music – Dan Q

Nostalgia, Music, and Computers

Duration 18:24

Podcast Version

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This is a blog post about things that make me nostalgic for other things that, objectively, aren’t very similar…

When I hear Dawnbreaker, I feel like I’m nine years old…

…and I’ve been allowed to play OutRun on the arcade cabinet at West View Leisure Centre. My swimming lesson has finished, and normally I should go directly home.

On those rare occasions I could get away¹ with a quick pause in the lobby for a game, I’d gravitate towards the Wonderboy machine. But there was something about the tactile controls of OutRun‘s steering wheel and pedals that gave it a physicality that the “joystick and two buttons” systems couldn’t replicate.

The other thing about OutRun was that it always felt… fast. Like, eye-wateringly fast. This was part of what gave it such appeal².

OutRun‘s main theme, Magical Sound Shower, doesn’t actually sound much like Dawnbreaker. But both tracks somehow feel like… “driving music”?

(It should, I suppose: Metrik wrote Dawnbreaker explicitly for that purpose in the first place, for use in a videogame I haven’t played³.)

But somehow when I’m driving or cycling and it this song comes on, I’m instantly transported back to those occasionally-permitted childhood games of OutRun⁴.

When I start a new Ruby project, I feel like I’m eleven years old…

…and I’m writing Locomotive BASIC on the family’s Amstrad CPC. Like many self-taught coders in the 1980s, my journey as a programmer begin with BASIC. When I transitioned from that to more “grown-up” languages⁵ I missed the feeling of programming in an environment where every line brought me joy.

Animation of an Amstrad CPC 6128 on which a program is typed and then executed. The program clears the screen and then prints the message 'Thanks for visiting DANQ.ME". — It’s not quite a `HELLO WORLD`, but it’s pretty-similar.

At first I assumed that the tedious bits and the administrative overhead (linking, compiling, syntactical surprises, arcane naming conventions…) was just what “real”, “grown-up” programming was supposed to feel like. But Ruby helped remind me that programming can be fun for its own sake. Not just because of the problems you’re solving or the product you’re creating, but just for the love of programming.

The experience of starting a new Ruby project feels just like booting up my Amstrad CPC and being able to joyfully write code that will just work.

I still learn new programming languages because, well, I love doing so. But I’m yet to find one that makes me want to write poetry in it in the way that Ruby does.

When I hear In Yer Face, I feel like I’m thirteen years old…

…and I’m painting Advanced HeroQuest miniatures⁶ in the attic at my dad’s house.

I’ve cobbled together a stereo system of my very own, mostly from other people’s castoffs, and set it up in “The Den”, our recently-converted attic⁷, and my friends and I would make and trade mixtapes with one another. One tape began with 808 State’s In Yer Face⁸, and it was often the tape that I would put on when I’d sit down to paint.

In a world before CD audio took off, “shuffle” wasn’t a thing, and we’d often listen to all of the tracks on a medium in sequence⁹.

That was doubly true for tapes, where rewinding and fast-forwarding took time and seeking for a particular track was challenging compared to e.g. vinyl. Any given song would loop around a lot if I couldn’t be bothered to change tapes, instead just flipping again and again¹⁰. But somehow it’s whenever I hear In Yer Face¹¹ that I’m transported right back to that time, in a reverie so corporeal that I can almost smell the paint thinner.

When I see a personal Web page, I (still) feel like I’m fifteen years old…

…and the Web is on the cusp of becoming the hot “killer application” for the Internet. I’ve been lucky enough to be “online” for a few years by now¹², and basic ISP-provided hosting would very soon be competing with cheap, free, and ad-supported services like Geocities to be “the place” to keep your homepage.

Since its early days, the Web has always been an expressive medium. Open a Web browser, and you’re seeing a blank canvas of potential. And with modern browser debug tools, you don’t even have to reach for your text editor to begin to create in that medium.

The limitations of that medium in the pre-CSS era were a cause for inspiration, not confinement: web pages of the mid-1990s would use all kinds of imaginative tricks to lay out and style their content!

