I bumped into my 19-year-old self the other day. It was horrifying, in the same way that looking in the mirror every morning is horrifying, but with added horror on top.
I stopped him mid-stride, he wasn’t even looking at me. His attention was elsewhere. Daydreaming. I remember, I used to do a lot of that. I tapped his shoulder.
“Hey. Hi. Hello. It’s me! I mean: you.”
…
I wanted to pick two parts of this piece to quote, but I couldn’t. The whole thing is great. And it’s concise – only about 1,700 words – so you should just go read it.
I wonder what conversations I’d have with my 19-year-old self. Certainly technology would come up, as it was already a huge part of my life (and, indeed, I was already publishing on the
Web and even blogging), but younger-me would still certainly have been surprised by and interested in some of the changes that have happened since. High-speed, always-on cellular
Internet access… cheap capacitive touchscreens… universal media streaming… the complete disappearance of CRT screens… high-speed wireless networking…
Giles tells his younger self to hold onto his vinyl collection: to retain a collection of physical media for when times get strange and ephemeral, like now. What would I say to
19-year-old me? It’s easy to fantasise about the advice you’d give your younger self, but would I even listen to myself? Possibly not! I was a stubborn young know-it-all!
Anyway, go read Giles’ post because it’s excellent.
I may have raved about other concept albums in the meantime (this one, for example…), but The Signal and the Noise still makes my top 101.
I’ve listened to it twice this week, and I still love it.
But I probably love it differently than I used to.
Spy Numbers / One Time Pad remains my favourite pair of tracks on the album, as it always was: like so much of Andy’s music it tells a story that feels almost
like it belongs to a parallel universe… but that’s still relatable and compelling and delightful. And a fun little bop, too.
But In Potential, which I initially declared “a little weaker than the rest” of the album, has grown on me immensely over the course of the last decade. It presents an
optimistic, humanistic conclusion to the album that I look forward to every time. After John Frum Will Return and Checker Charlie open the album in a way that
warns us, almost prophetically, about the dangers of narrow target-lock thinking and AI dependence2, In Potential provides a beautiful and hopeful introspective
about humanity and encourages an attitude of… just being gentle and forgiving with ourselves, I guess.
So yeah, the whole thing remains fantastic. And better yet: Andy announced about six weeks ago that all of his
music is now available under a free/pay-what-you-like model, so if you missed it the first time around, now’s your opportunity to play catch-up!3
Anyway: Acai turns out to be not only a kickass Clone Hero player, but he’s also a fun and charismatic commentator to take along for the ride.
Incidentally, it was fun to see that the same level of attention to detail has been paid to the on-screen lyrics for Clone Hero as were to the subtitles on the video version of the album. For example, they’ll sometimes imply that the next line is what
you’re expecting it to be, based on a familiarity with the song, only to bait-and-switch it out for the actual lyrics at the last second. Genius.
Do I need a “spoiler warning” here? Part of what made the album wonderful for me was coming in blind and not understanding that, somehow, it was both a mashup
collection and a concept album. I’d seriously recommend listening to it yourself and making your own mind up first, before you read my or anybody else’s interpretation of
the themes of the piece.
But assuming that you already listened to it, or that you’re ignoring my suggestion, here’s sophie’s review:
… what?
I am floored. Absolutely flummoxed. This is the first album in a minute to leave me completely speechless. Trying to express how incredible what the fuck I just listened to was is
more than difficult, but I suppose I can try because this album is unbelievably underrated and deserves a million times the attention it’s currently getting. There are really two
main pillars holding this up (don’t overthink that analogy, no, a building with two pillars wouldn’t hold up but that doesn’t matter shut up), those being the execution and the
concept. On a purely technical level, this album is unbelievable. These mashups are so well-achieved, so smooth and believable and un-clunky. The execution of the record is to such
a high standard it almost tricks you, like the best mashup albums do, into believing the pieces of song were always meant to be in this iteration. Purely from a how-does-it-sound
perspective, Musical Transients is remarkable.
But the second pillar, the one that really shook me to my core, is the concept. Don’t read past this point if you don’t want it to get spoiled. Essentially, the narrator of Musical
Transients is a person who realizes he is a she. It’s a trans self-realization project, and one handled with an unbelievable amount of telling care. The mashups are placed together
in a very purposeful manner to express this story chronologically, and the result is a pretty incomparable arc and deeply involving experience. Despite not a single note being
original, you really feel the person behind the screen making it, their story. And despite the subject matter often being focused on the confusion and depression a trans person
might feel, Musical Transients feels more like a towering celebration of trans identity and existence than a depressive meditation on trans suffering. It’s a remarkable feat of
storytelling and mashup production that just works on so many different levels. To me, it has to be among the most impeccably crafted, achingly beautiful albums of the year.
