I didn’t get anywhere with the odd (input ringbuffer? maybe the cleanup job thread?) problem that halts the program unexpectedly last night, but tonight it’s all running fine with slightly short renders and fewer layers. The pacing and density feels nice now, and fingers crossed I can defer actually figuring out that weird bug by keeping things at this activity level. :-)
The bluetooth speakers are back in the mix again - they sound nice inside flowerpots, much more localized in space and resonant. Still just going with six channels now, but two are going to the bluetooth speaker flower pots and four are going to six exciter resonators – two of the channels are just doubled up, I’m literally hooking two exciters up to each amp socket, which I think is OK because these are 4ohm exciters and the amps can handle 8ohms? I don’t really understand what ohms are. Nothing seems at risk of catching fire or anything though lol.
I’d love to spend another few weeks composing to play with the way things move over time… but I think it’s sounding OK and hopefully will be a reasonable balance of stimmy & slow moving for folks who want to meditate, etc. I’m excited that I didn’t have to disable the input ringbuffer! There will be a mic on a little stand with bell percussion, and one to travel around. Some of the computer routines use the mics for feedback, convolution, smearing, etc. The bells really come though, singing whistling etc mixes into everything else much more subtly. I hope people join in as they feel! I plan to make a little zine/flyer to give out encouraging that sort of thing, and giving permission to do things like move around, get close to the speakers, leave, etc. :-) (A little nudge I like getting in situations like these.)
Edit: hilariously (and distressingly) it all just crashed right after I wrote this after running for a few hours this evening. So it is… that means I still need to make a little emergency reconnect script, because it takes a few seconds to make the jack input/output connections and I’d prefer not to fiddle with that in the moment!