Some thoughts for the morning:
I'm thinking about starting a music recommendation newsletter, a music-review newsletter, as a way of bringing regular writing and publishing back into my life. I do miss it, but I just haven't found a sensible way of including it in my life again. I'm going to let this idea percolate, and maybe try writing a couple test newsletters.
Outside of my teaching obligations, I am trying to stay focused on mixing my EP. I ended up with 5 completed tracks, and though I’m not going to make even my extended deadline of 3/19, I’m still not going to be too far off — and still well within my ambition of completing the whole project in the first quarter of the year. So I’m satisfied with that. To finish and release 5 tracks inside of 3 months is in itself a feat, given that I released only about three proper tracks in all of 2020.
Last night I started to absorb another chapter of the Python games book. It finally occurred to me while studying that script, a Tic Tac Toe game, that the flowchart part of each script is almost more important than the actual code. The code part is incidental, or at least it's not nearly as important as designing the flow of decisions that the computer needs to make as it runs down the script. Which, at least at this level of simplicity, probably could be achieved in a similar fashion in any language. This is probably blindingly obvious to any experienced programmer, but to me it was a little bit of a revelation, that the specific code is just the trivia that gets you to the result. (Similar perhaps to how music actually operates on a much higher level of abstraction than the low-level trivia you're obliged to obsessively internalize as a beginning student. It doesn't matter so much what key a piece is in, what matters is the spatial relationships of the notes to each other -- but you can't tell that to an 8-year-old who barely knows half a dozen scales, at best.) I think this insight probably came because in this particular app, there was almost a one-to-one correspondence between each box on the flowchart and each function defined at the head of the script, so that it made me realize that the program, as such, when it finally got underway about halfway through the script, was an implementation of the logical flow of the flowchart itself and the blocks of code were implementations of the boxes on the flowchart. This makes me want to try and design something slightly more complicated than I have done before, just for fun, using this insight. So far, the only interesting thing I have written from scratch is a script to serve random prompts from the Oblique Strategies deck, and a similarly simple app to serve semi-random starting points for writing music (just duplicating what I have long done with a single six-sided die). Maybe I can imagine something on my walk today.
All right, on to mixing.