Nowadays, even with a hugely-expanded toolbox, virtually every corporate homepage fundamentally looks the same:

Logo in the top left
Search and login in the top right, if applicable
A cookie/privacy notice covering everything until you work out the right incantation to make it go away without surrendering your firstborn child
A “hero banner“
Some “below the fold” content that most people skip over
A fat footer with several columns of links, to ensure that all the keywords are there so that people never have to see this page and the search engine will drop them off at relevant child page and not one of their competitors
Finally, a line of icons representing various centralised social networks: at least one is out-of-date, either because (a) it’s been renamed, (b) it’s changed its branding, or (c) nobody with any moral fortitude uses that network any more¹⁴

But before the corporate Web became the default, personal home pages brought a level of personality that for a while I worried was forever dead.

But… personal home pages didn’t die: everybody is free to write websites, so they’re still out there¹⁵, and they’re amazing. Look at this magic:

A handful of the personal home pages I visited while writing this article¹⁶. Don’t they just make you want to give the Web an enormous hug?

Last year, I wrote:

Writing HTML is punk rock. A “platform” is the tool of the establishment.

That still feels right to me. 🤘

So… it turns out that I get nostalgic about technology in the same way as I get nostalgic about music.

Footnotes

¹ My dad in particular considered arcade games financially wasteful when we, y’know, had a microcomputer at home that could load a text-based adventure from an audiotape and be ready to play in “only” about 3-5 minutes.

² Have you played Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds? The first time I played it I was overwhelmed by the speed and colours of the game: it’s such a high-octane visual feast. Well that’s what OutRun felt like to those of us who, in the 1980s, were used to much-simpler and slower arcade games.

³ Also, how cool is it that Metrik has a blog, in this day and age? Max props.

⁴ Did you hear, by the way, that there’s talk of a movie adaptation of OutRun, which could turn out to be the worst videogame-to-movie concept that I’ll ever definitely-watch.

⁵ In very-approximate order: C, Assembly, Pascal, HTML, Perl, Visual Basic (does that even count as a “grown-up” language?), Java, Delphi, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, ASP (classic, pre-.NET), CSS, Lisp, C#, Ruby, Python (though I didn’t get on with it so well), Go, Elixir… plus many others I’m sure!

⁶ Or possibly they were Warhammer Quest miniatures by this point; probably this memory spans one, and also the other, blended together.

⁷ Eventually my dad and I gave up on using the partially-boarded loft to intermittently build a model railway layout, mostly using second-hand/trade-in parts from “Trains & Transport”, which was exactly the nerdy kind of model shop you’re imagining right now: underlit and occupied by a parade of shuffling neckbeards, between whom young-me would squeeze to see if the mix-and-match bin had any good condition HO-gauge flexitrack. We converted the attic and it became “The Den”, a secondary space principally for my use. This was, in the most part, a concession for my vacating of a large bedroom and instead switching to the smallest-imaginable bedroom in the house (barely big enough to hold a single bed!), which in turn enabled my baby sister to have a bedroom of her own.

⁸ My copy of In Yer Face was possibly recorded from the radio by my friend ScGary, who always had a tape deck set up with his finger primed close to the record key when the singles chart came on.

⁹ I soon learned to recognise “my” copy of tracks by their particular cut-in and -out points, static and noise – some of which, amazingly, survived into the MP3 era – and of course the tracks that came before or after them, and there are still pieces of music where, when I hear them, I “expect” them to be followed by something that they used to some mixtape I listened to a lot 30+ years ago!

¹⁰ How amazing a user interface affordance was it that playing one side of an audio cassette was mechanically-equivalent to (slowly) rewinding the other side? Contrast other tape formats, like VHS, which were one-sided and so while rewinding there was literally nothing else your player could be doing. A “full” audio cassette was a marvellous thing, and I especially loved the serendipity where a recognisable “gap” on one side of the tape might approximately line-up with one on the other side, meaning that you could, say, flip the tape after the opening intro to one song and know that you’d be pretty-much at the start of a different one, on the other side. Does any other medium have anything quite analogous to that?