Yes. Yes, this.
I absolutely agree with sophie that there are two things which would individually make this an amazing album, but taken together they elevate the work to something even
greater.
The first aspect of its greatness is the technical execution of the album. Effortless transitions1 backed by clever use of pitch and tempo shifts, wonderfully-executed breakspoints between lines,
within lines, even within words, and such carefully-engineered extraction of the parts of each of the component pieces that it’s hard to believe that
Psynwav doesn’t secretly have access to the studio master recordings of many of them2.
But the second is the story the album tells. Can you tell a story entirely through a musical mashup of other people’s words? You absolutely can, and Musical Transients
might be the single strongest example.
I was perhaps in the third or fourth track, on my first listen-through, when I started asking myself… “Wait a minute? Is this the story of a trans person’s journey of
self-discovery, identity, and coming out?” And at first I thought that I might be reading more into it than was actually there. And then it took until the tremendous,
triumphant final track before I realised “Oh shit, that’s exactly what it’s about. How is it even possible to convey that message in an album like this?”
It’s possible I’d have “got it” sooner had my first listen-through had been to the the “music video version” of the album,
which features visual clues both subtle3
and less-subtle, like… well, the colours in this blinds-transition.
This is a concept album unlike any other that I’ve ever heard. It tells a heartwarming story of trans identity and of victory in the face of adversity. You’re taken along with the
protagonist’s journey, discovering and learning as you go, with occasional hints as the the underlying meaning gradually becoming more and more central to the message. It’s as if you,
the listener, are invited along to experience the same curiosity, confusion, and compromise as the past-version of the protagonist, finding meaning as you go along, before “getting it”
and being able to celebrate in her happiness.
I wish I’d watched the music video version first. Maybe I should be recommending that to people.
And it does all of this using a surprising and entertaining medium that’s so wonderfully-executed that it can be enjoyed even without the obvious4
message that underpins it.
Okay, maybe now I can be done gushing about this album. Maybe.
2 Seriously: how do you isolate the vocals from the chorus of We Will Rock
You while cleanly discarding the guitar sounds? They’re at almost-exactly the same pitch!
3 A subtle visual affordance in the music video might the VHS lines that indicate when
we’re being told “backstory”, which unceremoniously disappear for the glorious conclusion, right after Eminem gets cut off, saying “My name is…”.
4 Yes, obvious. No, seriously; I’m not reaching here. Trans identity is a clear
and unambiguous theme, somehow, without any lyrics explicitly talking about that topic being written; just the careful re-use of the words of other. Just go listen to it and you’ll
see!
This is the age we’re shifting into: an era in which post-truth politics and deepfake proliferation means that when something looks “a bit off”, we assume (a) it’s AI-generated, and (b)
that this represents a deliberate attempt to mislead. (That’s probably a good defence strategy nowadays in general, but this time around it’s… more-complicated…)
…
So if these fans aren’t AI-generated fakes, what’s going on here?
The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:
Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse
…
I put them side-by-side below. Try going full-screen and pause at any point to see the difference. The Instagram footage is noticeably better throughout, though some of the audience
clips still have issues.
…
The Internet’s gone a bit wild over the YouTube video of Will Smith with a crowd. And if you look at it, you can see why:
it looks very much like it’s AI-generated. And there’d be motive: I mean, we’ve already seen examples where politicians have been accused (falsely, by Trump, obviously) of using AI to exaggerate the size of their crowds, so
it feels believable that a musician’s media team might do the same, right?
But yeah: it turns out that isn’t what happened here. Smith’s team did use AI, but only to make sign-holding fans from other concerts on the same tour appear
to all be in the same place. But the reason the video “looks AI-generated” is because… YouTube fucked about with it!
It turns out that YouTube have been secretly experimenting with upscaling
shorts, using AI to add detail to blurry elements. You can very clearly see the effect in the video above, which puts the Instagram and YouTube versions of the video side-by-side (of
course, if YouTube decide to retroactively upscale this video then the entire demonstration will be broken anyway, but for now it works!). There are many
points where a face in the background is out-of-focus in the Instagram version, but you can see in the YouTube version it’s been brought into focus by adding details. And
some of those details look a bit… uncanny valley.
Every single bit of this story – YouTube’s secret experiments on creator videos, AI “enhancement” which actually makes things objectively worse, and the immediate knee-jerk reaction of
an understandably jaded and hypersceptical Internet to the result – just helps cement that we truly do live in the stupidest timeline.
