Right, so, what have I been up to?

I had a cold for a week. Lots of coughing.

I’ve been getting down to the last petty annoyances on my motorcycle to-do list. I’ve replaced the control levers, replaced the clutch lever bushing – it actually pulls straight and smooth now, for the first time since I’ve owned it! – replaced the broken seat latch, replaced all the worn-out rubber bushings that hold the side panels on, replaced the headlight element (the high-beam didn’t work). The carbs need to be cleaned & synchronized, but that’s a bigger job than I want to deal with myself, so I took the bike over to Steg’s shop. Perfect timing, since we’re having a serious cold snap today! The bike will be in great shape by the time spring arrives in earnest.

I’ve been playing with an algorithm for generating percussion sequences. The idea is to create an instrument I can add to my music machine that will let me create and adjust percussion tracks on the fly, driving a MIDI drum module. The central conceit of my music project is that I want to create as live a performance as possible, and if this thing works out it’ll let me improvise drum tracks from scratch instead of just tweaking the ones I’ve prepared ahead of time.

The algorithm works surprisingly well, for the simplicity of its design. It’s based on Toussaint’s paper The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms, in turn based on Bjorklund’s timing system for a neutron accelerator, The Theory of Rep-Rate Pattern Generation in the SNS Timing System. It all sounds very high-tech, but the basic idea is simply this: natural-sounding rhythms are those which distribute their energy as evenly as possible across the repetition unit.