¹¹ Which is pretty rare, unless I choose to put it on… although I did overhear it “organically” last summer: it was coming out of a Bluetooth speaker in a narrowboat moored in the Oxford Canal near Cropredy, where I was using the towpath to return from a long walk to nearby Northamptonshire where I’d been searching for a geocache. This was a particularly surprising place to overhear such a song, given that many of the boats moored here probably belonged to attendees of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention, at which – being a folk music festival – one might not expect to see significant overlap of musical taste with “Madchester”-era acid house music!

¹² My first online experiences were on BBS systems, of which my very first was on a mid-80s PC1512 using a 2800-baud acoustic coupler! I got onto the Internet at a point in the early 90s at which the Web existed… but hadn’t yet demonstrated that it would eventually come to usurp the services that existed before it: so I got to use Usenet, Gopher, Telnet and IRC before I saw my first Web browser (it was Cello, but I switched to Netscape Navigator soon after it was released).

¹³ On the rare occasion I close my browser, these days, it re-opens with whatever hundred or so tabs I was last using right back where I left them. Gosh, I’m a slob for tabs.

¹⁴ Or, if it’s a Twitter icon: all three of these.

¹⁵ Of course, they’re harder to find. SEO-manipulating behemoths dominate the search results while social networks push their “apps” and walled gardens to try to keep us off the bigger, wider Web… and the more you cut both our of your online life, the calmer and happier you’ll be.

¹⁶ The sites featured in the video are: praze, elle’s homepage, sctech, Konfetti Explorations (Marisabel), Frills (check her character sheet “about” page!), mrkod, Raven Winters, Cobb, ajazz, Yusuf Ertan, Alvin Bryan, Armando Cordova, Ens/DepartedGlories, and Jamie Tanna.

Roomscale VR Still Rocks

Over the Christmas break I dug out my old HTC Vive VR gear, which I got way back in the Spring of 2016. Graphics card technology having come a long way¹, it was now relatively simple to set up a fully-working “holodeck” in our living room with only a slight risk to the baubles on the Christmas tree.

For our younger child, this was his first experience of “roomscale VR”, which I maintain is the most magical thing about this specific kind of augmented reality. Six degrees of freedom for your head and each of your hands provides the critical level of immersion, for me.

And you know what: this ten-year-old hardware of mine still holds up and is still awesome!²

The kids and I have spent a few days dipping in and out of classics like theBlu, Beat Saber, Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Raw Data, and (in my case³) Half-Life: Alyx.

A tweenage girl in a black 'Hazbin Hotel' hoodie wears a VR headset; the screen behind her shows that she's drawn a picture featuring a rainbow background and the word 'CAR', while playing Job Simulator. — It doesn’t feel *too* heavy, but this first edition Vive sure is a *big* beast, isn’t it?

I’m moderately excited by the upcoming Steam Frame with its skinny headset, balanced weight, high-bandwidth wireless connectivity, foveated streaming, and built-in PC for basic gaming… but what’s with those controllers? Using AA batteries instead of a built-in rechargeable one feels like a step backwards, and the lack of a thumb “trackpad” seems a little limiting too. I’ll be waiting to see the reviews, thanks.

When I looked back at my blog to double-check that my Vive really is a decade old, I was reminded that I got it in the same month at Three Rings‘ 2016 hackathon, then called “DevCamp”, near Tintern⁴. This amused me, because I’m returning to Tintern this year, too, although on family holiday rather than Three Rings business. Maybe I’ll visit on a third occasion in another decade’s time, following another round of VR gaming?

Footnotes

¹ The then-high-end graphics card I used to use to drive this rig got replaced many years ago… and then that replacement card in turn got replaced recently, at which point it became a hand-me-down for our media centre PC in the living room.

² I’ve had the Vive hooked-up in the office since our house move in 2020, but there’s rarely been space for roomscale play there: just an occasional bit of Elite: Dangerous at my desk… which is still a good application of VR, but not remotely the same thing as being able to stand up and move around!

³ I figure Alyx be a little scary/intense for the kids, but I could be wrong. I think the biggest demonstration of how immersive the game can be in VR is the moment when you see how somebody can watch it played on the big screen and be fine but as soon as they’re in the headset and a combine zombie has you pinned-down in a railway carriage and it’s suddenly way too much!

⁴ Where, while doing a little geocaching, I messed-up a bonus cache’s coordinate calculation, realised my mistake, brute-forced the possible answers, narrowed it down to two… and then picked the wrong one and fell off a cliff.

A chat with 19-year-old me

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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.”

…

Giles Turnbull, in A chat with 19-year-old me

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.

The Signal and the Noise is still excellent

13 years ago I wrote a blog post praising The Signal and the Noise by Andrew Paul Regan / Pagan Wanderer Lu. It’s still 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

Footnotes

¹ Though it’s possible that it got bumped down one spot by Musical Transients, this year.

² In a upbeat and bouncy way, though. These are cheers, not dirges.

³ Just remember to have a hanky ready for when you get to The Frosted Pane: it breaks my heart every single time.

Dan Q found GC1JAWP Sibelius Monument

This checkin to GC1JAWP Sibelius Monument reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF while my family examined the sculpture. What a great spot for a cache, and so well-maintained. FP awarded. TFTC!

Note #27271

Sometimes you really want the apparel for a band or album to exist and it just doesn’t. And so, not for the first time, I made my own…

Source image available for if you want one too: https://danq.link/slamilton-svg

Acai plays “Musical Transients” by Psynwav on Clone Hero

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Acai (via YouTube)

Turns out I’m not quite done obsessing over Musical Transients (previously, previouslier), and I found this video of a YouTuber playing the album on Clone Hero, because the album’s got an official Clone Hero chart to download and play.

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.

sophie reviews Psynwav – Musical Transients

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Yesterday I shared Psynwav’s Musical Transients, with which I’ve become briefly obsessed. Shortly after my post, an AOTY user posted a very positive review of the album that strongly echoes my interpretation of it.

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.

sophie (via AOTY)

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.

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.

Footnotes

¹ See what I did there… no, wait, not yet…

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!

Will Smith’s concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines

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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.

…

Andy Baio

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

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Psynwav

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.

Citing Lobachevsky

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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.

…

Opal

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.

And if you somehow don’t “get” the joke, Wikipedia can both explain and let you listen to the relevant song…

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

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…

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!

…

Adrian Holovaty

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.

Adrian Holovaty runs a tool that can “read” scanned sheet music and provide a digital representation to help you learn how to play it. But after ChatGPT started telling people that his tool could also read ASCII-formatted guitar tablature, he went and implemented it!

His blog post’s got more details, and it’s worth a read. This could be a historic moment that we’ll look back on!

All The Pondweed, So Many Pondweed

Have I posted this joke before? It’s all a Blur.

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”.

Delivery Songs

Duration 7:01

Podcast Version

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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.

On a verdant manicured lawn under a summer sky, two parents walk barefoot after their young child, who is running towards a traditionally-coloured yellow-and-white British ice cream van with visible branding reading 'fresh dairy ice cream' and '99 flake'. — Bet you want a double-99 with monkey’s blood now, right? If not, maybe hearing the chime will make the difference.

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!

A grey-haired man wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans leans casually against the open doors of a white van that's visibly filled floor-to-ceiling with 19-litre 'water cooler style' water bottles, plus a pallet lifter. The van is parked between red-and-white striped cones on an Istanbul street. — 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.

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.

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 sold out of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for myself.

² The official line from the government is that the piped water is safe to drink, but every single Turkish person I spoke to on the subject disagreed and said that I shouldn’t listen to… well, most of what the government says. Having now witnessed first-hand the disparity between the government’s line on the unrest following the arrest of the opposition’s presidential candidate and what’s actually happening on the ground, I’m even more inclined to listen to the people.

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…

Piano Repair

The sustain pedal broke on our upright piano.

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.

I feel accomplished.