From Brad Berger Sent Tue, Jun 16th 1998, 21:35
From Brad Berger Sent Tue, Jun 16th 1998, 21:35
on a similar note: my roommate was testing out a windows-based tracker (i forget the name of it, but it's pretty common, so perhaps someone knows the name)...he fed in a simple breakbeat loop, and layered multiple filters over it that he could change on the fly...despite having a pretty fast machine, he managed to get the program to eventually to choke by fiddling with whatever filters he used...the loop (in it's distorted, feedback-filled state) slowly crackled and dragged to a halt as the program reached it's limits...needless to say, the sounds he created this way were much more interesting than any song he would have created with the previously-boring breakbeat... -brad _____________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: (idm) Aesthetics of failure Author: "H. James Harkins" <xxxxxxxx@xxxxx.xxxx.xxx> at INTERNET Date: 6/16/98 9:40 AM I'm a little behind on my digests, but wanted to throw in a couple of pence-- You know, all this talk about "why make CDs skip?" and the behavior of the Gescom MD reminds me of a post that showed up on IDM awhile ago, sometime within the last year, probably, announcing a real-audio project that unfortunately I never checked out, but which sounded pretty cool. Apparently the people who made it wanted listeners to start the file streaming, and then initiate any sorts of processes that would eat up network bandwidth--large file downloads, browsing of graphics-intensive pages--to make RA screw up and see what the results would be. This is pretty tantalizing--I do recall on one occasion trying to listen to a 4OTF track via RA, but the connection was just a little bit too slow, so the meter was destroyed and the beats lurched forward in a totally unpredictable way, and all the while there was this tremendous spitting and crackling from the audio stopping and starting at non-zero points, sometimes maybe 10-20 times per second. Wow!! We've spent huge amounts of time trying to counteract data loss with more and more elaborate error-correction and compression schemes. The methods are so sophisticated at this point that, even if they can't be regarded as fully intelligent, they do have to make some decisions on their own. So naturally, it's going to be at least interesting to push the technology past its limits, to make it fail, and observe what our own preservation strategies do to data under worst-case conditions. So, in answer to the question "why make CDs skip?", I'd say one good reason is to remind us of the limitations of technology. J ________ \ / | "I don't want more choices, H. James Harkins | I just want nicer things!" xxxxxxxx@xxxxx.xxxx.xxx | \/ | -- Edina Monsoon "The sky is big enough to let all the clouds pass." -- Kobai Scott Whitney