• Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact

  • Automating the Breath Pulse

    April 26th, 2023
    jammer, music
    One of the pieces of my rhythm stage setup is a breath controller, which measures how much I blow. It's a good fit for anything where I want to have some flexible imprecise control, but one thing I've ended up using it for a lot is just a pulse:

    Here's it by itself:

    Here's it live, layered with everything else I'm doing:

    I'm still interested in having breath control as an option, for cases where I want more compelx patterns, but a basic pulse seems like something I should be able to automate. My system already knows the current tempo from how I'm playing the drums, so I could program it to simulate my breath pattern.

    My first attempts at this sounded all wrong: it turns out I didn't actually know what pattern I was making. It was just something where I'd played around with blowing different ways until it sounded the way I wanted it. So I collected some data, tracking breath pressure as a function of how far through the beat I was:

    I could do some kind of averaging to make nicer charts, but the overall picture is clear enough: I increase it linearly to a peak near the end of the beat (68% in reel time, 82% in jig time), and then decrease it linearly to a trough near the beginning of the next beat (27% in reel time, 41% in jig time). I programmed that, and now I can have the same pulse with my mouth free to do something else:

    While I'm happy with how the result sounds, I'm pretty confused by the curves. The pulse sounds like it's on the upbeat, so I would have expected a peak at 50% (reel time), and I'd have expected the pictured curve to sound quite late? It seems like we identify the beat with the center of the trajectory (48% in real time, 62% in jig time)?

    Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon

    Recent posts on blogs I like:

    Cycling Injuries Analysis in DC

    I looked at a few years’ worth of data for DC (where I live) to try to figure out how risky cycling is here.

    via Home May 19, 2023

    Who is nature good for?

    Not necessarily good for the fish. The post Who is nature good for? appeared first on Otherwise.

    via Otherwise May 8, 2023

    Some mistakes I made as a new manager

    the trough of zero dopamine • managing the wrong amount • procrastinating on hard questions • indefinitely deferring maintenance • angsting instead of asking

    via benkuhn.net April 23, 2023

    more     (via openring)


  • Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact