Theo Verelst Diary Page

Wed 27 june 2001, 14:00 PM

I've decided after good example to write some diary pages with toughts and events.

Oh, in case anybody fails to understand, I'd like to remind them that these pages are copyrighted, and that everything found here may not be redistributed in any other way then over this direct link without my prior consent. That includes family, christianity, and other cheats. The simple reason is that it may well be that some people have been ill informed because they've spread illegal 'copies' of my materials even with modifications. Apart from my moral judgement, that is illegal, and will be treated as such by me. Make as many references to these pages as you like, make hardcopies, but only of the whole page, including the html-references, and without changing a iota or tittel...

And if not? I won't hesitate to use legal means to correct wrong that may be done otherwise. And I am serious. I usually am. I'm not sure I could get 'attempt to grave emotional assault' out of it, but infrigement on copyright rules is serious enough. And Jesus called upon us to respect the authorities of state, so christians would of course never do such a thing. Lying, imagine that.
 

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Wed 27 june 2001, 14:00 PM

Not all events, thoughts and goals I have are described in these pages, though the example I had seems to have been clearer on some subjects maybe, I don't think I need to publically make every thing drawn out and clear in these pages. On the other hand, quite some is clear enough, and I do think it is of use to at least in this way produce my own account of many main thoughts and considerations, as my whole site started as a way to at least break through barriers set up by others, at least quite affraid of public exposure and public countenance of their ways and deeds. The idea is that when it is public enough and preferably verifiable and consistent, my credibility at least didn't suffer though I"m not at all in a normal life enough for someone with my background, experience, educations and capabilities.

Not all people and organisations I meet or interact with may want to use the same tacktics in this area, or simply may not be able to afford them or find them too costly, as I would, too, if I'd have had the choice in a normal world, so I cannot extend my writing freely to cover all areas that I'm somehow involved in, maybe unfortunately, though that depends on the actual effect these pages have, which I cannot measure easily, not in this time, and also not over a longer period. I see subjects I mention even appearing on CNN, so I don't think there is no effect, but there is no direct reader connection much, except for a lot of indirect mentioning or referenving, which in my opinion is not optimal. Anyhow, this is another 5c or more worth of writing, at least with some readers of which a few have the decency of reading then from source, and I'm sure the effect is at least that some know that these truthfull enough account probably stored on american territory are not making it easier to mess with me or what I stand for.
 

   Texel

Last weekend I was able to spent at Texel, an island on the north of Holland, about 10 by 20 kilometers I guess, and saw the opening of the yearly catamaran race around the island, which is colorfull, and of course was able to catch significant amounts of sun on the beach and nice enough green environment. Hardly any FM reception there, though wirelesses seemed still to work.

Succomming again to AM, I listened to some bbc stuff, and the same station that some weeks ago did the rock and roll history program I mentioned. I think I heard the top5 of 1965 or so, the year before I was born, which is definately fun. Ever heard 'Ule Bule' ? You can hear those bushnegros sing and than have their miserably medicineman be reduced to nothing in the standard but very effective twelve bar blues schema's end, wonderfull, wonderfull. Mainly fun enough and I'd think unbeatable. Add the semi devilish 'little' richard megavoice and only a few realy well chosen rock and roll classic piano strides and the whole world around the little am receiver box is reduced to quite irrelevant minus a few highlights.

I had the chance to play some acoustic (spanish) guitar after quite some time, which was fun, too. Optimistically as I felt enough, I tried some hendrix song impressions, of which purple haze and foxy lady can be convincing enough, hey joe works enough, too, and even voodoo child would be recognized, though in neither case I'm satisfied with even the first let's say advanced playing technique and soloing capability in my art, as compared to the real thing, though I think a few basic ideas I've mastered enough to like to listen to the guitar weaving its' fifths into some mildly non-linearly processed chord evolution, and some harmonics doing their tricks even in the acoustic domain good enough to stand out. Just the e710b with the right bass line makes a musical point more than clear enough, and I've withstood the temtation of thinking about that as boring and mechanically easy enough because I know it took me years to get it right, time it right and make it roll.

Some conversations and communications are not for public consumption, but they were there and relevant, and at least it is of use that there are people with serious attitudes about their lives, their christian convictions, and their relations, maybe that is more essential than anything, most other subjects in my hierarchy of relevance except for the evident primary human needs lie under the above of a nice environment, some good music and the making of it and probably interesting science and some other good enough free time amusement like good movies and books. Most games many people seem so occupied with don't even make it across the threshold in comparison. A nice girlfriend, of course, is in in that thinking, too.

Ha, that was on purpose, the next should than be sort of like a contact add, but I was only bringing a subject forward, I'm not too much at risk of the weeny idea, so I thought I'd play with the thought for a reason. Maybe as technical student with hardly any life, such is risky, but then the to be expencted bright enough future makes up for it, in my case there has been enough in the area, and I'm not too remote from at least a few woman who qualify (what and expression) as attractive and at least with serious enough interest in me, so evil minded people and groups probably don't have much chance of discarding me or what I have to say on the basis of considerations in these areas, which is fortunate.
 

   Monsterrack

The idea of monsterrack is to harnass some of the power of quality audio effect units, that is audio rack machines capable of adding effects like reverb echo, guitar effects, sound thickening effects (as Brian May for instance) into a internet driven setup. That is definately something.

So the story is like this. I made a sample of some sound I like, for isntance a guitar sampled with a sampler or soundcard, or my favorite synth lick, make a wav or aif file of it on a computer, dial up the monsterrack site on my internet browser, offer the wav sound file for upload to the mr site, after successful upload select the file on the browser, click on a button to instruct the real monsterrack to process the sound in that file, set the type of effect I want, for instance a thick reverberation effect, and press go to start feeding the desired effect machine with the sounds sample.

The processed sound coming out of the effect unit is sampled into the mr servers computer again, and offered back to me for download as an mpeg encoded sound file.

Isn't that something.

And it works, too, for real, and those lexicon effects they provide are not miserable. Unfortunately, I don't think I currently can download mpeg files, so I can't put up an example, though that would be worth a listen, for sure.

As an example, I've paste'd the number of processing steps on a two string physical string  simulation sample I've fed to monsterrack, showing the effects units and the names of the effects. The last effect is an overkill, but still makes for a strong sound, the one just before the last processing step is a strong enough guitar like sound, made with nothing but mathematics and the internet.
 

a2.wav - 2 string simu - Created at: 06:43:09 Jun 26, 2001 - Length: 4s - 1 channel
   1.a2.wav - Processed with Lexicon PCM81 ChorusToRvb - Created at: 06:43:58 Jun 26, 2001 - Length: 8s
   2.a2.wav - Processed with Lexicon PCM81 6 Vox Chorus - Created at: 04:52:19 Jun 27, 2001 - Length: 8s
   3.a2.wav - Processed with Lexicon PCM81 Tempo Gate - Created at: 04:56:06 Jun 27, 2001 - Length: 8s
   4.a2.wav - Processed with Line 6 POD Pro Small Tweed - Created at: 04:58:44 Jun 27, 2001 - Length: 8s
        1.a2.wav - Processed with TC Electronic FireworX Angry Moog - Created at: 04:59:52 Jun 27, 2001 - Length: 12s
        2.a2.wav - Processed with TC Electronic FireworX Classic Sweeper - Created at: 05:01:17 Jun 27, 2001 - Length: 12s
             1.a2.wav - Processed with Lexicon PCM81 Wet Chorus - Created at: 05:06:50 Jun 27, 2001 - Length: 16s
                  1.a2.wav - Processed with Lexicon PCM91 Guitar Cave - Created at: 05:09:04 Jun 27, 2001 - Length: 20s
The sample is of simular kind as on this diary page except only two strings, which is good enough a 'live' simulation, though of course not completely like a guitar would sound. On the other hand, when I played a g- the way I often play on the spansh guitar recently (which is barring the upper four strings in the
uppers string 'g' position with the 4th from highest string little fingered at upper string a position, I got a sound that was almost strikingly similar enough to a simulated sample I have in memory to make me think I had lost it somehow.

The first effect of the 4.th subset of effects I've tried is a guitar amplifier with overdrive (serious distortion of the signal) effect, as if I've plugged the sample into a physical guitar amplifier, and recorded the sound after putting the volume high, that creates a lot more brightness and brittleness and harshness to the sound, and technically speaking adds harmonics, which makes the sound more interesting to process. Also, the distortion effect is very non-linear, so that the progression and damping of the sound becomes more noticable in the sound character. A strong though not completely satisfactory guitar-like pluck results.

then the classic sweeper is like an effect pedal with filtering, making the sound harmonically varied.

And subsequently a warm enough chorus effect enriches and stereo broadens the sound effectively

The last effect is to add reverb, which is however mixed as a completely reverb effect, that is without mixing the original signal with the reverberated signal, so the whole note sinks away as in a large cave, standing not near the player but on the other end.
 

The idea of making the input leds blink in some remote (i thing us) location and feeding my music through their studio equipment is appealing.
 

   Unpaid labour

Just writing tactics. I'l probably be at a UN forum about child labour on friday, sort of by invitation, which may be interesting enough, though I find it hard to imagine what to do about so much misery also in that area in the world, and the effect of such political organisations on it, though I guess in general I'm in favour of their effforts, probably not like Amnesty International, who probably realy saves some (dozens?) of persons a year for real, hopefully of good and effective nature, but more in the area of me being able to in principle get a passport, guarantee to choose the job I want, have the right to an attorney, that sort of general legislative stuff, which without question is worth it, and all that regardless of race, caste, and political and religeous conviction.

I've been doing quite some things without pay for some time, as I've written about, and at least some of them are quite worth some payment or in principle in normal enough live quite in the range of payable work acitvities.

Lately I've checked out Visual Tk, the latest Cygwin unix-like shell and gnu C compiler, and a package called snack for audio rendering under tcl/tk (multi platform), and even the tcl webserver and some packages based on it (somewhat, which are quite extensive possibilities, it seems, as I too foresaw and started building a few years ago).

I've made a few starting points to apply these to a very peacable, deep enough, even academic and usefull application area, to be expected: sound synthesis. The tcl sound package 'snack' is quite powerfull, there is a vowel generator application example which is good explanation for some of the newer synthesis forms such as applied in the yamaha voice type of synth I mentioned some pages ago, and also of the generator algorithms in speech synthesis. It would work good on a party to, a skilled user can sort of form vowel sequences with almost speech like word meanings which sound fun, and with the right adjustment of the filter bandwidth and resonance peaks sort of kraftweerk-ish vocoder type of effects can be made, with a dryness and strength which are good enough.

The package can also play audio material from different sources, even up to a mpeg3 player with playlist, which is not my target, but examplatory of the strength of the package as user interface wrapper. On the technical side of things, waveforms can be interactively displayed on a tk canvas, at significant speed, and a few application examples, written completely in tcl/tk, are provided resembling known waveform editing programs, except the waveforms are only shown, not edited, though that is possible technically.All that for free, and then also recording and even real time spectrum diagrams through fourier analysis, also shown on a tk canvas, and a pitch extractor function.

Having the interests I have, I was interested in the row of buttons forming an octave of musical notes which beep at piano not frequencies (the major scale as it is provided) when pressed for a second or so.

Knowing that in another application an oscilator can be detuned, I wanted to know if I'd be able to play a sample set at different frequencies, and yesterday my experiment showed that can work, as it seemed in good enough quality, which is good starting point to make an application to experiment with self made samples.

I've tried the string simulator package I've made available I think already years ago again, and it worked fine with the tcl script provided to follow the simulation as long as the right port number is filled in, except that process switching under windows isn't optimal, which is common knowledge for me. Linking the string simulator to a real time interface is interesting experiment, on a fast enough machine that makes an interactive physical simulation possible, which is cool.

I think I'll start doing a bit more additive synthesis with simple interface, and add some filtering in a seperate simple C program, which when linked well should already provide more than enough samples, and I plan on making a page with them, maybe as addition to the wave laboratory page, maybe as seperate page. Linking the wave laboratory application, the menu's and the java spectrum and waveform applet with a real time sound generator is interesting experiment, too, which is quite possible using the tcl web server, which in latest version form seems to run fine, and easy enough to install, but since  I have no server to run all day, there is no more than a private or programming example point to be made, while a good page with examples may well sell my synth ideas seriously.  The idea of doing a javascript driven Java applet with real time sound engine well and making something nice with it is advanced and powerfull enough though to make a point with of course, and if I'd have the means, it would be quite worth making a good web site with, and draw visitors to it.