aberant space

quick into to MIDI

in describing some of my projects to others, i realized i started getting blank stares around the same point: MIDI.  first, i will tell you what it is not.  MIDI is not the bleeps that you hear from old video games, it is a protocol used by musical equipment to control devices.  so in my studio, i have a sequencer, which is just a program that sends commands like “turn this note on, turn this note off, adjust this parameter, change this, do that.”  then it is up to the instruments to listen to those commands and see if they should take action.  there can be up to 16 different channels, which essentially means you can have 16 different instruments for your sequencer to talk to.  These can be virtual synths that are programs, or physical hardware devices. 

the battle against patterns

i think i understand the battle against the GoF and patterns, some don’t need them (lisp, et al.) and some want to learn them the hard way.

my inspiration for this post

don't repeat your process

i’ve finally been able to put a name to something that has been bugging me for a while. imagine you take a developer and cut and paste the same bit of code all over the application. most will develop a look of disgust and tell you to keep your code DRY ( don’t repeat yourself ).

however, you can take this same DRY person and find that they repeat some of the same manual process over and over…

rake spec
svn status
svn add
svn diff | less
svn commit

i think the rules for process duplication are similar to the rules for duplication in code. if you see it duplicated twice, wince and think how to refactor. if you see it three times, refactor.  processes used more then three times should be automated.

remember, computers are really good at doing tedious, repetitive work.

ultimate midi controller

reacTIVision + ruby + jruby + processing + OSC + MIDI + ableton live = Ultimate MIDI Controller!!  

github project coming soon….