Musical Transients from Psynwav1 is without a
doubt the best mashup/mixtape-album I’ve heard since Neil Cicierega’s Mouth Moods (which I’ve listened to literally
hundreds of times since its release in 2017). Well-done, Psynwav.
It’s possible, of course… that my taste in music is not the same as your taste in music, and that’s fine.
Footnotes
1 If you’ve heard of Psynwav already it’s probably thanks to 2021’s Slamilton, which is probably the best Space Jam/Hamilton crossover soundtrack ever made.
The recent death of Tom Lehrer has resulted in all manner of interesting facts and anecdotes about the man being published
around the Internet, but perhaps my favourite was the tale about how, while working for the NSA in 1957, he snuck an Easter Egg into a research paper… that went undetected for nearly 60
years:
…
I worked as a mathematician at the NSA during the second Obama administration and the first half of the first Trump administration. I had long enjoyed Tom Lehrer’s music, and I knew
he had worked for the NSA during the Korean War era.
The NSA’s research directorate has an electronic library, so I eventually figured, what the heck, let’s see if we can find anything he published internally!And I found a few articles
I can’t comment on. But there was one unclassified article– “Gambler’s Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary”.
The paper was co-written by Lehrer and R. E. Fagen, published in January, 1957. The mathematical content is pretty interesting, but that’s not what stuck out to me when I read it.
See, the paper cites FIVE sources throughout its body. But the bibliography lists SIX sources. What’s the leftover?
…
So I sent an email to the NSA historians. And I asked them: hey, when was this first noticed, and how much of a gas did people think it was? Did he get in trouble for it? That sort
of stuff.
The answer came back: “We’ve never heard of this before. It’s news to us.”
In November of 2016, nearly 60 years after the paper was published internally, I had discovered the joke.
…
Bozhe moi!
Very Tom Lehrer to hide a joke so well that nobody would even notice it for most of six decades, while undermining and subverting bureaucratic government processes.
Our scanning system wasn’t intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks —
until I messed around with ChatGPT myself and got this:
Turns out ChatGPT is telling people to go to Soundslice, create an account and import ASCII tab in order to hear the audio playback. So that explains it!
…
With ChatGPT’s inclination to lie about the features of a piece of technology, it was
only a matter of time before a frustrated developer actually added a feature that ChatGPT had imagined, just to stop users from becoming dissatisfied when they tried to
use nonexistent tools that ChatGPT told them existed.
And this might be it! This could be the very first time that somebody’s added functionality based on an LLM telling people the feature existed already.
Accessible description: Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and a faded blue ponytail, stands in a darkened kitchen. Turning to the camera, he says “I get up when I want,
except on Wednesdays when I get rudely awakened by the tadpoles.” Then he holds up a book entitled “Pond Life”.
Here in the UK, ice cream vans will usually play a tune to let you know they’re set up and selling1.
So when you hear Greensleeves (or, occasionally, Waltzing Matilda), you know it’s time to go and order yourself a ninety-nine.
Imagine my delight, then, when I discover this week that ice cream vans aren’t the only services to play such jaunty tunes! I was sat with work colleagues outside İlter’s Bistro on Meşrutiyet Cd. in Istanbul, enjoying a beer, when a van
carrying water pulled up and… played a little song!
And then, a few minutes later – as if part of the show for a tourist like me – a flatbed truck filled with portable propane tanks pulled up. Y’know, the kind you might use to heat a
static caravan. Or perhaps a gas barbeque if you only wanted to have to buy a refill once every five years. And you know what: it played a happy little jingle, too. Such joy!
In Istanbul, people put out their empty water bottles to be swapped-out for full ones by the water delivery man2.
My buddy Cem, who’s reasonably local to the area, told me that this was pretty common practice. The propane man, the water man, etc. would
all play a song when they arrived in your neighbourhood so that you’d be reminded that, if you hadn’t already put your empties outside for replacement, now was the time!
And then Raja, another member of my team, observed that in his native India, vegetable delivery trucks also play a song so you know they’re arriving. Apparently the tune they
play is as well-standardised as British ice cream vans are. All of the deliveries he’s aware of across his state of Chennai play the same piece of music, so that you know it’s them.
Raja didn’t have a photo to share (and why would he? it’s not like I have a photo of the guy who comes to refill the gas tank behind my
house!3), so I found this stock pic which sounds a bit like what
he described. Photo courtesy Aiden Jones, used under a CC-By-SA license.
It got me thinking: what other delivery services might benefit from a recognisable tune?
Bin men: I’ve failed to put the bins out in time frequently enough, over the course of my life, that a little jingle to remind me to do so would be welcome4!
