Stats for nerds
4recommend
7mentions
6people
2011–2025years
57% recommend43% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- See also: Tempo timing, tactics and strategy in narrative-driven decision-making by Venkatesh Rao.
- Book recommendation to go with the OODA loop idea: Tempo, by Venkatesh Rao
- > the way theremins sound.
If I were to hazard a guess, I would say it may partly be due to the lack of transients, which again, goes back to the replacement of a physical process with an oversimplified informational model. In general, the ear is much more sensitive to the transient portion of sound than to the main oscillation. Many sounds can be synthesized with the same exact continuous waveform, but with different attacks, mainly due to the masking effects of the ear. Not to say Theremin doesn't have its place, but it has numerous issues and definitely deserves to evolve.
Thanks for the nyckelharpa video. I had definitely seen it before, but the significance hadn't been as strong then :) Seeing that inspiring performance in the context of this conversation was valuable!
In the past, I've been very conservative about avoiding corny and campy music tropes - there are way too many "wacky" novelty instruments, so I've avoided hurdy-gurdies, believing they had some kind of non-serious association (just listen to the name?!). As you pointed out, the leap from Electric Eel to Hurdy-Gurdy is almost trivial. So perhaps at some point I will loosen up and build some "digital hurdy-gurdies." In fact, one of my favorite instruments both conceptually and acoustically, is the autoharp. Perhaps I could combine the autoharp, nyckelharpa and hurdy-gurdy into something fresh.
In the meantime, I've been concentrating on that "transients and physical systems" problem. As we know, the traditional electronic envelope model, ADSR, is tremendously conservative and unashamedly uni-dimensional. Inspired by Venkatesh Rao's book, "Tempo," I'm trying to make a model of envelopes which is more like a weather system than bouncing ball.
- Consider the Lobster - essays by DFW
Startup Nation - discourse on startups in Israel
Tempo - narrative strategy by Venkatesh Rao - REALLY good read, distilled and full of gold
- "Second-guessing works by forcing someone to reverse acts of destruction. If I delegate a decision to you, you quickly spin up a set of relevant mental models, work to get a lot of momentum into them, pay the cost of killing many possible worlds, and experience the relief of a lightened load to carry. Then, by second guessing, I suddenly demand that you resurrect dead models, so I can validate or override your decision. Next time, you won’t put so much momentum in to begin with." (Venkatesh Rao, Tempo: timing, tactics and strategy in narrative-driven decision-making)
- "Work is simply whatever we must do to get from one decision to the next." (Venkatesh Rao, Tempo)
