It's that time again! I'm Listen/ing to Group/Beak/Music/Recording/>>> for the second time this morning with my Campfire Audio/Solaris. I'm at my favorite coffeeshop, got a great sandwich, and I'm about to dig in.
I recorded several episodes of Ghost in the Patch Alpha Sessions this week; I finally got the first senses of signal from that world that there an artistic well is possible here, that an aquifer of expression is down there.
My most recent session is the first one that is challenging me from an organizational perspective. It's the first one that makes me want to actually start to distribute multiple layers of this podcast.
comment tracks
It was beautiful to see GitP/A/Session/26/10/09-Fri fill up with a transcript, and then see my ghost gardeners relate it to the parts of the devices I use. It made me feel like the garden was alive, growing vines around this experience that felt spontaneous in the moment.
At the same time, there's a spooky portal to awe enclosed the sessions with no words. I want to call forth and summon that reverberant mystery. It's weird that words make the spell possible, but the cast of its signal is a wordless period that is best observed in a para-linguistic frame of reference.
This season, I've been thinking a lot about Diagram/Cross-Sections. I want to make a layered Podcast. There's a part of me that wants there to be layers to this in a broadcast medium sense.
Ghost in the Patch Alpha (gitpa): tinkering in the workshop, full of real-time commentary, frustration, ambulation.
Ghost in the Patch Epsilon (gitpe): secondary commentary, listening and responding.
Ghost in the Patch Iota (gitpi):
Ghost in the Patch Omega (gitpo): final version, no commentary
Another part of me want to eschew the unidirectional form of art in favor of the custom Palimpsest. That part of me wants to just make a custom app, not a podcast. People would visit the website to see what's up.
For a long time, I've wished that I could offer a form of SSO to my friends and family, so that different people could transparently be granted authorization to view different sides of my family and me, all without needing to tell them in advance about it. So, for instance, maybe I would have some kind of sign-in/sign-up form, and the sign-up would ask questions one after another, in a way that triangulated who they were and how we knew each other without giving things away, until they established their proximity to me some how. Basically, I'm thinking that I could grant people an SSO account ahead of when they created it, and they could choose to take it or not. It would be like telling the concierge of one's building, "if you ever see this person, let them in ..."
Anyway, once there was an authentication mechanism that made sense, one could naturally have the freedom to reply. Once you are in the gate, then you can reply at any time.
a new sort of representation of multidimensional streamed media, the top-down, multi-fingered river loom
I've been picturing that each piece would have a different sort of representation than the one most people are familiar with. Usually, one finds that audio files have a player with a play button on the left, a play bar in the center, and the play bar goes from left to right. Instead, I'd have something more like a type of loom that goes from top to bottom.
There would be several channels of audio vertically oriented, scrolling by like a river, as though the webpage were a portal onto a river that was flowing from top to bottom, only it would actually be multiple rivers - some of them audio, some of them control structures, for example, each manipulated or automated CC value would be its own river. it would change thickness, thinness based on its expression. For some di-pole controls like audio pan, it would flip right vs left with a line down the center. For example, on the microfreak control structures that can modulate one thing with another on a grid, it would be
For others it would be a thin river near CC value of 0 and a thick river near a CC value of 127.
Then in addition to the left to right layout of the audio and its tracks, we'd have layers of depth, and one could toggle layers of depth. At the "top" would be the final, official version, post omega (gitpo). Next layer "down" or "into" the third dimsnion would be penultimate version, iota, gitpi, and so on, until you reach gitpa, the initial, raw version. So by default, you'd be presented with the final version, but you could "zoom in" to see the versions that were prior and less editorial, with more commentary.
come up with a name for this visualization technique or ux pattern, where multidimensional visualization has in, out, left and right channels, with time going from top to bottom.
Stem Waterfall: a software-defined radio's waterfall display scrolls time from top to bottom, and each audio or CC lane is a stem.
Depth Waterfall: the same, naming the in/out layers from gitpo down to gitpa.
Prior art for time running top to bottom: the SDR waterfall display, and the falling-notes piano roll in Synthesia and the note highway in Guitar Hero.
Imagine it on a phone, where one could scroll down to go farther in the piece. By default it would be scrolling down to the bottom, and you could scroll back up. It's funny to think about a scroll bar as part of the interface that is a visual affordance that could be programmed like any other part of the UI. Are scrollbars used in mobile pages? If not, why not?
shylock = a cool name
tuning in
There's something special about radio. I remember making short-wave radio as a kid from an electronics kit. I climbed out the window and drove a screwdriver in the earth to ground the kit. I had a single earpiece that pulled in signals from far across the country. I felt like I was talking to distant planets. I wanted to say back, "I'm here, too." I always wanted to get into ham radio, and even started studying the test for it as a kid, thinking that might be in the cards, but it failed to materialize.