(My bin men often don’t come until after I’m awake anyway, so as long as they don’t turn the music on until after say 7am they’re unlikely to be a huge inconvenience to anybody,
right?) If nothing else, it’d cue me in to the fact that they were passing so I’d remember to bring the bins back in again afterwards.
Fish & chip van: I’ve never made use of the mobile fish & chip van that tours my village once a week, but I might be more likely to if it announced its arrival with a
recognisable tune.
I’m thinking a chorus of Baby Shark would get everybody’s attention.
Milkman: I’ve a bit of a gripe with our milkman. Despite promising to deliver before 07:00 each morning, they routinely turn up much later. It’s particularly
troublesome when they come at about 08:40 while I’m on the school run, which breaks my routine sufficiently that it often results in the milk sitting unseen on the porch until I think
to check much later in the day. Like the bin men, it’d be a convenience if, on running late, they at least made their presence in my village more-obvious with a happy little ditty!
Emergency services: Sirens are boring. How about if blue light services each had their own song. Perhaps something thematic? Instead of going nee-naw-nee-naw, you’d
hear, say, de-do-do-do-de-dah-dah-dah
and instantly know that you were hearing The Police.
Evri: Perhaps there’s an appropriate piece of music that says “the courier didn’t bother to ring your doorbell, so now your parcel’s hidden in your recycling box”?
Just a thought.
Anyway: the bottom line is that I think there’s an untapped market for jolly little jingles for all kinds of delivery services, and Turkey and India are clearly both way ahead
of the UK. Let’s fix that!
Footnotes
1 It’s not unheard of for cruel clever parents to try to teach their young
children that the ice cream van plays music only to let you know it’s soldout of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for
myself.
3 My gas delivery man should also have his own song, of course. Perhaps an instrumental
cover of Burn Baby Burn?
4 Perhaps bin men could play Garbage Truck by Sex Bob-Omb/Beck? That seems kinda
fitting. Although definitely not what you want to be woken up with if they turn the speakers on too early…
Normally the insides of the piano are a terrifying place that only our tuner gets to look at. A scary realm whose mysteries I cannot begin to comprehend.
But I was feeling very brave, so I popped it open, found this troublesome hinge, and bodged a fix. It sounds great.
The feature here is that you can take a color you already have and manipulate its components. Which things you can change vary by the color space you choose, so for an RGB color you
can change the red, green, blue, and alpha channels, for an HSL color you can change hue, saturation, lightness, and alpha, and for
my belovedOKLCH you can change lightness, chroma, hue, and yes, opacity.
The syntax if you wanted to use this and not change anything about the color is:
oklch(fromvar(--color)lch/1)
But of course you can change each component, either swapping them entirely as with this which sets the lightness to 20%:
oklch(fromvar(--color)20%ch/1)
…
This is really something. I was aware that new colour functions were coming to CSS but kinda dropped the ball and didn’t notice that oklch(...) is, for the most
part, usable in any modern browser. That’s a huge deal!
The OKLCH colour model makes more sense than RGB, covers a wider spectrum than HSL, and – on screens that support it – describes a (much) larger spectrum, providing access to a wider
array of colours (with sensible fallbacks where they’re not supported). But more than that, the oklch(...) function provides good colour adaptation.
If you’ve ever used e.g. Sass’s darken(...) function and been disappointed when it seems to have a bigger impact on some colours than others… that’s because simple
mathematical colour models don’t accurately reflect the complexities of human vision: some colours just look brighter, to us, thanks quirks of biochemistry, psychology, and
evolution!
This colour vision curve feels to me a little like how pianos aren’t always tuned to equal-temper – i.e. how the maths of harmonics says that should be – but are instead tuned
so that the lowest notes are tuned slightly flat and the highest notes slightly sharp to compensate for
inharmonicity resulting from the varying stiffness of the strings. This means that their taut length alone doesn’t dictate what note humans think they hear: my understanding is
that at these extremes, the difference in the way the wave propagates within the string results in an inharmonic overtone that makes these notes sound out-of-tune with the rest
of the instrument unless compensated for with careful off-tuning! Humans experience something other than what the simple maths predicts, and so we compensate for it! (The quirk isn’t
unique to the piano, but it’s most-obvious in plucked or struck strings, rather than in bowed strings, and for instruments with a wide range, of which a piano is of course both!)
OKLCH is like that. And with it as a model (and a quick calc(...) function), you can tell your
CSS “make this colour 20% lighter” and get something that, for most humans, will actually look “20% lighter”, regardless of the initial hue. That’s cool.
I spent way too long playing with this colour picker while I understood this concept. And now I want to use it
everywhere!
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