I need to start working on song structure, so here’s another test track. Publish or perish.

It also includes my attempt at a simple (1st inversion) C-maj bass line with an equally-simple A-min lead chord progression. The lead is gated, Trance-style, and everything is gain pumped to hell and back. I need to work on the mix and stereo image.

[I think my music theory needs work too -- shit sounds flat.]

“Sampling Soul” is a Duke University lecture discussing Illmatic and its effects on hip hop culture.

My Facebook feed is full of links to a news article on “UnicornBooty.com” titled “Canadian Gov’t Dissolves Thousands of Same-Sex Marriages (Including Dan Savage’s)“. I am disappointed but not surprised how my progressive friends uncritically accept news that fits their worldview. At the very least, it would be nice to see them link to a Canadian news source with a bit more reputation than UnicornBooty – every major mainstream news source carried the story yesterday.

The actual issue is that two women who were married in Canada but live in the UK and the US applied for a divorce under Canada’s Divorce Act. Section 3 of the Act specifies that a Canadian province only has jurisdiction over a divorce if one of the spouses has lived there for a year. As Reddit commenters sagely explained, the purpose of this is to prevent hostile spouses from cherry-picking whichever jurisdiction’s laws will suit them better – the same way that corporations do for their legal disputes. This should be extended internationally to prevent, in particular, husbands from divorcing their wives in misogynist countries.

Presumably what actually happened in court was that a lawyer for the Department of Justice argued that Canada should not foot the bill for this couple’s legal dispute because it’s as if they weren’t married as far as any country’s divorce laws are concerned. I am disappointed but not surprised that every major mainstream news source in Canada uncritically accepted whatever their original source for this story was without reading the legislation or thinking about what actually happened.

The larger issue here is that getting married in another country can have unintended consequences and you really should talk to a lawyer first. This couple should have signed a prenuptial agreement that had some divorce mechanism specified. In order to protect Canada’s same-sex marriage tourism industry, the government have said they’re going to come up with some way to hold divorce proceedings for couples in this circumstance.

I also have a beef with the way that foreign commentators like Dan Savage criticise Canada when things like this happen. Dan: Your country wouldn’t even let you get married, and yet you choose to continue to live there; you chose to come here and get married without doing your due diligence; why does my country owe you anything?

I’ve been listening to Sublime quite a bit — Everything Under the Sun — and in, I think, the Westwood One Interview Bradley talks a bit about their influences: “anything from the Ariwa Sounds label”. So I started listening to that — I think the label is trying to position itself as the roots of dubstep or something. Anyway.

Here’s a good mix of early 90s digidub, and here is a 100 song YouTube playlist of Macka B tunes, which are pretty great. I think I just heard a sample Tupac used! Here’s his song about being Vegan:

As a practising Rastafarian, Macka B’s music is based around the political and spiritual message of the religion, with an often light and humorous touch. Working with the Mad Professor, he combined dancehall and dub styles of reggae, although has avoided a more commercial crossover approach. He takes his name from the Judean rebels against the Romans, the Maccabees.

I forgot to post this when I wrote it a few months ago – it’s kind of oldmeme now.

First there was Ariel:

And then it spread to the other Disney princesses:

My favourite is Pochahontas:

And now it’s spreading to other Disney characters:

When governments attempt to increase their engagement with stakeholders (including civic engagement with citizens), they’re usually talking about something like the :

Engagement without deliberation is less informed, because government is relied on to fully educate the participants, and can at most ask participants to choose between pre-defined trade-offs rather than collaborative in problem solving. What governments are mostly doing now is faking engagement in order to better inform voters and make them feel good.

The Bureau of Land Management restricts Burning Man to a maximum of 50,000 participants averaged across the days (last year the peak population was 53,963). To maintain that, Black Rock City Corporation caps the tickets at 50,000. Last year, for the first time they sold out.

