sensing (on Terrence Tao’s blog!!! If you want to feel stupid go read his blog, lol. http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/reflections-on-compressed-sensing/; http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/compressed-sensing-and-single-pixel-cameras/#more-25; http://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/compressed-sensing/), so I’m wondering whether one can apply the method of compressive sensing to the problem of reconstructing high frequency lighting (and whether one can do this efficiently on current hardware).

Well, first of all, I mostly skimmed (if you can even call it that) a few resources regarding compressive sensing, and I recall seeing a paper (didn’t read it) on wavelets reconstruction of HIGH frequency lighting. A note of warning: the point about using spherical harmonics is because one can reconstruct LOW frequency lighting (without ambient occlusion) using only a few terms, allowing for fast reconstruction (it’s just a few dot products) not sure how many terms one needs for wavelets reconstruction (note: I never studied wavelets, but I assume it is some sort of series out of basis functions). Which brings me to the point of this post is that I saw something in compressive sensing regarding wavelets (or a certain ‘family’ of functions) which…I don’t know what the point is. It is just I THINK that these areas are related. SO ALL I”M PONDERING is whether one can apply compressive sensing to the problem of reconstructing high frequency lighting, because it seems that these subjects are RELATED.

Anyway, definitely something to look into. Also, I know for wavelet “type of problems” is !!!definitely!!! (not sure) related to compressive sensing. I remember skimming a paper on reconstruction of fluid dynamic simulations using wavelets. So one can simulate a MASSIVE explosion and then play it back efficiently, or something like that. LOL!

Whatever. I shall tag this post as BULLSHYT.

I’m going to try working on Project Zombie a little bit. I’m currently getting some preliminary networking coding done–in order to generate some interest in the project amongst “the group.”