Although you can apply for ticket bursaries, Burning Man is already skewed toward the wealthy, because it costs far more than just the ticket price to get to the black rock desert and survive there for a week. If demand was controlled by increasing the price of tickets, it would skew even further.* So Black Rock City Corporation has decided to sell tickets in a lottery. Interestingly, the tickets are still being priced in four tiers, as they were when ticket prices increased over time – from $240 to $420. This will actually increase economic diversity over previous years because some of the low price tickets will go to people who can only afford to go at that price, not simply the most organized Burners. I think that’s worth it in exchanged for added complexity. Although just like previous years, people need to have budgeted the money early in the year to buy tickets.

Most of the tickets are being lotteried in maximum batches of two, probably to prevent scalpers. For the first time, Black Rock City Corporation will create an online market place for reselling tickets, presumably providing seller verification to prevent fakes. It’ll be interesting to see how the market responds to the scarcity, especially with a central marketplace rather than eBay, Craigslist, etc.

* If poor people don’t go to Burning Man for cultural as well as economic reasons, then keeping ticket price down works as a subsidy – just like university tuition.

An unhealthy amount of my daydreaming time involves categorizing things*. For example, I’ve recently started thinking about getting a business card along these lines:

The odd title is down to another bit of musing: the more I learn about Music the more I think it’s actually the same art as Film and that Game Design is a more-general version of that super-art. Roughly: games are about making NP-hard decisions. Film/Music could be an immense graph of mathematical/physical relationships with individual works as traversals. Music, then, could be a particular problem space within the set of possible Games, which might be why Rock Band works so well.

“Aleatoric” because I like incorporating nondeterminism into things. “Bit” because everything I do is digital. “Sequencing” because everything involves an ordering in time.

* Buddhism says you might not want to spend time making up more illusions to layer over reality. Or, as Marvin the Paranoid Android put it: “Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.”

I believe that carbon emissions should be reduced just enough to stop environmental disaster. Most people are not explicit about this, but I think it’s a view almost everyone shares if they think about it: the climate can absorb some carbon without disruption, so there’s no problem in that amount of emissions. Besides, eliminating all emissions would require the end of civilization if not the end of mammals.

I would go further and say that some climate change is probably acceptable. The problem right now is that since carbon emissions are an externality, there’s no decision process over how much is acceptable. If carbon were properly priced, the market could weigh the trade-off between carbon-emitting activities and climate change. Will economic growth now be enough to make up for environmental consequences later?

This long, self-reflective essay gives a good counter-argument:

[Sustainability] means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so…The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul…This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon.

The environmental movement used to be about protecting the environment for the environment’s sake, but then it became co-opted by capitalism into this utilitarian economic thinking that I presented above: the environment is a big truck you can dump a certain amount of shit in before the tubes get clogged.

In Canada this is expressed by the tension between the Green Party, which sometimes acknowledges the trade-off between social justice and environmental justice (but mostly just promises all the justice!), and the NDP, which is a social justice party that added some sustainability policies. And the BC Liberals introduced a carbon tax because sustainability is just good business.

It doesn’t really matter because ecocentrism failed and now even sustainability is failing because the majority have decided (if subconsciously) that economic growth now is worth any amount of environmental pain later.

My lunchtime project was to learn about gated synth leads. The base note is held and I animated its volume envelope to break it up rhythmically. On top of that I added some held harmonics. If you’ve ever plugged your own ears and then waggled a hand to chop up someone’s voice, gating is the exact same thing.

The kick-snare side-chain-compresses the lead, and when the bass cuts you can really hear it — there’re other notes which come in that are otherwise masked out. The track sounded like it needed reverb, so I added small-ish amounts of echo to the whole thing in post.

There was some problem with the drums — the track is supposed to start with the kick-snare — but I think it’s fine for a testproj. The same envelope animation technique can pan the sound around in stereo space, so I could have had the synth pulsing between ears as well: awesome.